Recent political commentary has observed a dissociation from traditional left–right political views and a move towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum. The increasing chasm between the major parties in the US has brought a concurrent rise in rhetorical hostility and disregard. The right is slandered as racist, while the left is slandered as socialist. Common ground between the major parties is incredibly scarce. In response, some political commentators have suggested rationality as an antidote. Ben Shapiro’s mantra facts don’t care about your feelings ridicules the far left. Sam Harris’ plea for the dissolution of political tribalism calls for reasoned political thought. Such statements are useful in curtailing the extremes, but cannot address the depth of the divide. For that, we need to take a psychological approach.
The Significance of Ideas
Politics is the foundation of society. It is the process of making and implementing group decisions (as defined here) and has substantial influence on all dimensions of societal organization: economics, business, education and religion. The state holds such authority that political decisions affect both public and private conduct. Because of its influence, politics is the ideal forum for discussions of how we ought to collectively orient ourselves.
These discussions are about political attitudes. Political attitudes represent our tendency to evaluate political issues favourably or disfavourably. They give specific objects emotional valence, which guides how we interact with them. While this may lead to a simple judgement that a thing is good or bad, we can also hold many different attitudes towards a single item, which can confuse our behaviour. It is also possible to hold similar attitudes towards related things, which can unify behaviour. The conglomeration of a coherent set of attitudes is called an ideology: as Robert Erikson and Kent Tedin put it, it is a “set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.” Hence, political ideologies are sets of unified beliefs about which political structure can achieve the proper organization of society.
An ideology provides a framework within which to make sense of the chaotic nature of the world. Ideologies satisfy existential needs for closure and terror management. As John T. Jost argues, this allows the ambiguities of human nature, past, present and future to be explained by a coherent system of thought. As a result, there is a strong emotional component to belief structures. This psychological comfort can motivate complete devotion to certain beliefs. As a result, while in normal situations people hold attitudes, in the politically extreme Jung’s maxim holds true: “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”
The Significance of Ideologies
This explains the difficulty of challenging the politically extreme. The existence of competing ideologies acts as an assault on the certainty of one’s own worldview. When you present the ideologically possessed with information that runs contrary to their assumptions, you are not providing them with an opportunity to reassess the facts. Rather, you are presenting yourself as the articulator of a belief structure in direct opposition to the foundation that provides their emotional and psychological safety. Normal individuals can be influenced by conversation, but ideologues cannot. Ideological possession claims too much of one’s ego: a single concession can lead to the complete dissolution of identity. At the individual level, coming into contact with different ways of viewing the world can consume one’s entire psyche. At the global level, these competing ideologies threaten devastation.
The philosophical roots of each ideology run deep and act as the basis upon which a collective can create a coherent, stable society. The values they have inherited from society influence how the public act and these actions organize the culture around a shared ideal. Competing ideologies construct different social, cognitive and motivational systems. If these differences are significant enough, ideological commitments can hinder cross-cultural communication more than any language barrier—one striking example of this is the relationship between the west and Soviet Russia during the Cold War era.
The west is the product of Greek and Judeo-Christian thought, with their emphasis on the individual, who is endowed with certain inalienable rights. No matter how powerful the state, its legitimate claim to authority dissolves when it is too overbearing in its impositions on the individual. Individuals are represented in government through a democratic system and can determine—and are primarily responsible for—their life, work and leisure through the free market.
The ideology of Soviet Russia was Marxism-Leninism. The authority of a centralized planned economy under a dictatorship of the proletariat was established in accordance with a materialist view of the world. Class interests were primary: wealth was redistributed from the individual to the collective for the social good. Truth was regarded as class-specific, and class consciousness was considered a higher form of rational thinking: when science was found incongruent with the party line, the scientist was to recant or face arrest. Objective truth, istina, was considered part of the conservative conspiracy that had previously exploited the working class and, in the search for the ideal world, only the concept of pravda (a higher truth) was immutable.
The differences between these worldviews held the world hostage for several decades. There was an extraordinary drive towards nuclear armament. Capable of causing total annihilation, such weaponry forced the ideological opponents to confront the idea of mutually assured destruction. We were ready to destroy the physical world to maintain our belief structures—because our belief structures are more real to us than matter.
The Problem in the West
Since the end of the Cold War, the west has lacked an esteemed ideological opponent. However, there has been ideological splintering within western countries. According to the Pew Research Center, since the 1990s the American electorate has become more ideologically polarized: 94% of Democrats are now positioned to the left of the median Republican, and 92% of Republican voters to the right of the median Democrat. In 1994, 17% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans reported having very negative views of the opposite party: by 2014, this had increased to 38% of Democrats and 43% of Republicans. Of those respondents who had negative views of the opposing party, most claimed that the opposing party presents a serious threat to the well-being of America.
This increased ideological polarization seems to be accelerating the parties’ shift towards the ends of the political spectrum. Social media exacerbates this tendency by allowing us to curate our newsfeeds and select which viewpoints to engage with. Social media users are more likely to connect with those who share their political attitudes and disconnect from those who disagree, as these reports show. The creation of online echo chambers means that all news is filtered through an ideological sieve: Democrats and Republicans often live in completely different mental worlds. The tendency to filter information was clearly demonstrated in research conducted over 20 years ago.
In 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted the now famous invisible gorilla experiment. Participants were asked to watch a short video showing six people pass basketballs to each other. Their task was to count the number of passes between the players. At some point during the video, a man in a gorilla suit walks in, turns to the camera, thumps his chest and walks out. Around 50% of respondents failed to see the gorilla. Before continuing, take a moment to try a similar experiment on yourself, by watching the first 48 seconds of this video.
. . . . .
Even when primed to look out for non-trivial environmental changes, most of us fail to recognize them, as the experiment you have just done vividly demonstrates. For some reason, correctly counting the number of passes has more motivational significance than the introduction of anomalous material. This provides evidence for the philosophy of functionalism: despite our efforts to interpret the world accurately, we did not evolve to calculate cold facts, but to act functionally. If the instructions given in an experiment like the one above can modify our perception so radically, what can we expect from doctrines as psychologically deep rooted as ideologies?
Ideologies provide us with a framework that guides our behaviour towards an ideal. Different political attitudes unite to create different biases. These biases install a perceptual filtering system that is sensitive to information in line with a particular political ideology. One’s environment then manifests in accordance with one’s ideological goal—the news, daily events and all politically relevant things are considered good if they promote the ideal, and bad if they hinder it. Indeed, as Jonathan Haidt has shown, when people with different ideologies are shown the same information, they often interpret it differently. Hence, insofar as the common ground between the two parties has eroded, Democrats and Republicans may live in different conceptual worlds.
This creates a vicious cycle. We are psychologically wired to look for information through our ideological lens, which in turn motivates us to engage with echo chambers that confirm our ideological assumptions, which then seem to affirm the correctness of these moral assumptions. So, how can concerned moderates encourage the supporters of the two major parties in the US to reunite on common ground—especially when they don’t perceive any common ground in the first place?
A Possible Way Out
These profound psychological issues cannot be addressed using facts and reason. Facts can influence people who are already sympathetic to a certain viewpoint, but they operate at too superficial a psychological level to reach those who have been ideologically possessed. Processes of reason arrive too late in the development of thought to have much influence on premature ideological bias. No matter how reasonable an opponent’s view may be, political bias will filter it as an offence against the ideologue’s worldview and make her disengage from conversation before it has even begun. However, although they are unlikely to reach the ideologically extreme, there are psychological tools that can help us re-establish communication between moderates from the two major parties.
In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt uses the analogy of an elephant and a rider to describe the relationship between our emotional and rational systems, respectively. We might assume that the rider controls the elephant. However, if rider and elephant disagree on what direction to take, the six-tonne elephant will overpower the tiny rider and stride out in the direction it desires.
We can’t just appeal to the sympathies of the reasonable rider, then—we need to entice the ideological elephant. While we can influence the elephant to move in one direction or another, our rider will still require significant discipline to coax the enormous emotional beast into something resembling a reasonable gait. However, if we can get the elephant on side, the rider will have a much easier job.
By considering the different perspectives of the politically engaged, we can do a lot to connect with their emotional side. This can be done by simply listening to the other person’s political attitudes and why (they think) they hold them. This motivates reciprocation, and opens us up to the possibility of changing our own minds, as described here. To do this, you need not concede any of your political opinions, just attempt to bridge the political divide by re-establishing common ground.
When the Democratic donkey is taking a step to the right and the Republican elephant is moving to the left, our rational riders can lean toward the centre to look through the ideological filter of those across the aisle (even if only out of intellectual curiosity). This slight lean can achieve a lot: political enemies can realize that, although they may have different suggestions for solving an issue, there is a remarkable agreement in their perspectives in that they both consider there to be an issue in the first place. The major parties in the US were created to embody different aspects of the same constitution, and, despite significant differences in priorities, there are superordinate goals that cross party lines. The United States is not full of Democrats and Republicans, but fundamentally full of Americans.
One Final Caveat
Our everyday conversations can provide an opportunity to do this. Trusted friends don’t turn into psychopaths when engaging in politics. But they do when online, where, as this study has shown, people are far less open to different political opinions. Emotional appeals are only possible one on one. Our online profiles are too removed from ourselves to create a bond that permits a sympathetic reading of another’s perspective. As a result, online comments—no matter how considerate and moderate—are too susceptible to being interpreted as ideological statements. So, Ben, while facts may not care about your feelings, feelings often don’t care about your facts. We can’t address the facts if we are talking past each other in different ideological languages. To insist on our common humanity, we need to talk to each other in person.
7 comments
Most commentators on our current “fake news”and “post-truth” controversies, I fear, may perhaps be missing the real sources of our political polarization in their exclusive focus either on race and gender oppression (whether real or supposed)or else on the evolutionary roots of “tribalism” and “confirmation bias.”
We seem these days to have two competing “hegemonic discourses” (postmodern academese for “dominant orthodoxies”) that almost completely monopolize current discussions of political, social, and cultural questions, to the almost total exclusion of other possibly illuminating perspectives or viewpoints. Almost everybody nowadays seems to view politics, culture, and social relationships exclusively through the “lens” either of “critical race and gender theory” or else of evolutionary psychology, the primate brain, and the perils of ”bubbles” and “tribalism.” Nearly all our more reputable commentators on politics, culture, and social relationships have in effect become disciples either of Michel Foucault, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Robin di Angelo or else of Robert Ardrey, Steve Pinker and Edward O. Wilson, or so it seems.
All our conflicts are explained in terms either of “white privilege,” “patriarchy,” “structural racism,” “sexism,” “intersectionality,” and “the Other,” usually in a lingo seemingly translated from Gallic gurus like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, or else of “tribes,” “bubbles,” and “confirmation bias.” One “discourse” sees history, politics, and culture are seen as little more than the story of straight white European bourgeois males oppressing, exploiting, excluding, and diminishing the “subaltern Other” in a “hegemonic gaze” (a “racialized” and “sexualized” gaze, “naturellement”). The other “discourse” interprets history, culture and politics as essentiallly the story of primates impelled by brains evolved on the Pliocene East African veldt to huddle together in closed inward-gazing “tribes” and “bubbles” of the like-minded, nursing their “confirmation bias” and blocking off opposing views, abetted by Internet and social-media algorithms.
As I just noted, other possibly relevant or illuminating perspectives seem to be seldom if ever discussed these days. If one isn’t a “woke” politically correct feminist anti-racist intersectionalist Social Justice Warrior, but is too fastidious to be an Alt-Right white supremacist in a MAGA hat with a Confederate flag spouting “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theories, it’s almost a given that one will be expatiating learnedly on evolutionary psychology, tribalism, bubbles, confirmation biases, “assortative mating” (the complaint that too many Republicans hang out only with other Republicans, too many Democrats only marry other Democrats, and too many “hip” sophisticated culture-vultures move to the same chic big-city neighborhoods), and the diabolically misleading character of Google algorithms and Facebook “likes.” We rarely hear any more, however, of the various interpretations of social and political behavior that inspired lively academic and journalistic debate a few decades ago. All seems to be drowned out these days by “critical race and gender theory” and by neo-Darwinism–or else by Alt-Right snark and conspiracism.
We thus seldom hear any more, for example, about classical Marxist economic determinism, except indirectly, as in criticisms of Bernie Sanders for attacking economic inequality when he “should” have been talking more about race and gender inequities, or in the ridiculing of pundits who blamed “economic insecurity” for working-class Whites voting for Donald Trump in 2016, when they “should” instead have been denouncing those “deplorables’” racist and sexist bigotry! We almost never hear these days about status anxiety, status resentment, and the psychological ambiguities of social mobility, either, nor about the tendency of newcomers to a group to overdo what they see as that group’s good qualities, as in the ostentatious “conspicuous consumption” of the newly-rich, the super-patriotism of immigrants, the ultra-orthodox piety of religious converts, and the “leaning-in” over-conscientiousness of women professionals! Freudian psychology, too, is a “lens” or “prism” seldom encountered any more–whatever became of the Oedipus Complex, of oral and anal personalities, and of the toilet training of the compulsively neat, clean, frugal, and conscientious? We don’t really hear too much these days, either, about T. W. Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik’s 1940’s and 1950’s studies of the “authoritarian personality.”
Current discussions of our own time’s right-wing populism, “Alt-Right,” white supremacism, anti-immigrant prejudices, “Trumpism,” attacks on “cultural elites,” and “fake news” controversies seldom cite the 1950’s and 1960’s sociological analyses of that era’s “Radical Right” movements. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists like Richard Hofstadter, Peter Viereck, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan interpreted “Coughlinism,” “McCarthyism,” the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater and George Wallace movements in terms of status anxieties and resentments. Far right movements like the supporters of Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s, and of the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace in the 1960’s, these scholars argued, appealed disproportionately to groups in American society who were either insecurely upward-mobile or fearfully downward-mobile, either rising but not fast or fully enough, or sinking down from a formerly prestigious or respectable status.
These right-wing populist movements, they argued, appealed especially to groups who had prospered or at least risen economically, but still felt that they did not yet enjoy the respect and recognition to which they felt entitled, such as second- and third-generation immigrants (especially Irish and German Catholics) feeling patronized by WASP Brahmins and the newly-rich (such as Texas oil millionaires and “Sun Belt” aerospace and electronics tycoons) feeling snubbed by “old money.” They also equally applied, however, to formerly high-status groups, like many old-family WASP patricians and many rural and small-town Protestant fundamentalists, who felt their former secure status slipping away as newer groups (e.g., urban intellectuals of largely immigrant origin, government bureaucrats, and starting in the 1960’s also Black spokesmen) gained an influence, prestige, and social visibility seen as undeserved and illegitimate by the declining older “top-dogs.” Large numbers of these insecurely upward-mobile and resentfully downward-mobile Americans, according to scholars like Hofstadter, Viereck, Bell, Riesman, Glazer, etc., flocked to Josepg McCarthy in the 1950’s, and to the John Birch society, other similar “Radical Right” groups, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace on the 1960’s.
These 1950’s and 1960’s analysts of that era’s populist Right certainly noted, discussed, and sadly regretted the 1960’s “White Backlash” of working-class and lower-middle-class White (especially immigrant “ethnic”) resentment against Black demands. However, these analysts did not view American society through a simple binary Black/White racial “lens” or “prism” in the manner of today’s “critical race theorists” excoriating “structural racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” Rather, the Hofstadters, Bells, Riesmans, Glazers, and Moynihans depicted a pluralist scenario of many different ethnic, interest, and social groups all jockeying and competing for comparative advantage and a measure of respectful recognition. Hofstadter, Bell, Riesman, Glazer, Moynihan, and their colleagues thus portrayed WASP’s, Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Slovaks, Scandinavians, Greeks, “Negroes,” “Puerto Ricans,” the old-money rich, and the newly-rich as all similarly competing and jostling, sometimes of course a bit rudely, for “a piece of the action,” “a slice of the pie,” “a share of the graft,” and “a place in the sun.”
In this 1960’s scenario, the “Negroes” and “Puerto Ricans” were simply two more ethnic groups on their way up, just like the Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans, or Poles, though admittedly with some special challenges. The history of slavery, segregation, and lynching was certainly not denied–but was placed in a context of discrimination, prejudice, and even violence experienced by other American ethnic groups. Slavery was a great tragedy, indeed–but it was echoed by the 2,000-year persecution of the Jews, while lynching was offset by pogroms and the Holocaust. Southern “Jim Crow” had its parallels in the immigration restrictions of the 1920’s on Southern and Eastern European immigrants, in the tirades of WASP or “Nordic” supremacists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard against those East and South European “lesser breeds,” in the quotas on Jewish students at Ivy League universities, in the exclusion of Jews from elite clubs and resorts, in the “No Irish Need Apply” signs on posh WASP hotels and restaurants, in the difficulties of a noted Jewish scholar like Lionel Trilling in finding an Ivy League teaching position in the 1940’s, etc. Unlike our own time’s “critical race theory” zealots with their starkly binary black-and-white “oppressor and victim” dichotomy, the status-politics writers of the 1950’s and 1960’s were sensitive to all the fine gradations of snobbery among the relatively privileged and the subtle nuances of milder forms of discrimination among the somewhat less privileged. Nowadays, however, it is dismissed as just a silly exercise in frivolous triviality to make a fuss over, say, people not being invited to a charity ball, cotillion, country club, or fraternal organization–after all, what is a non-invitation to a fancy-dress party or exclusive club compared to Auschwitz or to Jim Crow lynching? The all too real obstacles once faced by MANY ethnic groups in full acceptance into American society are just ignored.
Our own time’s “critical race and gender theorists,” but equally so also the “bubbles”-bemoaning Internet-bashing evolutionists, seem to show little interest in the psychology of “countersignaling,” or “showing off by not showing off.” That is the strategy of people so confident of their valuable qualities that they feel no need to flaunt them, as against the often exaggerated displays seen as necessary by people with only a moderate amount of the good qualities in question–whether of wealth, social status, intelligence, education, competence, or physical strength. This contrast of anxiously diligent signaling of one’s desirable qualities versus confidently casual countersignaling explains the gaudy displays of the newly-rich versus the more restrained consumption of the established old-money rich. It also, as well, explains why immigrants and their children often display an ardent patriotism or even chauvinism, why new converts to a religion are often fervently pious and fanatically orthodox (“more Papal than the Pope”) in contrast to the more easy-going religiosity of “cradle believers,” and why women in business, academia, and the professions feel they must be “twice as good” as their male colleagues to be accepted or taken seriously, to diligently, zealously “lean in” to demonstrate their serious dedication and professionalism. The middle class (especially the lower-middle class, anxious to distinguish themselves from blue-collar workers and from “underclass” slum-dwellers) traditionally being staunch bastions of ultra-respectable mainstream culture, while privileged youth scorn “up-tight” petit bourgeois propriety to embrace counter-cultural lifestyles, is yet another familiar illustration of countersignaling at work.
So, I’ve often wondered, where are the Richard Hofstadters, Peter Vierecks, Daniel Bells, David Riesmans, Nathan Glazers, Setmour Martin Lipsets, and Daniel Patrick Moynihans of the 21st century?
This is a noble attempt to provide a way out of ideological extremism. But suppose the groups are separated by first principles that are irreconcilable. There are people who believe that there are transcendent truths in the world that apply to everyone alike. And people who don’t believe this. I don’t think there are any in between. You might make some progress on derivative ideas (like pro-life and pro-choice) by asking why each side feels the way they do. But no amount of probing will reconcile disagreement about these first principles.
The idea the politics has moved everyone to the extreme left or right is not quite correct.
Western cultural ideology has been moving steadily leftward since the renaissance.
With rising wealth every culture moves leftward.
Free from danger and want, we imagine there is enough for all and equality becomes our mantra.
The extreme right manifests itself in response to want and danger — when there is not enough for all and people may need to be prioritized and sacrificed.
The extreme left has now indeed become more extreme.
But what passes for the “right” is not extreme nationalism or racism (in spite of the left’s imagining that they see it everywhere they look)
The right wing has now shifted leftward too — and is now what used to be called — the old “center.”
Today’s right wing is what was formerly the libertarian moderate center.
Libertarianism is ultimately individualism (and not groupism)
The libertarian sees equality as something between “individuals” and not “groups.”
The extreme left is recognized by its obsession with equalizing groups. i.e. Blacks with whites, women with men, foreigners with the native born, rich with poor etc.
The extreme right is identified with its obsession that my group is superior to your group. i.e. Aryans are better than Jews.
The libertarian center does not focus on groups but on individuals. Individual liberty is the central position between the two moral extremes.
A book titled OUR HUMAN HERDS details these ideas in a concept called The Theory of Dual Morality.
Douglas Murray: “I don’t listen to somebody who has the worst possible hopes about me because I know they don’t want me to do well, well, it’s the same as a nation… don’t listen to these people, they don’t wish to ‘improve’ you, they wish to end you.”
The political arena is the battleground where we fight over grand moral principles. In every election we are told that the fight is over needing to be more equal and sympathetic to the down-trodden (liberalism) or that we all need to rush to the defense of our culture, history and traditions (conservatism).
What we discover is that the proponents of these arguments only show the “FACTS” that support the left or right “TRUTHS” they favor.
If we watch CNN, we discover that American cities are experiencing peaceful protests of thoughtful citizens demanding social justice;
while if we get our news from FOX, we learn that leftist extremists are burning down America and tearing down statues, threatening the most just and moral culture the world has ever known.
News organizations seek out the sensational and tout these left/right battles on TV every night.
By watching, we get the false feeling that these things are occurring everywhere.
If we look out our own windows we would notice that such goings-on are not actually occurring in our neighborhoods.
Turn off your TV and you would not know if a Republican or Democrat was in the White House.
The election season exacerbates these moral debates, and in a book published a number of years ago we discover how and why,
in democracies, every election is touted as “the most important in history” where we are told that the sky is always falling and that doom awaits us, unless we vote for the proper person.
Here is an excerpt from page 366 from the book Our Human Herds published in 2016:
Unlike with monarchies or dictatorships, in democracies the leader is “universally” acclaimed as the best man. We accept instead that we are choosing the lesser of evils. Candidates distinguish themselves from each other by focusing on one moral aspect over another. Conservative Republicans tell us that the Democrats want to reward sloth and punish accomplishment. While liberal Democrats respond by telling us that Republicans want to disregard the plight of the poor and are in no hurry to make women the social equals of men. The story-line changes little from election-to-election.
To be given a choice at all is to be presented with the democratic-concept that a second-best leader is possible and conceivable. Each candidate tells us that if the other person is elected, we will not be led well. Every candidate in some fashion tells us that the other candidate is somehow not up to the job. For almost 50 percent of the voters, the person who is elected is the one who they believed passionately is bad for our country.
We are told that at this election, as in every election, “We are at the crossroads of history.” Invariably, the election is over-hyped with hoopla, hyperbole, and hogwash. A few weeks after Election Day, the agitation dies down and things go on pretty much in the same way as they went on before the election. With most voters uninterested in the details of legislation, and who probably didn’t even know the names of this year’s crop of saviors a few months before election season…
In a commercial democracy, the voter, like the consumer, is bombarded with advertised slogans, predictions, and promises.
The voter/consumer is far more astute in judging the merits of his automobile purchase than he is of judging his representative in Congress. When buying a car, he has personal experience, having driven cars. The citizen, ignorant as he may be in mechanics, or inept as he may be at driving, is still likely to be a genius in these areas compared to how little he knows of international politics or legislative history. After all, the mountains of legislation passed each year subsidizing the efforts of the supporters of one political group or another hardly affects him, and yesterday’s promises of panacea or warnings of dread are forgotten. All are replaced with fresh new fears of the poor getting poorer or the immigrant ruining our culture.
These are our TRUTHS … and every election cycle we scrounge around for the FACTS that confirm our beliefs.
Here is Donald Trump in 2020 warning us of the historic importance of this year’s election:
https://youtu.be/8yuQckojyl0
Here is Joe Biden claiming this is the most important election in over a century:
https://youtu.be/sqB8HJSNhrg
You see, to have istina and pravda swapped.
Thanks. Another fine essay on this topic. But when will things change?