Politics of Everything (https://newrepublic.com/article/170246/fiery-gas-stove-wars) had a good ep last week on gas stoves, really dug into how it's become a cultural touchstone. Also did a really good job hammering home the health problems associated with it that have been known for literally decades and made some comparisons (perhaps unfair, it's very preliminary) to Big Tobacco.
I think it’s relevant to point out in regards to “But those conservatives who speak in high-minded abstractions seem to be driving at something more than this mundane observation. One often gets the sense that they believe that risk is not just inevitable, but somehow good; that is it invigorating; and that attempting to eliminate risk is not merely futile but cowardly and enervating.” that that is not really the case in terms of all risk management, but more specifically in the area of legislation (forcibly making something illegal by way of legislation). The argument is how to weigh proportionality. I don’t believe conservatives are against risk management. Making something illegal actually curtails risk management at the individual level. It’s also not that risk is necessarily invigorating, but that there is a cost in prohibiting something, on many possible levels (firstly personal freedom), that needs to be weighed against the positive aspects of legislating.
Hm. So I'm not a conservative (current politics: schizo), but I think you're right to identify risk as an underlying point of conflict here, and wrong about which side you fall on. Which is to say, I disagree with you, I draw the line elsewhere. It's not that risk isn't real and policy-makers have a responsibility to consider it. It's that "risk" as a trump card is too easy to game. You can't award it trump card status. It has to be one thing you weigh up against other things.
Addison, I think you're overlooking a category distinction: rather than remediable vs. inherent risk, the conservatives you're criticizing make a distinction between *personally remediable* and *not personally remediable* risk.
In this view - which I share for the most part - institutions should not generally be called on to address risks that are personally remediable, regardless of whether someone thinks that the institution could be effective in reducing the risk. To illustrate using the example of gas stoves, the Consumer Product Safety Commission might well be able to require appliance makers to lower their emissions - but they shouldn't do so, because I can just open a window or run my exhaust fan.
Aside from conservative distrust in institutions (which I find reasonable even if I don't always share it), there's another good reason not to call on institutions: because it incentivizes the individual to become helpless or apathetic to the steps they might take to reduce a risk themselves.
I think there's probably also a large gender gap at play: women generally are fine with reducing any kind of risk, men generally get antsy if they aren't doing something that at least feels like it's dangerous.
(Last thing: for what it's worth, my actual house in Northern Virginia has gas heating and electric cooking, and one of my long list of planned projects is to pay for a new range and a plumber to extend the gas line, because my wife enjoys cooking with gas.)
Eh. I’m conservative, and I don’t find “risk” to be enervating/thrilling/exhilarating/what makes life worth living/whatever. Generally the opposite, actually, personally. What I want, is to *be left alone*, to have the freedom to evaluate the risks inherent in life and make the ones that are correct for *me and my family.* What offends me is not that some people want no risk, or different risk, than me, but rather, their insistence that I must agree with and eternally abide by *their* risk benefit calculation, regardless of its applicability to my life.
I'm increasingly convinced that a major contributor to this ends up not being political but technological: the issues at play have costs that are applied at immense scale, but are so diffuse that normal rubrics don't transfer well. If we were talking about harm on the same scale but done in your immediate community, I don't think we'd be having this conversation: of course it's fine for the government to stop your neighbor from dumping raw sewage at your property line. We can physically see the link from action to harm to those impacted.
Something like Nox pollution from your gas stove, though, in addition to not fully knowing how harmful it is (probably *not* as bad as the asbestos we used before we understood how bad it was, but likely bad enough that once the data is in it's easy to see how we should try to dramatically curtail it). I've had people flat out tell me that as a driver they have *no* reason to think *at all* about the risks and damages their actions impose on others: it's up to them to deal with. A common rejoinder to the "driving kills 40k people a year" is just "well but we drive 3.2 trillion miles so that's an acceptable casualty rate _per mile_" which is a bonkers statement because the whole point is that it's not *the bulk of the miles* that are a problem, but specific fixable situations that just need to be designed for everyone involved instead of the driver.
I think the fight over stoves is dumb and counterproductive. But part of that is because I think we just haven't wrestled with the underlying questions and I don't think a lot of our general intuitions apply. I don't know how to fix that, definitely the best way would be if people could collectively step back and leave the emotional tags at the door and start talking options. The most serious stove electrification plans I've heard explicitly budget for providing tanks for a few of the homes to convert to propane when they turn off the line to the neighborhood, and I think we need to get comfortable with that kind of compromise while basically doing what we can to make electric options appealing and available for anyone who wants it before we even think about trying to nudge people who don't.
I agree that there is a tendency for conservatives to grossly minimize risk of real things (cars, pandemics, guns) that have documented real consequences. On the flip side conservatives tend to maximize risk from things like undocumented immigrants, child predation, election integrity. I live in a conservative state in a conservative community, and I often feel as if I’m living in a completely different world (even from my literal next door neighbors) when I hear them talk about what they live in fear of while completely negating the very real things (stroads with 45 mph speed limits as a start) that exist in our community. I’m fascinated by the dichotomy.
My brother and his wife live in Austin and were without power for four days last week. Their one burner camp stove was a life saver!
You are so right about this being yet another wedge in the culture wars. This is so driven by the virality of social media to the point where all nuance is lost. Jonathan Haidt writes about these issues vis-a-vis illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum (as well as the influence on the mental health of the young). He just started a substack as a sounding board for two books he's writing. I highly recommend his writings if you are not familiar with his work.
Politics of Everything (https://newrepublic.com/article/170246/fiery-gas-stove-wars) had a good ep last week on gas stoves, really dug into how it's become a cultural touchstone. Also did a really good job hammering home the health problems associated with it that have been known for literally decades and made some comparisons (perhaps unfair, it's very preliminary) to Big Tobacco.
I think it’s relevant to point out in regards to “But those conservatives who speak in high-minded abstractions seem to be driving at something more than this mundane observation. One often gets the sense that they believe that risk is not just inevitable, but somehow good; that is it invigorating; and that attempting to eliminate risk is not merely futile but cowardly and enervating.” that that is not really the case in terms of all risk management, but more specifically in the area of legislation (forcibly making something illegal by way of legislation). The argument is how to weigh proportionality. I don’t believe conservatives are against risk management. Making something illegal actually curtails risk management at the individual level. It’s also not that risk is necessarily invigorating, but that there is a cost in prohibiting something, on many possible levels (firstly personal freedom), that needs to be weighed against the positive aspects of legislating.
Hm. So I'm not a conservative (current politics: schizo), but I think you're right to identify risk as an underlying point of conflict here, and wrong about which side you fall on. Which is to say, I disagree with you, I draw the line elsewhere. It's not that risk isn't real and policy-makers have a responsibility to consider it. It's that "risk" as a trump card is too easy to game. You can't award it trump card status. It has to be one thing you weigh up against other things.
Addison, I think you're overlooking a category distinction: rather than remediable vs. inherent risk, the conservatives you're criticizing make a distinction between *personally remediable* and *not personally remediable* risk.
In this view - which I share for the most part - institutions should not generally be called on to address risks that are personally remediable, regardless of whether someone thinks that the institution could be effective in reducing the risk. To illustrate using the example of gas stoves, the Consumer Product Safety Commission might well be able to require appliance makers to lower their emissions - but they shouldn't do so, because I can just open a window or run my exhaust fan.
Aside from conservative distrust in institutions (which I find reasonable even if I don't always share it), there's another good reason not to call on institutions: because it incentivizes the individual to become helpless or apathetic to the steps they might take to reduce a risk themselves.
I think there's probably also a large gender gap at play: women generally are fine with reducing any kind of risk, men generally get antsy if they aren't doing something that at least feels like it's dangerous.
(Last thing: for what it's worth, my actual house in Northern Virginia has gas heating and electric cooking, and one of my long list of planned projects is to pay for a new range and a plumber to extend the gas line, because my wife enjoys cooking with gas.)
Eh. I’m conservative, and I don’t find “risk” to be enervating/thrilling/exhilarating/what makes life worth living/whatever. Generally the opposite, actually, personally. What I want, is to *be left alone*, to have the freedom to evaluate the risks inherent in life and make the ones that are correct for *me and my family.* What offends me is not that some people want no risk, or different risk, than me, but rather, their insistence that I must agree with and eternally abide by *their* risk benefit calculation, regardless of its applicability to my life.
I'm increasingly convinced that a major contributor to this ends up not being political but technological: the issues at play have costs that are applied at immense scale, but are so diffuse that normal rubrics don't transfer well. If we were talking about harm on the same scale but done in your immediate community, I don't think we'd be having this conversation: of course it's fine for the government to stop your neighbor from dumping raw sewage at your property line. We can physically see the link from action to harm to those impacted.
Something like Nox pollution from your gas stove, though, in addition to not fully knowing how harmful it is (probably *not* as bad as the asbestos we used before we understood how bad it was, but likely bad enough that once the data is in it's easy to see how we should try to dramatically curtail it). I've had people flat out tell me that as a driver they have *no* reason to think *at all* about the risks and damages their actions impose on others: it's up to them to deal with. A common rejoinder to the "driving kills 40k people a year" is just "well but we drive 3.2 trillion miles so that's an acceptable casualty rate _per mile_" which is a bonkers statement because the whole point is that it's not *the bulk of the miles* that are a problem, but specific fixable situations that just need to be designed for everyone involved instead of the driver.
I think the fight over stoves is dumb and counterproductive. But part of that is because I think we just haven't wrestled with the underlying questions and I don't think a lot of our general intuitions apply. I don't know how to fix that, definitely the best way would be if people could collectively step back and leave the emotional tags at the door and start talking options. The most serious stove electrification plans I've heard explicitly budget for providing tanks for a few of the homes to convert to propane when they turn off the line to the neighborhood, and I think we need to get comfortable with that kind of compromise while basically doing what we can to make electric options appealing and available for anyone who wants it before we even think about trying to nudge people who don't.
I agree that there is a tendency for conservatives to grossly minimize risk of real things (cars, pandemics, guns) that have documented real consequences. On the flip side conservatives tend to maximize risk from things like undocumented immigrants, child predation, election integrity. I live in a conservative state in a conservative community, and I often feel as if I’m living in a completely different world (even from my literal next door neighbors) when I hear them talk about what they live in fear of while completely negating the very real things (stroads with 45 mph speed limits as a start) that exist in our community. I’m fascinated by the dichotomy.
My brother and his wife live in Austin and were without power for four days last week. Their one burner camp stove was a life saver!
You are so right about this being yet another wedge in the culture wars. This is so driven by the virality of social media to the point where all nuance is lost. Jonathan Haidt writes about these issues vis-a-vis illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum (as well as the influence on the mental health of the young). He just started a substack as a sounding board for two books he's writing. I highly recommend his writings if you are not familiar with his work.