Know-It-All Society

by Michael P. Lynch

  This delusion is at work in tribal arrogance as well. Tribal arrogance is typically directed at specific groups and the sources of information that are associated with those groups. As a result, someone who is arrogant toward African Americans and Latino immigrants will dismiss sources perceived to be friendly to those groups—for example, CNN and the New York Times—as “fake news.” And just as someone can be arrogant toward a group, one can be arrogant because of a group. In other words, people can be arrogant about their narratives and convictions because having them is thought to be essential to being in a group they identify with. Beliefs that are central to the group’s shared identity become part of its cultural narrative. They become immune from revision and protected at all costs from counterevidence.

  The delusion at the heart of arrogance has two faces. The first face is epistemological. The tribally arrogant believe that their confidence in their own superiority stems from the fact that they are just smarter, more credible, and more knowledgeable than their opponents. But as with those that embrace false-flag conspiracies, their unwillingness to take obvious evidence seriously is more likely to stem from a defensive protection of a cultural narrative they identify with. This unwillingness, when expressed as a form of widely shared tribal arrogance, results in a kind of willful ignorance—a systematic and coordinated refusal to acknowledge evidence.26

  Such active ignorance isn’t just operating at the level of conspiracy theories. It also operates at the level of the more general cultural clash over Civil War monuments. This clash, as both sides clearly know, is not really about old stone statues; it is over history itself. For many white defenders of those monuments, the issue isn’t merely recognizing the historical facts, or even the physical bravery, of whites who fought for the South. That there’s more to the issue is evidenced by the fact that, for these defenders of the monuments, placing them in the context of a museum is not acceptable. The fight is over what Yale philosopher Jason Stanley usefully describes as the “mythic past”—an active rewriting of Civil War history that downplays both the role of slavery in the causes of the war and the racism of those whites who worked to undermine Reconstruction.27

  The second face of the delusion is moral.28 Tribal intellectual arrogance isn’t just about “us” versus “them.” It is about “us” over “them.” This fact is most apparent in the tribal arrogance of racism, since racists think not only that they are superior to other races but that the others are somehow at fault.29 People can be tribally arrogant but not racist, but it is difficult for them to be racist without, at least on some level, being tribally arrogant—without thinking, in other words, that their capacities for knowledge are superior and that they are to be morally commended, and the others morally blamed, for this fact. This holds generally for the intellectually arrogant, whether their arrogance is racist or not: their knowledge is superior, they know the secret truths. And they think this means that their humanity, too, is morally superior. They are better people because they know what’s what; the “others” are responsible for just not keeping up. That’s why tribal arrogance brings contempt in its wake. To be contemptuous about others’ beliefs—for example, their religious beliefs—is to see them as rationally inferior, or unworthy in certain respects, and to see those who have those beliefs as perhaps feebleminded or deluded or both.

  Put together, the two faces of delusion at work in tribal arrogance constitute something similar to Sartre’s bad faith—a lived denial of the evidence that is made all the easier by the pollution and corruption of the information environment.30 Such corruption creates an environment in which almost anything can be taken seriously; almost any claim, no matter how crazy, can be found credible. That corrupt information environment, in turn, makes it possible to be both gullible and cynical at the same time—in precisely the way we often see manifested online in the sorts of conspiracy theories that propagate there. The combination of gullibility and cynicism enables bad faith on a massive scale—a scale particularly useful to authoritarian leaders looking to promote ideologies of arrogance. As Arendt notes, “Under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”31

  Yet the bad faith at the heart of intellectual arrogance can stretch even beyond the ignoring of evidence. Arrogance distorts our relationship to truth itself. When we fall victim to it, we fall victim to the idea that, to some extent, our worldview is correct just because it is ours.

  There are two things this can mean. First, it might mean an equation of ego with truth. That often happens, as Arendt pointed out, in the case of authoritarian leaders. If a leader believes that the correctness of his views consists in their truth, then he may act as if his beliefs are true just because he has them.32 It is as if he thinks he’s a god; he thinks that if he believes p, then p. Note that this doesn’t mean he can’t change his mind, or that if he believes p then he must always believe p. What it does mean (assuming classical negation) is that if not p, then he does not believe p, and if he comes to believe not p, then not p. The divine may change his mind, but when he does, reality changes too.33 This is a bizarre conception of truth, and no one could hold it coherently. But I never said intellectual arrogance makes sense.

  Yet this is not the only way, and probably not the most common way that extreme intellectual arrogance pops up in our lives—or in authoritarian leaders. The second way arrogance can distort one’s relationship to truth stems from not caring about truth in the first place. For certain people, especially certain powerful people, what matters—what, in their view, makes their opinions correct—is not that they have a hold on the truth but that they have power, or brilliance, or wealth. What matters is something else, something connected to their self-esteem. Bad faith toward the truth works at the tribal level too. It can encourage the thought that if the relevant group or community is convinced of something, then it is true. Or it may be that the truth of the matter is simply unimportant or ignored. What matters is group loyalty. Might makes right, and truth is irrelevant.

  It is worth noting that the bad faith at work in arrogance means that it is more than just simple close-mindedness.34 You can end up being close-minded without identifying with a larger cultural narrative or being defensive about its truth. You might just be surrounded by information pollution, or lack critical thinking skills or the relevant concepts, or live where government prevents people, perhaps via censorship, from engaging in debate. Arrogance, on the other hand, is dogmatic close-mindedness that stems from bad faith, from a delusion about the basis of one’s confidence.

  Over the last few chapters, I’ve been arguing that our lives online and off encourage our natural inclination to think that we—that is, those who share our identities and convictions—have figured it all out, that we know it all. Our use of social media, for example, exploits tribal anxieties and attitudes that can feed intellectual arrogance. Attitudes like arrogance, in turn, become cemented into our narratives and blind convictions. The result is a cycle of sorts: attitudes like intellectual arrogance are embodied by convictions, which themselves encourage those attitudes.

  The point I’ve been making in the last few pages is that certain political ideologies play into this cycle: they speed it up by shaping the narratives that turn beliefs into blind convictions and, in turn, both reflect and encourage intellectual arrogance. They do so, we’ve found, in four main ways. First, the ideologies of arrogance exploit the natural and perfectly normal human desire for status and shared identity; second, they encourage loyalty to the tribe at all costs; third, they are hierarchical and adopt a politics of “us” over “them”; and fourth, they express a distorted and self-deceptive view of truth and its importance.

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sp; Strang and Arendt teach us that ideologies of arrogance can bear no counterexamples. If you believe in your inherent moral superiority, then mistakes must be defensively denied or explained away. That’s not surprising: arrogance is often a compensation for something—a perceived failure or loss—and as we’ve seen, it brings with it self-defensiveness, which brooks no admission of error. Recent battles over immigration, health care, and climate change illustrate this essential character of arrogance. Because of a real or perceived threat to an ideology of cultural or racial entitlement, many people are willing to follow conviction over the facts, to hold that these are problems caused not by Americans but by others, and the right prescription is to build a wall of purity between us. While these cases are important in themselves, taken together over the last decade they have had a snowball effect. They’ve caused many white Americans not to become more open or tolerant but to dig in on their beliefs, to denounce those who see room for cultural improvement—whether that be in terms of race relations or health care or transgender rights—as traitors to the very idea of the “real America.”

  5

  Liberalism and the Philosophy of Identity Politics

  Arrogant Liberals

  A young progressive I know was frustrated with his parents’ refusal to talk about politics with him and his partner. After repeated attempts, his mother finally told him why: his parents didn’t want to talk politics with the young couple because they found them to be insufferable, arrogant, liberal know-it-alls, and regarded the prospect as exhausting.

  It’s easy to sympathize; talking politics with your children—or your parents, for that matter—can be exhausting, no matter what side of the political spectrum you find yourself on. But this example also illustrates a simple fact about the American political landscape today: liberals are largely perceived, sometimes even by themselves, as arrogant and disdainful of those on the other side. Conservapedia, which bills itself as an alternative to Wikipedia, even has an entry for “liberal arrogance,” defined as the “tendency of liberals, in their unwarranted pride, to make presumptuous assumptions.” Google this topic, or roam around social media, and you’ll find lots of pieces that talk about liberals as intolerant, smug, and disdainful. And those are the polite words.

  Most of my fellow liberals are apt to shrug their shoulders at this. Sticks and stones, they say; after all, reflection and open-mindedness are core liberal virtues. The fact that others don’t appreciate our virtuousness, or project their own arrogant attitudes onto our values, is their problem, not ours.

  Indeed, but one might wonder whether that reaction is part of the problem. Perhaps we should first ask: What, if anything, about progressive political philosophy encourages this association with arrogance?

  As it turns out, the explanation is both simpler and more complicated than is often thought.

  Misunderstanding the Politics of Identity

  Perhaps the most commonly cited cause of progressive arrogance is identity politics. And identity politics, the thought goes, is very bad indeed. Among other things, we are told that it exploits “divisions between people,”1 is “poisonous to the American miracle,”2 and is responsible for leaving an entire generation “unprepared to think about the common good and what must be done practically to secure it.”3 Identity politics, according to this construal, undermines not only traditional liberalism, but democracy itself.

  There is something to this meme, as we will see, and progressives would be wise, both philosophically and politically, to grapple with it. But memes—ideas that replicate rapidly in fertile cultural environments—are also worth questioning. That’s because they tend to replicate without much conscious reflection on the part of those aiding in the replication. The need for reflection in this case is illustrated by one simple fact: those criticizing identity politics often don’t really say what it is, or if they do, they conflate one meaning of the term with another.

  Let’s start by thinking briefly about what we mean by “identity” in this context. As we saw in Chapter 3, we can mean different things by that term too. We might mean our personal identity—that is, what makes us one and the same individual person over time. Or we might mean our self-identity, the kind of person we want to be. But when people talk about their identity politics, they are thinking primarily of their social identity: the social groups they belong to, including family, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual preference, and the roles they play in their social life.

  At least two conceptions of the term “identity politics” are in use today in popular culture. The first use has its origins in philosophical concepts inherited from the Enlightenment but adapted for contemporary pluralist democracies. In this use, identity politics centers on advocating for public recognition of the concerns, needs, and rights of groups and identities that are often overlooked or marginalized in a society. In this use of the term, many forms of social activism and civil rights movements are exercises in identity politics.

  The second use of the term is in many ways parasitic on the first. But it also names an arguably older idea: that politics is really just tribal warfare by other means. Identity politics, in this view, is standing up for your tribe—that is, the group you identify with—because it is your tribe. As we will see, this is an idea that is predicated on a particular view of what politics is for.

  The problem with the “identity politics is bad” meme shooting around the internet today is that many people, including its critics and some advocates, tend to mush these two meanings together without realizing it. Observers on both sides of the aisle confuse those advocating for identity politics of the first kind with those advocating for identity politics of the second kind—and vice versa. That’s a problem, not only because it leads people to talk past one another but because it has a tendency to obscure legitimate criticisms of either kind of identity politics. But more than that, and like other linguistic conflations we’ve seen in this book, it can be deliberately manipulated, making us think we know more than we do.

  The current conflation of these two meanings of “identity politics” arguably stems from competing interpretations of one of the first contemporary uses of the term, in the 1977 political manifesto by the Combahee River Collective, a group of black feminist scholars that included the poet Audre Lorde and the writer and publisher Barbara Smith. In perhaps the mostly widely cited passage from the collective’s statement, the group argued that civil rights, black power, and feminist movements had failed to adequately represent them. “We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. . . . This focusing on our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”4

  Mark Lilla, in his recent polemic against identity politics from the Left, takes this statement, with its concern for “our own identity” as indicative of what he considers the selfish nature of identity politics, according to which the most important politics are those that are meaningful to the self, and “the movements most meaningful to the self are, unsurprisingly, about the self.”5 Thus, according to Lilla, the Combahee River Collective, while advocating a kind of politics that is in part a “very good thing” (because it has encouraged people to focus on aspects of history that have long been ignored) has also encouraged a destructive individualism that undermines and devalues the idea of the common good—an idea that earlier Leftist movements, like Marxism, took for granted.

  Lilla’s reading of the collective’s statement illustrates the second use of “identity politics” that I noted earlier. For Lilla, identity politics is overly focused on the self because it is focused on what I’ve called our self-identities—in particular those aspects connected to the groups we identify with. But more than that, he sees identity politics as incorporating a particular view about what politics is for: to advocate for power for one’s grou
p, national identity, or tribe and only for that group/identity/tribe. Many critics on the Right share this same conception of identity politics. Jonah Goldberg, in his recent book Suicide of the West, for example, argues that identity politics is only about power, and the use of it “to enthrone liberal ideals is inseparable from a desire for power—power for professors, students, activist groups, Democrats, etc.”6

  The idea that politics is all about power and tribe versus tribe is a sadly common one. It is also a dark vision, one that shares Machiavelli’s view that politics is essentially war by other means. In the twentieth century, the most influential philosophical proponent of this idea was the infamous Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was active in book burnings of Jewish authors, openly advocated anti-Semitic policies, and remained unrepentant after the war. But he was also an influential political thinker, whose work remains important (and controversial).

  Schmitt’s most famous contribution concerned the purpose of politics. He argued that “the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”7 For Schmitt, the idea of an enemy—a group of “others” to be opposed—is at the heart of politics itself. What Lilla and Goldberg agree on is that this conception of what politics is about underlies identity politics. Since they both want to reject Schmitt’s dark vision, they both reject identity politics.

  Lilla and Goldberg are right to reject the tribalist view of politics. It is also correct to say that some on the Left and the Right explicitly accept this sort of view, and there have always been philosophers who have argued its virtues. But I don’t think many people who see themselves as explicitly practicing identity politics accept it, and for the simple reason already noted: there is another way of understanding what “identity politics” means that doesn’t imply an endorsement of the politics of tribalism. Indeed, it is a clear misreading of the Combahee River Collective’s statement to think they were endorsing the tribalist reading of the term they arguably introduced. Later in the same statement, the collective argues that “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”8 In other words, their focus on their own identity was practical: being black and a woman puts you at the center of a Venn diagram of sorts—one where the intersecting circles represent “women,” “black,” and “economically disadvantaged.” The idea is that advocating for black women means engaging in a struggle for the freedom of people in all these circles. This is what is meant by “intersectionality.”