Just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for the extremely thoughtful comments on this article! That’s exactly the kind of intellectual community we’re hoping to build here. Excited for what is to come!
Below, I have suggested a tweak to your definition, which solves your status-seeking paradox, while including status-seeking in the definition. I suggest three benefits of this alternative. Thanks so much for starting this substack and sharing your views on fundamental questions!
Excellent essay. I think it is also important to remember that there are many kinds of status. People will often espouse views/opinions/beliefs in order to signal or maintain their status as group members, regardless of whether or not their group is wealthy, influential or powerful.
Good point. Sometimes, a person could be motivated to embrace luxury beliefs as a costly signal of in-group loyalty rather than an attempt to jockey for status in wider society.
I like your definition. I'd like to add that these beliefs normally come from people who study the liberal arts. And I think this is the real crux of the problem. The liberal arts teaches you to interpret the world as if it is a text. While this might have made sense in the 19th century, when we didn't really have anything better, statistics has come a long way. And this is why you don't see any modern equivalent of Ricardo or Freud in the social sciences. There simply is not way to gather empirical evidence without statistics, and when you dispense with it, like many people do in the liberal arts, while at the same time trying to say something about society, you end up producing increasingly loopy theories with tenuous connections to the actual world.
To me, these left-wing campus ideas come across as a particular kind of populism; bad ideas that sound great to the uninformed but are evidently bad to anyone with any degree of knowledge. I see very little difference, for example, between the left-nimby crowd and the anti-vax crowd in terms of science denialism.
Don't get me wrong. I love literature; I love languages; I love philosophy and I think we should continue to invest in and study the liberal arts. I just don't think they are well suited to analyzing the social. Their resources are best spent elsewhere.
Interesting point. And I certainly think that humanities professors are probably (somewhat) more prone to embrace luxury beliefs than social science professors. But I fear that lots of people who study the social sciences, which at a top university now usually entails getting at least conversant in statistics, also believe them. The unwillingness to recognize trade-offs, or to see that a well-intentioned and idealistic public policy can misfire badly, exists across different fields, I fear.
I think a foundation in statistics is helpful to analysis in general, and specific data analysis through statistical and mathematical methods is critical in understanding the world. However, it is not itself sufficient to prevent the sort of populism you decry. Just look at the AMA's (among other scientific organizations') position on youth gender medicine. The problem is not lack of statistics. The problem is a culture of systematic dogmatism, of moral certainty, of fear of the perception that one is a bad person. These problems, once endemic in culture, beat statistics every day of the week.
Excellent work! I have had an inner struggle with the concept of "luxury beliefs" because, while I had a sense that it was touching on something very real, the definition and examples offered by Henderson didn't fully resonate. I find your definition and argument far more compelling and accurate. Thank you for sharing these thoughts.
What a relief it is to read an essay in the social sciences that takes definitions seriously, and understands what makes a good one. Thank you!
Also, I think “luxury beliefs” has the potential to be an extremely useful concept, so I’m very glad to see you attempt to rescue it. And I think you may have succeeded.
As you mention several times, a definition needs to be useful (most people seem to think it needs to be “right,” which just causes useless arguments). I think more discussion of what use we wish to make of this concept might be helpful.
Thank you so much, Steven! And yes, I agree about the nature of definitions, at least in the social sciences. There’s no one true definition of a concept like luxury beliefs (or, for that matter, democracy). The question is whether a particular definition is clear, coherent and allows you to gain important insight about the social world.
As often is the case, thank you for being the measured thinker/writer Yascha. As a bystander to the culture wars I too think it a useful and interesting concept that does capture something about our zeitgeist in a useful shorthand. It feels like there has been a lot of pushback to RH in recent weeks, perhaps inspired by the NYT video segment he did. To be fair, I didnt think the video did a good job at explaining his concept, but for what it was (a non academic paper and not even an actual essay) the pushback was way disproportionate. To be honest, in some cases it has a whiff of professional jealousy to it.
Yes, some people seem to suffer from RHDS (Rob Henderson Derangement Syndrome). All the stranger because I’ve always found him to be a thoughtful and humble interlocutor.
The main issue is insulation between perspective and consequences. Think about what happens when rural and suburban gun enthusiasts enable a market in firepower that has deadly consequences in urban areas.
Gun enthusiasts, to their credit, have enough sense to stow their weapons safely and use them for their intended purposes: collecting, hunting and target shooting (they tell themselves it's about self-defense, but they live in some of the safest areas of of the country, so this premise hardly ever gets tested).
Is gun enthusiasm a luxury belief? It's not about signaling status, and people generally don't do it for fraudulent or devious reasons.
But there definitely is a considerable distance between believers and negative consequences.
Interesting example! And I think I agree: this may not be a core case of a luxury belief, and on Rob’s definition it wouldn’t qualify. But in my mind it should: Though it’s possible to be for gun rights while genuinely knowing about or being affected by the consequences in urban areas, most people who oppose any form of regulation do so in good part because they’ve never fully grappled with how different the effects are in major Metroid compared to rural areas. There’s no jockeying for elite status involved, but the luxury of not having to think about consequences is very much present.
It occurs to me now that once people become sufficiently convinced of an ideological position, moving closer to the problem could be no help because they can always find rationalizations for their point of view.
I also suspect college campuses' "ivory tower" status makes them inherently isolated from on-the-ground implications of ideals. They also serve an elite market of inexperienced, naive people. So, the luxury beliefs accusation has more resonance there.
Great discussion. I'd like to see Henderson's connection of luxury beliefs with "costly signalling" explored further. It's a very useful concept in biology. But for now, I wonder about 2 possible sub-categories of luxury beliefs (sensu Mounk): 1. Palliative Beliefs. Beliefs that (luxuriously) sooth the guilty conscience without (necessarily) requiring behavior change, . 2. Game theory beliefs. A version of The Prisoner's Dilemma. This belief only has utility to me if I claim it while most others hold the opposite. As soon as we all hold the same belief, no one gets any advantage (and we may all suffer). It may then be advantageous for me to flip and adopt the opposite (now minority) position. Stay ahead of the swinging pendulum! P.S., My wife IS an English teacher in rural Kansas. You almost seem to know her and her colleagues. Will this be a recurring character in your essays?
Palliative: (A) I'm ashamed of being white, neurotypical, heterosexual, and attending an elite univeristy, but righteous anger with the capitalists/colonizers/etc. helps me sleep better. (B) I secretly feel unworthy, unaccomplished, unsuccessful, but indulging in racist jokes or tirades against libtard elites makes me feel better. The stronger your belief, the more relief you get from your pain. Perhaps I've just repackaged the old idea of religious belief as an opiate.
Game theory: (A) You gave the example of European pacifism. It's hypocritical but rational if you have the luxury of believing all US presidents (controlling the majority of NATO military resources) will oppose Putin. (B) A lonely pro-homeless candidate for the California legislature may do well with voters--and may do some real good--as long as homeless encampments are small and rare and he/she and the voters have the luxury of believing that the majority of local politicians and police departments will enforce most codes. But if anti-enforcement city councils and jurists become the majority and encampments get out of control, that legislator might do better in the next election--and better for his/her community--to suddenly become interested in hygiene and law-and-order. This legislator could even use anti-homeless rhetoric on the campain trail with the luxury of believing that the left-leaning system would stop actual vigilantes.
Does the concept of luxury beliefs in any way apply to second generation immigrants from autocratic and theocratic regimes such as Iran or Yemen who affiliate themselves with the left wing of the Democratic Party and demand degrees of social justice which are unthinkable in the countries their families migrated from, often while wearing garments associated with the religion of that country?
This question is prompted by the often inferred sense that luxury beliefs are a form of hypocrisy.
If they support the autocratic regimes their parents escaped from, yes! More specifically, it would be a luxury belief in my mind if they lead a lifestyle that would be impossible and/or persecuted in their country of origin, while failing in any way to recognize or acknowledge the good things in their new home country which allow them to make those choices.
Thanks for the clear and fearless reply. It seems important to consider that ‘luxury’ is in this context not a concept confined to wealthy people. In the world of social media many people seek and easily acquire power and go on to misuse it. Migrants are one such group. Residing in a place that offers them material and democratic benefits then deploying their dual identity in a disruptive and dishonest way for personal or strategic benefit is not new. The USA was burned by this challenge in the Mcarthy era and now seems reluctant to call it for what it is. Such has been the success of the ultraliberal left, despite the experience of 9/11, in eroding the right of the State to defend itself. It is also happening in Europe. Maybe this is not just about casual hypocrisy or self-delusion.
Of course, my comments do not apply to all migrants.
Does “Queers for Palestine” fit into your broader “luxury beliefs” concept? For me, queer pro-Hamas activists (who enjoy freedom of speech) is simply ludicrous.
As a gay man, I try to be charitable and assume "Queers for Palestine" simply do not know what the hell they're talking about. I still want to slap the snot out of them. Factually, what we do know is that about half those now self-idenified as "queer" have never had any sort of same-sex experience or even fantasy. They're trying to appropriate some of the social cachet of being "oppressed". All that's required is to claim it although it helps to paint your fingernails a poisonous shade of green. The revival of the hate speech usage of the word "queer" is important to the propaganda and the reason for the intentional confusion between the common understanding of the word and some esoteric academic discipline.
Good point. As an older gay man (55) who wasn’t on social media till 2017, my discovery of this new tribe of straight “queers” was puzzling, to say the least. What do you mean by the revival of the hate speech usage of queer? Who revived it? Do you mean that academic leftists revived the hate meaning so queers could celebrate their “oppressed” status?
I very much appreciate that you are removing some of the negativity from the term (and in the process excising parts that are ultimately unnecessary to a "platonic" definition).
However, I think at the core, you cannot avoid that the definition contains quite a bit of psychological assumption. The core of "luxury beliefs" is that the BELIEF is not the anomaly that you're identifying; it's an evaluation of the believer that's pretending it's about the belief itself. You're mixing an evaluation of the idea with an evaluation of the psychological state of the person or people who believe the idea.
The same exact belief can be either luxury (if the person who holds it does so because they haven't really thought it through because they are isolated from it), or it can be a "normal" belief (if the person has thoroughly reviewed the data, the advantages and drawbacks, and has decided that the belief is the best course despite its drawbacks). So the belief is either luxury or not luxury depending on whose belief it is? To me, that's a term that's more useful for attacking one's enemies than for understanding an idea's merits and flaws. So politically, I completely understand its value. I'm just not sure that I particularly want to "rescue" it from its current users.
I'd rather it go away and we talk specifically about the problems with the ideas that Henderson identifies as "luxury beliefs" rather than talking about why those who have the ideas only have them because they are privileged, and label an idea a "luxury belief" as if that says anything about the idea.
You raise a central point, regarding (I think) whether we should be defining the belief itself or the belief-person combination. While the combinations are of interest, I think the key to social-political analysis is to recognize that some beliefs and collections of beliefs, although conceptually difficult, are independent entities with enormous power. However these entities are defined by how they function within society. So I'm talking about a belief-society combination.
You can find my attempt to define an LB as such an entity (Dawkins moved beyond memes to such viral belief systems). I'd be interested to know you agree with what I see as advantages.
It's probably fair to separate how it could be use within political scientific analytical discourse from how it is currently used in actual political and social discourse. In the former, I see promise for it, and I like your expansion / delineation in societal / personal combination with the belief.
However, its most common use now is not in that vein. It's used as a club that elides the actual ideas themselves in favor of attacking the status and psychology of the person with the beliefs. The best thing about the idea of LB within the discourse is that no one wants to be seen as having a luxury belief, not because the beliefs are incorrect or result in bad outcomes, but because the status you have to have in order to have a LB makes you a bad person.
I'm really taken by the thought that the right and left can hold partisan luxury beliefs about the same issue. It has me thinking of the line that I've often heard and read over the years: "Black neighborhoods are simultaneously overpoliced and underpoliced." That dialectic statement seems designed to activate the luxury belief engines of the left and right who don't live in black neighborhoods. So it seems accurate to say that luxury beliefs and dialectics are very separate pursuits.
That's really interesting, Sherman. Hadn't quite thought of it in these terms. But in a way it perhaps is the natural outcome of refusing to recognize trade-offs, which is a feature many luxury beliefs share.
I like your refinement, especially this bit: "the reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves."
But it seems like this version might have a bit of "and if this person disagrees with me, it's a luxury belief." Consider this example you give of a luxury belief:
"Affluent conservatives opposing the idea that the state has a responsibility to help citizens access medical care in part because they and their loved ones have never been unable to see a doctor for financial reasons."
That makes it seem as if the person can only hold the position because they lack experience with the real world. I think this is a fair criticism of the luxury belief concept. It isn't compelling to tell someone "well you WOULD agree with me if only you thought deeper about the problem." Perhaps a Yale English major truly is ok with the downsides of abolishing the police, because police abolition is something they are deeply committed to. I am fine with paying higher taxes to fund state safety nets, even though I will likely never use them and the taxes are a cost to me; this isn't irrational, it is a decision I am ok with backed by my beliefs. Maybe the affluent conservative and the Yale English major are the same.
I do still like the luxury belief idea as one that makes the claim people would feel differently if they were face to face with the consequences.
Well, I do think that judgments as to whether something qualifies as a luxury belief will always turn on deeper underlying disagreements about the social world; abolishing the police is only a luxury belief if doing so in fact would have bad consequences, and there’s gonna be disagreement about that. But I don’t think that any view of yours with which I disagree would qualify as a luxury belief; indeed, if you have thought enough about the policy to recognize its downsides, but genuinely believe that it is, all things considered, the best course of action, then your willingness to bite the bullet exonerates you to some extent (especially if you yourself might, to mix metaphors hopelessly, be hit by that bullet).
One of the frustrating things about discourse these days is that it seems like people come up with increasingly sophisticated ways to dismiss the arguments of the other side without really engaging with them. It's easy to then feel smart without every having your positions challenged.
I don't at all think that's what you're doing here, to be clear. But I think that it's a way people misuse the idea of luxury beliefs.
Yascha’s clear definition of Luxury Beliefs (LBs) and well-reasoned arguments make incremental improvements possible. The most obvious possibility concerns the role of social status. As he points out, although conferring status is an important part of the discussion, it needn’t be part of the definition, and including it seems to rule out LBs held by those not using them to seek status (Mounk's "status paradox"). That reduces its applicability and usefulness.
However, I believe status seeking can be included while avoiding Mounk’s paradox and that doing so has several advantages: (1) status seeking provides a far more robust explanation for the spread of LBs than the notion of a lack of negative consequences, (2) it eliminates the need to explain why LBs are so frequently associated with status-seeking, and (3) the modification of the definition requires defining LBs to be shared beliefs, a property that is obviously central to all LBs under discussion and one of their most essential qualities. As a start, define:
An LB is a shared belief that is spread primarily by people who:
. 1] are insulated from its damaging consequences, and
. 2] hold them because they confer social status.
Detaching the LB from the individual allows people who don’t fit the definition to hold the belief and thereby avoid Mounk’s paradox while retaining the explanatory virtues of status-seeking.
An additional requirement: ( 1b] less likely to hold the belief if not for #1 ) could be added to make the new definition closer to Mounk's, but I’m doubtful that this is needed.
This definition, like Mounk’s, is quite inclusive, which is generally a good quality for the first definition in a subject area that may have many related concepts of interest. I would immediately propose two subtypes of LBs, Personal and Societal because I think a crucial distinction is being omitted in the current discussion.
Some LBs can directly damage the person who holds them. An example is the first that Mounk gives in his essay — “Preferring monogamy is outmoded.” This LB can damage the person holding it regardless of how widely it is believed. This might be called a personal LB because it does personal damage. Another example is the widely held CRT belief advocated by Peniel Joseph that acting “respectable” is useless for inner-city Blacks.
Some LBs do not directly damage the person holding them but instead do their damage only if widely held. An example is the classic LB called “Abolish the police.” A person in a high-crime area will suffer no damage from holding that belief (!), so they have the luxury of believing it. That belief is only damaging if it becomes widely held by the community. This might be called a societal (or social?) LB. Admitting this distinction between personal and societal damage can explain why LBs can sometimes spread easily in populations that would be damaged by their social acceptance, making them more dangerous than we might otherwise expect them to be.
The Basic LB definition needs at least one more refinement. The personal damage done by an LB can be overcome by the conferred status if that is great enough. So, the LB definition should allow for LBs that are spread by people who are not insulated from the damage but acquire enough status from it to more than compensate for the personal damage it does. Devaluing learning as “acting White” is a likely example of this phenomenon.
I hold an in between view. Important beliefs are the ones that are contagious. In contagion depends on both the idea and the susceptibility of the population.
Hi Andrew, I have replaced the comment you liked with its sequel, which I think solved the problems raised previously. Hope you still like it, but wanted to give you the option.
It may no longer be the same comment, but it remains insightful and engaging. It also still fits within the overall view I have, which is that the concept of LB is basically:
1) A means to sneak judgements about the belief into the definition; if we define a LB as something that causes harm, then anything we call a LB automatically gets that assumed, even if we're simply confusing the harm part with the fact that it's a belief of primarily "privileged" people.
2) It's of great interest to people primarily because of its emotional valence in an argument: it's the functional equivalent of calling your interlocutor a hypocrite with a veneer of shallow analysis on top. It's designed to sting and to damage the status of those who espouse LB by implicating them in selfishly stepping on those who are less privileged, the exact thing they profess to value so highly. Ultimately, it's much less about the ideas themselves than it is about hurting those with the ideas politically and socially.
Maybe "luxury beliefs" can be a useful analytical tool rather than a bludgeon with the right definition and usage, but I suspect its present use cases are inescapable.
Andrew, Thanks for the encouragement. I'm new to the LB discussion, but your point about emotional valence rings true. I think Yascha was trying to avoid that by leaving status out of the definition. I habitually, handle this problem by blaming the ideas or ideology that has captured people's minds. So, of course, that's the trick I used in this case too. And yes, I think this turns LBs into a useful analytic tool. So I think we're quite closely aligned.
At the highest level my view is that people have little if any free will, same with ideologies. People cause mutations in ideologies, which then evolve to control people to reproduce them. --Cheers, Steve PS. I don't like to say this, because the viral idea that may save us is the idea the we have free will.
Thank you, Yascha. I completely agree with your revised definition of luxury beliefs and crucially, the phenomena to which it is applicable are not merely limited to the left. To supply a fresh example from the non-left, Niall Ferguson made his debut last month at the Free Press by penning an essay entitled "We're All Soviet Now". As someone who grew up in Communist China and is deeply grateful for and patriotic about American Democracy, this fits your definition of a luxury belief if not an outlandish herasy. Ferguson would not even have had the opportunity to pen such a statement if he did live in the Soviet Union or even modern day China. I am particularly troubled by the fact that Ferguson is far from an innocent graduate student but a fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institute. This seems closer to nihilism than populism.
Just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for the extremely thoughtful comments on this article! That’s exactly the kind of intellectual community we’re hoping to build here. Excited for what is to come!
Below, I have suggested a tweak to your definition, which solves your status-seeking paradox, while including status-seeking in the definition. I suggest three benefits of this alternative. Thanks so much for starting this substack and sharing your views on fundamental questions!
Excellent essay. I think it is also important to remember that there are many kinds of status. People will often espouse views/opinions/beliefs in order to signal or maintain their status as group members, regardless of whether or not their group is wealthy, influential or powerful.
Good point. Sometimes, a person could be motivated to embrace luxury beliefs as a costly signal of in-group loyalty rather than an attempt to jockey for status in wider society.
I like your definition. I'd like to add that these beliefs normally come from people who study the liberal arts. And I think this is the real crux of the problem. The liberal arts teaches you to interpret the world as if it is a text. While this might have made sense in the 19th century, when we didn't really have anything better, statistics has come a long way. And this is why you don't see any modern equivalent of Ricardo or Freud in the social sciences. There simply is not way to gather empirical evidence without statistics, and when you dispense with it, like many people do in the liberal arts, while at the same time trying to say something about society, you end up producing increasingly loopy theories with tenuous connections to the actual world.
To me, these left-wing campus ideas come across as a particular kind of populism; bad ideas that sound great to the uninformed but are evidently bad to anyone with any degree of knowledge. I see very little difference, for example, between the left-nimby crowd and the anti-vax crowd in terms of science denialism.
Don't get me wrong. I love literature; I love languages; I love philosophy and I think we should continue to invest in and study the liberal arts. I just don't think they are well suited to analyzing the social. Their resources are best spent elsewhere.
Interesting point. And I certainly think that humanities professors are probably (somewhat) more prone to embrace luxury beliefs than social science professors. But I fear that lots of people who study the social sciences, which at a top university now usually entails getting at least conversant in statistics, also believe them. The unwillingness to recognize trade-offs, or to see that a well-intentioned and idealistic public policy can misfire badly, exists across different fields, I fear.
I think a foundation in statistics is helpful to analysis in general, and specific data analysis through statistical and mathematical methods is critical in understanding the world. However, it is not itself sufficient to prevent the sort of populism you decry. Just look at the AMA's (among other scientific organizations') position on youth gender medicine. The problem is not lack of statistics. The problem is a culture of systematic dogmatism, of moral certainty, of fear of the perception that one is a bad person. These problems, once endemic in culture, beat statistics every day of the week.
Try R-Studio. In the past, statistics were very expensive or impossible. Not anymore. These days statistics are cheap and easy.
Thanks, I will.
Excellent work! I have had an inner struggle with the concept of "luxury beliefs" because, while I had a sense that it was touching on something very real, the definition and examples offered by Henderson didn't fully resonate. I find your definition and argument far more compelling and accurate. Thank you for sharing these thoughts.
Thank you so much, Emmit!
What a relief it is to read an essay in the social sciences that takes definitions seriously, and understands what makes a good one. Thank you!
Also, I think “luxury beliefs” has the potential to be an extremely useful concept, so I’m very glad to see you attempt to rescue it. And I think you may have succeeded.
As you mention several times, a definition needs to be useful (most people seem to think it needs to be “right,” which just causes useless arguments). I think more discussion of what use we wish to make of this concept might be helpful.
Do other commenters have some ideas on this?
Thank you so much, Steven! And yes, I agree about the nature of definitions, at least in the social sciences. There’s no one true definition of a concept like luxury beliefs (or, for that matter, democracy). The question is whether a particular definition is clear, coherent and allows you to gain important insight about the social world.
As often is the case, thank you for being the measured thinker/writer Yascha. As a bystander to the culture wars I too think it a useful and interesting concept that does capture something about our zeitgeist in a useful shorthand. It feels like there has been a lot of pushback to RH in recent weeks, perhaps inspired by the NYT video segment he did. To be fair, I didnt think the video did a good job at explaining his concept, but for what it was (a non academic paper and not even an actual essay) the pushback was way disproportionate. To be honest, in some cases it has a whiff of professional jealousy to it.
Yes, some people seem to suffer from RHDS (Rob Henderson Derangement Syndrome). All the stranger because I’ve always found him to be a thoughtful and humble interlocutor.
The main issue is insulation between perspective and consequences. Think about what happens when rural and suburban gun enthusiasts enable a market in firepower that has deadly consequences in urban areas.
Gun enthusiasts, to their credit, have enough sense to stow their weapons safely and use them for their intended purposes: collecting, hunting and target shooting (they tell themselves it's about self-defense, but they live in some of the safest areas of of the country, so this premise hardly ever gets tested).
Is gun enthusiasm a luxury belief? It's not about signaling status, and people generally don't do it for fraudulent or devious reasons.
But there definitely is a considerable distance between believers and negative consequences.
Interesting example! And I think I agree: this may not be a core case of a luxury belief, and on Rob’s definition it wouldn’t qualify. But in my mind it should: Though it’s possible to be for gun rights while genuinely knowing about or being affected by the consequences in urban areas, most people who oppose any form of regulation do so in good part because they’ve never fully grappled with how different the effects are in major Metroid compared to rural areas. There’s no jockeying for elite status involved, but the luxury of not having to think about consequences is very much present.
It occurs to me now that once people become sufficiently convinced of an ideological position, moving closer to the problem could be no help because they can always find rationalizations for their point of view.
I also suspect college campuses' "ivory tower" status makes them inherently isolated from on-the-ground implications of ideals. They also serve an elite market of inexperienced, naive people. So, the luxury beliefs accusation has more resonance there.
Great discussion. I'd like to see Henderson's connection of luxury beliefs with "costly signalling" explored further. It's a very useful concept in biology. But for now, I wonder about 2 possible sub-categories of luxury beliefs (sensu Mounk): 1. Palliative Beliefs. Beliefs that (luxuriously) sooth the guilty conscience without (necessarily) requiring behavior change, . 2. Game theory beliefs. A version of The Prisoner's Dilemma. This belief only has utility to me if I claim it while most others hold the opposite. As soon as we all hold the same belief, no one gets any advantage (and we may all suffer). It may then be advantageous for me to flip and adopt the opposite (now minority) position. Stay ahead of the swinging pendulum! P.S., My wife IS an English teacher in rural Kansas. You almost seem to know her and her colleagues. Will this be a recurring character in your essays?
Ha! I didn’t think so. But if you tell me more about the world of English teachers in rural Kansas, perhaps we can spin off some story lines!
As for palliative and game theory beliefs—very interesting. Care to give an example of each?
Palliative: (A) I'm ashamed of being white, neurotypical, heterosexual, and attending an elite univeristy, but righteous anger with the capitalists/colonizers/etc. helps me sleep better. (B) I secretly feel unworthy, unaccomplished, unsuccessful, but indulging in racist jokes or tirades against libtard elites makes me feel better. The stronger your belief, the more relief you get from your pain. Perhaps I've just repackaged the old idea of religious belief as an opiate.
Game theory: (A) You gave the example of European pacifism. It's hypocritical but rational if you have the luxury of believing all US presidents (controlling the majority of NATO military resources) will oppose Putin. (B) A lonely pro-homeless candidate for the California legislature may do well with voters--and may do some real good--as long as homeless encampments are small and rare and he/she and the voters have the luxury of believing that the majority of local politicians and police departments will enforce most codes. But if anti-enforcement city councils and jurists become the majority and encampments get out of control, that legislator might do better in the next election--and better for his/her community--to suddenly become interested in hygiene and law-and-order. This legislator could even use anti-homeless rhetoric on the campain trail with the luxury of believing that the left-leaning system would stop actual vigilantes.
Does the concept of luxury beliefs in any way apply to second generation immigrants from autocratic and theocratic regimes such as Iran or Yemen who affiliate themselves with the left wing of the Democratic Party and demand degrees of social justice which are unthinkable in the countries their families migrated from, often while wearing garments associated with the religion of that country?
This question is prompted by the often inferred sense that luxury beliefs are a form of hypocrisy.
If they support the autocratic regimes their parents escaped from, yes! More specifically, it would be a luxury belief in my mind if they lead a lifestyle that would be impossible and/or persecuted in their country of origin, while failing in any way to recognize or acknowledge the good things in their new home country which allow them to make those choices.
Thanks for the clear and fearless reply. It seems important to consider that ‘luxury’ is in this context not a concept confined to wealthy people. In the world of social media many people seek and easily acquire power and go on to misuse it. Migrants are one such group. Residing in a place that offers them material and democratic benefits then deploying their dual identity in a disruptive and dishonest way for personal or strategic benefit is not new. The USA was burned by this challenge in the Mcarthy era and now seems reluctant to call it for what it is. Such has been the success of the ultraliberal left, despite the experience of 9/11, in eroding the right of the State to defend itself. It is also happening in Europe. Maybe this is not just about casual hypocrisy or self-delusion.
Of course, my comments do not apply to all migrants.
Does “Queers for Palestine” fit into your broader “luxury beliefs” concept? For me, queer pro-Hamas activists (who enjoy freedom of speech) is simply ludicrous.
As a gay man, I try to be charitable and assume "Queers for Palestine" simply do not know what the hell they're talking about. I still want to slap the snot out of them. Factually, what we do know is that about half those now self-idenified as "queer" have never had any sort of same-sex experience or even fantasy. They're trying to appropriate some of the social cachet of being "oppressed". All that's required is to claim it although it helps to paint your fingernails a poisonous shade of green. The revival of the hate speech usage of the word "queer" is important to the propaganda and the reason for the intentional confusion between the common understanding of the word and some esoteric academic discipline.
Good point. As an older gay man (55) who wasn’t on social media till 2017, my discovery of this new tribe of straight “queers” was puzzling, to say the least. What do you mean by the revival of the hate speech usage of queer? Who revived it? Do you mean that academic leftists revived the hate meaning so queers could celebrate their “oppressed” status?
I very much appreciate that you are removing some of the negativity from the term (and in the process excising parts that are ultimately unnecessary to a "platonic" definition).
However, I think at the core, you cannot avoid that the definition contains quite a bit of psychological assumption. The core of "luxury beliefs" is that the BELIEF is not the anomaly that you're identifying; it's an evaluation of the believer that's pretending it's about the belief itself. You're mixing an evaluation of the idea with an evaluation of the psychological state of the person or people who believe the idea.
The same exact belief can be either luxury (if the person who holds it does so because they haven't really thought it through because they are isolated from it), or it can be a "normal" belief (if the person has thoroughly reviewed the data, the advantages and drawbacks, and has decided that the belief is the best course despite its drawbacks). So the belief is either luxury or not luxury depending on whose belief it is? To me, that's a term that's more useful for attacking one's enemies than for understanding an idea's merits and flaws. So politically, I completely understand its value. I'm just not sure that I particularly want to "rescue" it from its current users.
I'd rather it go away and we talk specifically about the problems with the ideas that Henderson identifies as "luxury beliefs" rather than talking about why those who have the ideas only have them because they are privileged, and label an idea a "luxury belief" as if that says anything about the idea.
You raise a central point, regarding (I think) whether we should be defining the belief itself or the belief-person combination. While the combinations are of interest, I think the key to social-political analysis is to recognize that some beliefs and collections of beliefs, although conceptually difficult, are independent entities with enormous power. However these entities are defined by how they function within society. So I'm talking about a belief-society combination.
You can find my attempt to define an LB as such an entity (Dawkins moved beyond memes to such viral belief systems). I'd be interested to know you agree with what I see as advantages.
It's probably fair to separate how it could be use within political scientific analytical discourse from how it is currently used in actual political and social discourse. In the former, I see promise for it, and I like your expansion / delineation in societal / personal combination with the belief.
However, its most common use now is not in that vein. It's used as a club that elides the actual ideas themselves in favor of attacking the status and psychology of the person with the beliefs. The best thing about the idea of LB within the discourse is that no one wants to be seen as having a luxury belief, not because the beliefs are incorrect or result in bad outcomes, but because the status you have to have in order to have a LB makes you a bad person.
I'm really taken by the thought that the right and left can hold partisan luxury beliefs about the same issue. It has me thinking of the line that I've often heard and read over the years: "Black neighborhoods are simultaneously overpoliced and underpoliced." That dialectic statement seems designed to activate the luxury belief engines of the left and right who don't live in black neighborhoods. So it seems accurate to say that luxury beliefs and dialectics are very separate pursuits.
That's really interesting, Sherman. Hadn't quite thought of it in these terms. But in a way it perhaps is the natural outcome of refusing to recognize trade-offs, which is a feature many luxury beliefs share.
Newish subscriber. If this piece is typical, I'll be around a while. Very helpful critique.
Welcome! :)
I like your refinement, especially this bit: "the reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves."
But it seems like this version might have a bit of "and if this person disagrees with me, it's a luxury belief." Consider this example you give of a luxury belief:
"Affluent conservatives opposing the idea that the state has a responsibility to help citizens access medical care in part because they and their loved ones have never been unable to see a doctor for financial reasons."
That makes it seem as if the person can only hold the position because they lack experience with the real world. I think this is a fair criticism of the luxury belief concept. It isn't compelling to tell someone "well you WOULD agree with me if only you thought deeper about the problem." Perhaps a Yale English major truly is ok with the downsides of abolishing the police, because police abolition is something they are deeply committed to. I am fine with paying higher taxes to fund state safety nets, even though I will likely never use them and the taxes are a cost to me; this isn't irrational, it is a decision I am ok with backed by my beliefs. Maybe the affluent conservative and the Yale English major are the same.
I do still like the luxury belief idea as one that makes the claim people would feel differently if they were face to face with the consequences.
Well, I do think that judgments as to whether something qualifies as a luxury belief will always turn on deeper underlying disagreements about the social world; abolishing the police is only a luxury belief if doing so in fact would have bad consequences, and there’s gonna be disagreement about that. But I don’t think that any view of yours with which I disagree would qualify as a luxury belief; indeed, if you have thought enough about the policy to recognize its downsides, but genuinely believe that it is, all things considered, the best course of action, then your willingness to bite the bullet exonerates you to some extent (especially if you yourself might, to mix metaphors hopelessly, be hit by that bullet).
I think you're right about deeper disagreements.
One of the frustrating things about discourse these days is that it seems like people come up with increasingly sophisticated ways to dismiss the arguments of the other side without really engaging with them. It's easy to then feel smart without every having your positions challenged.
I don't at all think that's what you're doing here, to be clear. But I think that it's a way people misuse the idea of luxury beliefs.
A Suggested Modification
Yascha’s clear definition of Luxury Beliefs (LBs) and well-reasoned arguments make incremental improvements possible. The most obvious possibility concerns the role of social status. As he points out, although conferring status is an important part of the discussion, it needn’t be part of the definition, and including it seems to rule out LBs held by those not using them to seek status (Mounk's "status paradox"). That reduces its applicability and usefulness.
However, I believe status seeking can be included while avoiding Mounk’s paradox and that doing so has several advantages: (1) status seeking provides a far more robust explanation for the spread of LBs than the notion of a lack of negative consequences, (2) it eliminates the need to explain why LBs are so frequently associated with status-seeking, and (3) the modification of the definition requires defining LBs to be shared beliefs, a property that is obviously central to all LBs under discussion and one of their most essential qualities. As a start, define:
An LB is a shared belief that is spread primarily by people who:
. 1] are insulated from its damaging consequences, and
. 2] hold them because they confer social status.
Detaching the LB from the individual allows people who don’t fit the definition to hold the belief and thereby avoid Mounk’s paradox while retaining the explanatory virtues of status-seeking.
An additional requirement: ( 1b] less likely to hold the belief if not for #1 ) could be added to make the new definition closer to Mounk's, but I’m doubtful that this is needed.
This definition, like Mounk’s, is quite inclusive, which is generally a good quality for the first definition in a subject area that may have many related concepts of interest. I would immediately propose two subtypes of LBs, Personal and Societal because I think a crucial distinction is being omitted in the current discussion.
Some LBs can directly damage the person who holds them. An example is the first that Mounk gives in his essay — “Preferring monogamy is outmoded.” This LB can damage the person holding it regardless of how widely it is believed. This might be called a personal LB because it does personal damage. Another example is the widely held CRT belief advocated by Peniel Joseph that acting “respectable” is useless for inner-city Blacks.
Some LBs do not directly damage the person holding them but instead do their damage only if widely held. An example is the classic LB called “Abolish the police.” A person in a high-crime area will suffer no damage from holding that belief (!), so they have the luxury of believing it. That belief is only damaging if it becomes widely held by the community. This might be called a societal (or social?) LB. Admitting this distinction between personal and societal damage can explain why LBs can sometimes spread easily in populations that would be damaged by their social acceptance, making them more dangerous than we might otherwise expect them to be.
The Basic LB definition needs at least one more refinement. The personal damage done by an LB can be overcome by the conferred status if that is great enough. So, the LB definition should allow for LBs that are spread by people who are not insulated from the damage but acquire enough status from it to more than compensate for the personal damage it does. Devaluing learning as “acting White” is a likely example of this phenomenon.
I completely agree that luxury beliefs is about the people who hold the beliefs rather than about the beliefs themselves.
I hold an in between view. Important beliefs are the ones that are contagious. In contagion depends on both the idea and the susceptibility of the population.
Hi Andrew, I have replaced the comment you liked with its sequel, which I think solved the problems raised previously. Hope you still like it, but wanted to give you the option.
It may no longer be the same comment, but it remains insightful and engaging. It also still fits within the overall view I have, which is that the concept of LB is basically:
1) A means to sneak judgements about the belief into the definition; if we define a LB as something that causes harm, then anything we call a LB automatically gets that assumed, even if we're simply confusing the harm part with the fact that it's a belief of primarily "privileged" people.
2) It's of great interest to people primarily because of its emotional valence in an argument: it's the functional equivalent of calling your interlocutor a hypocrite with a veneer of shallow analysis on top. It's designed to sting and to damage the status of those who espouse LB by implicating them in selfishly stepping on those who are less privileged, the exact thing they profess to value so highly. Ultimately, it's much less about the ideas themselves than it is about hurting those with the ideas politically and socially.
Maybe "luxury beliefs" can be a useful analytical tool rather than a bludgeon with the right definition and usage, but I suspect its present use cases are inescapable.
Andrew, Thanks for the encouragement. I'm new to the LB discussion, but your point about emotional valence rings true. I think Yascha was trying to avoid that by leaving status out of the definition. I habitually, handle this problem by blaming the ideas or ideology that has captured people's minds. So, of course, that's the trick I used in this case too. And yes, I think this turns LBs into a useful analytic tool. So I think we're quite closely aligned.
At the highest level my view is that people have little if any free will, same with ideologies. People cause mutations in ideologies, which then evolve to control people to reproduce them. --Cheers, Steve PS. I don't like to say this, because the viral idea that may save us is the idea the we have free will.
Excellent, thoughtful piece. I have to think about it.
Thank you, Jack!
Thank you, Yascha. I completely agree with your revised definition of luxury beliefs and crucially, the phenomena to which it is applicable are not merely limited to the left. To supply a fresh example from the non-left, Niall Ferguson made his debut last month at the Free Press by penning an essay entitled "We're All Soviet Now". As someone who grew up in Communist China and is deeply grateful for and patriotic about American Democracy, this fits your definition of a luxury belief if not an outlandish herasy. Ferguson would not even have had the opportunity to pen such a statement if he did live in the Soviet Union or even modern day China. I am particularly troubled by the fact that Ferguson is far from an innocent graduate student but a fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institute. This seems closer to nihilism than populism.
I completely agree, and was shocked that TheFP would publish such nonsense.