Tyler Cowen talks brilliantly about the fallacy of “mood affiliation,” which usually involves feeling an urgent need to counter optimism or pessimism towards a certain topic. It overlaps with “confirmation bias” and “cherry-picking,” and I find myself committing this fallacy quite often. For instance, I think climate scientists have engaged in alarmist predictions that are already failing to come true, so I like to dismiss as exaggeration any evidence of negative things happening to the environment. When you suffer from mood affiliation, you are so opposed to an extreme viewpoint that you feel the need to argue against anything that even comes close to that viewpoint for the fear that it helps validate the extreme viewpoint, even though the truth may lie somewhere between.
One topic that attracts mood affiliation from all over the spectrum is the threat of violence from radicalized American Muslims. I certainly believe there are those who overplay this threat, from conservative Republican voters fretting about Sharia law and TV shows about Muslims, to neo-conservatives looking to justify war, to the federal government making excuses to creep onto our freedoms via the TSA and other civil liberty intrusions. They are the pessimists in this exercise. Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is weakened, and it’s been ten years since 9/11. What do we still have to be afraid of?
But while pessimists suffer from “mood affiliation” by only focusing on evidence that Muslims are violent (thereligionofpeace.com is definitely a pessimist), others overreact in the other direction by only focusing on evidence that Muslims are not a violent threat. They are the optimists, and quite predictably, these tend to be libertarians or progressives who are opposed to the pessimist neo-con ways.
Now I may just be misunderstanding Tyler’s ideas, but I think Tyler himself is sometimes an optimist on this topic; last year he linked to an article about the lack of Muslim terrorism in Europe, prompting a comment that “the otherwise good Cowen turns off his brain when it comes to courting PC approval in terms of his view of Muslims’ activities.” (The link no longer works, but the text can be found here.) Yesterday (and this is what sparked this whole post), Tyler retweeted a link to a NYT article titled “Radical U.S. Muslims Little Threat, Study Says“; the tweet highlighted this key quote: “Of about 14,000 murders in the United States last year, not a single one resulted from Islamic extremism.”
That’s a good point, but I think it’s a little disingenuous. Neo-conservatives don’t fear that radical Muslims will commit a homicide or two; the fear is that radical Muslims will commit a terrorist plot or two that could kill hundreds or thousands. The NYT article also points out that, while trending healthily downward, “20 Muslim Americans were charged in violent plots or attacks in 2011.” The optimists think it’s great that there has been a “decline in cases since 2009,” the year of the infamous Fort Hood shooting, but the pessimists will just say the optimists downplayed Fort Hood back then, too, so of course they’re going to downplay last year’s twenty plots! As I wrote in December:
Remember last week’s tragic Hollywood shooting? The news says the motive is entirely unknown, but a witness claims the gunman yelled “Allahu Akbar.” The media fails to address the claim in any way, and suddenly you’ve got conservatives convinced that this is just the latest evidence – remember the Fort Hood shooting? – that the media is trying to hide the obvious fact that Islam is very dangerous.
In fact I won’t be surprised to see some pessimists using those Hollywood shooting rumors to “prove” that the New York Times is lying about the lack of Muslim murderers in 2011. When a poll last year claimed that 81% of American Muslims say “suicide bombing/other violence against civilians is [never] justified to defend Islam from its enemies,” the pessimists said, woah, what about the other 19%? Pessimists always think the optimists are trying to hide a real threat, which then opens the door to accusations of political correctness or liberal bias or conspiracy. Meanwhile, optimists always think the pessimists are trying to exaggerate a threat that doesn’t exist in the data, opening the door to accusations of ignorance, racism, and bigotry. (The exact same thing plays out with climate change, except that the optimist and pessimist players are often switched, and thus so are their accusations. Just replace “racism” and “bigotry” with “hypocrisy” and “Big Oil”.)
I think it’s possible to believe that most American Muslims may actually be less violent than the rest of us while simultaneously believing that a very small percentage of them really do pose a threat to our way of life with their “violent plots.” I also think it’s possible to believe that these violent plots are a threat while simultaneously believing that they’re not enough of a threat to justify the war on our civil liberties. Is that too much to ask?