Psychotherapy, or at least most cognitive and behavioral ones, offer various tools to cultivate such skills. The most emblematic one surely being the columns used in cognitive restructuring. They are usually oriented toward a specific diagnosis, but one can find plenty of free worksheets online. It sounds like a good place to start to get inspiration, if one's interested. But note that this demands quite the commitment : rewiring one's own thought process is no easy task.
Upon researching the term, I'm not confident this is the right term anymore, but I'm pretty sure I've seen and/or heard that the skill sets those techniques helps you get are considered as a subset of what is coined by the umbrella term "cognitive flexibility". The first results I get seem to associate this with the ability to adapt to change (in information, environment...) first and foremost, rather than being able to juggle between different theories or explanations, so I am either mistaken or the latter tends to get overshadowed by the former. If someone can clear things for me, that would be appreciated.
Surely adapting those tools, or creating new, specific ones, for general purpose mental hygiene, so to say, rather than helping with various specific diseases, could be interesting. I suppose some people in personal development already tried, but it's pretty hard discerning who you can trust in that field, and I'm really not familiar with it. Pushing academia to put more effort in non-clinical application is probably worthwhile. Just like I don't need to have any deficiency to profit from accurate nutritional information, I don't need to be anxious or depressed to benefit from education about how I to healthily deal with my own thoughts.
That said, it is painfully hard to make real progress with this, even with guidance (which is either saturated, very expansive and/or unreliable it seems...), and without institutionalization (schools, workplace programs...) I'm not sure whether it's worth the expanses. But mentally ill people are not representative of the whole population, and similar things like mood regulation programs have been implemented in schools already and show what seems to me like promising results for such innovative interventions, so my two cents is that it's at least worth a shot.
(It might be obvious, but mandatory disclaimer anyway : not a specialist, just interested in such things)
Yes, I think cultural struggle may be more general in the way that it is not linked to one theoretical framework only. If anyone knows of another theorized framework, I'm interested.
However, I'm not sure Gramsci would be unwilling to apply his ideas to this case. Cultural hegemony was mainly ensured by the clergy during feudal times, but they assured the hegemony of the landed aristocracy, not the clergy itself, for example. And the idea that hegemonic intellectuals need not be from the same class as the ones they favor by propagating ideologies (among other things) is pretty central troughout his work.
If we want to think of people directly involved in animal exploitation as the dominant - and hegemonic - class in this case, the fact that many institutions, like medicine, ministries, media and so on that are not directly involved are propagating the myths needed to ensure that the exploitation can go on would not be anything odd. And hegemonic ideologies usually pretend to be universal and tend to naturalize the status quo.
Lower class intellectuals like school teachers may not be the ones that directly profit from labor exploitation, or rent, slavery and so on, but they usually are propagating the mythos favoring the current dominant classes (except from specific transitional periods). And the natural superiority of humans is precisely the kind of naturalized state of affair and supposedly universal truth we'd expect to see in such ideologies. Divine rights were also supposedly "natural" (although they implied supernatural elements, but you get the idea), and religion pretended to represent a universal truth, for example.
Also, when you say "the identity and community interests of each human", this would be ground to call humans a social class (or at least category, but back in Gramsci's time, when class reductionism was still a thing, the nuance was not yet clear). And animal advocates could be seen as intellectuals linked to the social category of animals, even though they are not from that category themselves. And as you already know, I think altruism itself, by aligning some interests between different social groups, might be a basis to define a social category in a materialistic framework in itself in my opinion. So I don't think it is such a stretch to call animal advocacy a cultural struggle between vegans and either carnists or the industry. And human identity being imperiled is something that can be interpreted as a hegemonic ideology naturalizing those social categories.
I believe the fact that Gramsci intended his theories to apply to different modes of production and being mainly about strategy in general rather than one specific goal allow one to apply it to many different cases, with many different goals.
I am fairly new to the Effective Altruism community myself, and something I've been asking myself regularly is : questions around what actions are to be taken in order to collectively act upon the world in the most effective way in order to achieve altruistic goals are not especially new, so how is EA different from what has been said and done on the subject before it appeared ? This is more or less the whole point of entire fields of political philosophy and strategy.
As I get more and more familiar with the EA community and its intellectual productions, I'm starting to get a better grasp as to how both approaches are framing societal questions each in their own ways, and what similarities and differences there are between these two framings. In my opinion, EA and political frameworks are somewhat similar but different, and complementary, lenses through which we can frame and analyze societal issues.
I am currently in the midst of similar questioning myself, and I've been trying to link my reflections with the theoretical framework of the highly influential 20th political thinker Antonio Gramsci.
"Cultural struggle" is a term I encountered several times as an intellectual and activist. It sounds to me like this could fit the Gramscian notion of "war of ideas" and its tangential concept of cultural hegemony.
Do you know if there is a nuance between what people call the "cultural struggle" nowadays, and what Gramsci used to call the "war of ideas" ? Is Gramsci one of the historical authors upon which you ground your theoretical work ? And are there other ways to theorize that cultural struggle that would differ from what Gramsci and people following him wrote ?
Psychotherapy, or at least most cognitive and behavioral ones, offer various tools to cultivate such skills. The most emblematic one surely being the columns used in cognitive restructuring. They are usually oriented toward a specific diagnosis, but one can find plenty of free worksheets online. It sounds like a good place to start to get inspiration, if one's interested. But note that this demands quite the commitment : rewiring one's own thought process is no easy task.
Upon researching the term, I'm not confident this is the right term anymore, but I'm pretty sure I've seen and/or heard that the skill sets those techniques helps you get are considered as a subset of what is coined by the umbrella term "cognitive flexibility". The first results I get seem to associate this with the ability to adapt to change (in information, environment...) first and foremost, rather than being able to juggle between different theories or explanations, so I am either mistaken or the latter tends to get overshadowed by the former. If someone can clear things for me, that would be appreciated.
Surely adapting those tools, or creating new, specific ones, for general purpose mental hygiene, so to say, rather than helping with various specific diseases, could be interesting. I suppose some people in personal development already tried, but it's pretty hard discerning who you can trust in that field, and I'm really not familiar with it. Pushing academia to put more effort in non-clinical application is probably worthwhile. Just like I don't need to have any deficiency to profit from accurate nutritional information, I don't need to be anxious or depressed to benefit from education about how I to healthily deal with my own thoughts.
That said, it is painfully hard to make real progress with this, even with guidance (which is either saturated, very expansive and/or unreliable it seems...), and without institutionalization (schools, workplace programs...) I'm not sure whether it's worth the expanses. But mentally ill people are not representative of the whole population, and similar things like mood regulation programs have been implemented in schools already and show what seems to me like promising results for such innovative interventions, so my two cents is that it's at least worth a shot.
(It might be obvious, but mandatory disclaimer anyway : not a specialist, just interested in such things)
Yes, I think cultural struggle may be more general in the way that it is not linked to one theoretical framework only. If anyone knows of another theorized framework, I'm interested.
However, I'm not sure Gramsci would be unwilling to apply his ideas to this case. Cultural hegemony was mainly ensured by the clergy during feudal times, but they assured the hegemony of the landed aristocracy, not the clergy itself, for example. And the idea that hegemonic intellectuals need not be from the same class as the ones they favor by propagating ideologies (among other things) is pretty central troughout his work.
If we want to think of people directly involved in animal exploitation as the dominant - and hegemonic - class in this case, the fact that many institutions, like medicine, ministries, media and so on that are not directly involved are propagating the myths needed to ensure that the exploitation can go on would not be anything odd. And hegemonic ideologies usually pretend to be universal and tend to naturalize the status quo.
Lower class intellectuals like school teachers may not be the ones that directly profit from labor exploitation, or rent, slavery and so on, but they usually are propagating the mythos favoring the current dominant classes (except from specific transitional periods). And the natural superiority of humans is precisely the kind of naturalized state of affair and supposedly universal truth we'd expect to see in such ideologies. Divine rights were also supposedly "natural" (although they implied supernatural elements, but you get the idea), and religion pretended to represent a universal truth, for example.
Also, when you say "the identity and community interests of each human", this would be ground to call humans a social class (or at least category, but back in Gramsci's time, when class reductionism was still a thing, the nuance was not yet clear). And animal advocates could be seen as intellectuals linked to the social category of animals, even though they are not from that category themselves. And as you already know, I think altruism itself, by aligning some interests between different social groups, might be a basis to define a social category in a materialistic framework in itself in my opinion. So I don't think it is such a stretch to call animal advocacy a cultural struggle between vegans and either carnists or the industry. And human identity being imperiled is something that can be interpreted as a hegemonic ideology naturalizing those social categories.
I believe the fact that Gramsci intended his theories to apply to different modes of production and being mainly about strategy in general rather than one specific goal allow one to apply it to many different cases, with many different goals.
Thank you for this much needed discussion.
I am fairly new to the Effective Altruism community myself, and something I've been asking myself regularly is : questions around what actions are to be taken in order to collectively act upon the world in the most effective way in order to achieve altruistic goals are not especially new, so how is EA different from what has been said and done on the subject before it appeared ? This is more or less the whole point of entire fields of political philosophy and strategy.
As I get more and more familiar with the EA community and its intellectual productions, I'm starting to get a better grasp as to how both approaches are framing societal questions each in their own ways, and what similarities and differences there are between these two framings. In my opinion, EA and political frameworks are somewhat similar but different, and complementary, lenses through which we can frame and analyze societal issues.
I am currently in the midst of similar questioning myself, and I've been trying to link my reflections with the theoretical framework of the highly influential 20th political thinker Antonio Gramsci.
"Cultural struggle" is a term I encountered several times as an intellectual and activist. It sounds to me like this could fit the Gramscian notion of "war of ideas" and its tangential concept of cultural hegemony.
Do you know if there is a nuance between what people call the "cultural struggle" nowadays, and what Gramsci used to call the "war of ideas" ? Is Gramsci one of the historical authors upon which you ground your theoretical work ? And are there other ways to theorize that cultural struggle that would differ from what Gramsci and people following him wrote ?