This article that appeared on The Edge is a fantastic piece. The choice quote being:
Moreover, to earn membership in a group you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups. Hence, optimal weighting of beliefs and communications in the individual mind will make it feel good to think and express content conforming to and flattering to one’s group’s shared beliefs and to attack and misrepresent rival groups. The more biased away from neutral truth, the better the communication functions to affirm coalitional identity, generating polarization in excess of actual policy disagreements. Communications of practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty. In contrast, unusual, exaggerated beliefs — such as supernatural beliefs (e.g., god is three persons but also one person), alarmism, conspiracies, or hyperbolic comparisons — are unlikely to be said except as expressive of identity, because there is no external reality to motivate nonmembers to speak absurdities.
This raises a problem for scientists: Coalition-mindedness makes everyone, including scientists, far stupider in coalitional collectivities than as individuals. Paradoxically, a political party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about economics or climate without revisers being bad coalition members. But people whose coalitional membership is constituted by their shared adherence to “rational,” scientific propositions have a problem when — as is generally the case — new information arises which requires belief revision. To question or disagree with coalitional precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad and immoral coalition member — at risk of losing job offers, one’s friends, and one’s cherished group identity. This freezes belief revision.
This fits neatly with my observation that people who subscribe to various “coalitional myths,” whether they are nationalists who believe in founding myths of their nations or Creationists, are far more reasonable and flexible thinkers than “science advocates.” The former, conscientiously or not, are aware that their myths exist really for coalitional reasons mainly, not necessarily because they are “scientific facts” that stand on their own merit. The truth is that neither do the “facts” of the latter: even if they are facts in absence of coalitions, they are no longer “facts” as long as they have a coalition around them.
David Mayhew, in his work on coalitions (again, misleadingly titled “Congress”), points out how successful coalitions are built around obvious, uncontrovertible moral statements that nobody disputes — especially on the questions of general morality, the proverbial “mother, baseball, and apple pie” stuff, while the questions of controvertible nature are submerged in jargon, obscure procedures, and technicalities, with the benefits and costs thrown about so widely (or in small bits that are unnoticeable) that it is not necessarily possible to determine who exactly a particular bill is for or against. The net result is, or was, that Congress’s work as whole, provided no net benefit that could easily rally an electoral coalition for or, more significantly, against. Individual members had to run for reelection on their being good, honorable people, at least by the standards of the localities that they represented, but, by and large, they were — even if we might find the morals of their localities and times dubious in retrospect. Some time in the past few decades, this changed.
The political fights are now over “facts,” but these are coalitional facts, not factual facts. This does great violence to their factual nature, if there were any to begin with. Maddeningly, the fights have expanded outside the usual political realm, on so many issues — climate change is an obvious one, but there are many others. But once they are “coalitionized,” what used to be “facts” are no longer facts, for they cannot be subjected to the subject of falsifiability without giving aid and comfort to the “enemies.” You can’t have “politics” and science in the same room. If politics is to be subject to a scientific study, it must be depoliticized first.