Is my political opponent irrational? No, they’re not.

To say that someone you disagree with is “wrong” is one thing, to say that they are being “irrational” is another, and it is unjustified. There is no need for political psychologism. (8 minutes read)

    We are prone to accuse each other of being irrational, especially in highly polarized contexts. Let’s take, for instance, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and how various political commentators tried to make sense of people they strongly disagreed with. On the one hand, we had conservative commentators who argued “that the pandemic is not as severe as generally thought, and that the liberal media are victims of “hysteria” in failing to recognize this.” On the other hand, we had progressive commentators who would throw the accusation of irrationality back at them, by “citing a psychologist claiming that ‘in a crisis event, one thing people do is engage in sense-making—seeking out facts and coming up with explanations,’ as ‘a way of psychologically coping with the uncertainty and anxiety of the event, and of having agency in the response.’ By blaming the media, the conservative pundit was responding, in effect, to his own hysteria.”¹

    This kind of exchange is very common in the political sphere. As we can see, to call someone “irrational” is to provide a particular kind of explanation to describe how they came to be wrong on a particular topic. Here is the explanation provided: what at first appears to be a search for truth (after all, your opponents make claims and provide reasons), is in fact secretly motivated by non-epistemic motives (motives that have nothing to do with the search for truth). The search for truth was hijacked somehow. In the above example, both parties say of the other “yes, they appear to be coming up with beliefs, and arguments, but secretly they are doing this for non epistemic-reasons: the search for emotional tranquility”. The thing is: this kind of reductive psychological explanation of political behavior is always bad!

    As Jeffrey Friedman argues², we have to look at the main assumption behind those explanations in order to see why, in principle, they cannot possibly be accurate. What is the irrationalist explanation trying to explain? It is pretty simple really, and can be summarized this way: “How could someone not see the truth when it is so obvious?”. In this case, the right-wing commentator thought “how could someone not see that, obviously, the COVID epidemic is not that bad” and the left-wing commentator thought “obviously, it is that bad, how could they not see it”. For both of them, this prompted the thought that, actually, they do see it (they must do!), but they just choose to ignore it on purpose, because of some perverse ulterior motive (more or less conscious, perhaps, but ‘motive’ all the same). This is unsurprising: if you are convinced that the truth is self-evident, then you are forced to come up with explanations as to why your opponent manages the incredible feat of ignoring the truth staring them right in the face. But the thing is... no such feat has been accomplished! The obviousness assumption ignores the most fundamental aspect of our situation: the truth is not self-evident! We all start from a place of ignorance, not a place of knowledge, and we try to piece together information as much as we think is necessary in order to make sense of a situation. This information-gathering process is heavily influenced by the community we are a part of, which clues us in as to what is worth investigating and how to do it. This alone explains a lot of group differences when it comes to political beliefs, not irrationality.

    But then, could stubborn allegiance to one’s group identity, one’s community (“conservatives” vs. “progressives”, for example), be the irrational motive that prevents people from seeing the truth? Not quite, no. If we mean to suggest that someone is wrong about a particular topic because the community they are a part of does not supply them with the relevant kind of information about something, then, yes – fine! – of course it is fair to level that sort of criticism. That’s a normal political debate. The one we should be having. But unfortunately, we will often suggest something more than that: we will claim that turning to one’s community for knowledge is something humans do because of non-epistemic motives, such as greed or wanting to feel that we belong. On the contrary, as Neil Levy demonstrates in Bad Belief³, we have to recognize that turning to our community is a legitimate epistemic process. The labor of reason is distributed among the members of a community – it has to be – and you have to rely on the testimonies of other people. Thus, we are back to Friedman’s point: it’s fine to say that a community is wrong, but to say that they are being irrational, as if the truth was obvious and only non-epistemic motives could explain why one would “look away”, is a fundamental mistake.

    Once we understand this fundamental mistake, we can start noticing how comical the “obviousness” assumption can be when it manifests itself in daily life. We can read an entire book about a topic, and then tacitly assume that everyone has read it too, and judge them harshly for any deviation from the truth it delivers. Or, if we are feeling charitable, we can remember that they have not read the book, and try to explain it to them in 5 minutes, in an elevator. Quite predictably, this does not go well. Can it be because we were severely unequipped, and perhaps even unwilling, to perform the translation and pedagogy work necessary to talk across political divides?⁴ We would rather believe the truth shined bright in our words and they were just being stubborn. And after all, why couldn’t they get educated on their own time? This, of course, ignores the fact that the question of what book or newspaper article seems worth reading is not a settled question, but is part and parcel of the political debates we are having in the first place.

    At this point, you might worry that we have abandoned all means to push our political opponent to correct their flaws. After all, if we can look at someone who gravitates towards untrustworthy sources of information and declare that their behavior is “rational” because it makes sense within their “worldview”, then, how can we push them to do better? Well, actually, not only can we still push people to do better, but we are even in a better position to do so! First of all, there is nothing about judging that your political opponent is wrong, judging that their media diet is insufficient, or judging even that their conduct is selfish, uncurious, and sometimes⁵ insincere, that requires political psychologism. All you need is good arguments for your claims and the willingness to create a space where both you and your adversary can reflect on how you came to believe what you believe. Such self-reflection can potentially reveal gaps that can be filled with teamwork and compromises. Second of all, if you abandon political psychologism, all you abandon is a wrongheaded proposal about what your political adversary could do in order to think more clearly (for instance, “they need to deal with their unconscious motives”). This hypothesis is not helping you make your case, it is burdening you. It makes people angry and not receptive to what you have to say when you offer them a solution that is so clearly off the mark. The way you react when people throw this kind of bad psychology at you, is the way they will react when you do the same to them.

    But what about the fact that psychological studies (and other academic disciplines) demonstrate time and time again that people are biased exactly in the way that I am denying they are? What about the scientific studies on cognitive biases and motivated reasoning? Well, that’s the main bad news, unfortunately. Those works cannot be trusted when they commit the conceptual mistake I am describing here. Time and time again, those studies commit the mistake of treating some facts as self-evident and uncontroversial – even though they cannot possibly be – and then treat any study participant who rejects those facts as if they were clearly influenced by non-epistemic motives. It is bad science because it is bad philosophy. In the end, the presence of political psychologism in science can be explained the same way we should explain its presence in pop culture and political commentaries: it provides a neat explanation for why our political adversaries disagree with us, and even seems to promise a way to clarify our own thinking; therefore, we love to consume that kind of content. It is in high demand. (I’m not saying we are influenced by a non-epistemic motive; its appeal is consistent with a sincere search for truth.) It is also the case that once you have learned to rely on those concepts, it becomes harder to think outside of that particular box. Unlike Friedman (who thinks it forever remains uncontroversially clear through introspection that “I, at least” am not irrational in the way I accuse my political adversary to be⁶), I think that once you start believing in this kind of irrationality, the belief starts to influence your introspection, and you start to see yourself as forever tempted by irrationality and only occasionally triumphant against it. And so, in the end, you think this kind of psychological method “works”, gets “results”, and you are eager to share it with everyone. In spite of the fact that it just alienates people.

    Whether it be the COVID-19 pandemic or some other highly polarized debate, we have to remember that we can have those discussions without resorting to political psychologism. As we make efforts, everyday, to internalize this lesson, I propose that we remember the words of Spinoza: it might be very tempting to “conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault” and therefore to think we are “doing something wonderful, and reaching the pinnacle of learning” when we are clever enough to shower with praise a hypothetical fault-free human nature that is “nowhere to be found, and to make verbal attacks on [the human nature that], in fact, exists.” But the people who devote their lives to doing that, “instead of Ethics, they have generally written Satire” and they “have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, [only a theory of politics that] might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it.”⁷ These words move me because they make me feel how urgent it is to stop wasting our time in this way. It is high time we abandoned a philosophical attitude that decreases political literacy, and breeds only confusion, frustration, and mutual misunderstanding.

(24/06/2024)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

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Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1 Jeffrey Friedman, “Is political irrationality a myth?” in The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology ; SECTION I : Four pandemic examples. In this quote, Friedman is referencing this article: Warzel, C. (2020) “What We Pretend to Know about the Coronavirus Could Kill Us,” New York Times, April 3.

2Jeffrey Friedman, “Is political irrationality a myth?” in The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology ; Available here: https://www.academia.edu/47762216/IS_POLITICAL_IRRATIONALITY_A_MYTH This is really worth a read.

3Levy, Neil (2021). Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People. Oxford University Press.

4As Kevin Dorst points out “Conversations always take place within a common ground of mutual presuppositions. This is extremely useful, because it allows us to move much quicker over familiar territory to get to new ideas—at least when our audience shares our presuppositions. […] When we talk to someone who doesn’t share those presuppositions, we find ourselves having to unlearn a bunch of conversational habits on the fly. This is hard, so often the conversation runs aground. […] Talking across the political aisle [...] pulls the conversational rug of shared presuppositions out from under us.” ; In Defense of Epistemic Empathy https://kevindorst.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-epistemic-empathy?utm_source=publication-search

5I say “sometimes” because abandoning political psychologism entails abandoning the idea that your political opponents are inherently “half self-deceived” (pushed by their unconscious motives in ways that they could potentially detect if they made an effort), and therefore always “half-insincere”.

6Friedman, “Is political irrationality a myth?” p.265. (Section II)

7A Political Treatise by Benedict de Spinoza ; Chapter 1, Introduction, First paragraph ; https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125506/5038_Spinoza_A_Political_Treatise.pdf