GROUP-THINK AND THE FLOURISHING OF THE IRRATIONAL MIND
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing". - Freud
The observation that we live in a “post-fact world” is moving from an occasional comment to accepted reality. I hear it too often for my comfort. It is not the equivalent of stating that hip-hop has replaced the blues or the humanities are losing academic ground to science and technology.
Change is inevitable, but for the project of humanity to remain recognizable certain things must be accepted as permanent. Without a commitment to facts in which to ground belief, society cannot sustain its coherence. To treat facts as a matter of indifference, to ignore or distort them when they run interference with emotional proclivities, is to have the sidewalk crumble beneath our feet. It is to destroy the foundation of any organized social or civilized existence.
The requirements for any society, especially a modern, advanced society, are a general commitment by the populace to facts, reason, the test of evidence to verify belief, and an acceptance of warranted expertise, including scientific authority, as the repository of knowledge. It is ominous, to say the least, that these basic foundations seemingly are cast aside by huge swaths of the American people.
Irrationality is flourishing. It feels like an avalanche that is smothering truths and the norms of common sense. It's estimated that 50 million Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen despite no evidence that it was. Scientific expertise is dismissed as elitist. Hate groups abound and the most counter-rational conspiracy theories grip the minds of millions.
How are we to explain this outpouring of the absurd? America has always had its irrational fringes from its earliest beginnings. A classic analysis was Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, written in 1963. The phenomena that inspired Hofstadter were McCarthyism and the election of Dwight Eisenhower and the defeat of Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was often derided as an “egghead,” out of touch with the common man. Eisenhower's victory clearly had a different appeal that aroused Hofstadter's concerns. He wrote,
“Eisenhower’s decisive victory was taken both by the intellectuals themselves and by their critics as a measure of their repudiation by America. Time, the weekly magazine of opinion, shook its head in an unconvincing imitation of concern. Eisenhower’s victory, it said, 'discloses an alarming fact long suspected: there is a wide and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the people.' Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the election, found the intellectual in a situation he has not known for a generation.”
Hofstadter's concerns seem limited, almost quaint. He is irked by a general disregard for the intellect reflected in a focused rejection of intellectuals as a class. Yet, his analysis looks at broader causes in the culture of which he provides illustrative examples. The examples he renders seem by contemporary realities relatively rarefied, but one more than others is of ongoing and contemporary relevance.
Hofstadter has much to say about evangelical Christianity as a popular force spawning an attitude of anti-intellectualism. Noting that Billy Graham was the world's most accoladed man after Eisenhower, Churchill, and Albert Schweitzer, he cites Graham as saying,
“You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of every block of every city in America and you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.
During the past few years, the intellectual props have been knocked out from under the theories of men. Even the average university professor is willing to listen to the voice of the preacher. In place of the Bible we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. This is the work of so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these “intellectuals” have publicly stated that morality is relative—that there is no norm or absolute standard. . . .”
This is a good place to begin an understanding of our current crisis. We cannot understate the power of evangelical culture to transform society and undermine the importance of reason, science, and the life of the mind in general.
From the Scopes trial in 1925 until the late 1970s, evangelical Protestantism was for the most part politically quiescent. With Jerry Falwell and the rise of the Moral Majority, it emerged from the closet, moved American politics far to the right, and we have never since been the same. The Christian Right achieved its high watermark in the George W. Bush administration at which time hundreds of members of Congress were in its grip. The core of the movement were fundamentalists, who, by definition, seek to have their religious doctrine become the law of the land. Moving religion further into the public square, the influence of the evangelical subculture, estimated to be up to 30 percent of the American population, was felt well beyond its own adherents. To identify oneself as “a Christian” for many became increasingly a mainstay of American identity. Among the salient characteristics of evangelical religion is pervasive anti-intellectualism. Whereas mainline religions, Christian and Jewish, seek to reconcile their beliefs with the mainstays of the secular world, evangelical Christianity, as the Billy Graham citation makes clear, is to define itself in opposition to it. In short, the spread of evangelical culture into mainline society is the spread of anti-intellectualism. It is not the authority of the science teacher elucidating the tenets of evolution that holds sway over young minds; it is the preacher on Sunday morning espousing creationism.
This leads me to a question. Can we correlate our irrational environment to poor education? It is well known that American education has long been plagued with massive problems and substandard performance. In math, American students rank 30th in the world, and there has been no improvement in math and reading scores in the past 40 years. I can only ask how these dismal figures relate to the quality of education overall.
My elementary education took place in New York City during the Eisenhower years. I lived in a neighborhood comprised of a large number of Jewish immigrants primed for upward mobility. Though I attended school in a conservative era, I conclude that elements of John Dewey's progressive education left their mark. We were taught the importance of critical thinking, and yes, to “question authority.” The imperative of going to college was in our DNA.
I can only wonder about the quality and environment of American education today in the rural South, Appalachia, the conservative Midwest, and our inner cities. Are students taught the importance of science? Are they inspired with a love of the mind? Are they impressed with the importance of education in the formation of well-rounded lives? Are they taught to think critically? The absence of these values and skills may also explain why so many of our fellow Americans are vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and have dimished value for intellectual expertise, leaving them prone toward irrationality. The depressed state of education, I believe, partially explains much of today's anti-intellectualism. But it also draws the dividing lines marking the stark divisions, the tribalism, characteristic of our current era.
I conclude that education is a major factor, but only to a point. I tend to look at society through a sociological lens. And when I reflect on the relation of society to beliefs, I turn to the classic sociologist, Emile Durkheim. Among Durkheim's major works was The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which investigates the origins of religions. In that treatise, Durkheim elaborates what in my opinion is a compelling explanation of belief and its relation to society and social groups.
Durkheim concludes that beliefs derive their sway over the minds of people who adhere to them through the power of the group. In short, religious belief, and we can use God -belief as the primary example, is a sublimated projection of the power of the group. If God is construed to be all-powerful, then the Almighty's power is the power of the social group in ideational form. In other words, if God is omnipotent, our sustainer and source of being, we can conclude that the divine is a stand-in for society, which, considering the dependence of the individual on society, is all-powerful. In short, the person alone is totally vulnerable and perishes, and we are dependent on society not only for our physical existence but our sense of meaning and all else.
The dynamic works reciprocally. Just as ideas are given power by the group, so ideas bind together all people who share a common belief in them. When we discuss religion in particular, the engagement in group rituals tagged to those beliefs greatly strengthens the human bond. For example, when Christians engage in the mass, the power of the ritual does not derive from an acceptance of the verity that one is partaking of the body and blood of the savior. Rather, its strength and the convictions that ritual reinforces are derived from the feeling that so engaging in the ritual binds all Christians in the human sphere horizontally across the planet with all other Christians, and vertically through time with all other believers from the Last Supper until the Second Coming. In short, the social bond is greatly strengthened for those who stand under the canopy of shared belief and engage in common ritual.
Within Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan, who was the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and reinterpreted Judaism as a civilization rather than the expression of theological precepts, was explicitly influenced by Durkheim. Kaplan once wrote that when the Jew closes his eyes and recites the Shema, which is the central prayer of Judaism, he is not engaging in theological rapport with the Almighty. Rather, he is expressing the thrill of being a Jew. In other words, it is the power of community that fuels the power of belief and identity associated with that belief.
I conclude that Durkheim's speculations, which today would be aligned with what we understand as the social construction of belief, gives us insight into the power of the counter-rationalism taken hold in our time. With the dramatic fall in church affiliation, many have commented that politics is replacing religion as a locus of belief. And we may conclude that political beliefs and positions, and affiliations centered on those positions, are replacing the communal needs previously met by church membership.
We cannot underestimate the power of the group or the social bond in influencing what a person believes and what he or she holds to be true. All people wish to feel at home in the world, and people are generally more comfortable with people who resemble themselves, not only in terms of race and ethnicity but also in terms of folkways and beliefs. Such affiliation provides the feedback signals that strengthen one's own identity and enable a person to feel more secure in the world. Today, as American society is demographically changing, as new economies are pushing out the old, where change moves often at a bewildering pace, the world feels more alien to many, especially older white citizens who have felt America was theirs.
In the face of insecurity brought on by a changing society, and an economy in which the American dream has stalled, people take a parochial turn to bond with groups of people like themselves and increasingly who hold to similar beliefs, political and otherwise.
The power of group bonding and loyalty is very strong. Reason is a counterbalancing force, but reason speaks with a much weaker voice. It is too readily overcome by the power of the social group. In short, people will accept the most absurd counter-rational beliefs if they can experience a sense of togetherness and unity with others who hold to the same beliefs. Rational consistency can be beside the point.
We see this power in American society among those who would choose to oppose government policies that provide them with health benefits and may safeguard the lives of their children and their own when such opposition enables them to reject political ideologies they find anathema. They would prefer to choose diminished health and death in favor of aligning themselves with an ideological viewpoint they condemn. Or, look at those who reject taking the Covid-19 vaccine and risk death for ideological reasons. I believe it is the power of belonging to a group of fellow rejectors that greatly explains this behavior. Add to this feelings of resentment toward others, including those considered liberal elites and their world, and the embrace of irrationalism becomes even more explicable.
What is to be done? In previous essays, I have proffered the suggestion that providing economic security to those who now feel that the doors of opportunity are closed to them is our best shot, not to overcome this ominous reality, but to at least mitigate it. It is the primary reason I had hoped to see the enactment of the President's Build Back Better program. With that stalled and splintering, I am can only be less sanguine.
In the final analysis, those who value reason, knowledge, science, and critical thought can do no better than counter the dark descent into irrationality by standing strong for these saving values. And we need to do so militantly.
very interesting and thought provoking and not wrong but some comments -
Regarding Eisenhower vs. Stephenson - well victorious generals have won elections in our country since George Washington.
Intellectualism is OK for the ivory towers but the common folk want to feel that their leaders understand them and their needs (think George Bush I and the cost of a quart of milk) - Intelligence shared is maybe better than a separate class seen as intellectuals and even less good if they are seen as or think o themselves as superior. They just have different talents or gifts if one wishes. I can well imagine that Hillary calling Trump supporters "deplorable" effective roadblocked their ability to change their minds and support her.
Regarding education we are, nationally I think, stymied by the tenth amendment which puts that control in local hands mostly
I fear that we will be hard put in this technological environment to curtail the spread of mistruths and half truths and the only positive is that so much of our tribalism is now acquired so quickly it may be less solid than in past.
I so like the effort to look behind the anti-intellectual group think phenomenon - fear. I too tried to address this in my own style. https://www.facebook.com/marvin.friedlander.1