Know-It-All Society

by Michael P. Lynch

  Another reason we can feel resistant to calls for democratic dialogue is that we are as divided over what counts as “democratic” as we are over anything else. That’s nothing new in democracies, where dissent and disagreement is part of the point, and where the very meaning of core values is always up for renegotiation. But it is particularly salient now. Donald Trump infamously declared that some of those who marched on Charlottesville were “fine people”—by which he presumably meant (in a supercharitable reading) that some white protesters might have been motivated out of something other than pure racism and they should be allowed to express themselves. Yet apparently, he also thinks that (mostly) black football players kneeling during the national anthem should not be allowed that same self-expression, that they are “traitors.” And Trump, presumably, is not alone in these sentiments.

  There is a third complicating factor motivating feelings of anger in politics. Calls to civility and dialogue can themselves be divisive partly because they legitimately mean different things, depending on where you sit. The key variable is power. As any negotiator or moderator can tell you, dialogue feels different when you hold more cards than when you hold fewer, if only because the outcome of any exchange is more likely to be in your favor.

  For all these reasons, some reading these pages may find my concerns with intellectual arrogance worrisome. When you are feeling outrage, calls to being open to your own fallibility can sound like a request to waver in your convictions. You don’t feel fallible when you are angry. You feel right. And anger can be a useful political emotion; it motivates and focuses. But anger is also a gateway to a more complicated moral emotion: contempt.

  Try this thought experiment: Imagine you had a drug that could cause people to believe in your political point of view. What would you do with it? Give it to your racist uncle? Send it to your local congressional representative? Drop it in the water supply?

  You would be tempted. After all, politics is a high-stakes game, and getting people to believe “the truth” would save lives. But I’ve also found that even for people who would be willing to drop the drug into the water supply, most agree that there is something clearly wrong with doing so. Why? Because you aren’t asking people their opinions; you aren’t treating them as capable of making up their own minds. Dropping the political correctness drug into the water without people’s knowledge is a clear violation of what we might call basic respect.

  As we saw earlier, one of the most fundamental democratic ideals—an ideal that lies behind one conception of identity politics—is that that we owe each other basic respect. In a democracy, those in power can’t simply enforce their will without justification, because doing so violates that respect. Likewise, it is wrong to win our political battles by manipulation and deceit. That’s partly why fake news stories that spread online for political purposes rankle us. We are being used; being treated as mere dupes; being treated, as Kant would have put it, “as a mere means” to other ends, not as ends ourselves.

  This connection between respect and democracy is why we think that citizens are accountable to one another. No matter how different we may be individually, under the law we are all equal. And democracy is partly grounded on this fact. By trading in real reasons rather than “fake news” (or in brainwashing drugs as in the thought experiment I proposed earlier), we acknowledge that we owe each other some basic respect, and not just legally but as cognitive agents, as knowers and believers. Treating people with this kind of respect doesn’t mean you treat everyone as an expert. That would be silly. But it does mean treating people not only as capable of making up their own minds but as possible sources of knowledge.

  The mansplainer who repackages a woman’s point and explains it back to her (as his own insight, naturally) is, for this reason, showing a lack of basic respect. When men do this, they aren’t discounting their conversational partners because they think their partners are less informed but because they see their partners’ contributions as fundamentally less important than their own. They are taking those contributions to be less credible. And in so doing, they implicitly signal that they don’t feel they have to answer to a woman either. The sexist does not think of himself as accountable to women, and the general know-it-all doesn’t think he is accountable to anyone but himself. That’s an undemocratic attitude. In a democracy, at least in the ideal, we are accountable to one another.29

  This is why it is dangerous to allow contempt to inform our approach to political policy. Like its hotter cousin anger, cold contempt feels good, and it is sometimes justified. But infused into policy, it can lead to something darker: that we should back policies—as opposed to individual attitudes—that treat those we oppose as undeserving of basic respect. There is no doubt that this is a choice that many feel pressed upon them: the choice of whether to resist the use of democratic means toward undemocratic ends by using undemocratic means for democratic ends. In other words, the choice, many feel, concerns whether to defend democracy by being undemocratic—that is, whether to take political steps that force our beliefs on others—to engage in the equivalent of dropping the drug into the water supply. Emotionally speaking, that’s switching from respect to contempt.

  The temptation to abandon basic respect in favor of contempt wouldn’t be too concerning, if not for the fact that there is increasingly little in American life that is politics-free.30 Where we live, the cars we drive, the food we eat, the schools and churches we attend, the hobbies and sports we enjoy, the books we read, the television shows we watch, the clothes we wear—these are all increasingly tribalized. Everything has become laden with meaning, and a deep meaning at that, and liberals’ use of social media to shame and mock has certainly contributed to that fact.

  As our discussions in earlier chapters suggested, when ordinary things and issues become laden with meaning, the realm of the political—the realm of conviction—expands. And when that happens, what was once a matter of debate or even dialogue can become a matter of power and an opportunity for disdain and moral contempt.

  Contempt is a deeply complex, almost paradoxical emotion. It is how we treat someone who is beyond the pale, who has committed not just a moral failure but has failed as a person. To fail as a person, in the sense I mean here, is to be regarded as having forfeited respect. This is different from just being regarded as an ingrate, or as reckless, or as simply having false beliefs. The contemptible person is not just someone who has done a moral wrong. Stealing doesn’t make someone contemptible just on that basis. To hold the thief in contempt for his act of thievery, we must know something more—or think we know something more—about him. We must see him as having known better, and at the same time regard him as having, to some measure, responsibility for an irredeemable character. The target of contempt, as opposed to someone who has managed to do something wrong, is regarded as inferior in some respect, as not worth the effort.

  Like any emotion, contempt comes in degrees. To hold someone in extreme or total contempt, is to see him in two lights: first, as a moral failure as a person, and thus no longer deserving of the basic respect that persons enjoy, and second, as being responsible for this failing. To treat someone with total contempt is to act, incoherently, as though personhood is a test that one (that is, a person) can pass or fail. But this very assumption is what enables contempt to justify the most inhumane acts.

  Contempt is a powerful attitude, but it is not a particularly democratic one.31 And that is something that liberals would do well to heed. I say this because I, like everyone else nowadays, do have contempt for many of my political opponents. I, too, feel the rage of righteousness. But I also have come to recognize its danger. Once one feels contempt for someone or some ideology, respect disappears almost as a matter of definition. One does not work to compromise with those one holds in contempt. One does not seek an overlapping consensus with their values, or wish to have one’s kids associate with them, or try to converse with them at a dinner party, or step in to aid them when they are
threatened or bullied. That’s the danger that liberals need to be mindful of. The twin of arrogance is contempt, but contempt is not the sort of attitude that is easy to come back from. Anger, even resentment, can come and go. But once you are contemptuous of something, it is hard to climb back out of that hole. That, however, is the hole we on the Left are digging for ourselves, even as we scorn those on the Right doing the same.

  6

  Truth and Humility as Democratic Values

  Socratic Lessons

  One of the oldest methods for pursuing truth in the Western tradition is the elenchus—the Socratic method. In its basic form, it is an exchange between two people: one who questions and one who answers. In Socrates’s own hands, it was often a relentless but frustrating march that ended not in a great reveal of truth but in an admission of ignorance. It usually involved questioning someone who imperiously claimed to know quite a bit about something important. It typically ended with the examinees either admitting that they knew less than they claimed or suddenly finding they had another appointment. This passage about knowledge, from the dialogue known as the Theaetetus, is representative:

  Socrates: It is by wisdom the wise are wise?

  Theaetetus: Yes.

  Socrates: And is that different in any way from knowledge?

  Theaetetus: What?

  Socrates: Wisdom; are not men wise in that which they know?

  Theaetetus: Certainly, they are.

  Socrates: Then wisdom and knowledge are the same?

  Theaetetus: Yes.

  Socrates: So here lies the difficulty which I can never solve to my satisfaction—What is knowledge? Can we answer that question? What say you? Which of us will speak first? . . . Why is there no reply?1

  The process, in short, often seemed rather painful. Socrates admitted as much himself during his later trial, where he reported what happened when he cross-examined a politician who was heralded as wise:

  I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me. . . . So I left him, saying to myself as I went away: Well, although I don’t suppose that either of us know anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, but thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.2

  Socrates’s remark here highlights two distinctive elements of his method, both of which are relevant to the central puzzle we’ve been concerned with in this book: how to go about believing and holding our convictions.

  The first element concerns the people to whom that method was frequently addressed: the arrogant and the powerful. The greater your power, Socrates seems to say, the more you should be concerned about the manner in which you are forming your opinions, and the more you should be open to the possibility that you’ve confused ego with truth. Indeed, as Plato lays out in The Republic, Socrates was particularly keen to refute the most explicit version of this view. Voiced by the character Thrasymachus, it is the idea that “justice is in the interests of the stronger,” or as we sometimes put it, “might makes right.” That dark saying has always been seductive to the powerful, for obvious reasons. It is a philosophical apology for intellectual arrogance. And in combating it, Socrates faced, by way of his trial and eventual death sentence, the typical consequence that befalls those who question power.

  The other element of the Socratic method that comes through in the passage just quoted is that Socrates’s concern with intellectual arrogance began with himself. His starting point was his awareness of his own limitations, his awareness of what he didn’t know. This is the starting point that so inspired Montaigne in his tower and formed the basis of the warning in his writings of the dangers of intellectual arrogance for politics.

  In stressing that the path to true wisdom begins with realizing what you don’t know, Socrates was not alone among the ancients, whether from Europe or Asia. Lao-tzu made the same point: “To know that you don’t know is best. Not to know that you don’t know is a flaw.”3 One can read both philosophers, moreover, as emphasizing more than just the simple acknowledgment of our limited knowledge. Both were concerned with pointing out that our lack of knowledge was often due to our biases, our presumptions, our obsessions, and our blind spots. Thus, Socrates stresses, the politicians were prone to confuse power with knowledge, the successful tended to think that knowledge in one area meant knowledge in all, and the rhetorician replaced truth with persuasion.

  It is notoriously difficult to know exactly what Socrates’s considered views actually were. Our best source on his philosophy—Plato—had his own agenda, both intellectually and politically. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, portrays Socrates as a nutty crank, an attacker of tradition who was concerned only with twisting people’s words—with making them move like the statues of Daedalus, even when the speaker wanted them to remain still. The one thing everyone agrees on is that Socrates was a searching questioner, pestering everyone around him, friend or foe. During his trial in Athens for corrupting the minds of the youth, he noted that he would be comfortable with a sentence of death as long as he was able to question the spirits in Hades.

  Whatever the faults of his method, Socrates teaches us some essential lessons pertaining to our question of how to believe. The lessons are the result of his most fundamental insight: that in trying to figure out what to believe, we should, as much as possible, subject our assumptions to critical examination. Only then can we pursue truth over ego and avoid the arrogance that so afflicts the powerful.

  The first lesson we’ve just discussed, and it has been a constant theme of this book: to pursue the truth seriously, we must first own our own cognitive limitations.4 We need to come to grips with the fact not only that we do not know everything but that much of what we think we know may be due to our prejudices and assumptions. We must realize that our convictions may be the result of the blind acceptance of larger cultural narratives, and not the result of principled reflection.

  Unlike Montaigne, Socrates was no skeptic. He thought that humans should at least strive to know, and that the striving itself was crucial for politics. But he didn’t see it as something you could do alone. Inquiry for Socrates was dialectical. Knowledge, if one were ever to gain it, would come from dialogue with others.

  It is a sign of the digital landscape in which we live—a landscape dotted with humans bent over the black mirrors of their phones—that we need an ancient Greek philosopher to tell us to talk to one another. Human dialogue is still some of the best software we have for the pursuit of knowledge. Naturally, there are different ways to engage in it, depending on our aims. We may be aiming to win, to justify our points and show the other side the error of their ways. Or our aim may be to solve problems, to weigh the evidence, and to share information. Or we may seek to simply understand, to explore both our differences and our commonalities.5 Which of these aims Socrates had in mind is a matter of debate, and I won’t weigh in on that matter here. For our purposes, the more important point is that discussion with others can be beneficial from the standpoint of knowledge—even if neither side, as in the Socratic dialogues, reaches a settled opinion.

  In other words, we can learn from talking to others even when we don’t end up agreeing with them. For example, we might come to know at least what view not to hold, or we might simply learn that we don’t know what to think. But there is a deeper point here that is often overlooked: in talking to others, we often learn what we believe ourselves.6

  By this, I don’t just mean that we can discover what we really think through talking things through. That’s true, but the statement is also misleading. It assumes a picture of thought and language according to which our concepts, and hence our beliefs and convictions, are settled and precise. The metaphor suggests that through the process of dialogue we just uncover them, bring them out into the light. We just needed to find the right language, the right words, to express our already perfectly clear thoughts.

  This, of course, can happen. But something
else also happens: we sometimes don’t discover but create convictions while in conversation with others, or while participating in public discourse. Most people do not have particularly precise or carefully thought-out moral and political beliefs. One reason for that is obvious: we don’t have the time or inclination to think through all of the ramifications of difficult policies on taxes, immigration, trade, and so on, let alone plumb the depths of political thinkers like Plato or Adam Smith or Kant. People, after all, have things to do: families to raise, careers to pursue, art to create.

  So, one reason our political views lack precision is that we lack the time to make them more precise. But another reason is endemic to those beliefs themselves: it is often that the very concepts we employ in politics—general concepts like fairness or liberty, as well as specific concepts like marriage or immigration—are themselves unsettled. Their boundaries are not precise; or they may have a core that can be stretched and made more precise in very different ways.

  Many of our concepts—not just the political ones—are unsettled in this way. Wittgenstein pointed out that many of our concepts apply to things that have only a “family resemblance” to one another. The members of a family may not have any particular feature that they and only they share in common, but rather a set of overlapping features: some may share the same nose but not hair color, others may have the same hair color and height but different builds, and so on. Nonetheless, because of the crisscrossing nature of their characteristics, we can spot the resemblance.