Abstract
Practical politics is plagued by an unabashed and unrelenting mutual demonization of a given ideology, with each side classing each other’s cluster of ideas as pathological, i.e. “indicative of disease” and/or “extreme or excessive” or hopelessly irrational. This chapter specifically argues that the demonization, or the pathologization of conservatism as an ideology runs on a straw man fallacy—that is, detractors (and vulgar catechumen-like defenders) blithely assume that conservatism is coextensive with an ideology. This chapter argues for the view that not only is political conservatism not an ideological worldview, it is a cluster of epistemic virtues that should temper the rationalistic impulse regardless of ideological commitments—at least within the domain of sociality. Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held. Cognitive closure, otherwise known pejoratively as “new mysterianism”, is the view that the mind is structurally constrained in its computational power. Situated cognition, or ecological rationality, is a stance emphasizing rationality as being constitutive of activity, context, and culture. Social externalism is the view that much of our thinking is individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of a thinker’s community. The social complexity thesis is the view that there cannot be a predictive science of politics to drive a radical reconstitution of society. Complexity in the social realm, intrinsically stochastic, is coordinated by a voluntary manifold of self-organizing emergent spontaneous orders. Though each of these theses have resonance to so-called “political” conservatism they are not political positions per se. Regardless of ideological commitments, a cast of mind displaying a significant over-preponderance of rationalist traits, could well be deemed a neurodevelopmental disorder.
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Notes
- 1.
Schmitt (1927/1976) famously took the view that integral to politics is a friend-foe relationship, a relation holding between groups not individuals. Corey (2014) coined the neologism “dogmatomachy” from the Greek dogma (an opinion that falls short of knowledge) and machē (battle). Others take a forum view of politics, one that is constrained by obviously political institutions—e.g. the British parliament.
- 2.
By “reasonable” one doesn’t mean to imply that free-speech should in any way be curtailed.
- 3.
Conservative theorizing is caught between a rock and a hard place. Analytical philosophy, in line with much of academia, resents this primary colour, something that should necessarily be part and parcel of a balanced epistemological pallet: Duarte et al. (2015) note that the lack of viewpoint diversity conspicuously missing from social psychology circles, must surely have epistemic consequences for psychology. Many a self-identified conservative theorist in turn has resisted an analytical approach (Beckstein and Cheneval 2016). Sensitive to the supposed anti-intellectualism attributed to conservatism, Roger Scruton notes that the grand rationalistic systemization of political theorizing inherently confers a smug and self-congratulatory attitude upon proponents (see note 4); this in contrast to the conservative emphasis in articulating “the reasons for not having reasons”
- 4.
A platitudinous gesture to “self-brand” oneself, a form of vanity, dressed up as selfless conviction: “people are trying harder to look right than be right” (Haidt 2012, p. 89; emphasis added). Taleb’s scathing polemic articulates the generalized psychological driver behind this impulse: “The IYI [The Intellectual Yet Idiot] pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited” (Taleb 2018, p. 124). As Susan Haack puts it, this is no more than “activism masquerading as inquiry” (Haack 1998), the sine qua non of the clerisy that is characteristic of the prevailing “professional” thinker.
- 5.
This lack of conceptual precision is tied to what has been termed as “conceptual creep” (Haslam 2016; Haidt 2016). Indeed, Percy long since pointed this out: “Nothing much is proved except that current categories and names, liberal and conservative, are weary past all thinking of it. Ideological words have a way of wearing thin and then, having lost their meanings, being used like switchblades against the enemy of the moment”. Percy (1991, pp. 58; 416). Percy pointedly wrote (1991, p. 92) out that “Political conservatism is neither sinful nor illegal—though sometimes one wonders if liberals don’t think it is”.
- 6.
Academic social theorizing, now operating primarily under the shadow of Marxist “false consciousness” (or miscognition) and wedded to radical social constructivism (often deeply at odds with the prevailing best science; Marsh 2005; Nyíri 2016), has been the major driver behind the significant narrowing of the Overton window. Duarte et al. (2015) note that the lack of viewpoint diversity conspicuously missing from social psychology circles, must surely have epistemic consequences for psychology. Most notably has been the consistent failure of Implicit Association Testing in passing standard tests of replicability (Lilienfeld 2017).
As Susan Haack puts it, “activism masquerading as inquiry” (Haack 1998) is the bread and butter of the priestly class of “professional” thinker.
- 7.
Mathematician Eric Weinstein’s (2016) Four Quadrant Model similarly illustrates how the media stigmatizes certain nuanced views that challenge the status quo by portraying people who hold those views as prejudiced or intolerant. For Percy (1971) ideologues are the bore crashing the conversation of mankind.
- 8.
A case in point being Angela Merkel’s display of hubris syndrome traits with regard to the migrant crisis: “a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate. This can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale. The attendant loss of capacity to make rational decisions is perceived by the general public to be more than ‘just making a mistake’” (Owen and Davidson 2009; see also Murray 2017).
- 9.
The prevailing view in the academy is that power and politics are in lockstep (Michel Foucault), thereby making politics a ubiquitous activity (See Robin 2011 as an preeminent instance).
- 10.
As with all ideological analyses, none can be tidily encased in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Different ideologies cluster concepts differently; some concepts are sidelined, downplayed, emphasized, or reinterpreted. So, for example, conservatives do not conceive “social” justice to be purely a matter of distributive justice as is also the case for libertarians, but for somewhat different reasons. Libertarianism, derivative of liberalism, has over-sacralized one value to the detriment of all others—in this case, the market (see Abel and Marsh 2014). See Iyer et al. (2012) on the Libertarian disposition.
- 11.
See Eyal and Tieffenbach (2016) on incommensurabilty and (market) value.
- 12.
It is this outlook that has, not surprisingly, tilled the soil for, what in current jargon is known as “intersectionality”, an ever-expanding, voracious hierarchical basket of rights-claims running on irrelevant collecting features making for an inherently divisive political culture. In identity politics the explanans (a particular statement, law, theory or fact) and the thing to be explained (the explanandum) have been inverted (so, for example, it would be deemed irrational for non-conformists holding feature x not to subscribe to an expected ideology despite their superficially similar characteristics), e.g. self-identifying Black or gay conservatives.
- 13.
The term “regressive Left” was coined by Nawaz (2016, pp. 210, 251). The policing of language or compelled speech language being a star example of a stochastic spontaneous order, necessarily invites a perpetually authoritarian response in enforcement because of the quicksilver nature of complex systems; a notable slide towards a Koestler-like Sonnenfinsternis moment has now been set in motion by the Canadian government’s adoption of Motion-103 and Bill C-16.
- 14.
Looking after those less fortunate can also be found as a prime social value in idea of “noblesse oblige” of High Toryism.
- 15.
E. O. Wilson’s “sociobiology” of the mid-70 s was deemed too controversial, so much so that he was, sadly, viewed pretty much as a pariah for two decades afterward. As Haidt (2013b, p. 282) more elegantly puts it: “I got the feeling that sociobiology was radioactive. It was dismissed as reductionist and it was tainted as a gateway theory leading to racism and sexism.” The regressive Left’s anti-science bent has now been fully unmasked by ex-Google employee, James Demore’s memo: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf.
- 16.
A. J. Ayer and C. L. Stevenson offer the two classic twentieth century formulations.
- 17.
Others include Honderich (1991); Jost et al. (2003) make the feigned sounding claim to the contrary: “This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled” (Jost et al. 2003, p. 340). The latest addition to this genre of crude polemics is Robin (2011). It is telling that for Robin power, à la Lenin, is the central primary question without ever making any distinctions as per (Dahl 1957) or Russell (1938). Moreover, Robin overly conflates power with authority, and in turn, authority with hierarchy.
- 18.
This claim is odd since in the 30 years that I’ve been monitoring the so-called “culture wars”, the right has been operating within the wake of the Left’s hegemony, especially in education. Though it was the Right of the ’80s and ’90s that harboured anti-science (debates about evolution) and censorious tendencies (music labeling, actually in cahoots with the left), this stance is now more applicable to the “regressive” Left). Lakoff’s book comes over as having an ideological to axe to grind and as such is weakened with infelicities.
- 19.
A far deeper critique can be found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre.
- 20.
Haidt anecdotally mentions that as a self-identifying liberal he had tried to offer the Democrats advice on how to beat Republicans at their own game—the offer was not taken up.
- 21.
Burton (2015) tentatively point to the higher degree of neuroticism amongst “liberals” compared with “conservatives”.
- 22.
A critic of Haidt suggests that “fairness and relief of suffering are more fundamental values than authority and loyalty, which are virtues only if their objects are worthy” (Blum 2013). In other words, Blum is saying that blind loyalty to an authority is unacceptable. Blind loyalty is not a feature of writers even as early as Burke. Blum would need to spell out with far more conceptual discrimination the varieties of- and the logic of- loyalty, de jure authority generalized as follows: A has authority over B if and only if the fact that A requires B to φ (i) gives B a content-independent reason to φ and (ii) excludes some of B’s reason for not-φ-ing (Green 1988).
- 23.
Bernstein et al. (2012).
- 24.
Haidt along with Lakoff is the latest in a line of theorists offering a Dual Process Theory (DPT) of cognition, Khaneman (2011) along with Haidt being the two most prominent recent versions. This process comes in a variety of overlapping if not identical binary concerns, notably as propositional knowledge versus tacit knowledge, rationalism versus empiricism, deliberate versus intuitive consciousness, declarative versus procedural, abstract versus hermeneutic, formalized versus traditional (custom, prejudice, convention, habit), fast versus slow thinking and I’d expect more DPT such as these beside. Four points should however be noted. Whosever dual process model one cares to take, the positing of these two systems should not lead one to any of the following inferences (Evans 2012):
(a) that there is indeed a sharp duality and that ne’er the twain shall meet; (b) that these two “systems” have definitive brain structure instantiations; (c) that “fast” thinking is intrinsic; (d) that “slow” thinking is intrinsically rational.
The methodological “moral” I take from Kahneman and Tversky’s work from the early 70s is not that one should be alert to the supposedly infallible deliverances of intuition but that neither the lay individual nor indeed the expert in any knowledge community, are immune from systematic error. Surely this epistemic insight should be assimilated by social theorists.
- 25.
A recent exception is Alexander (2016) who attempts a refutation of what he calls Oakeshott’s “minimal” and overly “abstract” definition of conservatism. The upshot, on Alexander’s account, is that proponents make “conservatism sound like the most natural thing in the world … [and] unexceptional” (Alexander 2016, p. 20) or as Rescher puts it, conservatism is a “matter of balance”, or fine-tuning with the burden of proof on the proponents of change (Marquez 2015), an Aristotelian sense of proportionality. Alexander’s point is precisely my point though I have distinguished historically specific, indexical and contextual conservatism (See Rampton 2016); Sutherland (2005) and Turner (2003) are two trailblazers in making the connection between Oakeshott and non-Cartesian cognitive science.
- 26.
A philosophical unpacking would be in order (see Mumford 1998).
- 27.
See Brannan and Hamlin (2016a) on the stability of practice/convention.
- 28.
Brannan and Hamlin (2016b) distinguish adjectival (a value widely-shared across most ideological profiles), practical (empirical Pareto-like distribution values) and nominal (a distinctively held value)—types of conservatism.
- 29.
Horgan and Timmons’ (2007) “morphological rationalism” is the idea information contained in moral principles is already embodied in the structure of an individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments.
- 30.
Oakeshott famously took a swipe at Hayek for having rationalist tendencies in that having no plan was just as rationalistic as the central planners (Marsh 2012).
- 31.
Known primarily for his analytical Marxism Jerry Cohen later wrote: “The conservative attitude that I seek to describe, and begin to defend, in this paper is a bias in favour of retaining what is of value, even in the face of replacing it by something of greater value. I consider two ways of valuing something other than solely on account of the amount or type of value that resides in it. In one way, a person values something as the particular valuable thing that it is, and not merely for the value that resides in it. In another way, a person values something because of the special relation of the thing to that person. There is a third idea in conservatism that I more briefly consider: namely, the idea that some things must be accepted as given, that not everything can, or should, be shaped to our aims and requirements” (Cohen 2011; see Brennan and Hamlin 2016b for a close-grained discussion of Cohen).
- 32.
Taken thus, I think it way too simplistic to use hot issue terms such as abortion, gay rights, multiculturalism and so on to establish a nuanced conception of the conservative (Tritt et al. 2016). This said, some gays not beholden to the “regressive” Left bemoan the “domestication” of their lifestyle because of legalized marriage. Their view is that gay marriage can be seen as yet another expression of the rationalist’s controlling impulse to shrink the transgressive “sandpit” that has long since provided a vital spark to keeping liberal culture dynamic. (See also note 12). Insofar as abortion is concerned, it is first and foremost a philosophical problem, not a political one, as the IYI vulgarian is wont to promote.
- 33.
- 34.
A curious schizophrenic-like phenomenon that has typically infected Western intelligentsia of late is satirized by evolutionary behavioural scientist Gad Saad as Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome; that is, the holding of contradictory beliefs manifest as willful ignorance or self-delusion despite overwhelming empirical evidence that x is or is not the case (see note 4). Philosophically, this can be roughly recast as a form of Sartrean “bad faith”.
- 35.
Some studies have suggested that there is a genetic aspect to an ideological preference (Hatemi et al. 2014) but as the researchers acknowledge, finding bridging laws from bio-chemistry to sociology, is a tall order. If as Tritt et al. (2013) say, emotional arousal is tempered by a conservative stance, then this is clearly dispositional. The same caution should be adhered to in positing a link between media preferences and political orientation (Xu and Peterson 2017).
- 36.
Hirsh et al. (2010) suggest that personality binary traits such as Conscientiousness versus Openness, Agreeableness versus Politeness, Orderliness versus Openness have some correlation with “conservative” versus “liberal” political outlooks. As I’ve said, there is only a highly contingent relation if one understands conservatism to be an epistemic virtue. This applies to another study by Xu et al. (2016). In an earlier study, Xu et al. (2013, p. 1510) admit to this contingency. Hirsh et al. (2013) make a more plausible connection between religiosity and conservatism in that it jibes with Haidt’s six drivers of moral psychology. Malka and Soto (2015) again miss this contingent relationship and do not seem to have a very nuanced conception of Left-Right ideological spectrum as per the discussion of ideological morphology in § 2.
- 37.
I’m indebted to Martin Beckstein, Nick Capaldi, Nathan Cockram, Francesco Di Iorio, Andrew Irvine, Gus DiZerega, David Hardwick, Douglas Livingstone, Kristóf Nyíri, Efraim Podoksik, Geoff Thomas and Seth Vannatta for specific comments and/or broadly related discussion. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Marsh, L. (2018). Pathologizing Ideology, Epistemic Modesty and Instrumental Rationality. In: Bronner, G., Di Iorio, F. (eds) The Mystery of Rationality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94028-1_12
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