Telescopic Abstraction

Scott Alexander takes on "Telescopic Altruism" (TA):

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

Readers will recognize that TA is a restatement of Steve Sailer's concept of "Leapfrogging Loyalties". Scott rebuts:

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

As always, Scott's argument has more nuance than this single paragraph, so read the whole thing. What I want is to address this:

Dave Barry has a saying - "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

This is the opposite of the “telescopic altruism” hypothesis. A telescopic altruism believer would insist that being nice to a waiter is a red flag - “he’s just signaling niceness to people of other social classes because he’s incapable of loving people of his own class - I bet he’s a jerk to his family!”

You could call Barry’s alternative position correlated altruism. People who are nice to a far-off group are more likely to be nice to a nearby group, because all forms of compassion come from the same place.

Scott frames the TA discourse as liberal vs. conservative. So let me run with that for a second.

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to speak politely to the waiter serving him? To tip generously?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to greet by name the guy coming to empty his office trash can at the end of the day?

• Is a liberal or conservative woman more likely to be kind to the dweeby coworker trying to screw up the courage to embarrass himself?

• Is a liberal or conservative more likely to invite an immigrant family to share Thanksgiving Day dinner?

These are all opportunities to reach across (condescending, in the classical definition) a divide -- race, class, SMV -- to someone immediately in front of you. I could offer my own guesses as to how these metrics would break down along political lines, but that's kind of beside the point. As Steve himself hints at in his own comment on the post, the actual contest is in some sense between dualing abstractions:

In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, "The motivated use of moral principles," UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians.

In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. This liberal desire to shove a white man to his death to salvage blacks rather than a black man to salvage whites was extremely statistically significant (p = .002).

Note that this was an exercise in pure abstraction: no live blacks or WASPs were harmed in the making of this survey; they only existed at the meme level. But real people can also be made to exist at the meme level. Here is an example: SecState Clinton's phenomenally successful (given her diplomatic objectives) campaign in 2013-2014 to brand Russian irredentism as "pro-White". Given Russia's primary target was Ukraine, this was at an object level absurd (and regrettably, a segment of the online Right also fell for it), but it was critical in mobilizing the Democrat hive to support Ukraine and getting the ScandiCucks Sweden, who sat out the contest with literal Soviet Communism, to join NATO. I respect the skills.

Once you notice this pattern, you can't unsee it.