Time To Take A Step Back From Our Beliefs
How Ideological Conformity Replaced Intellectual Curiosity
I: Thought Groups
There is a global context of partisanship that has not existed so deeply in the Western sphere since the Catholic-Protestant conflicts. ‘Thought’ has been broken down into ideological bubbles, to which your ideas must completely align. With this polarisation, has come the decline of critical thinking and intellectualism.
A few weeks back I came across an article titled ‘The death of the public intellectual’ by Sabine Carys, in which she discusses the 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. on “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of African Americans?”. Baldwin advocated for the notion, whilst Buckley opposed it. Despite the 1960s crowd of predominantly white middle and upper class scholars, the chamber voted overwhelmingly, 540 to 160, in favour Baldwin. Carys said:
“The weight of his words was felt throughout the hall, those who had entered certain in their convictions felt their opinions begin to unravel.”
However, as Carys goes onto to argue, this flexibility of thought is nowadays almost extinct in the common sphere, and I add, that is true even within academic circles which have traditionally been the well of intellectual liberty. We are now compartmentalised within the strict boundaries of our ‘thought group’, to the extent of rebuking someone from the opposing group, even if we happen to agree with their idea.
With the dominance of social media and technology, we are no longer forced to challenge our ideas, I can simply choose which debate I want to watch on YouTube and I can turn it off if I oppose the views being presented.
If Baldwin V Buckley were to happen today, there would be a clearer partition between those who identified with Baldwin’s liberal ideas of civil liberties and those who sought more individualist & capitalist ideals. That might seem an obvious statement to make but the intent behind it is that we would vote based on our predisposed ideas, not based on the arguments made and what we believe is righteous.
II: Confused Populism
When ideas become tribal markers rather than subjects of inquiry, societies begin to import and export ideologies like commodities, again conformed to thought groups.
This can clearly be seen with the transnational migration of US-MAGA populism across the Atlantic into Britain and continental Europe. To understand why it stuck, we first need to understand how it penetrated European politics.
European and American conservatives held little in common until recently, the Republic Party has represented capitalist neoliberal ideals of free-markets, deregulation and small government, whilst the European peers focussed on social conservatism i.e. traditional family structure, religious values, and national pride.
The migrant crisis, which followed the Arab Spring, resulted in millions of immigrants landing on Europe’s Mediterranean shores, geographically the worst recovering region from the 2008 financial crisis. Traditional conservative parties such as Partido Popular (PP) in Spain or the Conservative Party in Britain offered little to mitigate the flow of newcomers and thus was born the European populist movement. Vox separated from PP, the Reform Party was birthed out of political defectors from the Conservatives and UKIP, this pattern was consistent across Europe.
Out of the immigration case, grew euro-skepticism and anti-globalism, fanned by people like Trump, Steve Bannon (Trump’s ideological architect) and Elon Musk. Based on these minor common objectives, conservatives in Europe joined a thought group that does little to regard their tradition and values.
European policy and politics were slowly americanised, the rollback of 2008 era regulations, the introduction of previously banned pesticides into the food chain (Monsanto), outsourcing oil pipelines to American suppliers (Exxon) and the creeping presence of American tech in government offices (Palantir).
Europe’s disenfranchised became capricious, abandoning paternal collectivism and compromising on their values, so they can sit closer in line with the American regiments. The European populist thus imported alien ideologies, as a solution to the import of alien people (and in their argument, alien ideologies). From the world of Baldwin V Buckley, we have regressed, in todays political arena, identities, not arguments, determine allegiance.
The result of conservative transfiguration into populism, reflected less resistance to globalisation than a replication of American political tropes. What should have been a reaction to migration and political instability evolved into an ideological dependency, imported narratives supplanted indigenous political tradition.
III: The Media Allegiance
Media has become a political instrument that swayed, if not controlled, our allegiances. However, with the decline of legacy media, we now have more viability to dictate our exposure to opposing views, making us more immutable. On every side of every thought group, media is now approached with suspicion.
I recently attended a lecture given by Polly Toynbee and David Walker that discussed the ‘historic right wing bias’ of British media. Toynbee listed five or four of the largest media organisations in Britain as examples of unbiased news, whilst listing a handful of tabloids as evidence of the right wing media bias. The same pattern can be seen in reverse with the US, a right leaning industry is often seen as left-wing biased by hard-line Republicans.
To discuss the role of the media in allegiances and thought groups, I want to refer to an article in the American Journal of Political Science by Matthew S. Levendusky, Why Do Partisan Media Polarize Viewers?. Levendusky says that as motivated readers, we have two classes of goals:
“Accuracy goals (the desire to reach the correct conclusion) and directional goals (the desire to reach the preferred conclusion, i.e., the conclusion that that supports our existing beliefs)”
Levendusky says that the latter, directional goals, have a strong effect on our processing of information. When we consume the news, we don’t just process the information provided by the media, we incorporate additional information that we have stored regarding the subject and information that helps fit the story into our narrative. If a liberal leaning person consumed a news story on Trump, their subconscious directional goal would be to assume the underlaying story is negative.
This may pair into another cognitive bias known as disconfirmation bias; we accept any evidence without scrutiny if it fits our narrative or the opposite, ignoring evidence that opposes it. This feeds into the rigidness of thought groups, we dismiss evidence that is contrary to the party line, to what our herd believes. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign rode on his character as a businessman that can save the economy. Despite wild market volatility since the start of his term, supporters ignore the turbulence and focus on proattitudinal evidence like the uptick of domestic production, since it fits the narrative Trump is improving the economy for average Americans.
According to Levendusky’s research, the effects of disconfirmation bias continue to grow and the grip on the host is enlarged the longer they remain unexposed to opposing views or contrary argument:
“because it lacks a counterargument of any sort, this information (implicitly) seems stronger and even more persuasive”
Once media producers step into the cycle of partisan news, it is difficult to move back, even slightly, because the audience becomes accustomed to a certain narrative and they expect you to provide the evidence for this narrative.
In October, I attended a public conversation between infamous journalist and interviewer, Emily Maitlis, and journalistic researcher, Ayala Panievsky. The discussion, Journalism Under Attack, investigated how to combat the increasing isolationism from the media on all sides of the political spectrum but particularly on the right-wing populist front.
Maitlis & Panievsky repeated throughout the talk the importance of not catering to right-wing criticism and avoiding moving in the political field to attract more viewers. It was then no surprise when Maitlis was asked during the Q&A, ‘How do you make populists and right wingers less suspicious of the media?’, her response was simply:
“I don’t know”
Despite my upmost respect for Maitlis as one of the most influential journalists in British media, I don’t think she understood how she was also stuck in a thought group. She was just as stubborn and suspicious of the opposition, as they were of her. As was the case with Toynbee, she was surrounded by likeminded people, editors who agreed with her stances and loyal readers that probably rarely objected to her coverage.
What was once conceived as the fourth estate, has become entangled in the same structures of allegiance and thought groups it was meant to scrutinise. As ideological borders harden, the media no longer mediates but replicates the polarisation of the societies it reports on. The issues of polarisation in journalism are not external, but intrinsic.
IV: What Comes Next?
The field of ideas across the political spectrum, has now become an economy of validation from within our echo-chambers, rather than curiosity, critique and discovery. Thought groups, the populists, the woke left, and the partisan media have conspired to turn intellectual debate into an anthem of loyalty and polarisation. Baldwin & Buckley, despite the stark difference of their beliefs shared a devotion to argument itself. I fear that the devotion is now largely extinct, replaced by suspicion. It is absolutely essential to once again, exchange ideas without allegiance, and for disagreement cease to be a declaration of war.