This conversation was taken from our recent book, Science, Anti-Science, Pseudoscience, Truth, edited by Anthony Morgan. If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation. We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.
Anyone who’s had an argument about politics with a friend may walk away wondering how this friend could possibly hold the beliefs they do. A few self-reflective people might even wonder about their own political beliefs after such an argument. This conversation explores the reasons that people have, and could have, for political beliefs: the evidence they might draw on, the psychological sources of their views, and the question of how we ought to form our political beliefs if we want to be rational. It focuses in particular on the nature of ideology as a particularly charged form of political belief. Why has ideology in the modern era become so divisive, and how can we better orient ourselves amidst the confusing and disorientating terrain of competing ideologies?
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Anthony Morgan (AM): On the face of it, political belief is the broader category, and ideology is a form of political belief. We may question that as we go through! So, I thought, as Oliver has written on political beliefs, we could maybe start from there. Oliver, your main area of philosophy is epistemology. Could you say a bit about what epistemology can offer to our understanding of political beliefs?
Oliver Traldi (OT): Epistemology is the normative study of belief, and so it can offer an evaluative perspective on people’s rationality in politics. This helps us answer broader questions about people’s motivations in politics, what the causes of political events are, and what the explanations of political events and political behaviour might be. To offer a crude example: if a lot of people like a certain policy, one kind of explanation might be that they looked at the data and decided this policy would be a good way of addressing some problem. Another kind of explanation might be that this policy has something to do with the deep-rooted neuroses in their society and it helps them sublimate these neuroses through the mechanisms of this policy. One of these explanations appeals to rationality in cognition, and the other to irrationality in cognition. Understanding which of those types of explanation tends to be the right one when it comes to politics can help us understand the causes of political phenomena and how to deal with them.
AM: William James wrote: “In the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favour of the same conclusion”. Do you think that it would be unfair to offer the same characterization of political beliefs as William James does with religious and metaphysical ones?
OT: One way of interpreting what’s going on there is that James is talking about certain kinds of cognitive bias, such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and so on. These biases have to do with avoiding evidence that challenges our prior or preferred beliefs and looking for evidence that confirms them. Some people definitely do these things some of the time when it comes to political beliefs, but experimental evidence indicates that people can be receptive to new evidence about politics and can change their views about politics. Joshua Knobe has been doing research into racist beliefs. One model we might have is that people have racist beliefs, and due to various cognitive biases they never get out of those beliefs. But it might turn out that what people have instead is racist motivations. They’ll constantly shift their beliefs to fit their motivations. So, even if people are irrational, there’s still a question about where the irrationality is: are they stubbornly sticking to their beliefs, or will they keep shuffling through new beliefs as long as it fits their motivations? And epistemology can help in making distinctions and filling out that kind of
picture.
AM: The second section of your book looks at theories that give “scientific, causal accounts of what gives different people their different beliefs”. So, what is the role of science or empirical evidence in your picture of political belief?
OT: If our question is whether people are rational about their political beliefs, then science has a significant role to play, because the social sciences provide and test accounts of how people form their political beliefs. Political epistemologists are interested in the normative questions related to how people should form their political beliefs, but we are also interested in starting out with descriptions of how people form their political beliefs and evaluating them. Even once you have a description in hand, there’s a lot of philosophical argument to be had about whether a political belief meets criteria for rationality or irrationality. Take conspiracy theories as an example. At what point of getting into the conspiracy theory is somebody irrational? And is this a feature of all conspiracy theories? At the same time, as philosophers, we need to be careful because the same controversies that exist in philosophy also exist in science. We can’t simply assume that because one prominent scientist wrote some story about how people come up with their political beliefs, the case is closed. I remain a bit sceptical of some of the scientific accounts, especially in light of phenomena like the widely-reported replication crisis in the social sciences.
AM: Jason, you dedicate your book to Charles Taylor. You come at the issue of ideology as a political scientist. Taylor was very critical of the ways in which the human and social sciences conduct themselves, especially in relation to their emphasis on quantitative or experimental frameworks. Please can you say something about his critique here?
JB: I’m working out of the hermeneutic tradition, which is a tradition that holds that the human sciences are about self-interpreting, meaning-making creatures. So, in order to grasp human actions, you need to put them within the context of meaning. This means historicizing action and understanding action ethnographically within particular cultures. I’m in a political science department, but if it were up to me, it wouldn’t be called the political science department because I don’t think there is a science of politics.
I think of ideology as much broader than political belief or political epistemology. The reason for that is because I think that ideologies are “maps of meaning”. You can sharpen them up into political beliefs or epistemological questions, but ideology is broader than both because they are expressive of this anthropological agent that self-interprets and world-makes. We can sharpen up beliefs, make finer conceptual distinctions, conduct a logical analysis of political beliefs, and so on, but, for the most part, we’re always already thrown into a political culture in which we are engaged in ideological, quasi-ideological, or proto-ideological practices.
My book is a first-person account of what it’s like to hold an ideology: to discover my practices, my sense of self, my meanings that always exceed my ability to logically analyse them or make them cohere. To see this, you have to make that interpretive turn. Political ideologies need to be lavished with the kind of interpretive attention that we give to literature, history, and so on. That’s something I take from Charles Taylor, as well as from other thinkers like Heidegger.
AM: One of the people who provided an encomium for Lost in Ideology notes that you’re a critic of “misplaced appeal to scientific authority and political life.” Where do you think this misplaced science or scientific authority is most obviously present?
JB: I inherited from Clifford Geertz, the American anthropologist, this definition of ideologies as cultural maps, and I’m against the notion that ideologies are just a negative or pejorative form of false consciousness. I think they can fall into that, but they’re also generative, and modern people cannot live without ideology. We need it just to take a step, and those of us who think we don’t have an ideology are actually still operating within ideology because we’re orienting ourselves within social and political space. We are cultural, self-interpreting animals, and this generates a criticism of any ideology that tries to naturalise itself, that considers itself to be mere science or common sense. One of the ways that my approach to ideology remains critical is that it can negate forms of ideology that claim to just naturalise. And so I offer a critical perspective on forms of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, and racism that have these naturalising tendencies. And then the question is: what’s still standing? What’s still standing are forms of ideology that can still interpret themselves and defend themselves as cultural traditions that make ethical claims and engage in world-making practices.
It is important to bring up empirical facts and attend to them carefully. I’m not anti-science, but one of the things we all detect in this age of extreme ideological contestation is that facts don’t really resolve our ideological conflicts – or only do so to a small degree. The reason for that is because ideology makes a bid on meaning and significance. There’s this excessiveness to ideology. I call it “ethical magnetism” in the book: it makes a claim on my very sense of self, I feel like this is true, everything clicks, I have a purpose, I have a mission, I have steps I can take. So, you can do logical analysis on it, but people can always shore up the logic or even ignore it because they feel like there’s some powerful claim on significance that exceeds or goes beyond the facts or a particular logical contradiction.
OT: I’m curious about what it means to “naturalise” something. Jason clearly thinks that those ideologies that try to naturalise themselves in some way are the bad ones. Take John Locke’s talk of natural rights. Locke thinks that it’s not just the rights that are natural, but that a minimally reasonable person would be able to see that these are our rights. If naturalising something just means claiming that if people think about it for a bit, they’re going to agree with you, then it seems to me that most people are engaged in a great deal of naturalising most of the time. In fact, it’s hard for me to see how you would mount an argument without some kind of naturalisation, because in mounting an argument about politics or a meta-argument about arguments about politics (like we are doing here), we are engaged in the task of trying to persuade people that the argument we have made is correct. If this is what naturalisation amounts to, I struggle to see what is so bad about it.
JB: Well one form of naturalization involves de-historicizing a political ideology and treating it as a mere biological apparatus. Take Locke: I have an extended example in Lost in Ideology in which I describe how Europeans arriving in the Americas expected the indigenous to simply “naturally” abide by the practices of contractual private property. This led to a long series of tragic and often nefarious misunderstandings between the two groups. It’s quite apparent that those who expect other cultures to simply speak and act in their terms are in a deep muddle. My philosophical account can describe what has gone wrong here. And there are certainly ways of defending a tradition that does not take this bad misstep.
Of course, there are different ways to naturalise one’s ideology and I think Oliver is right that many of us naturalise our political beliefs. But that doesn’t mean naturalization is inescapable. It only shows how deeply scientism has penetrated into modern self-understanding.
If ideologies are cultures, they need to be learned, you need to get the hang of them. You can convert in and out of them, just as with religions. You can grow up in a household that’s well versed in them. You can synthesise them with other stuff, so that they’re not totally coherent. But this awareness that ideologies are cultural is missing, so what we do instead is yell at each other about the obviousness of our political position. Think of the idea that free market economics is just a science of efficiency. What about the significance or meanings behind free market practises? To just say that it’s a science to have free markets (which was the way politics by and large went down the United States in the 90s) is just scientism. It is draping a project that has to do with world-making, meaning, and ethical significance, in the false mystique of the sciences in order to convince people that free markets are the only rational way to organise a society. A similar point could be made about Stalinist variants of Marxism in the twentieth century or the racist beliefs Oliver was discussing above. The problem with racism (in addition to its being morally vile) is that it naturalizes a hierarchy that it is actually always trying to culturally enact. Racists always incoherently vacillate between claims that it is obvious and natural that racial hierarchy exists, and railing endlessly about how they need to mobilize culturally to make this supposedly natural thing happen.
When someone says that they are arguing from nature in the domain of ideological world-making, my guns come out philosophically. All this serves to do is to hide or obscure their own position. This is the exact opposite of how people would approach politics within the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions.
OT: I can think of two ways to respond to this. The first one would be something like:I’m a moral realist, so at the end of the day, I’m interested in the question of which tradition is right. If all you have are these battling traditions, then it seems that you cannot answer the question of what we should do about politics. I have a problem with anything that has this feel of relativism, anything that in principle undermines our ability to provide an actual answer in the end. But there is a second, newer way that I’ve started thinking about when it comes to this sort of thing, which has to do with different ways of conceiving the project of political theory. One goal you might have regarding political disagreement is adjudication: figuring out who’s right. But another goal you might have regarding political disagreement is amelioration: figuring out how to keep people from blowing each other up. Jason, do you think of yourself as within that second tradition that’s more oriented towards stability, avoiding war, things like that, rather than focusing on who is right?
JB: Definitely not. I care intensely about what is true and just in politics. It’s my deepest animating commitment. The problem, as Taylor pointed out long ago is how you achieve objectivity in a field of objects that is cultural. Ethics and politics exist in the realm of culture. The mistake is to infer from this that they are “relativistic.” They are most certainly not. But you will not achieve objectivity about them by simply appealing to data or a syllogism. You are going to have to work within rival traditions of interpretation. In fact, the entire final chapter of my book explains how to achieve objectivity in this domain. I am not inventing the wheel here. My discussion is highly influenced not only by Taylor but also by Alasdair MacIntyre and Imre Lakatos, amongst others.
The state of the art in hermeneutic philosophy is not at all relativism; rather, it is forms of objectivity that recognizes you do not have a shortcut to scientistic appeals to mere facts that force everyone to be a progressive or a Marxist or a conservative or a neoliberal. Data and rationalism cannot resolve the problem of ideology for us. We need the art of interpretation. In fact, it is part of a scientific civilization (for all its many benefits) to ping-pong back and forth between a standard of objectivity that is unavailable in ethics and politics (that of science) to a Nietzschean-inspired subjectivism and relativism. But a whole range of defensible positions on objectivity is missing from the discussion that go back to Aristotle’s idea that ethics is a form of practical and not theoretical certainty.
OT: I think of objectivity as a feature of perception or of cognition, rather than as being related to precision. I think of it as involving a certain clarity, a lack of being clouded by something. In fact, at points objectivity might require avoiding a false precision. The danger of technocracy, for example, doesn’t have to do with false objectivity, but with false precision – the idea that we can measure increasingly diverse areas of human life that have hitherto resisted quantification. What is important is some kind of responsiveness to evidence or to the consequences of one’s actions. As long as people can re-evaluate their pictures of the world, they must be doing it on the basis of something more fundamental than an ideology, which is the start of objectivity.
AM: How much commonality across ideologies do we need for a well functioning politics?
OT: There are two concerns here. One is about big groups and the other is about small groups. The worry about small groups is that if you can convince, say, 1% of the country of something, that’s millions of people, and if you get millions of people together, they can destroy the country. The worry about big groups is whether they see themselves as having any common ground, whether they understand each other at all. Something that I think about a lot is the phenomenon of sorting or clustering. If you look at politics in the not-too-distant past, people would agree with their party, say, 70% of the time, and with the other party 30%. But what you see now is these party platforms forming and everybody tending to stick with the party platform on every issue. It’s very hard to simultaneously accept that these party platforms are always changing and are responsive to strategic concerns in American politics and believe that your party has all and only the views that angels would have.
Part of what happens when we cluster a lot is that we become ideologically monolingual. I would wish for more ideological polyglots and political polyglots. We must try to get the hang of the other person’s political language so that we understand it better. If we fail to do this, it can look like everything in the world reflects back at us how commonsensical and natural our own political beliefs and practices and meanings are. And the danger is that when we end up sorting in this way, everything in our world reflects back at us that what we believe is just common sense.
I think Americans have lost that interpretive art of understanding the other. As a result, our neighbour can feel culturally more distant from us than the person across the country, even across the world, who shares my map. If you never lose your ideological bearings in discussion with someone because, say, you only marry Republican or only marry Democrat, that’s a disaster if what you want is a pluralistic democracy.
My entire book is an appeal to modern people that if you see the anthropological bind we’re in, i.e. that we are blessed/doomed to live in an age of ideology, then one thing you can recognise is the same meaning-making plight in the person across from you.
AM: Oliver, imagine someone who is really trying to get it right when it comes to their political beliefs. What should they do?
OT: One idea is to listen to people we disagree with and to think about what their actual reasons for their beliefs are, and whether we can take those reasons on as our own. That’s something J.S. Mill thought we should do; it’s part of his argument for free speech. Other than that, I think the way to get good political beliefs is the same as the way to get good beliefs in any complicated scenario where you can’t completely trust people. How do we develop the right beliefs about who to trust and who not to trust? You develop this sort of sixth sense, this sort of “smell test”, some kind of intuitive notion for when something is off in how it’s being presented to you. We can try looking behind the curtain, thinking about what people’s actual motivations are, and considering what those motivations lead them to say and to avoid saying. Overall, we should think hard about who we can trust.
Further Resources:
Jason Blakely, Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life. Agenda, 2024
Oliver Traldi, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. Routledge, 2024
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