from such great Haidts
This is just a scribble; I may publish a piece on this, or several, soon. I want to talk about Jonathan Haidt’s lecture-essay “The Age of Outrage”. It crystallizes a lot of the shibboleths of my current classical-liberal crew: an opposition to “illiberalism” writ large, an association of the “tribal” (right) politics of Trumpism with the “tribal” (left) politics of campus activists, a sort of half-centrist half-pluralist mindset, and so on. What Haidt on Twitter called the best response came from Paul Crider and mostly just defended “intersectionality”. But this is sort of a side point. The real meat of Haidt’s thinking comes in two claims and I think both of them are arguably wrong.
Haidt’s first claim is a kind of traditionalist-conservative thesis about the fragility of our current sociopolitical structures, which he calls “liberal democracy”. His second claim is explanatory: this fragility can be traced to the evolved, “tribal” nature of human psychology. Our thinking divides people into “us” and “them”, good and evil, one flag versus another, etc. On this note there is a lot of good stuff in the essay about the phenomenon of political polarization. I tell anyone who will listen that polarization along basically partisan lines was still the big takeaway, or one of the big takeaways, from the 2016 election. But it’s not clear in what sense polarization itself threatens liberal democracy.
First, let’s recall that the whole point of liberal democracy, according at least to Francis Fukuyama, is that it’s a natural and necessary end-point for the evolution of every society through history, that competition between societies necessitates that every one reaches some form of liberal democracy, as illiberal or undemocratic societies will be unable to compete. This is the opposite of fragility. And what is Haidt’s evidence for this fragility? Hysteria from people like him — and, on more than one occasion, myself — about threats from campus politics is usually more or less unsourced. And what of the threat from Trumpism? For all the fear about the erosion of institutional norms, it’s clear that the travel ban is in the hands of the courts, journalists are still reporting on the Russia scandal, comedians are still gleefully mocking Trump, and so forth.
Second, let’s note something more general about the overall hue and cry about threats to liberal democracy. It is always the liberal part that people think is under threat, and it is always the democracy part that people seem to think should be further limited to make room. Consider this exchange on “low-information voters” between Claire Lehmann (full disclosure: she’s the editor of Quillette, where I have published quite a bit) and libertarian-technocrat philosopher Jason Brennan. You can form whatever opinion you want on it, but part of your evaluation should include the fact that even libertarians want to keep the masses out of politics somehow. Contrast this with someone like Chomsky, or with the more Chomskyan elements of the online left (his influence is visible in Current Affairs and The Intercept mostly, I think): Chomsky believed there was absolutely no role for expertise in politics. I’ve made noises along those lines as well.
What does Haidt take to be liberalism? What does Haidt take to be democracy? These words are almost always “undertheorized” — a word Jason Willick used to summarize my objections to Mark Lilla’s book The Once and Future Liberal. Rather than understanding liberalism and democracy as fundamentally in tension with each other, as someone like Antonin Scalia rightly did, Lilla ruled out ex cathedra as undemocratic the popular movements which he felt threatened the liberal order. A similar mistake is made in deciding too quickly that campus excesses are “illiberal”. Adrian Vermeule, for instance, argues very cogently, on Twitter and elsewhere, that these excesses are in fact the apotheosis of liberalism (or maybe not even that, yet). And why wouldn’t they be? They are, after all, always framed in terms of basic rights and freedoms. Whether they win or lose might therefore be seen as the question of which liberalism is ascendant. (See the end of my essay on the Hypatia controversy for some thoughts on balancing such things.)
Third, let’s turn to the “tribalism” explanation for the fragility of liberal democracy. In general, I have long wondered about classical liberals’ invocations of cognitive biases to explain the wrong thinking of political partisans. It seems not so different from the “regressive left” tendency to utilize other “diagnostic” tools rather than engaging alternate views directly: all the -isms, all the -phobias, “bad faith”, “internalized” x/y/z, and so on. When it comes to other attributions of bias, we point readily to findings like stereotype accuracy to question the “diagnosis” model of discussion. We write and share criticisms of research programs like implicit or unconscious bias. But despite the fact that there is ample pushback to the “heuristics and biases” approach in psychology, including e.g. Gigerenzer’s attempts to demonstrate that there is not always a tradeoff between effort and accuracy, classical liberals retain the “bias” model in the cognitive realm. I do it too!
One way to flesh out this concern is to ask: Why do classical liberals need “civic education”, a topic they talk about more than a little bit? The notion that we must inculcate our values didactically in people’s formative years seems completely contrary to the free thought we advocate. And yet talk of civic education, and of somehow imbuing students (in college and earlier) with the values of truth-seeking, curiosity, intellectual humility, respect for alternate viewpoints, etc., is so common in our crowd. If we are so in favor of imbuing values in that case, why would we be so against the ridiculous microaggression workshops, for example, which we rightly despise? We need to get our story straight on stuff like that.
Fourth, let’s consider that accusations of tribalism often demonstrate more tribalism on the part of the accuser than the accused. I touch on this, in a way, in my essay on epistemic humility and group dynamics. Remember the New York Times article this fall arguing first that Bill Clinton was indeed an abuser, but second that it was correct of his supporters not to believe the accusations against him, as there was in fact a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against him in the 1990s? Compare The American Conservative on global warming as “too good a problem”. Tribal anti-tribal reasoning goes like this:
- You are a “tribal” person; in particular, you have tribal cognition.
- Your conclusion seems to follow too cleanly from your “ideology”.
- So I will disbelieve you, and if you’re right I won’t give you any credit.
If “cleanly” is confusing, try “conveniently”. The idea is basically that we don’t need to listen to people when they’re arguing for things that fit their worldview too well. The reason this is insane is that those things are probably why they have that worldview to begin with. Very, very few people actually use an ideology as a sort of set of first principles from which to deduce the world. It is much more likely that an ideology is generated through abductive and inductive reasoning on a set of kinds of events and situations. Of course, once it’s been generated, it proffers predictions, which can be wrong; it can be misused, overapplied, and in particular people will often avoid abandoning it when their predictions turn out false.
Plus, as I wrote over a year ago, tribes only really emerge when people perceive threats from other tribes forming that they’re not a part of. This makes it clear that waving our arms around about there being tribes everywhere — something, again, of which I myself have been guilty — can actually increase tribalism, and not in a way that’s at all paradoxical or counterintuitive.
Haidt is a fascinating thinker and a great asset to the classical liberal-sphere, or whatever it is I’m a part of now. But just as male feminists should be especially wary of being sexually abusive, and just as social conservatives should take special care not to have drug-addled orgies, in this sphere we need to make sure to really embody our values: engaging people in all political and intellectual schools, questioning our fundamental assumptions, defining our terms clearly and avoiding jargon, paying attention to potential objections and empirical disproofs, and changing our views when such things do come to light.
I am no longer convinced I understand either just what this “liberal democracy” is that Haidt is so worried about or just what this “tribalism” is that seems to underlie his worry. As I always say in my critiques of leftist thought, more theoretical work is needed to clarify and buttress these conclusions, and to render them comprehensible to those not already committed.
