This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Michael Patrick Lynch’s book Know-it-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture. Michael Patrick Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he also directs the Humanities Institute. He is the author of Truth as One and Many and The Internet of Us.
What is this book about?
This book is about the epistemology and psychology of our political convictions. What they are, how we form them, and why we can’t seem to change our mind about them. Socrates say in The Republic that the problem of politics is no ordinary question: it concerns how we ought to live. I think that’s right, but I also think an important and overlooked aspect of the question of how we ought to live is how we ought to believe.
How we form and maintain our political convictions matters because in a democracy, political commitment is important: an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all. On the other hand, democracies tend to cease becoming democracies when we cease listening to each other’s convictions. The question we need to confront, and which motivates this book, is how to do both.
What I argue in this book is that we are increasingly intellectually arrogant about our own beliefs and convictions, and that, thanks to a toxic mix of technology, psychology and ideology, this arrogance is coming to define all of our political relationships with one another. Intellectual arrogance, as I define it—following Alessandra Tanesini—is a psycho-social attitude. It is the attitude that you when you think you have it all figured it out, that your knowledge can’t be improved, and that you therefore need no help from the evidence and experience of other people. It’s the attitude of the know-it-all, of the mansplainer and the tyrant. And it involves a distorted relationship towards truth.
But arrogance is not just an individual failing, it is a social failing. It can go tribal and become an attitude we have about our own political group or identity. When that happens, it underwrites a dangerous and often violent politics of not just “us vs. them” but of “us over them”. This is the politics underwriting white nationalism and many authoritarian, anti-democratic movements around the globe today.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Over the last few years, I’ve been concerned, as have many, with the breakdown of our democratic institutions. I’ve become convinced that much of the problem lies in the attitudes we are taking towards ourselves and others – particularly our epistemic attitudes. That’s the problem that motivated me to write this book.
Put it this way. We are living in a time when not just political norms but the norms of evidence themselves are unsettled. There is increasingly very little common ground between the narratives of the Left and the Right, even the most trivial details of fact are disputed and questioned, and “fake news” has simply become a label for news that one doesn’t like. In such times, the question of how to go about figuring out your convictions is very much a living existential question.
Or it should be. But in fact, the unsettledness of our norms is making us not more reflective, but less. Judging by the tenor of our political discourse, our answer to the question of how we should believe seems to be: as dogmatically as possible. Recent data from the Pew Research Center suggests that people from different sides of the political spectrum, at least in the United States, still agree more than they disagree on many issues. But this same data also shows that, increasingly, we regard the other party with suspicion—as dishonest, uninformed, and downright immoral. The idea that we should listen to their views seems unthinkable. Moreover, we know the other side regards us the same way, and we resent them for it. The Right sees liberals as arrogant know-it-alls, while myself and others on the Left retort that this is precisely the description of the person the conservatives elected president of the United States.
But maybe both sides have a point. Maybe there is something about the toxic mix of human psychology, technology and political ideology that is making us all prone to be ignore evidence and confuse ego with truth. I think this is something philosophers can investigate fruitfully using the tools of our discipline.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
Philosophically, the question of conviction is I think bizarrely under-theorized. I present a theory of conviction in the book. Convictions aren’t just strongly held beliefs, or beliefs I think are necessarily true. My belief that two and two make four, or that I am, I exist, are as strongly held as any, but it would be odd indeed to say they are my convictions. In the book, I argue that convictions are commitments to propositions that reflect my self-identity—that is, my aspirational identity, or the kind of person I want to be. That’s why attacks on our convictions seem like attacks on who we are—because, in a sense, they are. And that’s also why our convictions are often super-resistant to counter-evidence. Because they reflect our aspirational self, they can make it prima facie practically rational for us to be epistemically irrational.
Another idea about which I’m keen to hear feedback concerns what we are doing when we share news or news-like content on social media. I argue for an explicitly expressivist account of these communicative acts. In sum, I claim that the primary function (what my colleague Ruth Millikan would call the stabilizing function) of these acts is to express our emotions and sentiments—often tribally important emotions like outrage. Such expressions help to signal to others they are we part of the group, that we think like them, and that we can be counted on. That’s useful in all sorts of ways, but not when we don’t recognize that is what we are doing. We think we playing by the rules of reason online when often we are not—we are playing by the rules of the water-cooler or the playground. And that unawareness on our part makes us particularly vulnerable to those who would deceive us for political gain by getting us to spread fake news and propaganda.
How is your work relevant to historical ideas?
I talk about the historical evolution of many the relevant philosophical concepts throughout the book, but Socrates, Montaigne and Arendt are major “characters” – that is, to say I’m keen to unpack their ideas and find their work continually rewarding when thinking about political epistemology.
Montaigne in particular needs more attention from contemporary philosophers. He was a man that lived in times even more divisive and violent than our own and his influence on Hume was palpable. He is not always great, I’d say, at constructing arguments, but he knows what is important and he has more ideas than most. Plus, he is fun to read.
And Arendt, of course, is a philosopher for our age. No one working on political epistemology today can afford to ignore her work.
What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?
This book, like some of my other books, is aimed at a dual readership. Part of that readership is very general: the sort of person who is interested in ideas. But it is also very much a a philosophical essay with an extended argument for a philosophical point that I hope is read by professional philosophers.
For those interested in writing such books, one thing to consider is what writers call your voice. Increasingly, I’ve found my models to be philosophers like Dan Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum or Bernard Williams who pretty much always write in the same voice no matter what venue they are publishing in. Certain younger philosophers, like Kate Manne seem to writing in a similar vein. That is, all their writing is accessible but content-full at the same time. But that’s not the only model – another model is the Bertrand Russell or Dave Chalmers model – tailor your style to the audience. And of course the content matters too for determining which way to go; some of my earlier work on truth and consequence might simply not be accessible by non-specialists. In any event, neither method for forming a voice is superior to the other; my point is that knowing which one you are trying to use is super-helpful.
What’s next for you?
The future of truth. That’s the name of a new research project (or suite of projects) I’m pursuing at the Humanities Institute—the research institute I direct at UConn. The operative question is: does it have a future? I sure hope so, but I don’t think I’m alone in thinking it now seems to be an open question. By that, I mean not that truth itself—the property—is somehow going to go away, but that we seem to be facing a downward spiral in terms of how culture values it and related notions.
I’m also starting to work on a new project in political epistemology – tentatively entitled “Democracy as a Space of Reasons”. It is an attempt (probably misguided) to bring together my thinking on reasons with my thinking on politics and the internet. Here’s hoping.
You can ask Lynch questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
*
The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
