Kossacks often use the term “reality-based community.” We pride ourselves on being more in touch with what’s really going on than our foes on the right – but what is reality? Do we all perceive the same reality? To what extent do we see chiefly what we wish to see, and what kinds of truths can’t we avoid seeing?
First, let me be clear what I am not asking:
- I am not asking if our beliefs are more or less factual than those of the right. We can debate that later, once we’ve talked some more about the texture of belief itself.
- I’m not asking whether or not objective reality exists.
What interests me is the nature of the knowledge we rely upon, where it comes from and what types of thoughts constitute it. Are some kinds of beliefs closer to reality than others? I intend to demonstrate that beliefs come in several kinds, and that it’s important to know what kind of claim a given belief makes about reality.
First of all, there are factual claims. A factual claim (some, I suppose, would call them “positive” claims) is about actual sense experience. That is, it’s a description of something out there that can be perceived. Actually – many factual claims are about abstractions, such as the claim that “one plus one equals two.” I won’t hash out rationalism versus empiricism here – to me, what these two types of statements have in common is overwhelmingly more important than their differences: what makes factual claims is their belonging to the outside world.
When I say “the pear is round” I am referring to something outside of me – roundness. My ability to perceive round shapes may be a function of my eyeballs, and the choice of that word a function of my brain – nevertheless, my eyeballs and brain didn’t decide whether the pear would be round, cubical, pyramidal, shaped like Ted Stevens, or whatever. The pear decided that.
I know, this is all basic philosophy stuff. Let’s get to the interesting parts.
The problem with thinking of factual claims in terms of sense experience is that most of the time, we don’t have common sense experiences to argue over – particularly on the Internet, where I don’t know what you or your pear actually look like. Here on DKos, when we’re having factual arguments we’re usually arguing over heuristics – rules about which kinds of factual claims are true.
Actually, we political types do a lot of this sort of thing. When a right-wing guy announces that he knows the bold new health care plan will fail because government plans are doomed to failure, he is making a broadly heuristic claim – he’s saying that “the health care plan was a roaring success” is bound to be false, in the same way that a physicist would immediately suspect the statement “I flew through the sun and lived.”
There’s a subtle distinction to be watched for here: we all know that many of the right wing are suspicious of government out of essentially emotional bitterness with it. Indeed, our heuristics are often shaped by our emotions and what we want to believe, instead of what we can actually say we’ve observed. The thing to keep in mind, is that the heuristics – the guidelines themselves – are still factual in type.
The reason I raise that is to emphasize that while heuristics may be more subject to emotional bias than straight-up fact claims about the shapes of pears, again the similarities between those two types of statement outweigh the differences when compared to another kind of claim: value claims.
It is my belief that our ability to value comes from pleasure and pain, those axiomatic conditions of life as an animal. In any case, each of us values subjectively, on our own. When I say a thing is “good,” I am not observing something about it (like roundness), I am conferring my approval on it. Yes, it sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget that “good,” “bad” and other words derived from those are different in kind from facts like roundness, greenness, Ted Stevensness and so forth. I can say “Bush rules” and you can say “Bush sucks” and neither of us can prove the other is wrong, because sucksness and rulesness are conferred individually upon Bush, not inferred about him.
“But Joseph,” you say. “That’s obviously not true. I mean, Bush sucks because he’s a cock. Objectively, anybody who would lie to go to war is a cock and therefore sucks.” Congratulations, you’ve observed the next, related type of claim: moral claims. Moral claims are like heuristics, only about values – that is, they are rules applying to how things are valued. If starting wars for flimsy reasons is bad, that implies the value judgments you confer on: Bush, McKinley, Hitler and so forth. Moral systems are elaborate hierarchies of these kinds of rules, intended to ensure the promotion of ends values that are, as often as not, only implied.
It is a real problem the extent to which values and morality masquerade as facts and heuristics, and vice versa – the extent to which these incompatible types of belief try to set the agendas for one another.
What makes it stupid in addition to problematic is that properly understood, incompatible types of claim have no implications on one another – and therefore do not conflict. You don’t have to believe that government will fail to believe government is bad, for one example out of nine hundred millions of examples of this kind of confusion. The Scottish philosopher David Hume once famously wrote that “what is cannot determine what ought to be.” That’s a clunky way of putting a crucial truth that is largely lost on American politics today.
Rationalists like Ayn Rand have argued that this is nonsense, that moral claims are a subset of factual claims, and that we should always aspire to factuality, even in moral thinking. She would say that for living beings, proper values can be deduced using reason. There’s still an implicit ends value there, though: to continue living. Yes, survival may be an obvious choice but as a choice it still requires a chooser, and that means it’s subjective. Likewise, moral zealots on the Christian end often hold factual thinking in suspicion, as though it were indicative of an immoral or untrustworthy temperament. The same person would probably argue that making morality out to be subjective is a grave and dangerous project, as though what we value were somehow more mutable or less important than what we observe.
(Why did I just use two examples drawn from the right? So as to work with a heuristic, that I imagine many people have, that makes it easier to believe claims about the incorrectness of conservative thinkers. Were I making the same point elsewhere, I might have used – I don’t know, Dewey and the academic social sciences or something.)
Most of us have one kind of belief that we prefer for emotional reasons. If you asked me at nine years old, I would have said that reason was superior, that only facts matter, that morality is for stupid people. I only liked truth-claims in the scientific mould. I’m sure many of you felt the same way, or indeed the opposite way. To convince nine-year-old me of a moral belief, it would have been effective to couch it in psuedo-pragmatic terms that were in fact nonsense, solely to appeal to my aesthetic appreciation for “logical” thought. Today, I recognize that paradoxically, my belief in logic and reason is a moral, emotional one at core, and not itself the product of rationality.
I intend to argue that because these are incompatible forms of claim, both of which are fundamental to what we’d think of as our important “beliefs,” we should regard them with equal seriousness and put away the silly project of justifying one in terms of the other. It is okay to have our own values; it would be stupid not to share our facts.
There are three chief political implications here:
- For all the energy we devote to finding logical arguments for our policies, we should devote just as much to explaining our values – not just so the world understands why we hold them, but so that we understand how our morals interact with and influence our factual heuristics, and vice versa. This is the key to knowing what biases affect our explanations of the world.
- When someone “cannot be persuaded with facts and logic” (as, for example, many atheists claim Christians cannot), don’t be afraid to appeal to emotions. They are a valid influence on our ideas, even if we should be careful exactly how they influence our ideas. Often, it’s the jujitsu of emotional appeal that wins elections and builds blocs.
- Obviously, the third thing is never to be afraid of the facts, because what is can’t determine what ought to be – they can’t touch what you value. But I doubt many of you needed to be told that one.