Know-It-All Society Read online

  KNOW-IT-ALL

  SOCIETY

  Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture

  Michael Patrick Lynch

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To Terry, who keeps me humble, or tries to

  The concept of “truth” as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.

  —BERTRAND RUSSELL

  Who needs Google? My father already knows everything.

  —INSCRIPTION ON A MUG

  Contents

  PREAMBLE: NO ORDINARY QUESTION

  1. MONTAIGNE’S WARNING

  Nothing More Wretched

  Like Ears of Corn

  A Very Social Attitude

  2. THE OUTRAGE FACTORY

  Google Knows All

  Fake News and Information Pollution

  Sharing Emotions

  3. WHERE THE SPADE TURNS

  Why We Don’t Change Our Minds

  What Kind of Person Are You?

  From Belief to Conviction

  4. IDEOLOGIES OF ARROGANCE AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT

  Roots of Authoritarianism

  Telling It Like It Is

  The Logic of Status Threat

  Arrogance, Ignorance, and Contempt

  5. LIBERALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF IDENTITY POLITICS

  Arrogant Liberals

  Misunderstanding the Politics of Identity

  The Rationality Brand

  The Politics of Contempt

  6. TRUTH AND HUMILITY AS DEMOCRATIC VALUES

  Socratic Lessons

  Intellectual Humility

  A Space of Reasons

  Truth and Democracy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL SOURCES

  INDEX

  KNOW-IT-ALL SOCIETY

  Preamble: No Ordinary Question

  THE problem of politics is no ordinary question, Socrates says in The Republic; it concerns how we ought to live.1 This book is about a particular version of the Socratic question: how we ought to believe. Or to put it more precisely, it concerns how we should go about the business of acquiring and maintaining our political convictions.

  It is a pressing question. One reason it is pressing is that we are living in a time when not just political norms but the norms of evidence themselves are unsettled. There is increasingly very little common ground between the narratives of the Left and the Right, even the most trivial details of fact are disputed and questioned, and “fake news” has simply become a label for news that one doesn’t like. In such times, the question of how to go about figuring out what to think is very much a living existential question.

  Or it should be. But in fact, the unsettledness of our norms is making us not more reflective, but less. Judging by the tenor of our political discourse, our answer to the question of how we should believe seems to be: as dogmatically as possible. Recent data suggests that people from different sides of the political spectrum, at least in the United States, still agree more than they disagree on many issues. But this same data also shows that, increasingly, we regard the other party with suspicion—as dishonest, uninformed, and downright immoral.2 The idea that we should listen to their views seems unthinkable. Moreover, we know the other side regards us the same way, and we resent them for it. The Right sees liberals as arrogant know-it-alls, while the Left retorts that this is precisely the description of the person the conservatives elected president of the United States.

  But maybe both sides have a point. Maybe all of us, in a certain sense, are know-it-alls, and that’s part of the problem.

  America, as a culture, has never lacked confidence. We like to think of ourselves as A number one, top of the list, king of the hill—and deserving special attention because that is so. And self-esteem, cultural or otherwise, is mainly a very good thing. But if there is a single attitude most closely associated with our national consciousness at this political moment, it’s not confidence. It’s arrogance. In particular, a certain kind of arrogance that now defines our political relationships with each other. It’s the arrogance of moral certainty—of thinking your side has it all figured out, that you don’t need to improve because you are just so great already. It is arrogance about what we believe or think we know—intellectual arrogance.

  Several factors are conspiring to encourage the spread of this attitude. The most obvious is our politics. In the United States, in particular, we are becoming numb not only to outrageous falsehoods, but to the bizarre self-assurance with which they are pronounced. We were told crowds were bigger than they were, that the sun shone when it didn’t, that Trump won in a landslide—and that was just in the first few days after his election. Since then, our political discourse has become even more polluted with arrogant indifference to truth. Most of us have probably felt at some point or other that it can’t get worse—and then it does.

  All this highlights another reason our Socratic question is pressing. It is pressing because how we go about believing has a direct effect on what we believe. If we approach the question of whether to believe that climate change is real, or that vaccines cause autism, with our minds already made up, we will get an answer that reflects ourselves more than the truth. But more than that, if we become convinced that those who answer differently are also approaching the question with minds made up, we may begin to feel that the whole enterprise is bankrupt. We may begin to listen to those who tell us that everyone is entitled to their alternative facts, that all news is fake news and social media simply weaponized information. We may begin to think, with Camus, that “dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic.”3 In other words, the dogmatic arrogance we see in our political discourse may be due to our belief in our tribe’s infallibility, or it may be due to the fact that we’ve simply punted on truth and embraced power as the measure of our success.

  These reflections suggest that our Socratic question is really about our attitudes toward truth, both in life and in politics. How we should approach truth in politics is a problem with a long history. The current political situation with the presidency in the United States, or the recent presidential election in Brazil, or nationalist movements in Hungary, Austria, and even Great Britain, only serve to bring it into bold relief. The resolution of those situations, whatever that may turn out to be in each case, will not make the underlying problem go away. The more we come to think that tribal convictions are all that should matter, the more we arrogantly dismiss evidence for victory and truth for power, the weaker our grip on democracy becomes, no matter who is in power. Children raised in such an environment will absorb the lessons it gives them: that language is best used for hypocrisy and confusion, and democracy is for fools. As Arendt put it, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world . . . is being destroyed.”4

  It is tempting to think that these problems can be handled with technical, policy-driven solutions: reimagining our digital platforms, or passing new legis
lation, or teaching people more facts about civics. And without a doubt, those things are terribly important. But at the end of the day, dealing with our attitudes toward truth and conviction won’t be solved just by teaching people more facts when we don’t agree on what counts as a “fact.” The problem of how to deal with the spread of dogmatism and the politics of arrogance is not a technical problem; it is a human problem. If we want to solve it, we have to change how and what we value; we must change our attitudes.

  An attitude is an explicit or implicit mental evaluation that we make of the world around us; it is a frame of mind, a kind of positive or negative mental orientation. Attitudes have been much discussed in social psychology for over a century, and in philosophy long before that; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume might have called them sentiments. And scientists since Freud have warned us that the mental attitudes driving us are often ones we would consciously disavow and be embarrassed to find ourselves holding. Our attitudes matter for how we relate to the world, to one another, and to ourselves.

  You might think the idea that really matters in our polarized political landscape is civility. But while I have nothing against civility (except when “be civil” is used as code for “shut up”), I am concerned with something more fundamental. Civility marks a social norm, a baseline of appropriate social conduct. But how we act is the result of how we think—what we believe and therefore think we know. So if we want to understand our “uncivil” behavior, we must start with our attitudes toward our beliefs. Belief informs action—both within and without politics. Whether we cooperate or interfere with someone, whether we enact a policy or protest against it, who we vote for and why—all depend on what we believe. And it is important to understand not only those beliefs themselves, but our attitudes toward how we form them, how reliable they are, and how willing we are to change them. We need to come to grips with how we regard both ourselves and others as believers.

  It is for this reason that intellectual arrogance is such a useful focus for understanding the challenges facing democracy. Unlike incivility, intellectual arrogance is essentially concerned with beliefs—both our own and others’. When we suffer from it, we think we have nothing to learn from anyone else—that our worldview can’t improve from hearing what people with different perspectives have to say.

  But intellectual arrogance is not just an individual failing. I hope to convince you that it is also a social failing. In the right conditions, arrogance can go tribal and become an attitude that “we” have toward “them.” And when that happens, we have started down the road toward an undemocratic future, since what I will call “tribal arrogance” causes us to put loyalty before truth and believe not only in the superiority of our views but—much more dangerously—in the superiority of our humanity.

  The root of the problem is a tendency for conviction to give rise to arrogance. Thus my account rests on several, typically unnoticed, facts about the role that conviction plays in our lives. A conviction is a belief that takes on the mantle of commitment—a call to action—because it reflects our self-identity. It reflects the kind of person we aspire to be, and the kinds of groups and tribes we wish to belong to. That is why attacks on our convictions seem like attacks on our identity—because they are. But that is also why we often ignore evidence against our convictions; to give them up would be to change who we imagine ourselves to be.

  That is a fact about the human condition. Its unnoticed consequence is that in unsettled times, humans are apt to go about the business of forming their political convictions in a very defensive, identity-protective way. But it also means we are ripe, during such times, for being taken advantage of. It is entirely human to want to be confident in your convictions, to be confident in yourself and your tribe.5 But that desire for confidence, coupled with a fear of change, makes people vulnerable to political ideologies that would exploit these facts for authoritarian ends. Ideologies of arrogance, on both the Left and the Right, exploit our fears and desires by selling us cultural narratives not just of “us and them” but of “us over them.” And these same ideologies encourage us to expand our identities by expanding our convictions, by giving everything around us a political meaning, and therefore making our every choice—from the clothes we wear, to the cars we drive, to the coffee we drink—a matter of conviction.

  It also tends to go unnoticed that currently, we are doing all of this to ourselves. To understand how these cultural narratives develop, you have to understand where we communicate them: on the digital landscape. Information pollution—fake news and propaganda—accelerates the spread of group polarization and the sense that “we” know and “they” don’t. They are effective not mainly because they get people to believe false things. They are effective because they get people to feel certain things, to share attitudes that reinforce their convictions and thus their identity. Social media, I’ll argue, is a blind-conviction machine.

  This book may seem like the literary equivalent of waving your hands and pointing at where the real problem lies—even while everyone else, not caring about the causes of the fire, heads for the exit. But it also hopes to plant the seeds for an alternative ideal—one that sees conviction as no enemy of reason and evidence. Bertrand Russell once began a book defending the importance of rational argument in politics by admitting that “if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system.” But, he added, dryly, “since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.”6 Like Russell’s defense of rationality, a plea for less arrogance and more intellectual humility is easy to dismiss as idealistic and unneeded. Unneeded because we are all prone to think that it is only the other guy who is arrogant, and everyone knows that already, so why bother? Idealistic because we all know that nothing ever changes.

  I confess my idealism—but I do not apologize. It is in the nature of philosophy to aspire to ideals, and to try to learn from our failing to meet them. It is these goals that this book aims to meet by diagnosing our culture’s current obsession with self-certainty and abstracting from that a political lesson about the value of truth in democracy. In the end, the essence of that lesson is already contained in Socrates’s query. To live is to have conviction, to tie your beliefs to action. We cannot take seriously the question of how to live without also taking seriously the question of how to believe.

  I

  Montaigne’s Warning

  Nothing More Wretched

  Who hasn’t thought—after an angry election, or an especially rancorous holiday meal with relatives, or simply in response to the numbing hostilities of the twenty-four-hour news cycle—of simply walking away from politics? Of just curling up with a good book and checking out of the world? For many people today, that probably just means getting off social media. For Michel de Montaigne, a minor nobleman, politician, and eventually one of the greatest writers of the sixteenth century, it meant something far more literal. At the age of thirty-eight, he retired to a tower, stocked it with books, and tried to drop out of political life.

  Politics had left Montaigne in a skeptical frame of mind. Humanity likes to think of itself on a busy quest for truth, he thought, “but is it within the capacity of Man to find what he is looking for?” Montaigne was doubtful. There was a “plague” on Man: “the opinion that he knows something.”1

  The France of Montaigne’s day was going through a period of extremely violent political and intellectual upheaval. The scientific discoveries of Copernicus had shaken the educated European’s worldview, which took Earth as the center of the universe; the discovery of the New World threw into doubt the centrality of Europe itself. Most dramatically for the average person, the Catholic Church’s traditional claim to be the sole arbiter of truth was under assault by the Protestant Reformation.

  These three storms of doubt—about the nature of the universe, geography, and religious knowledge—left people feeling unsettled. Prophecies of doom were rampant; the
apocalypse, or at least the end of civilization, was thought to be nigh. But most people did not react to these challenges to their belief systems by questioning whether they had things right. Far from it; religious extremism was rampant, with each group convinced that its side alone had discovered the religious truths of the universe. The uncertainty of the times justified in many people’s minds drastic action and a ferocious, blind faith. As a result, cities and towns throughout France—including in Montaigne’s own region—witnessed citizens of one religious persuasion slaughtering neighbors who were of a different persuasion. Those who advocated moderation or suggested that the solution to the religious wars was really political, not spiritual, were regarded with suspicion by both sides. Massive uncertainty over belief had fueled not diffidence but dogmatism.

  Born in 1533, Montaigne spent his life navigating these conflicts, serving as mayor of Bordeaux, and surviving civil wars, various personal attacks, and the religious hostilities that had littered France with corpses.2 Although he later reentered political life, Montaigne was not impressed by the rampant dogmatism of his day, saying at one point, “Zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency toward hatred . . . [but it] never makes one go flying towards goodness.”3 He preferred, he said, to retreat into his tower and into “the arms of learned virgins.” It was there he wrote his famous essays, a form of writing he invented. They sparkle with observations about humanity but especially about himself, including his own tendency to fall victim to the same plague of vanity and arrogance that he saw in others.

  In this endeavor he was inspired by the example of Socrates, who had advised, eighteen hundred years before Montaigne, that the path to wisdom begins with knowing yourself. The Oracle of Delphi had pronounced that no one was wiser than Socrates, but Socrates himself said he knew only that he didn’t know much. Montaigne’s writings are sprinkled with references to the ancient Greek philosopher, whose constant searching for answers he admired. But Montaigne’s real obsession was with a subtly different group of thinkers—the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics, who maintained that what made people unhappy was their tendency to think they knew more than they actually did. Unlike Socrates, however, the Pyrrhonians didn’t encourage people to know more. If we want to be happy, they said, we should just give up on the quest for knowledge. Indeed, we should even give up on believing anything at all.