Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities

DallasMay writes "This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.'"

Comments

Re:More to the point...

[anaesthetica]

Who came up with that definition?

His name was Thomas Hobbes and he wrote a book called Leviathan. Hobbes wrote this book in the context of the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, both of which were massive civil conflicts centered around religion (Protestant sects vs. Catholicism).

In order to prevent further religious conflict, Hobbes set out to create a philosophical basis for the bracketing of religion from public life. Not the abolition of the Church outright, but the removal of the ability for people to make (public) claims about what is true (private piety was still assumed). He rejected revelation as a basis for truth claims, but noted that most things that people 'know' aren't really derived from experience, but are instead things that they believe on the authority of someone else. For instance, we believe certain things about reality because we recognize the epistemic authority of physicists.

Without an ultimate authority to resolve claims about reality/truth, Hobbes believed that people would never escape the devastating civil wars that he saw all around him in Europe. Rejecting revelation as a source of knowledge, Hobbes said that the person of the 'sovereign' would have to serve as the ultimate authority on truth claims in order to prevent civil conflict.

Establishing a sovereign authority would be the only way that rational individualism could prosper. Individuals, freed from epistemic confusion or conflict, could then engage in public life with the maximum freedom to pursue their (material) interests.

This is relevant to TFA given that it pits individualists (epistmeic authority allowing for skeptical materialist individualism) against communitarians (people making broad values/truth claims supposedly binding on others).

It's hard to find a more relevant philosopher for understanding modernity than Hobbes. The way that authority, truth claims, individualism, state sovereignty, and materialism are politically entwined are all to be found within Hobbes' writing. Even if you disagree with the conclusions he came to, it's still worth reading and knowing why he wrote what he wrote.

So yes, individualism and authority are quite closely linked in the history of Western thought.

Footnote: Hobbes was the first major translator of Thucydides. Many of his views on civil war and epistemic confusion come from Thucydides' description of the Corcyraean Civil War (in Book III of Thucydides' History). The episode is only about 8 pages and well worth reading to see how deeply ingrained this particular strand of political philosophy is embedded in Western thought. It's a pretty chilling description of the collapse of convention, law, norms, and the very meaning of words in the face of violence.