How to Think Page 6

  He then gives a powerful example. He mentions being chastised by readers when he expressed relief that Osama bin Laden was dead. More than one person Alexander found reasonable and thoughtful manifested “conspicuous disgust that other people could be happy about [Bin Laden’s] death. I hastily backtracked and said I wasn’t happy per se, just surprised and relieved that all of this was finally behind us.”

  But when Margaret Thatcher died, Alexander continues, “on my Facebook wall—made of these same ‘intelligent, reasoned, and thoughtful’ people—the most common response was to quote some portion of the song ‘Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead.’ Another popular response was to link the videos of British people spontaneously throwing parties in the street, with comments like ‘I wish I was there so I could join in.’ From this exact same group of people, not a single expression of disgust or a ‘c’mon, guys, we’re all human beings here.’ ” And even when he pointed this out, none of his readers saw a problem with their joy in Thatcher’s death.

  And that’s when Alexander realized that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.” The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.*

  PUNISHING THE OUTGROUP

  Since Alexander wrote that initial post, an article has appeared based on research that confirms his hypothesis. “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” by Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, indicates that Americans today do not simply feel animus toward those who disagree with them politically; they are increasingly prepared to act on it. Iyengar and Westwood’s research discovers a good deal of racial prejudice, which is to be expected and which is likely to grow worse in the coming years, but people seem to think that they shouldn’t be racists or at least shouldn’t show it. Not so, when the difference has to do with ideology: “Despite lingering negative attitudes toward African Americans, social norms appear to suppress racial discrimination, but there is no such reluctance to discriminate based on partisan affiliation.”* That is, many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien Tribe. And—this is perhaps the most telling and troubling finding of all—their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup. Through a series of games, Iyengar and Westwood discovered that “outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.”

  I mentioned at the outset of this book that many of its themes and topics arise from my belonging to two often antagonistic communities, academia and the Christian church. And of course academia and the church have their own internal antagonisms, which are curiously similar. One phenomenon common to both is the power of the logic usually summed up as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” People who can’t stand one another will form powerful alliances if by doing so they can thwart their ideological enemies—and they will pursue that thwarting with a vigor and resourcefulness that would arouse Napoleon’s envy—and with a relentlessness that might well make him quail.

  Here we might recall the “unscrupulousness,” the headlong rush forward, of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques. When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable—indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries. As a nineteenth-century pope notoriously commented, “Error has no rights.” Caught up by the momentum of his or her cause, the Optimist can easily forget the vital addendum to the papal statement made by Orestes Brownson: “Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”*

  One of my consistent themes over the years—one I will return to in this book—has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people. And I have seen this in both academic and ecclesial settings as well: using the existing rules against your opponents, or formulating new ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them, without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair, or even whether they might be turned against you someday, when the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.

  The task of this chapter is to suggest ways of recognizing the power of animus and strategies for overcoming it. One of the classic ways to do this is to seek out the best—the smartest, most sensible, most fair-minded—representatives of the positions you disagree with. If your first thought on reading that sentence is that smart, sensible, and fair-minded people are extremely rare among your opponents, I would ask you to reflect on whether you think they are any more common among those who agree with you. And if you say they are, then I would encourage you to reflect on one of the lessons of the previous chapter: You have a large emotional investment in thinking that.

  We’ll discuss some of the ways we could figure out who counts as a “typical” representative of a position, and how important that is; but my chief mission in the latter part of this chapter will be to show you how to find the people who are really worth reading or hearing—even when you disagree with them.

  “But,” someone may well be saying right about now, “you write as though finding some people and some ideas repulsive is always wrong, intrinsically wrong. But there are some ideas, some points of view, that genuinely are repulsive—and the people who hold them, especially if they hold them vigorously, can be pretty damned repulsive too. Remember GOD HATES FAGS? DEATH PENALTY FOR FAGS?”

  Indeed. And yet, as we’ve seen in our look at the transformation of Megan Phelps-Roper, at least one person who once carried those banners pretty clearly wasn’t a monster. And it’s highly likely that the number of non-monsters holding monstrous views is greater than one. Over the years, I’ve had to acknowledge that some of the people whose views on education appall me are more devoted to their students than I am to mine; and that some of the people whose theological positions strike me as immensely damaging to the health of the church are never theless more prayerful and charitable, more Christlike, than I will ever be. This is immensely disconcerting, even when it doesn’t mean that those people are right about those matters we disagree on. Being around those people forces me to confront certain truths about myself that I would rather avoid; and that alone is reason to seek every means possible to constrain the energies of animus.

  BULVERISM AND SEA LIONS

  What to do when a non-monster holds ideas that strike you as being repulsive—not just wrong, but so repellent that your instinct is to get away as far as possible? Some years ago Leon Kass wrote about what he called the “wisdom of repugnance,” and while that concept tends to be associated with conservatism, in point of fact people across the political spectrum believe in the wisdom of repugnance. They just feel repugnance for different kinds of people and different acts.* I think it’s fair to say that our repulsion glands don’t secrete their chemical cocktails with complete reliability: sometimes we’re rightly repulsed; sometimes we’re repulsed unnecessarily, and can learn to get over it. So without denying that there genuinely is a wisdom in repugnance, I’m going to focus on those cases when we need to ignore that gland’s secretions.

  So we have a problem: this person’s beliefs are disgusting; this person seems to be just a person. Okay, so maybe he isn’t a monster as such, but that doesn’t
mean that he’s not seriously messed up: morally corrupted (a “hater”) or in the grip of some kind of psychological affliction (“fearful,” “angry,” “bitter”). Note the embedded assumption in such statements: that error results from pathology. He couldn’t be wrong if he weren’t morally or psychologically seriously dysfunctional—that’s the implicit or explicit message.

  And yet all of us have been wrong. People you love and admire above all others have been wrong, and you can give plenty of examples of their wrongnesses if you want. Yet you don’t attribute those errors to pathology. You don’t place those people in what Hillary Clinton notoriously called the “basket of deplorables.” Why not?

  Such inconsistencies are worrisome enough, but it gets worse. Note that this fascinating conversation about why so-and-so is wrong is quite useful in helping us avoid a more challenging question: How do we know that so-and-so is wrong? That’s a question always worth asking, even if what so-and-so believes is that the Holocaust never happened or Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Just asking the question is a useful intellectual checkup, a reminder to assess the varying degrees of confidence in which we hold our views. (For instance, there is zero evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a great deal of evidence that he isn’t, but the secret-Muslim theory is possible in a way the no-Holocaust theory is not.)

  Here again C. S. Lewis comes to our aid. In a comical passage from a serious essay, he imagines one Ezekiel Bulver, “one of the makers of the Twentieth Century,” whose great achievement was the uncovering of this great and lasting truth: “Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” So Lewis gives this popular argumentative strategy—“assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error”—a name: Bulverism.* It’s a variety of the good old ad hominem fallacy, and a very common one indeed, but Lewis is wrong to think that it’s a product of the “national dynamism of our age” (whatever that means) or that it’s a recent phenomenon at all. It’s probably as old as disagreement itself. Consider, for example, one of the most infamous contests of public abuse we’ve ever seen, one from five hundred years ago: the mutual condemnations of Martin Luther and Thomas More.

  But before we consider this case of Bulverism in action, we need to add a complication, a complication very relevant to us: the role new technologies played in it. The intimate relationship between the printing press and the Reformation has long been understood, and if anything has been over-stressed. What has been comparatively neglected, in part because it has left so faint a historical record, is the European postal system—though it wasn’t really a system, and it was hard to be sure whether any given letter would reach its destination. This is perhaps why so many letters of the period were printed and published—open letters, as it were, prefaced to books or published separately as broadsides. But this created an ambiguous situation for any written conversation, sliding along an ill-defined continuum between what we today would call the public and the private.

  A valuable tool for understanding this situation is a concept introduced by Christopher Alexander et al. in their seminal book A Pattern Language, which explores the social contexts of architecture and more generally the design of spaces. The concept is intimacy gradients. Many of the tensions that afflict social media arise from incompatible assumptions about what degree of intimacy is in effect in any particular conversational exchange—the sea lion problem, we might call it.

  Everyone agrees that confusions about whether a conversation is private, or public, or semiprivate (e.g., a conversation at a restaurant table), coupled with what has been called the “online disinhibition effect,” contribute to the dysfunctional character of much online discourse; but it turns out that this is an old story.* Which brings us to our example.

  Thomas More’s attacks on Martin Luther and his followers, and Luther’s attacks on Catholicism (and especially the papacy), make most of today’s online insult fests seem tame. More wrote to Luther about “your shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up,” and said of Luther’s followers that they “bespatter the most holy image of Christ crucified with the most foul excrement of their bodies”—bodies “destined to be burned.” Luther, for his part, referred to the “dear little ass-pope” who licks the Devil’s anus, and said of all the popes, “You are desperate, thorough arch-rascals, murderers, traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full of all the worst devils in hell—full, full, and so full that you can do nothing but vomit, throw, and blow out devils!”

  More and Luther would have insisted that their theological enemies were driving poor unwitting Christians to Hell and therefore deserved such language, and worse, if worse could be imagined. But I think the violence of the language is partly explained by the disinhibition generated by a new set of technologies, chief among them the printing press and postal delivery, which enable people who have never met and are unlikely ever to meet to converse with—or in this case scream at—one another. It is almost as though they’re screaming to be heard across a great distance, in much the same way that in the old days of analog long-distance phone calls people raised their voices to be heard by someone in Paris or Buenos Aires. Rarely will any of us talk that loudly or that fiercely to our next-door neighbors.

  Indeed, one might say that neither More nor Luther can see his dialectical opponent as his neighbor—and therefore neither understands that even in long-distance epistolary debate Christians are obliged to love their neighbors as themselves. Maybe the very philosophical concept of “the Other” arises only when certain communicative technologies allow us to converse with people who are not in any traditional or ordinary sense our neighbors. In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard sardonically comments, “Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other.” And it is perhaps significant that Kierkegaard, who spent his whole life engaged in the political and social conflicts of what was then a small town, Copenhagen, can see the degeneration involved in the shift from “neighbor” to “other.”* He is calling us back from the disinhibition, and accompanying lack of charity, generated by a set of technologies that allow us to converse and debate with people who are not, in the historical sense of the term, our neighbors. Technologies of communication that allow us to overcome the distances of space also allow us to neglect the common humanity we share with the people we now find inhabiting our world. For every Megan Phelps-Roper, for whom digital technologies are the means of discovering humanity in unexpected places, there seem to be a hundred people who use those same technologies to maintain the Repugnant Cultural Otherness of those with erroneous beliefs.

  We might recall here Roger Scruton’s commendation of taking “a negotiating posture towards the other”—to do that, I think, is to cease to see a person as “the other” but rather as “my neighbor.” And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery. As long as someone remains to you merely “the other,” the RCO, accessible through technology but not truly present to you in full humanness, then the temptations of Bulverism will always be right at hand.

  LIFE IN RATIONALIA

  So this chapter and the previous one have been about how attractions and repulsions affect our thinking. One response to these problems might be to say: Let’s eliminate attractions and repulsions and make our decisions purely rationally, by assessing the available evidence. We discussed this idea earlier, but our argument has moved further, and on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, we may now revisit the issue and get a little deeper into it. It’s a vital topic, and by exploring it further we’ll be able to tie together several threads of what it means to think well.

  In June 2016 the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson generated a lot of
attention by tweeting, “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” This was a tweet likely to warm the hearts of the people who call themselves “the Rationalist community”—people like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson, who in 2006 created a group blog called Overcoming Bias.* (Hanson is now the primary blogger there.) According to this model of rationality, which I believe it’s fair to say that the people I’ve just mentioned think is the only model of rationality there is, attractions and repulsions alike are simply biases, and biases interfere with our ability to assess evidence and therefore should be “overcome,” eliminated.

  But here we should recall our old friend John Stuart Mill’s discovery that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings . . . when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives,” and how this discovery led him to a new position: “The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”

  Mill’s point is compelling on its own, which is how I left matters when I told his story. But we might now note that it was, more than a hundred years later, confirmed by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, as he explains in his powerful book Descartes’ Error. Damasio discovered that when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised. They use reason alone—and, it turns out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.