The Science for Scorn Being Too Awful, and Why It Must Be Replaced
Links in this post aren’t merely sources. Most are easy to glance at, and for guiding along and are repeated because of that for guiding the reader around unfamiliar info. Also note this case transitions from what science gives us, to moral obligations in light of it.
Why the Normal Definition of Scorn Isn’t Good Enough
A reasonably accurate definition of scorn should cover the key aspects of what it is. Oxford Dictionaries defines scorn as “The feeling or belief that someone or something is worthless or despicable; contempt”. Defining scorn as only being a reaction or feeling doesn’t include the scientifically grounded function in which it operates. The root of scorn is easiest to see when at its most intense, but whether strong or weak, is one of socially-related disgust. It would do no good to condemn something that isn’t defined well. But this step by step case includes showing that scorn serves a primary function. A word that has a primary function that isn’t included in its definition, is a badly defined word. Therefore, in the making of this case, we adopt a more accurate definition of scorn.
How We Are Informed by and How to Understand Systems Theory/Cybernetics
Systems theory is interdisciplinary, and used all over the sciences, such as transfer of energy, ecosystems, sociology, but most importantly, is key in clinical work with families within the behavioral sciences: “Systems theory provides a set of principles and concepts that inform our understanding of human behavior…” The common terms are nothing like what they mean in systems, but the process in which the change is generated is called a positive feedback loop. Open systems have mechanisms that reinforce them and repairs changes, as they negatively impact system integrity. These generate negative feedback loops.
The normal meaning of “positive feedback” is nothing like what it means in systems. The terms “positive” and “negative” concern how system instability decreases as too much or too little of a resource is present compared to the systemic boundary. So in systems, and as seen in figure 1., you can have either of the two be increases and decreases of a resource, depending on where the . Boundaries are what keeps a system a stable foundation for operating. But in open systems, change is inevitable, and can even be beneficial to a system in the right situation.
Positive And Negative Feedback, And Scorn in Our Social System
Since a social system is an open-system, now all we need to do is look for the constants in open-systems of positive and negative feedback loops. Social norms make up social system boundaries. People are the components, and thus, we know people deviate from equilibrium in a social system. So now, all we need to do is look at our social systems, and see how people deviate from systemic equilibrium and from where the system’s negative feedback comes. We have other delivery vehicles for positive and negative feedback loops.
The Role of Disgust in Scorn
Disgust is the mechanism of delivery in scorn, as disgust leads to avoidance behaviors. It causes a strong reaction due to having seemed to have evolved to assist in the preservation of life against physical sources of contamination. The identified evolutionary advantage was that one member of a primitive population would be able to signal contamination risk to bystanders at potential risk. Disgust can be a deterrent for behaviors in the context of a community, because human beings have evolved pro-social dependencies, and thus are averse to being at odds with the social system. So scorn is an exploit of people’s naturally evolved pro-social tendencies, by means of disgust.
How Disgust is Incredibly Avoidable, Especially Social Disgust
As what scorn is, and the role it serves becomes clear, we now turn to why its social malleability and clear role makes it easy to see why we can replace it. Every indication about it shows we have evolved an astonishing ability to circumvent, avoid and sidestep it. Social disgust is so unstable, our own culture shows incredible differences on what is disgusting, let alone socially disgusting. Families even have differences. The differences get even wider, as things that would absolutely disgust those in our culture, are honored in others, such as “The Etoro believe that for a boy to achieve manhood he must ingest the semen of his elders”. Even how intense a person feels disgust, is incredibly alterable by culture. And this seems to be part of the way disgust evolved for humans. The evidence shows disgust has evolved a dependency on social signaling. And we have witnessed cultural changes in recent years related to people realizing their disgust toward diverse sexual orientations and gender identities was unfounded. This is not to mention just how often people rationalize away reasons to not follow through with it, such as the case with those defending Mark Driscoll, or the Duggar scandal, and every politics cycle provides rationalizations for why one’s preferred candidate does not deserve the scorn that a non-politician would expect. Plus, just preparing ahead for the situation, has shown to reduce it, even in very unsettling and disturbing situations.
The Operating Cost of Scorn
The most significant reason why scorn-aversion should be implemented is that scorn backfires upon on the system in very destructive ways. However, because social disgust is so often seen as a treatment, the overall destruction caused by that backfiring has gone too unnoticed. When weighing the benefit of being able to be disgusted at badly behaving people or their actions or beliefs, one must evaluate the total damage done by having the component under review, be allowed to persist in the system. However, the next section will identify how scorn creates such a substantially large wake of destruction. It creates more problem than it fixes. Moreover, this disgust reaction misidentifies the overwhelming problems it causes, as uncaused by itself.Once the populations harmed by this component are revealed, if one wishes to continue to maintain scorn, it must be done under the premise that it is worth harming those people and perpetuating the root of the backfire problems. Essentially one must declare those people worth harming so that one could avoid the inconvenience brought on by scorn-aversion. It is by no means any sort of exaggeration that their suffering must be an operating cost.
Objections & The Harm of Wrongful Scorn
One would have great difficulty identifying many things worth scorning, that isn’t underpinned by scorn in the first place. The vast majority of people do not have a moral reasoning development, appropriate for living conditions in our era. Such a significant lack of post-conventional reasoning creates a moral imperative for practices compatible with different levels of reasoning. People not on the post-conventional level, (around 80% or more of the population), just take what they are modeled, and practice it as best as they can. Scorn requires the ability to both accurately identify when one should employ it against others, and when one should identify it as being wrongfully applied to others or self, which is only afforded by post-conventional reasoning. Scorn use results in backfire damage to the system. Many ideologies and belief systems have incorporated scorn at the core in very damaging ways. Internalizing scorn badly in the individual level has also caused terrible damage. Using medical science as an analogy, where human population is the patient, and scorn is the treatment, one finds the patient is experiencing terrible diseases as a result of the treatment. And yes, there is symptom alleviation from applying the treatment, but at this point, it appears that most of the symptoms being managed, arose from the use of the treatment. Stopping the treatment would eliminate the core of the symptoms because people take their values from cultural influence. If one has a logic-based reservation to scorn-aversion, it must be given consideration and addressed before the person with the reservation ought to adopt scorn-aversion. However, to simply resist adopting scorn-aversion, on account of the difficulty of practicing scorn-aversion, is to decide that the people wrongfully harmed by scorn are worth harming for either benefit or inconvenience. The operating cost of harm for perpetuating scorn is immense:
- On a global scale, in situations of intense conflict, significant cases where people inevitably must die present, and major conflicts must remain unresolved. This is because of the reduced receptivity scorn causes one to have toward an opponent, has clearly lead to both unnecessary deaths and the perpetuation of the relevance of ideologies, religions and belief systems that reinforce great enmity with disagreement and deviance. Scorn causes hostility to be a necessary factor in viewing opponents, and causes misunderstandings that break down negotiations.
- Those whose perceptions lead them to error must be harmed for their mistakes: People are victims of their error. We have cases, such as Westboro Baptist Church deconversions, where people figure out they got it wrong and are mortified when they do. Scorning must be worth inflicting harm on people for getting things wrong.
- The truth must also become subject to scorn for many people, and remain inaccessible to them: This is because people are going to scorn things as they see fit, so when misguided, the truth can easily become collateral damage. Once anything is an object of disgust, considering the object valuable is unlikely, causing scorn to trap those unfortunately snared from access to the truth.
- Many people following social directive to scorn fall victim to it, and must suffer, (including a number of people must die) as a result of the misidentification of scorn targets: Examples of this are easily seen in those avoiding medical science. This is because of the ideological divides that are perpetuated and reinforced by scorn, and intolerance created by disgust.
- Large portions of humanity must live their entire lives filled with excess self punishment, sorrow, and low senses of efficacy: Scorn causes one to view oneself as an object of disgust for failures. Many people are less forgiving with themselves, than others, in applying scorn. Viewing oneself as an object of disgust causes suffering of varying levels.
- Many in the mentally ill community must live without proper treatment: Fearing the shame perceived from disorder diagnosis, many with mood disorders avoid both diagnosis and treatment. Furthermore, many mentally ill individuals, exposed to the social shame against dependency, fight against life-saving and quality of life-enhancing measures.
- People with personal problems must remain afflicted by those problems: Many will have suffering, and reduced quality of lives, because seeking help is scorned, and temporary inadequacy is a shameful state because of scorn. As a result, to protect themselves from the cruelty of being made an object of disgust, many fall into denial about their otherwise temporary problems.
- Excess suffering due to unrecognized and resolvable personal deficits, personal errors and personal character-imperfections: Since feedback remains scorn-saturated, feedback often must be withheld. This causes many people to fail to take measures to obtain the potential of what they otherwise could achieve by means of identifying those flaws.
- Marginalized groups will continue have expression of their needs disregarded by many, and getting support to people will remain generally impaired by scorn-based resistance: Any disruption to the system, creates a negative feedback loop, and as we have seen scorn is a go-to-feedback loop. But scorn meets change with dismissal. As with families a positive systemic change in a larger system is made possible by reconfiguring the allocation of resources. Dismissal impairs that process. Many social change efforts are currently being impaired by scorn.
As previously mentioned, an overwhelming amount of the situations that deserve scorn, are to treat a problem caused by scorn backfire. In terms of individual choice, to adopt scorn-aversion, what must be considered concerns how inescapably immoral it is to willfully maintain components in our macrosystem and subsystems that have an operating cost that provides personal gain at the expense of harming others. On a social level, the same argument can be used regarding the expense of harming significant numbers of the population. Therefore, there is a parallel in scorn-aversion advocacy, to that of the reasons behind making other social adjustments, such as adjusting our language to accommodate vulnerable populations. When considering all the people who must be victims to the operating cost of scorn, the cost is too high for justifying the use of the treatment. It is by no means an emotional evaluation, but rather a logical one when contending our moral responsibility is to find alternative, less harmful social treatment methods, on account that the harm from this treatment method is too great. Such is the case, even if alternatives were to be more difficult.
Consideration of Alternatives to Social Disgust
In the present system needing replacement, scorn is distributed according to where it is deserved. Deserve is a means to proper distribution, and scorn is a means to solving the problem. However, the protected status of scorn suggests that the means have been mistaken for ends. Greater self-awareness of the system at work, and the true systemic ends is needed to cut through such a mistake. Adjusting “deserves scorn” to “deserves problem-solving attention”, restores awareness to the end purpose, as opposed to the means, performing ABC-model cognitive restructuring. Once this is accomplished, one need only seek an alternative form of problem-solving attention to target whatever the presenting problem happens to be, that would usually be responded to with disgust. And ultimately, to avoid doing so, is to engage in a false dichotomy logical fallacy, limiting one’s options to scorn and tolerance, when there are other options than the two. Scorn is already rejected in counseling and therapy. The available well-practiced alternatives particularly suited to skeptics, and already used by clinicians, are person-centered methods, and cognitive-behavioral methods.
Science Advocates And Their Scorn
Any science advocacy is a treatment for a social condition, and science advocates should not be using treatments shown by science to be severely risky and harmful when safer and more reliable treatments exist. Science advocates often pick scorn as the preferred treatment modality. They then justify their senses of superiority and their rude and aggressive behavior, saying that they are fighting activists that misrepresent science. Personal branding, humor, and freedom of expression have also been used as reasons to justify scorning behavior in science advocacy, but those reasons don’t justify harming people or perpetuating harm. Another justification sometimes used to defend scorn, concerns cognitive biases enhancing the difficulty of persuasion. While there are limitations commonly known, such as the backfire effect, even that effect is enhanced when coupled with a sense of adversarial relationship. Such sort of relationship is one by which a scorn-averse approach would not be characterized. Alternatively, the type of approach needed for highest bias avoidance has been identified as reflective thinking, a subset of critical thinking. It is further clear that the perpetuation of an adversarial relationship is an ideal environment for the growth of bias. Therefore, any dependence on fostering such environments would be contrary to science, and then unscientific. This would also mean such dependence, after being notified of the science, unless a valid science-based counter-argument is raised, would be hypocritical for science advocates. Granted, there is anecdotal evidence of conversion by scorn but any dependence on the anecdotal evidence is no different from depending on anecdotal effectiveness of any outlier. Furthermore, it is necessary for science advocates to represent when the sciences indicate a need for systemwide social change. This is particularly true when the data from the sciences indicates that accepted components of our social system are a source of damage for quality of life, as well as being a source of psychological and bodily harm. Issues such as the labeling of GMO’s, for example, pale in comparative importance. Arguably, science advocates could have no more pressing of a concern for the advocacy of science than to eliminate the scientifically verified known barriers to science communication in society, as such barriers create the bottleneck for science info. And by no means would further perpetuating such barriers be justified under these circumstances. This would be especially true, and again arguably very immoral, if one does such a perpetuation for humor or personal branding of one’s advocacy effort, as that would be advancing personal gain over science communication, which would be selfish and destructive in such circumstances.
Conclusion
Much has been said about scorn, how it is disgust, systemic, a way of keeping things from getting out of hand. But it causes problems and has an operating cost that is too great. It may be hard to let go, but the last thing worth mentioning is that there is a peace of mind that comes with letting go of that burden laid on us that makes us think we have to keep our disgust toward behavior and beliefs and people as a result. Receptive Skepticism is working to raise awareness, and begin advocacy for replacing this dangerous mechanism. It begins with those who see why scorn is awful, committing to avoiding the use of the mechanism of scorn. It is hoped that this case will help you consider the merit of why RS is a worthy cause, and that you will experience the sense of urgency, that will enable you to join the RS community and cause, and put the effort forth to both help RS raise greater awareness, and gather better resources for advocacy efforts. We are all prisoners to our error and victims of our own misguided perceptions. Case and point the few who have left the Westboro Baptist Church over the last years. Once freed from their imprisonment to error, they were able to be by all accounts, decent people. Scorn punishes people for being prisoners of their perspectives. I know for myself, that wading through all the horror, injustice, and misguided beliefs in the world wear me out a lot less now that I have begun practicing scorn-aversion. With a scorn-averse approach, our tolerance for ourselves will help us face our own problems, and get a lot further along in personal development. And being good is enjoyable as well. People may opt to make you an enemy still, but you don’t have to see people as your enemies anymore. And that is freeing.
John Kelly
Receptive Skepticism
Last Revision 08/18/2017
Previous Revision 04/10/2016