Know-It-All Society Page 5
This emphasis on emotional reactions is perhaps most obvious on Facebook, whose stated goal, after all, is emotional connection. Consider how the platform encourages us to react to posts that we share with one another. It used to be that one could only “like” a post or refrain from liking it. But now Facebook offers the choice of a few different reactions, each corresponding to a basic emotion and represented by easily recognizable emoticons: frowny face, happy face, surprised face, and of course, angry outrage face. My experience in using these emoticons, which I suspect is widely reflected in others’ use as well, is that they have a deep impact on how you think about the pieces being shared. For one thing, the emoticons that other people in your network choose in reacting to a post can strongly affect how you yourself react. That effect is similar to the effects of social pressure offline. If everyone in your workplace dislikes something someone said or did, it is difficult not to show a similar reaction. Similarly, if your friends express outrage at a news piece, it can feel awkward not to do so yourself. And independently of that factor, the emoticon you choose can help condition how you comment on the post, if you do comment. If you choose the angry emoticon, for example, it is extremely unlikely that you will then comment by saying that the piece in question really made you think.
Now consider a thought experiment. Imagine that instead of the emoticons, we had a choice of three buttons that we could use when sharing a news story or other claim to fact: “justified by the evidence,” “not justified by the evidence,” and “need more information.” How might having these choices—instead of emoticons aimed at the most basic human emotions—condition how we would engage with what we share and what we don’t share?
One thought—no doubt overly hopeful—is that they would make at least some of us more reflective or thoughtful. We might even be less eager to share something we haven’t read—because we would be thinking of people’s reactions as being hinged not on their outrage or joy but more on the evidence they perceive the piece to communicate. It might encourage some of us to be more skeptical, and humbler, ourselves. But unless the basic digital economy changed, my hypothesis is that eventually, we would start treating all three buttons emotively. Eventually—as the old expressivists would have predicted—we would start to use the language of evidence to express feelings, not considered opinions. We could play on the emotions of others to get them to rate as “justified by the evidence” items that nonetheless go unread. And we might engage in spreading fake news and misleading evidence. So, not as much might be gained as we would wish.
Yet even if, in the way of thought experiments, this one is idealized, it highlights a crucial point. Just changing the surface appearances of our social-media platforms won’t help. As long as we ignore the fact that their underlying economy rewards the expression of strong emotion over reflection, we will continue to deceive ourselves about the real nature of much of our communication on those platforms. We will continue to contribute, unwittingly or otherwise, to a corrupted information culture. And we will continue to make ourselves vulnerable to information polluters who revel in that corruption and take advantage of our naïveté, all the while complaining that our critics are peddling fake news.
3
Where the Spade Turns
Why We Don’t Change Our Minds
There is a certain tension in human life that most of us recognize, and that can cause us deep anxiety. That tension is between being open-minded and standing fast—between a willingness to change and having the courage of one’s convictions. It is a tension we see play out on the political field—where an openness to change is generally an unwelcome attribute in politicians—even though most people want their governments to adapt to changing circumstances. But it also crops up in our personal lives anytime our fundamental commitments are challenged. For, the hard truth is that while we all like to think of ourselves as open-minded and intellectually humble, most of us find uncomfortable, or even morally problematic, the prospect of changing our minds about something that matters.
Sometimes shifting an opinion can even seem rationally impossible. There are times, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once noted, when reasons just run out, and “our spade is turned” on bedrock. That is how we often think of our deepest convictions—as the ground on which our worldview stands. They become part of the landscape, our frame of reference, our “picture of the world” that is the very “background against which [we] distinguish between what is true and what is false.”1 To reject them would be to completely change the picture, or maybe even erase it entirely, leaving us with no ability to know what is right, and what is wrong.
Wittgenstein was personally familiar with what it means to radically change your worldview. After all, this was the man who had declared that his first book, published in 1921 and amounting to something of an extended logical poem, had essentially solved all the problems of philosophy. The key, he thought, was understanding the secret logical structure of both thought and the world, on which all knowledge of any import must be based. Years later, he reversed himself and rejected his earlier work as being itself based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how language relates to the world and, indeed, of the point of philosophy itself.
Wittgenstein came to think that logical structure is less important than what we do with language, and he came to doubt the very possibility of grounding knowledge in the certainties of logic. In some of his last work, published posthumously, he insisted that the quest for philosophical justification always comes to an end—“but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part, it is our acting, which lies at the bottom.”2 What he thought we must learn to accept was the “groundlessness” of our beliefs.
Wittgenstein’s remarks bring to the fore a fundamental problem in any attempt to grapple with dogmatism and arrogance in politics. As we’ve seen, social media can reinforce our natural penchant for self-certainty. But is it possible there is something deeper—something about the very nature of conviction itself—that makes us resistant to entertaining any idea that challenges our fundamental frames of reference? To what extent do we resist change not because of logic but because, as the later Wittgenstein might have said, we simply can’t let go of our form of life?
What Kind of Person Are You?
The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson famously noted that nothing good was ever achieved without enthusiasm—and, one might add, nothing bad was ever accomplished without it either.3 By “enthusiasm” here, Emerson presumably meant more than just joyful participation; he meant a motivating emotional commitment to what matters to us. That’s a good approximation of what we mean by “conviction.” Convictions are the wellsprings of action but the offspring of doctrine.4 As any demagogue can tell you, to galvanize voters it helps to appeal to an ideology—namely, one people can identify with. What matters is getting voters to go beyond mere belief to total commitment.5
This is why there is an emotional component that comes along with conviction—what we call the “feeling of conviction.” When directed at something you also believe, it is the feeling of self-confidence. It is a good feeling. It is good to be right, but it is also good to just feel as if you are right. That’s why, for those of us worried about the fragile state of democracy, the old Yeats line still resonates: the “best” are often filled with self-doubt, while the worst are filled with the passion of conviction.6 And it is also why it is important to understand why our convictions form in the first place.
Convictions feel certain. But not everything we feel certain about is a conviction. I don’t need conviction for anything I’m absolutely or logically certain about. When René Descartes declared he was certain that he thinks and exists (popularly, but erroneously, understood as the inference “I think, therefore I am”), he meant he couldn’t actively doubt he was thinking at that moment—because doubting is thinking. But it would be odd to say this was Descartes’s conviction. Indeed, the interesting thing a
bout convictions is that they are often formed in the face of opposite convictions. Unlike logical certainties like 2 and 2 make 4, or philosophical certainties like Descartes’s belief in his own existence, we generally know that others may oppose our convictions. We are aware that our convictions can be doubted and challenged, even if we ourselves just cannot imagine that they are false.
Here, Wittgenstein seems on the right track: What makes a conviction a conviction is not its logical certainty or how well supported it is. It is not the content of the conviction that matters; what matters is its connections, or its perceived connections, to our way of life. Convictions aren’t just beliefs we feel certain about. They are commitments to action.
To put it differently, our convictions signify to others what kind of person we take ourselves to be or aspire to be, and they reflect our self-image of being that kind of person. It is this fact that makes a conviction feel certain to us, whether or not it really is. Convictions are where attitude meets identity.
Identity is itself a Gordian knot. But this much we can say: the answer to “Who am I?” is a complex mix of internal and external factors. The external factors include those of history (for example, where my family came from), the environment (where I grew up), and biology (my genetics). But they also include the social groups I belong to (including my family), my ethnicity, my race, my gender, my sexual preference, and the role that I play in my social life. What kind of job I have, what sort of love life I enjoy, and how I interact with others all affect who I am and how I see myself. In short, much of what I am is partly the result of my social identity, as sociologists have long pointed out. But my overall identity—the kind of person I am—is also the result of internal psychological factors—my motivations, desires, hopes, fears, and the play and limits of my imagination. What philosophers like to call personal identity is often understood as built out of the continuity and connectedness of these psychological aspects—what Locke called consciousness. As John Locke emphasized, at least part of what makes me the same person as the boy in the photograph above my desk is that I remember being that person.
The aspect of overall identity that I am most concerned with here, however, is self-identity. My self-identity is determined by the interplay of the two internal and external kinds of factors just described, together with a third: what I care about, my values, and deepest commitments. Caring about something means identifying with it, investing in it to the point that I thrive when it flourishes and suffer when it is diminished.7 And what I care about not only shapes the kind of person I aspire to be but signifies to others the kind of person I am. My values and commitments feed my own self-image—my representation, accurate or not, of myself in all three aspects of my overall identity: social, personal, and self.
One way to understand how my self-identity functions is to see it as my aspirational best self—as reflecting my deepest cares and commitments. I may desire to smoke; old habits die hard. But to the extent that I care about not being the kind of person who does—to the extent that I am committed to being healthier—I will sacrifice this desire and not smoke. Likewise, parents sacrifice many of their own goals for the sake of something that matters still more to them: the welfare of their children. Lovers sacrifice their needs for their beloved; activists, for their cause. It is a distinctive aspect of human beings that we can order our commitments in this way and regard ourselves as fully responsible—fully together—only when we end up acting in ways that reflect what we conceive to be our best selves.
The aspirational aspect of conviction captures the element of truth in the existentialist view that we choose our convictions; we decide on them. Jean-Paul Sartre thought we were “doomed” to be free to decide on our deepest moral beliefs. Taken literally, that idea seems implausible, for it ignores the fact that our convictions, like our other beliefs, often sweep over us and emerge out of histories we did not control.8 This spontaneous emergence is apparent when we suddenly find ourselves having a conviction we did not know we had. But there is obviously some truth in Sartre’s point as well. We often speak of coming to decide that something is right, or something is wrong. By this we mean that convictions are the commitments we would actively endorse as being central to who we are, were anyone to pose us the question.9 We cannot control whether we believe or think that a particular proposition is deserving of our conviction. But what is under our control is our taking it up—our committing to it.10 A conviction is a commitment that reflects the kind of person we want to be.
We often represent our aspirational visions of ourselves in an almost narrative form.11 We structure our self-identity like a narrative—we see ourselves as having a beginning, a middle, and an end—but it is also composed like a narrative. We are storytelling creatures who tell the stories of ourselves to ourselves and to others. We can even see our self-narrative as having a plot of sorts; that is, we construct our self-narrative around the events and characters that have mattered to us and that guide our conception of the good.12
But the story of our self is not composed in the same way that Charles Dickens consciously plotted a story (the story of our teenage years: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”). For one thing, the narrative of our self-identity doesn’t have just a single author. Our self-identity is our conception of our self, but it is also the result of stories told by others. Our parents tell all those embarrassing stories of when we were little; our friends tell all those stories about when we were in college. And of course, our self-stories are formed against the background of larger stories—cultural narratives that tell us what kind of people Americans or Europeans or South Koreans are; political narratives that tell us what kind of people Republicans or Democrats are; racial narratives that tell us what kind of people blacks and whites are; gender narratives that tell us what kind of people women and men are. Each of these cultural narratives has plot points of its own—elements that identify values and morally and politically significant events around which the rest of the story unfolds. By absorbing these narratives, we absorb the various moral prejudices and biases of our culture.13
This is not to say that every wider cultural narrative and every group membership is going to matter equally. For most people, whether or not they are members of AAA will not mean much for their conceptions of themselves.14 The stories that matter are the stories we tell each other about the nature our tribe—about what kind of people we belong to, and what kind of people we don’t. These are the stories that tell us what is sacred to us. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild describes such narratives as “deep stories.” As she puts it, a deep story is “a feels-as-if story—it’s the story that feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel.”15 Hochschild’s point is that our cultural narratives are shaped by and embody our attitudes.
This way of conceiving of self-identity helps us understand the nature of conviction. Convictions are those emotionally laden commitments that have become so woven into our self-narrative that they have become a part of our self-identity.
A simple way to illustrate this point is to conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that a scientist offers you a million dollars in exchange for a “conviction transplant.” If you take the deal, you give up three of your deepest convictions and are “implanted” with their opposites. So you might, for example, become a committed racist, believe that your loved ones are unimportant dullards, lose your faith, and so on. Would you do it? I hope not. And, even if you did—thinking, for example, what the money might do for your loved ones—you’d probably see accepting the money as a significant sacrifice.
What explains our reactions here is that, when we are in the throes of conviction, we regard giving them up as a harm, precisely because we think of them as making us a certain kind of person. Indeed, some might think that losing their core convictions would mean they would cease to exist as the same individual; whoever survived the conviction transplant wouldn’t be them, i
n other words. But even if we don’t go that far, we are likely to think that losing our convictions will make our life a bit less worth living. And that sentiment tells us that our convictions signify to ourselves what kind of person we aspire to be.
Crucially, it works the other way around as well: we see other people’s convictions as revealing who they are, and they in turn look at our convictions in the same way. Consider, to take a more realistic example, a religious couple worried that sending their daughter off to a secular college might cause her to lose her faith. Intuitively, their fear concerns their daughter’s identity as religious. It is not about her existence per se; it is rather about the manner of her existence. The parents are afraid that their daughter will lose a belief of such fundamental value that she will no longer be the same kind of person. They may think that losing her religious faith will make her lose her moral compass; or they may simply feel that, even independently of morality, her religious convictions are part of who she is. We take our core convictions as both reflecting and constituting what kind of person we are—but we also use them as a way to measure other people’s tribal identities. What makes you in or out of the group is often a matter of what you’re committed to believing as much as what you do.