Have you ever wondered why Republicans will cling to a belief despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Consider, for example, a recent debate with a die-hard Republican friend of mine. I have great respect for him as a human being, but I was amazed when he claimed that global warming was the product of mass hysteria among academics and liberals. After some digging I produced Naomi Oreskes’s essay in Science Magazine that unambiguously lays out the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. His response? He was totally unmoved.
In my frustration, I wondered – how can he possibly continue to cling to his beliefs despite having no real counter-argument to sound reasoning and evidence? The answer, I found, is that his authority structure is simply very, very different from mine.
Continue after the flip and let me share what I have learned, in the hope that we might better know how to tailor our ideological frames to seemingly intractable recipients. This knowledge is even more important as we seek to make inroads into the red states as part of our 50-state strategy.
My realization came as I read through an amazing (if somewhat opaque) book by Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth. I read this book before entering graduate school in molecular biology because it deals with the social historical aspects of one of the first modern institutions of science – The Royal Society, with a focus on Robert Boyle – and what it means for something to be true in a scientific, but also broader, sense.
One of the aims of the book is to debunk a major tenet of modern science – that knowledge comes only from experimentation and first-hand knowledge. This theory of knowledge exists in contrast to that of the pre-modern era, where knowledge was not personally acquired by rather passed from elder to initiate. As Shapin puts it, in the modern age
If we are heard to say that we know something on the basis of trust, we are understood to say that we do not possess genuine knowledge at all. (16)
The irony, he points out, is that modern scientists can personally vouch for the truth of an impossibly small amount of knowledge. Take myself, for example. I "know" that our genes are encoded in polymers of deoxyribonucleic acids (or DNA) – for any gene, there will be a specific sequence of DNA that is transcribed into RNA by an enzyme named RNA polymerase, and this RNA will then be translated into a protein by a ribosome. But do I really know these "facts," seeing as how I have never personally even verified the structure of DNA despite working with it every day?
Shapin explains that all knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is a communal good:
What counts for any community as true knowledge is a collective good and a collective accomplishment. (5)
When you think about it, it would be absurd for society to work in any other way. Individuals would be forced to rediscover the entire corpus of knowledge de novo. The computer programmer couldn’t be content being told how his program physically works. In order to "know" why his algorithm performs the function he thinks it does, he would be forced to build the computer himself – he would have to mine the ore, fabricate the plastic, and piece it all together himself to truly understand why his computer code works the way it does.
But societies don’t work like that. We have authority structures and a communal body of knowledge (that is to some degree mutable) so that individuals can make a more efficient contribution to the whole. Shapin explains these authority structures as follows:
Accordingly, in order for that knowledge to be effectively accessible to an individual—for an individual to have it—there needs to be some kind of moral bond between the individual and other members of the community. The word I propose to use to express this moral bond is trust. (7)
Thus, Shapin explains that knowledge is not objective. It has a moral character, even for the supposedly most objective of all communities, the scientific community. My knowledge of DNA is grounded in the trust that I have in my textbooks. When I perform work in the laboratory, I trust that a microscope works as I have been told. I trust that the cells I am looking at have the components that my professor has taught me.
What does all of this have to do with the 50 state strategy? Everything.
The distribution of trust is therefore coextensive with the community, and its boundaries are the community’s boundaries. (36)
We only believe the members of our knowledge-community. We believe Science Magazine. We believe Keith Olbermann. We believe Kos. We believe the New York Times editorial board. We believe these authorities because they are part of our community. We’ll debate with them and sometimes disagree with them. But we trust them enough to faithfully engage in this debate.
To illustrate this point – how many people who are reading this diary right now believe in anthropogenic global warming? Probably almost all. And how many of us have first-hand knowledge of its existence? Probably almost none. And yet we believe in it because people we trust say it exists. We trust Naomi Oreskes and Al Gore to report on the beliefs of the scientific community. And we believe that scientific community.
My Republican friend? He does not trust Science Magazine. He believes most university professors have a liberal bias, and cannot therefore be fully trusted. He trusts the Washington Post editorial board. He trusts (recently powerless, thank God) Senator Inhofe.
This is why he will never be persuaded by the information that persuaded me. It isn’t part of his knowledge-community. It isn’t trustworthy.
As another illustration, consider Seymour Hersh’s report that Iran is not anywhere near acquiring nuclear weapons. The response among liberals was undoubtedly to believe the story and to believe that President Bush was once again twisting the truth to coerce us into another needless, criminal war. Conservatives, however, saw the report differently (brought to you by Red State):
I don't believe anything Seymour Hersh writes.
I am more convinced every day... That Hersh just makes this up...that there are, in fact, in his stories, no leaks.
Hopefully I have helped you see more starkly what we are up against. Providing facts and evidence, even a mountain of it, isn’t good enough as long as the authorities of the other side are telling another story -- be it by providing a different perspective or by outright lying.
So what is there to do to recruit these people away from Limbaugh et al.? To be honest I’m not entirely sure, and I hope you all can develop these answers together with me. But to start, we need to understand the importance of getting them to trust us -- they need to see that we share the same hopes and concerns, and that we will be more faithful stewards of these hopes and concerns than their current leaders. To the degree that we continue the culture war by making them an other is the degree to which we shoot ourselves in the foot.
On a parting note, I’d like to repeat the words of Francis Hutcheson as quoted by Shapin: the trust that forms the basis for our societies is "one of the ‘immediate principles in our nature’" (12). I agree that trust is built into our innate fabric, since it forms the basis for all of our social action, and we are social animals. However, I believe that this trust takes a very different form among communities of liberals than among communities of conservatives. Specifically, liberals spread authority out among its members because we have more faith in the power of the individual to reason. We are skeptical by nature because we have the curiosity and the desire to personally validate more of what is deemed true by our knowledge-communities.
Conservatives, on the other hand, concentrate authority among the few. They listen to Rush Limbaugh and don’t care to verify the truth of what he says (as opposed to the likes of us who dig online for facts and trails of evidence). They more often believe wholesale what their President tells them, and what their pastors tell them (do not take this as a general condemnation of religion, since I am only criticizing those who believe without critique). Their authorities are demagogues like Limbaugh, Coulter, and O’Reilly. A community like ours, where everyone has a voice, is anathema.
That’s what I learned. I hope that what I thought was truth will resonate with what you, the community, finds true, so that we might add it to our growing body of knowledge.