If that assessment is right, then it raises an interesting and pressing question: if we can turn almost any belief into a blind conviction as a result of our desire to conform to preexisting cultural narratives, then what happens when it becomes super easy to share and shape those narratives? What happens when we carry around devices in our pockets that are essentially designed to do just that?
Our identities are not generally formed one by one. We construct the stories of our selves together, collectively. We just don’t realize it most of the time. That’s always been true, but it is especially so now, when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are increasingly being constructed in online social networks. For many of us, the kind of people we are is partly determined by our life online—what our social networks say about us, and what we say to them. Put differently, social-media platforms like Facebook are often used—either wittingly or unwittingly—as vehicles for self-expansion. Now we can see that they do so because they act as social reinforcement tools for moral entanglement. The platform is built to “connect us” emotionally—which, in practice, means it enables us to communicate our sentiments and attitudes to each other and to reward and punish each other for doing so. It is so good at it that it causes us to take up as commitments beliefs we may not have even thought about very much. As a result, we act on the policy that certain things are true even if we have no evidence to think they are. They must be true, we think, because—well, because that is what folks like us believe.
Earlier we saw that we are often ignorant about what we are doing on social media. We think we are exchanging information or knowledge—we are testifying to the credibility of something. But often we are not doing that at all. We are, without knowing it, expressing our emotional states and our attitudes. And that also makes it easy for social media to spur blind conviction. By sharing our outrage or our emotional attachment to some claim of fact, we signal to each other that the tribe must commit to it. We signal to each other that it should be a matter of conviction, that it should be part of our story. And we signal that it would be dangerous to change our minds. As a result, commitments that we think are principled, a result of our individual story of our best self, are actually just fragments of a larger cultural narrative. Social media can be a very effective blind-conviction machine.
In sum, to turn a belief into a conviction is to expand the self: we commit to beliefs as central to the narratives we identify with. And since those narratives concern what we value, beliefs that become convictions become morally entangled. Expanding the self and moral entanglement therefore tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes that expansion and entanglement is principled. Although we may not be correct at the end of the day, we commit to a belief because we come to see it as a moral matter of importance that the evidence supports. But often there’s nothing principled about the way we arrive at our commitments. Often we allow the conviction machine of our online life to adopt commitments blindly. And unreflective adoption of commitments, in turn, leads to the sort of defensive, cognitive wall building associated with know-it-all arrogance. Intellectual arrogance is the result of confusing our self-esteem with truth. So, turning a matter of fact into a matter of conviction is always a danger. And when that happens blindly, on the basis of attitudes and not evidence, it feeds into a spiral of arrogance leading to more blind conviction leading to more arrogance.
We will need cognitive science to tell us about how the brain functions on conviction. The philosophically and politically important point is that when we are unaware that convictions can seem principled while actually being blind, we are helpless in the face of the conviction machine. And that helplessness makes our narratives—our very identities—vulnerable to being hijacked by those who feed off tribalism and transform conviction-inspired rage into an ideology of contempt and hate.
4
Ideologies of Arrogance and the American Right
Roots of Authoritarianism
The “amazing fact,” wrote the German philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1945, after two world wars and the Holocaust, is not that a dictator’s followers are willing to tolerate evil in his name. The amazing fact is that they don’t waver even “when the monster begins to devour its own children.”1 This lack of concern for the interest of their citizens (on the part of the dictators) and for their own interest (on the part of the citizens) deeply puzzled rival states and outside observers at the time. “The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.”2
Arendt was concerned with specifically totalitarian movements such as fascism, but many of her observations apply to authoritarian states in general. She points out that outsiders’ puzzlement about the motivations of authoritarian leaders can be strategically helpful to those leaders. In the case of Hitler, it made him unpredictable, simply because his reasons for doing things, and the reasons for his followers to go along, did not seem to make sense to many observers at the time. As Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Holocaust, has pointed out, one explanation for this unpredictability is that the Nazi movement in particular was not nationalist in a strict sense of that term.3 That’s because Nazi ideology wasn’t geared toward, or motivated by, a typical liberal conception of national self-interest.4
Nazi ideology regarded national borders and institutions as tools to be used and then discarded when they were no longer needed. What was essential to Nazi ideology was blood (race) and soil (geography). The former marked the true divisions between the tribes of humanity; the latter referred to the idea that in order to prosper and feed themselves, racial tribes must compete for land. Once this racist ideology was accepted as a grand narrative, the standard economic models of the time—models that took it in the interest of nations to look out for the individual interests of their citizens—were less effective for understanding Nazi intentions.
The nature of Nazi ideology illustrates a general point about the psychology of authoritarian politics. Authoritarian rulers cultivate among members of the public two seemingly incompatible attitudes that nonetheless actually reinforce one another. The first is a feeling of defensiveness due to real or imagined persecution—the idea that somehow one’s race or tribe or culture is under threat. In Hitler’s eyes, “culture” meant Aryan culture, the tribe was the Aryan race, and the threat was a feared lack of land and food production. The other attitude is the felt sense of the tribe’s inherent superiority—again, in Hitler’s case, racial superiority. In almost all cases this superiority, racial or otherwise, is seen as emerging from history—a history whose secrets the dictator claims to have unveiled against the wishes of the enemy. Once this history is revealed, once the secret proclaimed, the people are told they will regain what was rightfully theirs all along. They only have to follow the leader.
This combination of perceived superiority and defensive insecurity provides a fertile psychosocial breeding ground for first resentment, and then hate. The attitudes naturally reinforce each other. Those who suffer from insecurity in the face of a perceived threat are prone to bolster their self-esteem by claims of superiority; those who claim superiority naturally regard those who disagree with them as a threat. Compounded many times and reinforced with the stirring power of a narrative, feelings of superiority combined with insecurity encourage not only racism and hostility but the more general idea that one’s tribe has hold of both the true and the good, that it can’t be wrong about what really matters, and that these facts should infuse policy and political action. It encourages, in other words, tribal arrogance.
People are attracted to arrogance. It is a powerful drug because it is so simple: it produces a feeling of power that requires no actual power, a feeling of knowledge that requires no knowledge. And it is easy to confuse arrogance with confidence, especially if you are feeling insecure and put upon. It is thus not surprising that ideologies built on
tribal arrogance encourage loyalty, but not one based on content, as Arendt knew: “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of a concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”5 Details only hem in those seeking tyrannical power. As Arendt notes, one of Hitler’s greatest political achievements lay in overcoming the National Socialist Party platform, “not by changing or officially abolishing it, but simply refusing to talk about it or discuss its points.”6
What was important, Hitler knew, was not having rational, detailed policies. Political power lay in stoking the combination of anxiety and perceived superiority, and hence the hateful arrogance of the tribe. That was the force that could cause members of the tribe to ignore an overreach of the dictator, even when he came to eat his own children. The point is not what ideas are presented but how they are presented, whether they resonate with the underlying attitudes and anxieties motivating the target public. As Arendt points out, “The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content.”7
As specific content becomes less important, so does truth. Arendt is chillingly clear on this point: “The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.”8 For, to admit an error is to admit that there is something more powerful than you, that your triumph—and hence the movement’s—may not be inevitable. As a consequence, she writes, speaking across the decades, “before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”9
An ideology of arrogance is an ideology of the insecure and the defensive, and it is an ideology that at bottom must be hostile to truth, lest it wither in the face of the facts.
Telling It Like It Is
Arendt’s analysis of the role of truth in authoritarian politics, and how those governed by such politics are willing to put their interests aside, is a universal thesis built on a historical example. Current American politics gives us other examples.
One of the puzzles of Donald Trump’s rise in American politics is the overwhelming support he received from evangelical Christians during the 2016 campaign. That support mystified commentators on the Left and more than a few evangelicals themselves, since Trump seems to represent the very opposite of Christian values: greed, intolerance, selfishness, and a lack of humility. Not to mention that for much of his career he had taken stances on issues like abortion and gay marriage far from those found in typical conservative Christian circles. Nonetheless, the support was there, and real.
It is this puzzlement that evangelical writer Stephen Strang set out to address in his 2017 book God and Donald Trump. Strang, a publisher and CEO of Charisma Media (which published the book) campaigned for Trump; his bio on the book’s jacket even proclaims that he attended the “election night victory party in New York.” The book’s unsubtle subtext is that the very fact that so many mainstream Republicans and liberals were puzzled about evangelical support for Trump is one reason he won the election. The “dominant progressive culture,” Strang says, missed the point, and thereby displayed its basic ignorance of both the evangelical movement and many American voters.
Strang’s explanation for why evangelicals supported Trump comes in two parts. The first part is a now-familiar cultural narrative. Trump understood the “deep resentment of the men and women in the flyover zones who felt their country was being ripped from their fingers and their moral heritage being squandered.”10 These voters, writes Strang, “were tired of the government’s lurch towards globalism in the Obama administration. They were concerned about the impact undocumented immigrants were having in their communities and they were rightfully afraid of the threat of radical Islamic Terrorism.”11 Early on in the campaign, Strang writes, he came to “believe Donald Trump shared those emotions,” although he confesses to having been worried as to how much was a matter of “tactics” and how much was “genuine concern for the future of the nation.”12
Nonetheless, throughout the book Strang makes the case that for many evangelicals, the important thing about Trump was not whether he shared their faith per se, or even whether he shared all the same values. As Strang himself admits, while he thinks Trump is a Christian, it is not clear that Trump understands the difference between evangelical Christianity and mainline Protestantism.13 The important thing, says Strang, is that Trump “tells it like it is”—even when, and especially when—“the way it is” is unpopular on the Left. In a telling passage, Strang discusses Trump’s speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention—the speech in which he famously declared that the nation was in crisis, that crime was running rampant, and that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” To the mainstream media, Strang notes, the speech was darkly dystopian; but to “those who agreed with Trump’s vision for America . . . his words were encouraging, largely because someone was finally speaking the truth.”14
Aristotle famously (and rightly) said that to speak the truth is to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Understood that way, the idea that Trump excels at truth telling is, well, bizarre. He is willing to say almost anything and is notoriously untethered from the facts. (This is the man, after all, who gave a rambling, inappropriate speech to the Boy Scouts of America and then—in the face of direct denials by the organization’s leader and his desperate attempts to distance the organization from the speech—declared they had told him “it was the greatest speech ever made to them.”) So rather than arguing the point, we should be asking what is meant by phrases like “he tells it like it is” or “he speaks the truth” when used in this sort of context.
There are at least two salient interpretations. Understood one way, for example, to say of someone that they “speak the truth” is to say not that they describe the objective facts, but that they are willing to speak of what is momentous and hidden and to do so no matter what the consequences. This is the revelatory use of the phrase “tells it like it is.” And many Trump supporters do see Trump as willing to state what they think of as momentous hidden “facts”—such as that climate change is a hoax, or that immigrants are taking over the country—which those in the “mainstream media” are not willing to take seriously. Such views are momentous in that those who hold them perceive them to be of grave, possibly even sacred, importance; but they are hidden in that—again, in the eyes of those who hold them—they’ve been deliberately obscured or ignored.
Another use of the phrase “tells it like it is” is what we might call the emotional use. Telling it like it is or speaking the truth can also mean saying what you feel. The “it” that one tells here is not the world but oneself. And what attracts some, perhaps many, of Trump’s supporters is not what he says, but his expression of anger, resentment, and supreme confidence when he says it. There is no apology for those feelings, no backing down. That is what many people are responding to when they say that Trump speaks the truth. It is not the content of his views but the feelings he gives voice to—feelings that they think have been denied or that they have been belittled for experiencing. As the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild notes, Trump’s ability to give voice to shared emotional truth often elated his followers in a way that cemented tribal loyalty. It was the elation of having one’s attitudes validated. And the “desire to hold on to this elation became a matter of emotional self-interest.”15 Voting for Trump, in this view, wasn’t just a matter of supporting someone with the right policies or even the right values. It was supporting someone who shared their attitudes and was willing to publicly express them.
This basic ambiguity of phrases like “tells it like it is”—trading between “uncovering the hidden facts” and “saying what you really feel”—often goes unnoticed by those on the Left. But the emotional and the revelatory uses help to explain why this phrase resonates with Trump supporters.
It also helps to explain why so many of them seem, at least to their opponents, to be immune from the facts. If you distrust the media and scientific institutions, it is not surprising that citing media sources and scientific evidence is not going to be persuasive. But it is also not surprising that you’ll think that the media is obscuring deep “truths.” For it is the nature of “hidden facts” that they are bound to fly in the face of more widely accepted truths. Moreover, because cultural narratives embody our attitudes, and those narratives can, in turn, determine the convictions that form our self-identity, the validation of your attitudes and feelings means the validation of that identity. To those who share these attitudes and the convictions that go with them, “telling it like it is” means giving voice to that identity. Evidence is beside the point, and citing facts will just seem like an attack on one’s identity.
Crucially, Strang makes just this point himself. As noted, he emphasizes the importance of Trump “sharing emotions” right from the outset; the worry is not whether Trump shares a policy vision, but whether he is being emotionally authentic. But as I’ve noted, Strang also adds a second part to his argument: an explicitly theological explanation of why it made sense for evangelicals to support Trump. He quotes former Watergate conspirator and now evangelical minister Chuck Colson’s idea of “common grace.” As Strang explains it, “A key aspect of the concept holds that secular leaders are raised up in times of great historical consequence to protect God’s agenda and His purposes. Such leaders are chosen for a unique role, whether or not they may actually know God or even care about doing His will.”16
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