Are people holding racist views more often right-wing? For some, this connection is almost definitional. Let’s look at a different question: Are rationalists commonly more right-wing? I guess while you might have a view on the former question, you’ll likely have no answer to the second question. In fact, you might want to argue that the second question doesn’t make sense. Why is that, though? I don’t think there is an a priori connectedness of beliefs about race, right-wing politics or rationalism. Rather, connections between beliefs emerge in the light of their relevance. My hunch is that we see beliefs that matter to us politically as part of a holistic framework. By contrast, we seem to look at beliefs that we don’t see as politically relevant in an atomistic fashion. In other words, when things matter to us, we’re more alert to the connection between beliefs, taking one belief as indicating others. Conversely, when matters have cooled down, we tend to view beliefs in an atomistic fashion and remain ignorant about connections unless we study them carefully. Accordingly, I think that holistc versus atomistic considerations of beliefs are related to their respective relevance. If this is correct, this has grave consequences for the way we approach disagreements today and with historical hindsight. In what follows, I’d like to explore this point for thinking about (deep) disagreements.
Let’s begin by thinking about deep disagreements. Unlike peer disagreements about individual claims, deep disagreements obtain in a more holistic sense. They concern most fundamental beliefs. Common examples of such disagreements are ones between adherents of homeopathy and evidence-based medicine, about abortion or about whether a given society is racist. It’s not settled what precisely makes such disagreements deep, but if we follow some central accounts, they are deep because of different world-views or because they disagree about second-order assumptions regarding what does or doesn’t count as pertinent evidence for a claim. As far as I know, most of the literature on deep disagreements works with examples that we easily recognise as (politically) relevant. Now I am undecided whether relevance is what makes disagreements deep, but I wonder whether the choice of examples in the literature drives our views of how the depth comes about. As I see it, then, we should include historically remote* examples to study what makes disagreements deep. Arguably, disagreements about rationalism and empiricism can be just as deep as those about vaccines, but that will escape your notice if you only study disagreements that currently count as relevant.
Let’s look at another example then: Imagine you’re having a discussion about the origin of knowledge. Someone says that, ultimately, all knowledge comes down to reason and self-evident principles. Now imagine that, instead of a polite inquiry of what these principles are, this interlocutor is greeted with scorn and shouted at: “How can you make such wicked claims?!” Imagine further that she is de-platformed and banned from speaking at public events as a result of her “outrageous views”. While we’re witnessing quite a bit of shouting and de-platforming these days, it’s more often for views identified as racist, trans-exclusionary or sexist, but rarely for rationalist convictions that discredit divine illumination or revelation through the Bible. However, if you were to return to Paris in the year 1277, you’d find this view harshly condemned along with 218 further propositions. (Here I reference a paper discussing this condemnation as a form of deep disagreement.) Arguably, the disagreement between members of the Parisian arts faculty and the leading theologians around Etienne Tempier has cooled down since then and made way for other disagreements to become heated.
What I take from this is that disagreements about, say, racism are not per see deeper than disagreements about whether philosophers must accept supernatural standards of evidence. The former are just more heated than the latter. If this is correct, an immediate question is what the heat adds to the disagreement. As noted above, I think it makes for a more holistic view of the disagreement in question. If we’re interested in whether people are our political allies, it’s natural to assume that we’re more interested in detecting indicators of pertinent beliefs. Is this person a racist, we might wonder. We might see the likelihood increased, if we notice that they hold certain beliefs about the economic status quo and who deserves to participate in economic welfare. As Justin Smith-Ruiu once pointed out, this is often following associative patterns of prediction. Making moral judgments, then, is like shopping with Amazon: “People who like to eat meat also fail to care about the climate.” By contrast, outside a philosophy seminar, we’re probably less interested in figuring out whether someone is a rationalist. Admittedly, there are some papers asking whether Hume was a rationalist, but apart from a lack of heat, such questions are treated much more individualistically, i.e. with regard to the particular author. Here, identifying rationalism doesn’t serve as helping to detect a pattern common to people read as empiricists…
Such historical remoteness or closeness might already feature between different generations. The current debates about racism or sexism, for instance, seem to have been completely absent or irrelevant for the generation of my parents. When my parents were confronted with arguments about sexism, for instance, they truly didn’t know what hit them. The point of such comparison is not to judge, blame or exculpate; the point is to see that, for them, a particular take on sexism, would not have come as a holistic network of beliefs, but as individual claims here and there. Gradually, such claims grew into holistic sets that are by now identified as “progressive” or condescendingly as “woke”. While the inferential relations between individual claims remain open for debate, the set has begun to form a package of beliefs that is readily suspected once one of the pertinent beliefs is expressed. Between different generations, the depth of the disagreements about, say, sexism, might be asymmetrical in that older generations might feel more remote from certain views, thus seeing them atomistically and abstract away again quickly, while current young generations might feel the cohesion between beliefs much more strongly. So while the former might have a hard time seeing the point, the latter will feel like defending their whole world-view or form of life, when advocating for a certain belief.
However, if we were to see rationalism (again?) as a trait going hand in hand with optimism about moral and epistemic progress, we might care more about figuring out who is and who isn’t a rationalist. Then, cool deep disagreements about rationalism might turn once more into hot deep disagreements. Conversely, disagreements that we now see as deep might cool off so much that we forget all about the holistic systems or forms of life we take them to be part of.
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* Historical remoteness or closeness of disagreements is not a linear trait, of course. In a globalised world, regional differences can feel as remote or close as differences in time.
Handling Ideas 