The More We Agree, The More Wrong We Are?

“The more you agree with people on your side of political debates, the more likely you are to be wrong about the facts.”  Crispin Sartwell, “The Downside of Consensus” ¹

It was bad enough when Jesse Elias Spofford wrote an essay a while back about the futility of citing facts when discussing ideological and political issues: everybody’s got facts, wrote Spofford, from Alex Jones to Ezra Klein, and everybody finds a way to select the facts that fit their preferred narrative, and to interpret or explain away facts that don’t seem to fit.  It’s a fool’s game, Spofford insisted, to think that “facts speak for themselves” or that you can use facts to settle partisan disagreements.

Now along comes Crispin Sartwell to explain that not only is it the case that “people on different sides can’t agree about facts,” but that partisans on both sides “are not committed to saying what’s true”; rather, they just want to say whatever furthers their cause and whatever affirms their solidarity with other members of their political tribe.  Therefore, concludes Sartwell, such partisans cannot be trusted.  It makes no difference which side you’re on, because if you’ve taken a side at all your judgment and your intellect are already compromised:

“Relentless political partisans—Reince Priebus or Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Charles Krauthammer or Michael Tomasky, Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity, Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio—should at this point be regarded as having next to no credibility on factual questions.”

There is, I think, a good deal that’s useful in Professor Sartwell’s article, such as his reminder that we are all—to the extent that we identify with a cause or a group of some kind—prone to what’s been called “epistemic closure,” closing our minds to contrary beliefs and even refusing to listen to contrary arguments.  Noting the way “groupthink” develops, he writes:

“When we live in rival unanimous systems of facts, we generate rival unrealities, dueling hallucinations.  Perhaps that’s how we ought to think of Red and Blue America: not as geographical or ideological regions, but as rival fictional universes, as though there’s a war between Middle Earth and Narnia.  People create a consensual illusion and confirm it to one another…”

We all recognize that tendency in other people; we also all tend to believe that we’re immune to it ourselves.  We liberals know that there is such a thing as the “Fox bubble,” but don’t try telling us that there’s an equally unhealthy and closed-minded “MSNBC bubble” as well—because on MSNBC, the talking heads are right.

Sartwell observes, tellingly, that “the truth is not our only goal.  Perhaps our capacity for belief is given to us by evolution in order to help us achieve unity and solidarity with each other, so as to be able to act in concert.  We often believe for social reasons, to express our membership in a family, a community, a nation, or a movement.” ² He concludes by reminding us of the value of dissent: “we should encourage configurations of people, from political movements to middle-school cliques to all of us together, to be open to heretics, dissenters, and eccentrics…because dissenters are likelier to be right.”

I’m all for dissent, and I recognize (I think) the dangers of partisan groupthink and epistemic closure.  Blindly trusting what someone says simply because he or she is on the side of the angels (as we see it) is not a hallmark of critical thinking; blind allegiance to any cause is dangerous. We do, of course, have to choose our reliable sources, our preferred experts, and our trusted commentators; but we should be aware at all times that they could be wrong, and yes, we should care more for the facts than for their implications for “our side”.

Still, I wonder: is it automatically true that Rachel Maddow has no more credibility than Sean Hannity (or vice-versa)?  Here’s an idea that Crispin Sartwell doesn’t mention: how about we check their statements against the actual facts?  I know that won’t persuade partisans on either side—Jesse Elias Spofford has already made that depressingly clear—but won’t it have some bearing on the idea of their respective “credibility”?  If it’s wrong to accept someone’s claims simply because they’re on our side, isn’t it equally wrong to automatically dismiss someone as merely “partisan” and therefore untrustworthy?  Partisans can be right, and even if “relentless” partisanship increases the odds that facts will be distorted or misstated, it doesn’t mean that such will always be the case.³

So I suggest, pace Crispin Sartwell, that while we acknowledge the dangers of partisanship and advocacy, we don’t assume that all partisans are equally unreliable.  Instead, we do some fact-checking, and we read diverse sources and diverse opinions, and we do what we can to find out what’s what and who’s right (or at least credible) on a given issue.  There are facts out there, after all; just because they may be presented as part of a partisan argument doesn’t make them any less true.

I can only hope that not too many people agree with me on this.

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¹ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/against-consensus/375684

² Uh-oh: Professor Sartwell apparently believes in evolution.  I guess we know which side of the ideological divide he’s on.

³ I am scrupulously avoiding the Nazification of this argument: So are you saying, Professor, that a partisan advocate against Hitler’s policies would be no more credible than a partisan advocate in favor of those policies? Even short of that, however, Sartwell’s claim that “all partisans are created equal and equally lack credibility” makes me uneasy. It's true that Sartwell is criticzing "relentless political partisans" and "unanimous systems of facts" rather than all partisans and all consensus on facts, but such qualifications are easy to overlook or dismiss, and "relentless" is a pretty subjective term.