Disagreeing Despite the Data
Why I Wrote “Disagreeing” Despite the Data
by David Apgar
It’s never been easier to become a pundit. All you need to know is one word. Why can’t Congress pass laws and budgets? Polarization. Why can’t Americans reduce shooting deaths? Polarization. Why have lawmakers in a state just hit by two once-in-a-century storms banned government use of the words ‘climate change’? Polarization. What causes polarization in the U.S.? Polarization.
Wait a second – polarization can’t explain everything! Why should your politics affect your medical preferences, risk tolerance, or religious beliefs? And why all three of them? It’s not new, so why is it flaring up now? Where does it come from, anyway?
Extreme polarization first struck me in several countries where I did economic development fieldwork – especially Nepal, Lebanon, and Haiti. But you see similar patterns in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Mali, the U.K., Yemen, and the U.S. In each case, something blocks factual agreement and communities segregate by belief.
A couple things about belief segregation. It’s an outcome, like polarization. But it’s more specific and gets at why polarization has become so stubborn. Its fissures run deeper than psychological traits like affability or insecurity – it splits communities with all sorts of personality types. It can’t simply be cultural since it cleaves cultures that have worked together for a long time. It’s not a tactic but it can be the result of one.
My book argues it has to do with how we think. The link between the belief segregation immiserating whole countries today and ideas about learning I put to work in my earlier risk-management career stared me in the face for years. Once I recognized it, I had to start writing.
In the 1930s, Popper wrote you can’t find truth but you can avoid error, and you do that by checking assumptions. Well, that’s exactly what a lot of Americans are refusing to do, whether the subject’s climate, health, or elections.
In the 1950s, Wittgenstein argued you can’t develop language by reporting your private experiences. Language is irreducibly social, like following rules. Isolation impoverishes what we can say and think – and we have a crisis of isolation.
Now, if you look at any nonfiction bookshelf, you’d think the 20th century stopped with Wittgenstein. And with T.S. Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn wrote science is no brave march toward truth but rather social upheavals that flip accepted paradigms followed by bureaucratic periods where scientists flesh them out.
By the 1970s, though, thinkers like Donald Davidson used translation theory to put sharp limits on the relativism Kuhn’s history implies. Davidson’s theory shows factual agreement between groups requires shared projects. Without interaction, communities’ language use drifts apart until they can’t tell whether they agree or not regardless of the words they use. And our larger communities have become as insular as you can get.
These turning points in 20th-century philosophy reveal three requirements for widespread factual agreement: a pervasive habit of assumption checking, densely connected communities, and projects straddling those communities. They’re necessary conditions – not nice-to-haves. Dogmatism, individual isolation, and group insularity will all eventually put factual agreement out of reach.
Group insularity is the hard problem. For one thing, it’s hard to reverse. Given how some of our larger communities have walled themselves off from the rest, after all, why stop? Why should any community stop preferring separate news sources, churches, clubs, civic groups, retirement communities, schools, towns, and states?
Lebanon shows where it can lead. Three sectarian groups live close together in the tiny country but have no shared institutions, projects, or public life. Religious authorities perform all marriages, run medical facilities, and distribute state social benefits. Restaurants, clubs, and taxis cater to specific communities. As a country, Lebanon failed even before the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Remedies in the U.S. will depend on state initiatives for a while if only because the incoming administration is so skeptical of efforts to foster social inclusion. Fortunately, states in the U.S. have the convening power to pursue those efforts. California could bring diverse communities together by funding civic groups, supporting unions, and widening public school enrollment. It could even establish a universal statewide service program for young people to spend six months on public works or social services.
The big lesson for me from this book is that widespread factual agreement is no foregone conclusion. Lots has to go right to enable it. Finding ways to reverse the separation and closure of communities in the U.S. has to be a priority if we want to reestablish a factual commons. Without common ground we can’t really be sure what we’re arguing about and we’ll end up with separate, mutually unintelligible democracies.