Manjoo 1-4

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself-- that is to say, risking oneself.    -- James Baldwin, "Letter From a Region in my Mind"

So, why are our worldviews so precious to us that we'll engage in all the mental hijinks that Manjoo discusses, selectively engaging with information and molding perception of sensory evidence to what is most comfortable with our sense of the world? Ideally, our ways of identifying ourselves politically and socially are simply handy labels that indicate what we see as the pressing issues and how we think they should be addressed, an umbrella term that indicates what opinions we hold. Ideally, we form them in service of trying to apprehend what's true and good, and should shift and be replaced as we grow in understanding. Ideally, those opinions are makeshift things that we aren't interested in for themselves.

I say “ideally” because I think that’s what most of us assume we are up to. I know in my case, the civics education I received through middle and high school presented democratic participation in those terms. I’m having some trouble articulating this. Basically, what I remember is that when my teachers tried to engage us in thinking about “the issues”, they framed the task as one of considering arguments and evidence. It didn’t require any introspection into how we made decisions. That seemed to be how they presented the democratic process as well, and some tellings of democracy certainly idealize the involvement of the folks as a great engine of positive change.

If political identity only reflected opinion, then I don’t think there would be anywhere near as much effort put into seeing the world exactly as we are comfortable seeing it. A concept that I’ve found helpful for understanding what might be going on here comes from the folks at Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, who have identified something called “identity-protective cognition”:

"As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.”

One of the most fascinating things to come out of their research is that intelligence (which I’m using as a blanket term; the actual studies used numeracy and scientific literacy) doesn’t seem to make a person more likely to change their mind in the face of new evidence that contradicts their views. Instead, it seems that intelligent people are actually better equipped to reaffirm their own views in light of that evidence:

In another study, he tested people’s scientific literacy alongside their ideology and then asked about the risks posed by climate change. If the problem was truly that people needed to know more about science to fully appreciate the dangers of a warming climate, then their concern should’ve risen alongside their knowledge. But here, too, the opposite was true: among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.

What do we take away from this? Cognition is more tuned to performing a social function than a truth-finding or solution-finding function. We make sense of the world through the lens of our sense of self and our sense of group membership.

I feel like a lot of us watching the last presidential election missed something very important. As people watched the way Trump handled argument, they wondered how someone could support a guy with his “ideas”. And from outside conservatism, it seems a lot of us just took Trump as another conservative, right in line with how consistently awful their ideas always are. Remember, back in 2012 everyone knew that Romney was also a racist who hated women (kept them in binders, if memory serves), and if you felt that “Bushitler” communicated something about the truth, W was a fascist. But conservatism does in fact have an intellectual tradition that’s more than prejudice and fascism, and what’s incredible about Trump is that he deviates from it in important ways. Look at the ranks of #NeverTrump and you’ll discover a host of prominent conservative intellectuals, including Tom Nichols and George Will, who currently feel politically homeless. While many of us were getting worked up at the success of Trump’s ideas, what we missed was that, actually, ideas didn’t matter at all. Something about the ways he identified made a big difference.

This blog is running long, but I want to turn back to Manjoo very briefly. I find that, while he associates “realities” with political tribes, he doesn’t plumb the ways that group membership or cultural affinity provide the urgency for creating those realities, and I think that’s a serious weakness. Two examples: 45-47, Manjo discusses research that shows conservatives are more selective of their news sources than liberals. I found him to be remarkably incurious about why this would be the case. Conservatives aren’t just selective about what views they consume. They are also much more likely to hold a negative view of the public institutions that circulate ideas, namely national news media and universities.

I once heard someone on Twitter say that, for all the criticism of the liberal leanings of the New York Times, conservatives had yet to produce a news organization of the same caliber. It would be convenient to draw the conclusion that conservatives hate thinking and investigation. It would also be self-serving and lazy. What we could also be seeing here is the growing perception that journalism and higher education are simply not places for conservative people, with the result being disengagement and hostility.

This leads me to my second example of True Enough’s blindness on the importance of identity: the cover of the book. The cover is loaded with culturally marked objects. The border is red, white, and blue, and the central image is a grinning, freckled Boy Scout. Consider the conflicting values surrounding this country’s colors; consider the ethos of the Boy Scouts found in the Scout Law and Scout Oath, with its echoes of squeaky clean ‘50s morality (not that I or anyone else know what that was, but culturally it’s a thing that I can recognize) and how people in different parts of our cultural landscape will respond to it. When juxtapozed with the title and the term “Post-Fact Society,” which should also remind you of the coining of “truthiness” on the Colbert Report and the credo “Reality has a liberal bias” from roughly the same era, the cover ceases to communicate what the book is about and starts to communicate who it is for, and who it is hostile to.




My point, at the end of all of this (and thank you for sticking it out), isn't to exonerate Republicans for their party's shenanigans. I think these are powerful dynamics, but they only explain why things look the way they do. They don't excuse individuals from taking responsibility for their own conduct. Ultimately, I feel that the confluence of technology and our age-old cognitive biases, puts the onus on individuals to change in a more urgent way than ever. If our sense of self is leading us to indulge in falsehood, then what we need is a humbler sense of self that enables us to pursue truth. And different kinds of discourse the enable that kind of pursuit, but I'm done for today.