May 02, 2018

Doubling Down

I can’t remember where I read this, but there have been a number of studies that demonstrate that “when myth meets fact, myth wins.” In other words, if you present someone with a list of facts that seriously undermine his or her belief system, the last reaction you can expect is acknowledgement of the error of their beliefs. Instead, they will just “double down”: vehemently insist, without being able to refute your facts, that what they have asserted is correct. What they will not due is engage you on a rational level.

I have seen this repeatedly on this blog. For twelve years now, when this type of confrontation comes up (dozens of times, in fact), there has been only one case in which the other person conceded that s/he was wrong, and that s/he would have to rethink his or her beliefs on the subject. The rest just double down—this usually involves a lot of rage on their parts—or simply disappear from the discussion.

Many years ago I wrote an essay on this theme called “Tribal Consciousness and Enlightenment Tradition” (included in the collection A Question of Values), in which I pointed out how feeble the Enlightenment tradition was; almost as if that period of European history had never even occurred. Arguments are marshaled on each side of a dispute not based on facts or reason, but on the side one is on; on who one is, basically. As a thought experiment, I suggested that if all Palestinians were suddenly turned into Israelis, and vice versa, you would find the “new” Israelis coming up with the very arguments about the disputed territory that they had previously rejected, and the “new” Palestinians doing the same thing from the opposite side of the stage. Truth, or objective discourse, is hardly an issue here. What is at stake is psychological, or religious, or ethnic, survival.

How many times have white cops killed a black unarmed male, who was posing no threat to them whatsoever, and then, after an internal investigation, been acquitted? One can reasonably guess that acquittal was the point of this “investigation,” rather than honestly getting to the bottom of the story.

These examples point up an obvious condition of our current situation: there is very real dialogue any more, and we have dissolved into a collection of warring tribes.

This dichotomy of myth vs. fact, tribalism vs. Enlightenment reason, is the focus of an essay I posted here a short while ago by Alan Jacobs, called “Wokeness and Myth on Campus”:

Jacobs uses a different terminology than I do, but the problematic is the same. There is the world of critical thinking, science and philosophy, and instrumental and discursive reason. On the other side of the ledger we have the world of myth—the “nonempirical unconditioned reality” of our experience, not amenable to either verification or disconfirmation. Some of you may recall an earlier discussion on this blog about layers of mind, following the work of Merlin Donald: Mimetic, Mythic, and Theoretic. The Mythic layer is about narratives, belief systems, allegories, and is very old—hard wired, as we like to say. The Theoretic is a relative newcomer on the scene, going back only to the first millennium B.C., and (says Donald) its hold on our consciousness is rather tenuous. In a word, folks like the Hebrew prophets, or Socrates, or Confucius, or the Buddha, were not all that popular. The “crowd,” so to speak, was much more interested in the Golden Calf than the Ten Commandments. (For more on this see Neurotic Beauty, Appendix III. The shift from mythos to logos was the focus of Robert Pirsig’s seminal work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) As I argue in “Transference, Ideology, and the Nature of Obsession” (included in the collection Are We There Yet?), it may come down to a question of degree of zeal. We will never do away with narrative thought, nor should we; but what are the outer limits? Rajneesh? Jonestown? When we debate the nature of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon, for example, it is really this issue that we are debating. As Jacobs says (quoting Leszek Kolakowski), “One can participate in mythical experience only with the fullness of one’s personality.” Presenting facts, or logos, to someone caught up in mythos (any mythos), is spectacularly useless.

Jacobs uses current student protest as an example of this fruitless collision of the two worlds. When the protesters’ interpretation of events is challenged on a logical basis, the reaction is typically rage. What they are really saying, according to Jacobs, is “You are denying my very identity”—a response that makes sense only from within the mythical mode. Analytically questioning a religion, ideology, or complex mythical framework won’t work, because for the student protesters, for example, it really is an assault on who they are (at least, that's how they see it). Disagreement, honest questioning, or alternative points of view is for them “defilement,” something that has to be “cleansed.” Chants and curses, shouting down a speaker and refusing to let him/her present his/her argument—these things, says Jacobs, don’t arise from any type of discursive rationality, but “from the symbolic order of the mythical core,” and are a response to seeing that core disturbed. There is no point in talking to these groups about “critical thinking” and “the free exchange of ideas,” and phrases like these are simply not adequate to the cultural clash between the two modes of being. His final question: “Is the university the sort of institution that can accept and incorporate people who are operating largely from within the mythical core?” Perhaps, in the long run, no.

Of course, it’s not just the university that is at stake here. All of the above can be applied to the political world at large, whether we are talking about Palestine or white police forces. What the thinkers of the first millennium B.C. offered—Socrates, the Buddha, etc.—was distance, sometimes known as reflexivity: the ability to stand back from your particular narrative, your own mythology, and see it as a narrative, as a mythology. “Above all,” said Talleyrand after the Terror of the French Revolution, “no zeal.” Of course, one might argue that too much distance can lead to inaction, or apathy (think of Hamlet, poor shmuck); but given the current state of the human psyche, drowning as it is in narrative, I don’t think we need to worry excessively about that danger.

Here’s the flip side, in any case. Many years ago, I had a Native American girlfriend for whom passion was pretty much a way of life. We were both in our twenties; we talked a lot about life and love. I remember I said to her at one point, “I'm just concerned that passion has a dangerous side.” “Don’t worry, Maury,” she replied; “it’ll never be a problem for you.”


©Morris Berman, 2018