Know-It-All Society

by Michael P. Lynch

  Wittgenstein thought that games, too, only shared overlapping features: some games are competitive, but not all are (think of a child throwing a ball against a wall); others involve teams, but not all do; some have explicit rules, but others’ rules change or are created on the spot. The concept of a game is thus unsettled or fluid; no single characteristic or essence nails down what a game can be. As a result, we are free to create new things that nonetheless we find useful to label as games because we can spot the resemblance. The same is true, Wittgenstein thought, with many of our concepts, and it is not difficult to see his point. Concepts as different as jazz, religion, and pornography all seem like this. They apply to things with not a single defining essence but an expanding family of characteristics.

  Because of their fluid and unsettled nature, our disputes about what counts as a game or religion or jazz, for example, often take the form of an explicit negotiation. This is apparent to anyone who remembers negotiating the rules of a newly invented playground game, or has played with a child, or has engaged in barroom discussions about whether figure skating really should be counted as an Olympic sport. In such situations, we are aware that we are often simply trying to justify stretching the concept one way rather than another.7

  My point is that many of the concepts we use in our political debates are like this.8 Take the concept of marriage, for example. Political arguments about that concept were, for some time, focused on whether it could even apply to a union other than that between a man and a woman, with some people arguing that it could not, and others, victoriously as it turned out, arguing that it could. Advocates on both sides would sometimes act as if the concept were perfectly settled; it was just a matter of everyone recognizing where its precise boundaries lay. But I think it more likely that we were negotiating those boundaries during political discourse about the concept, engaging in an exchange of reasons both implicit and explicit for pulling the concept in one direction rather than another. Moreover, I don’t think this case is atypical. Public discussion is often a continual process of conceptual renegotiation that is a combination of creation and discovery. It is a process that teaches us something; we not only learn from it how our concepts are used, but through renegotiation we create further rules for how they ought to be used in the future.

  Changes in convictions can result from this combination of creation and discovery. Derek Black, born in 1989, was raised in a prominent white nationalist family; his father was the founder of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront. And Black was brought up to be a very active white supremacist himself—running (and being elected to) office in Florida, working on a radio show and at Stormfront with his father, and generally pushing a racist agenda. But during his college years, he changed his mind after forming a friendship with fellow student Matthew Stevenson, who invited Black to attend weekly Shabbat dinners.9 Conversations with Black at these dinners were at first apolitical. But over time, trust developed, and they began to talk about racism.

  During those conversations with Stevenson and others, Black began for the first time to really engage with the evidence undermining his views of white superiority. Moreover, he began to understand the consequences of those views—the kind of racial terror they led to. Before graduation, Black publicly renounced white supremacy. In a later op-ed in the New York Times, he described the transformation this way: “For me, the conversations that led me to change my views started because I couldn’t understand why anyone would fear me. I thought I was only doing what was right and defending those I loved.”10 What happened is that he learned there were good reasons to fear racist ideology. These reasons made him abandon it—and to form a strong commitment to antiracism.

  The reasons for Black’s particular conversion are no doubt extremely complex.11 But even the basic outlines of his case illustrate the importance of building trust, of reaching out, of dialogue—of not being arrogant. Black’s change in conviction was the result of a reflective process of both tracking the evidence and testing his conviction for coherence against still deeper moral convictions. Among his foundational beliefs was the idea that he should not embrace harmful and frightening views. But he realized he was embracing such views—precisely because of the evidence brought before him. His new conviction still reflects the person he wants to be, but that’s partly because he changed who he wants to be and partly because he realized he was confused about what kind of person he really was. He both discovered something—that his racist views were violating another conviction that he had—and created something, a new antiracist conviction.

  Convictions reflect our self-identity, so they are difficult to change. Even talking about them can be delicate and feel like a betrayal, and explicit debate over our convictions with those who have opposing views can actually cause us to harden our views. But Black’s case shows this isn’t always so. When we approach our convictions with a Socratic attitude, when we are willing to improve and reshape our views by appeal to evidence and the experience of others, change is possible.

  Intellectual Humility

  These reflections suggest that there is a distinctive Socratic attitude toward how we should go about believing. It is, perhaps, the deepest legacy of philosophy, its one true and honest answer to the question of how to live. Montaigne and Hume strived, if imperfectly, to embody it. The American philosopher John Dewey would have called it open-mindedness; the educational establishment sometimes calls it critical thinking. But the best term for it might be “intellectual humility.” It is not so much a trait as a kind of mental stance or orientation, one that we can hold more or less, and that can be reinforced or suppressed by our social conditions. It is not always valuable; it can be overblown or out of place. But it is a crucial attitude for inquiry and, I believe, for democracy itself. I’ll define it as follows: to be intellectually humble is to see your worldview as open to improvement from new evidence and the experience of others.12

  In order to see yourself as being able to improve from what others bring to the table, you can’t think you know everything. You have to have absorbed the first Socratic lesson, and own your limitations. But being intellectually humble means more than admitting when you don’t know. It means wanting to learn from the evidence and the experience of other people. That is why we treasure intellectual humility in our colleagues, our teammates, and our friends. And it is also what makes intellectual humility so important for democracy. As Dewey argued throughout his career, successful democratic politics requires constant work. We must work at mutual respect, and to do that we must work at listening and learning—to try to be open-minded, to be free “from prejudice, partisanship, and other such habits that close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new problems and entertain new ideas.”13 We need, in short, to be free from arrogance.

  Socratic inquiry shows that intellectual humility involves caring about truth. For this reason, it is an attitude that is at the heart of science and philosophy. Perhaps more surprisingly, it is also an attitude that requires confidence. Socratic intellectual humility is not timidity in belief. And it is not the attitude of skepticism—at least, where that is understood to mean doubting that you know anything at all. In order to adopt Socratic humility, you can’t be overly concerned about your ego. But that doesn’t mean you lack an ego; you just don’t put your ego before truth. To be open to learning from others, you need to be confident enough to realize what you know, and what you don’t.

  What all this tells us is that intellectual humility is not an opponent of conviction. To be open to improvement you must have a base to improve on. As Dewey remarked, this kind of attitude is “very different from empty-mindedness. While it is hospitality to new themes, facts, ideas, questions, it is not the kind of hospitality that would be indicated by hanging out a sign: ‘Come right in; there is nobody at home.’ ”14 In other words, listening to others, like a lot of things of value, is good, other things being equal. And things are not always equal.

  Think about lying. Your mom no doub
t taught you that honesty is the best policy. And it is. But policies have exceptions. When the Nazis are at the door looking for the Jews hidden in your attic, deceit is your only real option. The same holds for intellectual humility. You don’t need to thoughtfully reconsider your views about racism when talking to the white supremacists on your doorstep. And one reason you don’t has to do with the core meaning of intellectual humility. It means, in part, being open to the evidence supplied by the experience and testimony of others. But “evidence” here is key; just because someone comes up to you and says the Earth is flat doesn’t mean you have to take that statement seriously. You can be intellectually humble without, to paraphrase a well-known expression, being so open-minded that your brain just falls out.

  So, intellectual humility isn’t timidity in belief. It isn’t about servility either. The kind of humility I’m interested in isn’t a matter of abasing yourself or seeing yourself as lower than others. It is not about giving up your convictions just because others, or the majority, think you must. As Socrates’s own life makes plain, the pursuit of truth and the combating of arrogance often put you into conflict with those in power, simply because those in power are often the ones most resistant to challenges to the status quo and least able to recognize that they have confused ego with truth. That fact can often mean that who is being arrogant and who is being humble will be a matter of dispute.

  Few events have stirred the pot of tribal arrogance in the United States more than the simple act of kneeling on a football field. During the 2016 season, Colin Kaepernick, a professional quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, decided to protest what he considered to be disproportionate police violence against African Americans by kneeling during the singing of the national anthem at the start of the games in which he played. Kaepernick did not make speeches or give many interviews. He did not lecture. He just knelt.

  The reaction to Kaepernick’s protest is a textbook case of how the flames of arrogance and contempt are fed by the toxic combination of ideology and our digital platforms. But it also illustrates how one person’s effort in humility can be portrayed as a display of arrogance. Kaepernick and many of the football players who joined him insisted that they didn’t mean any disrespect to individual first responders or veterans. But that is not how their detractors and critics—including President Trump—saw their actions. To them, the kneelers were disrespecting the flag, as well as both service members and first responders. To his supporters, Kaepernick was humbly protesting racism and white arrogance. To his critics, he was arrogantly putting his politics before the respect owed to those in uniform.

  Dissent has long been thought to have political value, at least in democracies. It is an expression of the freedom of thought and action that democracies value. But for Socrates, dissent also had value because it could be done in pursuit of truth. During his trial, Socrates posed to himself the question that was no doubt on the lips of many in Athens: why could he not just go away, keep silent, and live a quiet life? The answer, he suggested, was that to do so would have meant giving up on a central feature of a worthy life: inquiry. Ceasing his dissent would have meant giving up on pursuing what was true.

  This seems an overstatement; as Aristotle implicitly suggested later, Socrates could have taken his inquiry, and his life, to different shores. Nonetheless, Socrates made an important point here: critical dissent is often a way to pursue politically important truth. It can, for example, act as a form of rational persuasion, as a way of laying out the evidence for thinking that a policy is flawed. That’s why so many dissidents—from Thomas Paine to Marx—have used the pamphlet, essay, letter, book, or blog post to lay out their case against the policies of the powerful to those whom they hoped were still persuadable. The idea is that you can educate via the practices of dissent.

  But protest and dissent can educate even when they do not persuade. The civil rights marchers in Birmingham and ACT UP protesters staging “die-ins” during the AIDS crisis weren’t intending to change the minds of their most hardened opponents. They were seeking to raise the profile of an issue; to bring it to the attention of a public that wished to look away. Dissent can highlight the intellectual arrogance of the powerful. It can remind the privileged that they don’t know everything. It can plant seeds of doubt. Acts of dissent can increase knowledge but also model a democratic way of pursuing it.

  All of which makes Kaepernick’s act of protest—and of those who followed him—at once noble and saddening. Kaepernick himself was initially inclined to sit during the national anthem, but as was widely reported, a military veteran convinced him that it would be more respectful if he kneeled.15 As that veteran, Mark Boyer, would later say in an interview, “We sorta came to a middle ground where he would take a knee alongside his teammates. . . . Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother’s grave, you know, to show respect.”16 It is therefore ironic that the act of kneeling—an action nearly universally seen as symbolic of humility and respect—is now viewed by many as a sign of the opposite qualities.

  At least, that is the short-term reaction. Dissent, as any advocate of civil rights can tell you, has to play a long game. The general point I want to make here is that the Socratic attitude, the attitude of intellectual humility, is not antithetical to either conviction or critical political engagement. The opposite of intellectual humility is not conviction but the idea that we have no need of further inquiry, that our convictions are settled, and that no combination of future events could cause us to ever renegotiate their boundaries. The opposite is arrogance.

  A Space of Reasons

  Few philosophers are honored with their own stamp; John Dewey was, in 1968. A half century later, Dewey remains one of America’s most influential thinkers, having contributed enormously to psychology, political theory, and most famously, education. But his star has faded in academic philosophy. As with Bertrand Russell, much of the discipline generally now just nods politely in Dewey’s direction, every so often offering a tip of the cap with a citation here or there.

  This is not too surprising. Dewey—again like Russell—was a giant of his time, and giants have a way of going in and out of fashion. But it is a shame, for Dewey thought long and hard about the themes of this book, and about truth and democracy in particular. In Dewey’s pragmatist view, the value of truth is not something pure and golden, for truth itself cannot be strained away from the muddied waters of human interests. Truth always has a human face, and absolute certainty, Dewey thought, was an illusory goal whose pursuit in the political realm only encourages our worst instincts. “Truth,” Dewey believed, “is important because of social interests.”17

  One of Dewey’s driving ideas was that democracy is more than just a form of government; it is a way of life, “a conjoining of communicated experience.”18 Democracies, both Dewey and Hannah Arendt believed, aspire to be a kind of common space—a space where disagreements can be navigated without fear of violence or oppression. Democracies, we might say, are spaces of reasons.19

  I have urged in these pages that this conception of democracy is essentially grounded on the even more basic ideal of respect for persons.20 Again, the point is that in democratic politics one regards one’s fellow citizens as autonomous and worthy of equal respect. That means treating them as capable of making up their own minds. And we treat our fellow citizens with respect when we see them as capable of making these judgments on the basis of reasons—even when, in fact, we know that nonrational forces often rule the day. That’s why we feel squeamish about manipulative political advertising, even when it is on our “side.” Getting people to agree with us is not all that matters. How we reach agreement also matters. As we saw in Chapter 5, as tempting as it might be to release a drug into the water that would get everyone thinking as you do about politics, it would be wrong to do so because the act would violate basic respect, basic human dignity.

  To see democracy as a space of reasons is to regard the ideals of democratic politics as requiring a co
mmitment to pursuit of the truth. But not in just any way—for example, in complete disregard for human welfare (as Nazi scientists did, for example, in experimenting on Jewish prisoners). The particularly democratic value attached to the pursuit of truth lies in the manner in which democracies promote and protect these pursuits by ensuring rights of free assembly, speech, a free press, and the norms of academic freedom.21 “The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion,” Dewey noted. “That is the problem of the public.”22

  In this, I believe Dewey is exactly right. The space of reasons that democracies need is a common public discourse. That’s why Dewey believed that democracies should encourage institutions that engage in inquiry in a way that improves the “conditions” of discourse. It’s what makes artistic, scientific, historical, legal, and journalistic institutions so essential. They construct the public space of reasons by providing reasons; they pursue truth not through fiat but by prizing evidence and inquiry. In encouraging these institutions, democracies hope to increase the public stock of knowledge. But the point I take from Dewey is that the true democratic value of these institutions lies in the fact that they embody the open, public pursuit of that knowledge. It is their pursuit of truth via open, transparent, and deliberative inquiry that makes them part of the practice of democracy.