Yesterday I heard on NPR a story about how some Republicans, dissatisfied with the election results, were protesting at the homes of civil servants in the Midwest somewhere. The bracing thing in the story was that they were basically threatening the officials’ children – beating on the door and making aggressive noises, and so forth. One of the people interviewed theorized that this kind of behavior was – in part – a product the president’s encouragement. The theory is that Trump is, in this way, undermining democratic norms.
Call this the norm
erosion hypothesis. I’ll get back to
it in a minute, but first I’m going to talk about beliefs, pretentious waiters,
and football.
First, beliefs. It’s
a common thought on this blog that politics is mostly not about beliefs. Partisans are
ideologues without ideologies. As
Jason Brennan said
last month, “Very few people start with an ideology and then select a
political party on the basis of that…Instead, the overwhelming majority of
people join political parties for non-ideological reasons.” Sometimes I wonder if it makes sense to
attribute beliefs to political partisans at all. Sure, they have cognitive, representational
mental states. They can think about the
inferential relations between these attitudes, and even feel a kind of
coherentist pressure in monitoring them.
But their attitudes lack the modal stability of beliefs. Instead, partisans’ “commitments” are tossed
to and fro with every
change in the wind from political elites.
When the letter to the Ephesians used language like that to admonish the
faithless, it was because their apparent beliefs were fragile. While beliefs tend to resist reconsideration,
their attitudes more
resembled those of small children – who are just in process of learning to
think about how representations
might be true or false.
If partisan attitudes are belief-like in some ways but not
others, how should we understand them?
Long ago, in the simpler age of 2005, Simon Keller wrote about how
patriotism demonstrated a kind of bad faith. “Bad faith” is the idea from Sartre that sometimes we act like we are
not acting. Picture the waiter who does
everything in his power to present himself as if his performance as waiter was
not an act at all, but instead an expression of who he really was. He bows a little too deeply, supposing that
is how the perfect waiter would bow, etc. etc.
Keller admits he is kind of like the waiter when it comes to his support of
the Geelong Football Club:
My project is to form and defend
Geelong-centric beliefs about the world of football; for these to be the sorts
of beliefs that I can defend in conversation, I must take them to be supported
by an interpretation of the evidence that is not influenced by the desire to
reach one conclusion rather than the another, but for them to be the beliefs
that I want them to be I must actively interpret them in a biased manner. I want to have certain beliefs, but to ensure
that I have those beliefs I must deceive myself about my motivations, without
acknowledging the deceit.
Keller’s thought, way back then, was that patriotism
approximates his own bad faith football fandom.
The patriot wants to maintain beliefs in a biased way without admitting
it – when that is not how <belief> works.
Times have changed.
In 2005, it seemed philosophically controversial to say political
beliefs could be crazy like football beliefs.
Today, it seems bonkers to imagine how (American) football beliefs could be
as unhinged as Americans’ political beliefs.
Something else is different as well. In 2005, political bad faith was centrally
about patriotism. People gerrymandered
some “beliefs” to say their country was best.
But now bad faith is within, rather than between, countries. Compare:
Bad
Faith Patriot: Someone who takes shared national membership to confer
higher moral status (or, anyway, a stronger claim to distributive justice, or
something), when this is obviously false.
(At least, on this blog we pretty much take its falsity to be obvious.)
Bad
Faith Partisan: Someone who takes shared partisan affiliation to confer
higher moral status (or, anyway, a stronger claim to our normatively charged
allegiance, or something), when this is obviously false.
So what about the norm erosion hypothesis? My own guess is we’re right to worry if one
side in America won’t accept election results.
Also -- lest this not be obvious -- it is wrong to scare other people’s
children. Likewise, it is a big mistake
to think that we should care less about humans outside our country than inside
our country. (This
podcast from the fall on the topic is really worth a listen.) The fact that the within-our-country problems
are more salient on the news shouldn’t make us care less about those problems,
but it should help us realize that harming
children from other countries matters way more than we might have been
attending to. (As Lant Pritchett explains,
this isn’t just
an American problem.)
The letter to the Ephesians says that faith
is not something we make ourselves.
Political psychology tells us that political attitudes are also not
something we make ourselves. They’re a
product of our tribal loyalties and leaders.
If it make sense to ask about how faith could be a gift from God, it may
also be worth thinking more about where bad faith comes from.