Appeasement is greatly underrated. As I’ve explained before:
Didn’t the Munich Agreement prove for all time that appeasement doesn’t work? Hardly. Despite its well-hyped failures, appeasement is an incredibly effective social strategy for dealing with the unreasonable and the unjust… also known as 90% of mankind. Whenever someone makes bizarre demands upon me, my default is not to argue. Instead, I weigh the cost of compliance. If that cost is small – and it usually is – I let the babies have their way. If you bump into me in the grocery store, I say “Sorry.”
Doesn’t that open the floodgates to additional demands? Not in my experience. One symbolic gesture is enough to placate most of the unpleasant characters I encounter. After my concession, we usually go our separate ways. And even when I repeatedly interact with the same unreasonable, unjust person, at least my appeasement makes it hard for them to imagine that they have to get back at me for my past wrongs.
Despite their scorn, almost everyone knows that appeasement works. How do I know this? Because everyone appeases to cope with social realities. Recall your day. Did you experience some unreasonable, unjust treatment? Probably. If so, did you escalate the conflict until reason and justice prevailed? Probably not. Why not? Because it would be a Pyrrhic victory, likely to leave you unemployed and alone.
But I have to confess: When Twitter lashed out at Robin Hanson last week for asking a perfectly reasonable question, my emotional reaction was, “These people cannot be appeased! We must not yield a single inch to this mob!” And it wasn’t hard to construct a superficially solid argument to support this emotional reaction. Namely:
1. Robin’s question was reasonable.
2. His tone was not only polite, but friendly.
3. Virtually everyone who knows Robin personally vouches for his sincerity and kindness. Several (including me) were happy to publicize this information.
4. His critics’ main reaction was still personal abuse, condemnation, publicly “taking offense,” etc.
5. Faced with people so unfair and so unreasonable, isn’t escalation the only viable option?
Could I be wrong about (1), (2), (3), or (4)? I doubt it. But on reflection, there is so much that (5) is missing.
First and foremost, it forgets about the audience. In any debate, you’re officially talking to your opponents, but it’s quixotic to imagine you’re going to persuade them. In reality, you’re trying to persuade spectators. And as the story of Jesus so famously reveals, calmly enduring abuse, returning good for ill, wows spectators. I don’t know how many people Robin persuaded, but he would have persuaded far fewer if he lost his cool and treated his opponents the way they treated him.
Second, the argument against appeasement ignores long-run persuasion. You’re not going to persuade people when they’re upset. But eventually, many people will calm down. Once they do, they’re more likely to reconsider their original position if you acted nobly throughout.
Third, long-run persuasion is especially important in the face of a moral panic – and the social justice movement seems a prime example. In such situations, (a) many people are only upset because other people are upset, and (b) many current abusers will eventually find themselves among the abused (as in “The revolution devours its young.”) I would not be surprised if some of Robin’s more prominent critics eventually find themselves on the wrong side of “their side.” By appeasing these critics today, returning good for ill, you raise the likelihood that when they’re unfairly treated, they’ll consider the possibility that they treated others unfairly in the past.
If that ever happens, I’ll welcome them with open arms. Knowing Robin, he’ll do the same. Appeasement is far from fool-proof, but commitment to it really does pay off.
P.S. Wouldn’t real appeasement just be to lie, “What I fool I was, you’re absolutely right” – or just to remain silent in the first place? The answer, of course, is that appeasement is a continuum. When I say appeasement is overrated, I’m not claiming that you should go to the endpoint.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Dec 27 2018 at 3:36pm
I think the problems are with premise 1/2. Sure, Robin is friendly and polite, but the way the question is framed comes across as biasing and somewhat begging the question. I have not seen the latest version of A Star is Born (and barely remember the 70s version that I did see on TV at some point), but I would be greatly surprised if many viewers of the movie saw this as a case of either explicitly or implicitly trading sex for professional assistance, it is supposed to be a love story after all. Then there was the whole “female soured” on it, which sort of minimizes the female perspective and feels written from the male pov. And his follow-up question that “she knows he’ll likely stop helping if sex stops.”
There’s a really interesting and valuable question underlying all of this, but unfortunately Robin’s style isn’t particularly socially sensitive to the right way to go about asking it in a way that will appeal to the non-converted.
RPLong
Dec 27 2018 at 4:30pm
Maybe you can take a stab at it, Dylan. How would you phrase Robin Hanson’s question such that it was not so off-putting?
Dylan
Dec 27 2018 at 5:40pm
I’d like to, but 1) I haven’t seen the movie so I’m not sure exactly what parallels to draw, and 2) I suspect I’m not much better than Robin at writing on this topic in a sensitive way.
Being more direct and inquisitive about it might have helped. Instead of writing a poll, just starting with a question like “Hey, I just saw this movie and to me it it looks like a powerful man in the entertainment industry falls for a woman and offers to help her professionally, but it is clear he is also interested in her romantically and they end up having sex. Given the power differentials, and the fact that the woman might feel compelled to sleep with him in order to further her own career (or worse, feel that if she doesn’t sleep with him he’ll be able to sabotage her budding career), is this kind of relationship OK?”
Start there, and then ask follow-up questions based on the response? I’ve got no idea if that line of questioning is any more appealing to the types that attacked Robin on social media…but it’s less off putting to me.
Jonathan S
Dec 27 2018 at 11:52pm
It’s amazing that the long overdue collision of feminism and the sexual revolution is bringing back traditionalist sexuality (i.e. commitment prior to getting physical) when both movements wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from that view.
Miguel Madeira
Dec 28 2018 at 8:47am
I don’t see where the “commitment prior to getting physical” is relevant to the point; if the problem is the “power differential”, a commitment before the sex will change much (and I did not see the movie, but my impression is that it is a kind of commitment, no?)
Miguel Madeira
Dec 28 2018 at 8:49am
What I wanted to write was this:
I don’t see where the “commitment prior to getting physical” is relevant to the point; if the problem is the “power differential”, a commitment before the sex will change much? And I did not see the movie, but my impression is that it is a kind of commitment, no?
[a forgotten question mark could change much of the meaning]
BH
Dec 27 2018 at 4:54pm
I think the problem is with the word appeasement. It implies you give something (eg. an apology) to the other side to make them stop. Not retaliating against people who have attacked you isn’t appeasement because you are not giving them something.
Giving something to a social justice focused person in order to make them stop their behaviour is interpreted as an admission of guilt and as permission to move on to the punishment stage. It also signals to many outsiders that the person focused on social justice was right all along.
It’s a bad idea.
RohanV
Dec 27 2018 at 7:22pm
I think there are two scenarios here, and the “anti-appeasement” side is concerned with one scenario, and you are concerned with the second.
Your scenario (as I see it):
Other person gets upset/potentially upset
You appease
Other person backs down (maybe apologises as well)
Everyone goes on with their lives
The dangerous scenario:
Other person gets upset/potentially upset
You appease
The other person escalates
?
If the response to appeasement is escalation, appeasement stops working. You keep appeasing, and they’ll take everything you have. This is the scenario that the anti-appeasement side really cares about.
This is why you are upset with the Hanson situation. You believe that (1), (2), and (3) are enough for a appeasement, and the correct response of your opponents should have been to de-escalate as well. But since they didn’t, the anti-appeasement side says “stop appeasing” instead of continuing to appease.
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 28 2018 at 12:03pm
The whole contretemps is pretty funny. Professor Hanson clearly forgot about the dinner table rule of things not to talk about in a public gathering (these according to my late mother): sex, religion and money. Professor Caplan’s blog makes the same mistake.
Hazel Meade
Jan 3 2019 at 11:21am
I think the problem is that Hanson immediately framed the issue as “sex for career help”, when the actual situation in the film is more like “sex for a possible long-term romantic commitment, with some added career help”. Typically when two characters are “in love” in a story, the implicit bargain is ALWAYS that any sex they have is in the context of a potential future marriage. The career help is just a bonus that makes the romantic relationship more likely to “work out”. The way the question is framed sort of implies that Hanson either didn’t see that the woman would naturally assume that a long-term relationship is on offer, or thinks that it would be normal for the man to enter a sexual relationship without making it clear that no long-term commitment is offered, while the woman labors under the assumption that it is. Several commenters easily pointed out that the romantic aspect of the relationship changes the situation, so it’s unclear why he didn’t frame it that way.
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