Mind In A Cage ...

How Orthodox Ideology Is Making Us Dumber.

One night, just about eight years ago, I was sitting in a circle of singer-songwriters under a dark Texas sky. We were at the Kerrville Folk festival, and it was the end of a long day. Probably close to midnight. Just some people who weren’t quite ready yet to call it a night. Talking and laughing and trading songs.

Somehow the conversation turned to a recent vandalism attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the Midwest. Most people present shrugged it off as ‘just another right-wing crazy’, but one woman - a moderately well-known touring singer-songwriter - became instantly incensed. She was really angry that this clinic and been damaged and would be closed for a week. She just couldn’t understand why people like this hoodlum were allowed to move around freely in society.

I probably should have known better, but I spoke up. “Well, we have to understand that something like half of the people in this country think that abortion clinics are killing children.”

”Well they’re just fucking WRONG!” she snapped. Whoa!

”Agreed”, I said. “But they would argue that …”

”No! Stop talking! There are no arguments!” Now she was standing up and putting her guitar into its case. Completely flustered by my polite mention of a belief that I didn’t hold but was aware of. Her husband was trying to calm her down and she was snapping at him too as she stalked off into the darkness.

This is an in-person example of the sorts of thwarted conversations I was having on Facebook on a range of issues with people on the hard ideological left. At that time, I was a Democrat myself, and didn’t really know anybody on the hard ideological right. But I’d done work for lots of conservative people and knew that they were not the caricatures many thought them to be.

This incident at the Quiet Valley Ranch, makes for a good illustration. Because it seems to me that the vandal and the folk-singer were not only unwilling to look beyond their own assumptions, but were incapable of doing so.

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I talk a lot about evolution. Because, in my view, an understanding of our roots as social primates living in small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, holds the keys to understanding us in modern times. Our lives have changed dramatically, but the brains we use to negotiate these lives, have changed a whole lot less.

We evolved in a lawless world where we either belonged to a tight-knit band of friends and relatives, or we died alone. We’re hard-wired to seek the stability of group affiliation. And when we find it, we want to keep it. And to have solid status within it. And to avoid being cast out from it.

I have zero doubt that the guy who smashed up the abortion clinic was connected to a group. Probably one filled with religious ideas about Satan and salvation. His aggression was likely a way of proving himself within that group. Just as I’m sure that the hot-headed songstress belonged to a pro-choice group of some sort.

Of course, simply being a touring folk-singer assumes that she’s also on the ‘progressive’ side of liberal. That is itself an affiliation with pretty specific ideological demands; ‘reproductive freedom’ not the least of them.

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Neither of these people would say that he/she has anything at all in common with the other. But, assuming that neither has changed since then, they actually have a lot in common. Both identify very strongly with a set of ideas. It’s become a big part of who they are. They hold these views absolutely. As an orthodoxy.

Think of the difference between the ‘Jewishness’ of say, Jerry Seinfeld, and that of the men with the black hats and beards and braids.

There’s no wiggle room for these guys. This isn’t just a religion. It’s nearly their entire self-concept. The folky and the vandal might not wear uniforms like these Hasidim do, but believing that there should be no limits on abortion or that there should be no abortion whatsoever, are hard inflexible orthodoxies all the same.

The singer-songwriter in question wasn’t just mad at the vandal … she was mad at me for even suggesting that this guy might be driven by moral impulses. If I’d posed the same idea about her to the guy who busted up the clinic, he’d probably have an even more extreme reaction. Maybe he’d have accused her of supporting infanticide. Maybe he’d even call her a murderer. The truth is that neither side has done near as much listening as shouting. And I doubt that self-reflection is very high on either’s list.

One of my favorite thinkers, Jonathon Haidt, has probably done the most important work on understanding our divisions. He was the first to land hard on the moral aspect of our commitment to the left or the right.

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

When we know that our strongest opinions are held in the same way that our moral values are held, we understand how these ideas become beliefs and eventually orthodoxies. At that point, no questioning of those beliefs is encouraged or even allowed.

Haidt often observes that ideologies are fine - natural to our species - but that orthodoxies have ruined the national dialogue by shutting down discussion. The organization he co-founded is called Heterodox Academy. Here Haidt and his cohorts - largely people of the center-left - are working to see that our universities become, once again, places where all ideas get a fair hearing.

I highly recommend Haidt’s books and online talks, but I want to add an insight that I don’t believe I’ve heard him talk about. It goes like this:

Holding an orthodox political opinion on a given issue, actually makes a person LESS knowledgeable about that issue.

The touring folk singer in question, lives in a world where she very rarely comes in contact with anybody from outside her ideological tribe. So naturally she knows well the arguments of her own tribe, regarding abortion. She feels that protecting the bodily autonomy of a young woman is her moral duty.

That’s fine as far as that goes. But holding that idea as an orthodoxy, cements her into a fundamentalist version of that moral idea. And showing tolerance toward a conflicting idea, could cost her everything. Her friend-group, her relationships with venues that book her. Musicians and producers and booking agents, and even those who offer her free lodging as she tours around.

ALL of this could be lost if word got out that she’d showed empathy toward an anti-abortion extremist. Her words to me show that she actively insulates herself from arguments that might make her understanding of the issue more nuanced. “Stop TALKING. There are no arguments!” She was actually running away from hearing the other side’s thinking. And also from being seen doing so.

And the vandal in our story, would undoubtedly face an equal-if-opposite threat from his peer group if he was to moderate his views of the pro-choice movement. “What? Now you’re fraternizing with baby killers?”

Therefore neither of them can safely show their opponents the sort of respect that might lead to a compromise both sides could live with. Instead, each side has pushed away from compromise … in an attempt to gain and defend ground.

It’s this dogmatic intransigence on both sides that’s escalated the abortion war to its current level. I can hardly imagine how outraged that folksinger is about the Dobbs decision. The vandal and his friends are probably still celebrating.

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If you’re going to be ever-ready to explode into the streets with your placards and bullhorns, there’s no room in your mind for doubt.

This means that NOT reconsidering your own beliefs from time to time, is your best bet.

Once a person is strongly identified with a set of ideas, he can’t study them objectively without risking internal conflict at best and social isolation at worst. So he attenuates his skepticism and uses denial to retroactively erase any nagging questions he had along the way to accepting the doctrine.

Therefore he knows less about it than when he started. Even worse, he is training his mind away from curiosity, and that’s a loss to his cognition in a general way.

If one makes a habit of this anti-inquisitiveness, one is effectively locking his mind into a cage.

I doubt that there was ever a philosopher who thought more about thinking and knew more about knowing, than John Stuart Mill. He famously wrote the following:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

In other words, if what you know about your political opponent and his views comes primarily from what your own tribe’s thought-leaders tell you … then you can’t really know for certain that your own position is worth holding.

You must hear the arguments from “persons who actually believe them … in their most plausible and persuasive form”.

Otherwise we know ‘only our own side of the case … and little of that’.

This is true for a folksinger trying to make her way in a cultural world peopled and controlled by progressives. Also true for a vandal who’s found belonging and purpose among fundamentalist Christians who believe that a group of cells barely visible to the naked eye is no different in value from a human child.

Has either really thought deeply about the long-term effects of the beliefs they hold with such unwavering devotion?

The anti-abortion absolutist is correct about the preciousness of a child born because its mother was refused an abortion. But has he really considered the chaotic squalor in which that child might live with an unprepared, unwed mother who wasn’t even responsible enough to keep from getting pregnant?

The pro-choice absolutist has thought about that a lot. But has she ever deeply pondered what old age will look like for the millions of freedom-seeking feminists who chose career goals over motherhood? What geriatric frailty will be like for those women who casually cancelled pregnancies in order to assert their autonomy? No grown-up children to check up on them? No grandkids to spoil and be proud of, who call to ask Grandma for advice? Or just to say hi.

And what of the greater societal consequences if either side wins absolutely? Without any access to abortion we’ll end up with even more fatherless kids trapped in a multi-generational cycle of poverty.

On the other hand, if the progressive habit of reproducing far below the replacement rate continues, there won’t be enough new taxpayers to fund social programs or youthful human bodies to care for the childless elderly.

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Any issue that’s important enough for us to be divided about is guaranteed to be filled with complexities. Down-the-road repercussions that a one-sided opinion can’t possibly predict.

The problems we’ll encounter going forward, will need an all-hands-on-deck attitude toward problem solving. Ideological bubbles aren’t going to cut it. We all need to keep informing and re-informing ourselves, when the human propensity for group-opinion leaves us behind the curve.

This takes an intentional avoidance of all heavily biased news outlets. Media bias watchdogs like AllSides do a decent job of sorting it out. For a deeper-dive, try Ad Fontes Media. Their frequently updated Media Bias Chart is much more nuanced.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I subscribe to Forbes, The New York Times, The Dispatch, Politico, The Hill, Wikipedia, and Tangle News. Also the bargain version of Washington Post, primarily for George Will’s column. I often watch videos made by Reason, and occasionally stream the NBC Evening News with Lester Holt on YouTube.

I sometimes read GroundNews, which aggregates multiple versions of news stories which they have rated for bias. I often listen to NPR in the car and correct for bias as I go. I like the late-night BBC broadcasts that they play on KPCC in L.A..

My thinking is influenced by discussions I hear on podcasts with hosts Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Chris Williamson, and the guys at Triggernometry. I follow the work of Steven Pinker, and as mentioned, Jonathon Haidt. I belong to the cross partisan organization ‘Braver Angels’ and read their newsletter. And I haunt the fact-checking sites on the regular.)

Above all we must be willing to self-reflect. To look honestly at the times in our lives when we’ve been absolutely certain about something only to find out we were in error.

And to carry a little humility with us into the future. To realize that our minds are mammalian problem-solving organisms not much interested in objectivity. If we can look back on past episodes of ‘getting it wrong’, and be honest with ourselves as to how shallowly we’d really thought these positions through … then we can apply at least some doubt as to how informed we are now, on a range of issues.

Just speaking for myself here, but humans are humans.

Thanks so much for reading Morrison At Large. I look forward to your comments below. If you enjoyed this column, consider sharing it. And please hit the little ‘heart’ icon to let me know you liked it. -Dave