I've been considering a post all through the Christmas period on a topic that has perplexed me for several months and which has struck me as germane to the entire Hitchens/Dawkins/Harris atheist assault on religion, the Respect-SWP debacle, this year's Edge question (nice, incidentally, to see the Guardian finally catching up with C&S in their appreciation of the Third Culture crowd), as well as a number of other topics that we Doubting Johnnies, heretics, and infidels enjoy examining, namely, "Why do so many smart people believe such stupid things?" I have postponed writing on this topic and will probably continue to do so for a while, but Norm has also touched on the issue tangentially here in wondering why it is that the humanities appear NOT to necessarily ennoble those who come into contact with it, so I thought I'd scribble down some quick, cursory thoughts and maybe examine the topic in more detail if I can be bothered or if anyone else displays any interest in extending the discussion.
I've been reading a number of books on the topic, most recently Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things," Robert Sternberg's "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid," and Thomas Gilovich's "How We Know What Isn't So," but my interest, I suppose, goes as far back as my reading of Denis Tourish's On the Edge. The short answer seems to be, as far as I can tell, that "smart people believe stupid things because they arrive at their positions for non-smart reasons," such as adopting a position because it suits some psychological need or because, given a set of facts, the determining factor in choosing between one interpretation out of many has more to do with what the particular individual finds comfortable, convenient, livable with, self-justifying, self-gratifying, or just less threatening to his or her already established views and values, than any willingness to weigh the evidence impartially. Moreover, what education and reading appear to do, rather than lead to any ennoblement or greater skepticism, is simply make people better able to defend the position they have determined to keep to. The arguments and evidence advanced in these books suggest that people frequently become so attached to a particular argument or worldview that they find it difficult to reject it, especially when there are social pressures to save face or avoid admitting error, and are instead more likely to seek confirmatory evidence and downplay the significance of any countervailing evidence they encounter.
Maybe I'll come back to this again. Suffice to say that, IMHO, it provides great potential in explaining why apparently well-educated and smart people continue to be Christians, or Marxists, in spite of the preponderance of so much evidence against them.
But for now, just to return to the "assault on religion" and one of the reasons why I think no amount of "evidence" and hectoring will convince theists to abandon their Gods, here's Scott Atran talking over at the Edge site about his psychological experiment on the "limits of rational choice with Muslim mujahedin on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi." If you have the time, check out all the responses to this year's Edge question. It's really fascinating stuff.
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I love Shermer's stuff, particularly because he has such an odd and interesting history. But your point is very interesting in itself and is something that is so hard to pin down a basic explanation for although I think FWIW you've got it. I really agree with you that for many rhetorical devices or sleights of hand are arrayed to further completely untenable arguments, and often in a fairly cynical way. Taking Marx or Christianity specifically, I think that the only way beyond that is to relate on an emotional level to both (should one wish to) but to recognise the enormous limitations of same and the fact that they are guides, but not solutions or explicators of the world. A better position is doubt or uncertainty, although it's a difficult place to be sometimes... and while I'd still see myself as Marxist in some sense - probably as a useful shorthand for saying that I think class structures are a dominant aspect of societal dynamics, it's certainly not meant as proscriptive... i.e. that 'Marxism' is the answer...
But again returning to your point, I too am genuinely puzzled by adherence to 'Marxism' in the way that... say entirely intelligent and sincere people seem to be. It seems to be so totally closed, so self-referential and also self-serving... But, is it similar to the belief in Christianity. Got to go away and think about that...
Thanks for your comment, WBS. Is Marxism like Christianity? When any theory becomes resistant to the evidence, I'd say it begins to approximate a religion. Its adherents remain so out of faith.
As for calling oneself a Marxist as a sort of shorthand for saying that "class structures are a dominant aspect of societal dynamics," that's your preorogative. I'd only point out that there are much more adequate theories of society that ALSO regard class structures as A dominant aspect of societal dynamics. ;-)
Cheers
Hi John,
Great post. I was going to link to the Edge question myself, and now will just link to you.
I've not read the books you mention, but I have long been interested in the same question. The tentative answer I have reached is that people believe a load of nonsense because, actually, on closer inspection, and if you make the effort to come to a sympathetic view, it's not a load of nonsense at all. On some level, even if it's literally or scientifically wrong, it makes sense.
Imagine reading a post saying exactly the same thing as you, but substitute the world "Marxist" (I consider myself a reasonable and reasonably intelligent person, and also a Marxist) or "Christian" for "anarchist". Why is it that otherwise reasonable people fall for the infantile delusions of anarchism?
The only way to proceed, then, would be to assume that anarchists and marxists and Christians and so on all have very good reasons for believing what they do and that, rather than change their minds, we just need to try to understand why people think what they do, and challenge them to come to a similar understanding of you and what you think. That's the only way to change minds – change your own!
But now I think I've gone on too long and have started preaching to the converted....
Cheers
Stuart
PS Scott Atran piece: wonderful! I admire Atran enormously, and his book on religion is well worth getting too.
Hi Stuart--
Yes indeed, that's pretty much my feelings on the matter and why I included the Atran piece at the end. It also seems to me that anthropologists (and any half-way-decent sociologist) will have grasped this point: that although these beliefs seem weird or foolish, they have an internal coherence that renders them a reasonably solid and consistent worldview. If we want to understand them, we need to get inside them, not argue from the outside from an incommensurable viewpoint. What is required, in other words, is a materialist approach to people's beliefs and thoughts, much as Atran suggests.
Going back to good old Sartre again, in his Search for a Method he suggests pretty much the same approach to understanding human behaviour: an objective analysis of the material conditions, combined with a phenomenological/existential exploration of the individual's choices and the reasons behind them. Of course, when Sartre talks about objective material conditions, he believes Marxism can provide an accurate description of them. I disagree, as do plenty of anthropologists and sociologists, no doubt, but that doesn't mean we should abandon a materialist, scientific approach to understanding attitudes and behaviour, only that we should be willing to weigh the evidence impartially, something that I believe Marxists are unable to do by virtue of the inflexibility of the demands that their theory places on their interpretation of the facts, a point that Sartre himself made against what he called "dogmatic Marxism". I just think we need to be especially conscious of the potential beam in our own eyes and the possibility that we are lending more weight to particular evidence as a result of our own prejudices.
Another point worth making: Once a worldview has such an internal consistency and coherence, it's almost impossible to break someone out of it. They will always sacrifice or diminish the value of countervailing evidence in favour of the chosen paradigm. It is far better to have, I think, not an incoherent or inconsistent worldview, but an incomplete one, one that is open to the possibility of revising the meaning of all evidence presented to date.
Agreed, mostly! I am currently writing an essay on why I believe Marx (in Capital) provides a useful anthropological theory of human behavioiur and thought. I'll wing it your way when it's done -- hopefully by the end of next month.
Cheers
Cheers, Stu. I'll look forward to that.
Two other points worth making, one of which was a flippant remark I made at Darren's place regarding a comment by Engels and the impossibility of separating or prioritizing the economic over the political, social, psychological, etc. Here
The other is Sartre's comment in the appendix to Existentialism is a Humanism, when he responds to criticism of the absence of existential angst in most human choices. He refers to humans' "originary choices," which is to say the fundamental, basic choices we make about how we are going to live our lives and which subsequently determine our responses to events and people we encounter. If we want to understand an individual's worldview, and why they interpret evidence in a particular way, one of the things we need to know and understand is how they conceptualize/conceive of themselves and their place in the world: What their originary choice was. Such a choice is difficult to give up, because it forms such a fundamental part of our identity. Someone who has called themselves a Marxist for 20 years has a lot of emotional investment in not surrendering that self-image. It's tantamount to an admission that they've wasted two decades of their life. Howeverr, it's also conceivable that humans could not function without such an originary choice, that constant angst would indeed be the consequence of a failure to commit.
Sorry John (and Darren), I missed that exchange in Darren's comments box, and I agree with John. Humans are symbolic creatures, and what they think and what they think they're doing are important aspects of what they are. Any 'marxist' materialism that misses that out is hopelessly one-sided.
And I agree too that changing our minds is difficult. A mental test I always use on myself is to ask, what would make me change my mind (hence the interest for me of that Edge question)? If I can't think of anything, time to think some more!
Stuart--
You might want to check out Michael Albert's Unorthodox Marxism. Even though it was written years ago, it covers much of the same ground we're discussing here. I read it just before Christmas after I read Albert's fascinating autobiography, Remembering Tomorrow, and I've resisted sending it on to you only because I haven't yet got over its insights and don't yet want to part with such an amazing book!
You can see what Albert's been up to in the intervening years at Z magazine and the link to ParEcon in our blogroll. I wouldn't really categorize his thought as Marxist since it's so close to what I would recognize as anarchism, but you may feel differently.
No, I know next to nothing about Michael Albert. I will indeed check him out, sounds interesting. Cheers
Thinking about what you're saying John, do you believe that there can be an undogmatic Marxism (actually, I wonder did Sartre believe there could be?). For my money I go with those like Andre Gorz who were Marxist then pointed out some fairly obvious flaws and while retaining a class analysis tilted towards an admixture of other issues, perhaps predominantly Green. I guess I'd put it this way. Although I don't agree with many who cleave to a Marxist viewpoint - or have held such a viewpoint but moved somewhat away - I tend to trust them slightly more than those who don't or didn't. I'm sure that is due to a commonality of discourse. And I tend to extend that to many/most on the left from anarchist to social democratic again presumably because of the commonality. But I suspect that's as futile and self-serving as the sort of systems of belief that you point up in your post. :(
Hi WBS--
As someone who was "trained in Marxism" (by which I mean the A Level Sociology I was taught practically preached Marxism as the best possible interpretation of social facts), it took me a long time to unlearn what I'd been taught and taken on trust. I, too, would be more inclined to trust social commentators who have come from a "class struggle" tradition, but I would find myself distrusting anyone who had maintained a rigidly Marxist outlook over any great length of time.
As to whether there can be an undogmatic Marxism: One of the points David Graeber makes in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (or whatever it's called) is that anarchism lacks any single guru: The anarchists I know have a pick n mix attitude - "I like this in Bakunin but disagree with all that, I like a lot of Kropotkin but disagree with that, I like what Malatesta says here, but all that is rubbish," and so on. It's perfectly acceptable to have this attitude and still call oneself an anarchist. Whereas, it's impossible to call oneself a Marxist and then say "Well, I agree with this bit in Marx about class struggle, but I disagree with all that bollocks about Hegel and the dialectic, about the labour theory of value (maybe), about historical materialism, about the priority of the economic infrastructure over the the superstructure," and so on. You've pretty much got to accept the baggage, else how are you a Marxist and not some other kind of communist?
When I referred above to the value of an incomplete worldview, I had in mind the arguments advanced by Claud lefort, Habermas, and the frankfurt School against so-called "totalizing" worldviews that have an answer for everything. Once you have an entirely consistent, coherent worldview, outside of which there is nothing that cannot be explained, the temptation to totalitarianism is inevitable. It applies, I think, to Marxism, to Islam, to any philosophy of everything. If I've understood these thinkers correctly, and there's no guarantee of that, for Lefort, this is why there must always be space for opposition, why democracy is essential; for Habermas, it points up the necessity of dialog, of an Other to provide a contrary viewpoint; and for the Frankfurters like Adorno, it means resisting cultural forms that offer themselves "completely," without space that needs to be filled in by the audience. To the extent that Marxism is regarded as having the answer to everything, then, it has to be regarded as dogmatic. What would an undogmatic Marxism look like? I'd suggest that it would look a lot like anarchism.
But then I would, wouldn't I? ;-)
I'd also go along with you on the Gorz thing. I've only read him over the past couple of years, and then the eejit topped himself, but some of his ideas strike me as very interesting indeed.
I should add that there are plenty in the anarchist milieu who have not come from that "class struggle" approach and who do not include any form of class analysis in their "anarchism." I'd be suspicious of them too!
If you accept the whole Marxist package, then you must be a dogmatist of the worst kind – very much like those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, even all the bits that contradict the other bits. Marx contradicted himself and changed his mind, so how is it possible to accept it all?! Use the dialectic, I suppose!
Heh heh heh. Indeed. But why would someone call themselves a Marxist if they don't agree with what is distinctive about Marx's theory? I've often said that what is original in Marx's thought is wrong, and what is right in his thought isn't original. I just say it to wind up Marxists, of course, but for someone to call themselves a Marxist and not accept the specifics - even the contradictory bits - is a bit like someone calling themselves a Christian and then saying, "Mind you, I don't believe in the Sermon on the Mount or the Resurrection. Just the bits about God and the Last Supper."
Of course, it's difficult to know where to draw the line: Kurt Vonnegut said he regarded the Sermon on the Mount as the most wonderful of speeches and a fine philosophy to live by, but I doubt he would ever have called himself a Christian!
I've just this minute read an article about a Christian hedge-fund manager. He must have skimmed past the bit about camels and needles!
I suppose I still call myself a Marxist because the common wisdom is that Marx got everything wrong, or is outdated. My opinion is that he got everything right, in the essentials, and couldn't be more relevant in our globalising, capitalist world.
Academic Anthony Brewer goes as far as to say that anyone who wants to understand the modern world must read Capital. I agree with him more than I disagree!
post-Marxist anyone? I'm thinking reading what you say John that my Marxism is of the most residual sort. It's sort of pinned into a sector delineated by Gorz, Rudolf Bahro and ... er... some sort of wishy washy New Times/Marxism Today approach, yikes!
Hi WBS--
Nothing to be ashamed of! A lot of the post-Marxists came to their conclusions after having to work their way through Marx and coming out the other side, either because they felt he wasn't relevant to new circumstances, or because history had thrown up new evidence to falsify his theories, or because they realized that fundamental aspects of his theory didn't square with how the world works, while other interpretations appeared to be more reasonable or perhaps had implications that were less immoral.
Hi Stuart--
academics, eh! What do they know? ;-)
Still, even if Brewer was right about Capital, I'd stand by my flippant comment: Whatever is accurate in it - the facts, figures, statistics - has come from other sources, whereas what is inaccurate and fundamentally wrong - Marx's own synthesis of those facts, the categories he uses, the law of value, the materialist dialectic, and so on - is all Marx's own work. So many facts marshalled to such a misleading conclusion!
I'm not suggesting that mainstream economists are any better, of course. On the contrary, I'd have more time for the post-Marxists that WBS cites, because at least they've grasped that much that is wrong with Marx's theory applies equally well to classical economics, which is precisely why so many of them moved "Greenwards" - namely, that the inseparability of the economic sphere from political, environmental, racial, and gender spheres means that it isn't possible to construct valid laws that apply to just one sphere in the real world; of course, the appearance of having done so can be achieved, but only by abstracting from reality, and that's precisely what Marx and the classical economists do.
I have a friend who is an academic -- a historian of economic thought. And he detests economists. But, he says, whenever he goes to conferences, he spends most of his time defending the economists he detests because they're more right than the people who dismiss them as irrelevant. Much like Marx and his socialist contemporaries, I guess, who dismissed political economy, while Marx hailed it.
Not only do I believe that it is possible to abstract from reality to come up with a model of it, I believe it's impossible not to! Unless, that is, we are to give up entirely on the notion that it is possible to have a science of society. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that it is.
For my defence of the law of value, however, you'll have to wait till I've finished the essay I mentioned. I'm sure you're on the edge of your seat!
Cheers
Hi Stuart--
I can't wait!!
My point about abstracting from reality isn't that we shouldn't do it (I'll leave aside for the moment whether or not we can avoid doing it) but that there is always the inherent danger that any abstraction we make actually bears no connection to the real world. For one thing, relations between abstractions may very well have laws of their own independent of the laws of relations between things. Moreover, in the case of Marx, by taking one sphere or class of qualities in isolation, (i.e. the economic sphere in his case), it's possible to construct a pure, Platonic system governed by clear "necessary" rules. But those rules will ONLY apply to the abstract ideal world that has been constructed and never in the real world, because in the real world it isn't possible to isolate and separate out qualities the way we can in our heads. In other words, Marxism represents, for me, a wonderful thought experiment and nothing more than that. When it's tested against reality, it comes up short time and again because the categories and definitions he uses simply don't correspond to items in the world
As a case in point, Marx's definitions of feudalism and capitalism, as critiqued in Jack Goody's book. It's hardly Marx's fault that so much historical evidence has turned up with regards to social development in both Western European and Eastern countries since he wrote Capital but the evidence that has appeared highlights the inadequacies of his categories.
This is a genuinely fascinating discussion. Any pointers then to texts (other than the ones mentioned ) to construct a post-Marxist leftism? I have to admit that it runs very much with the grain of my thinking... but again, it's problematic if only because many of the vehicles for actually dealing with the social systems we live in seem to be finely honed from a Marxist (or even sub-Marxist perspective in the case of social democracy) perspective which might just explain why they fail and fail again.
Hi WBS--
I genuinely would know where to begin! one of the problems with an incomplete worldview is that it's constantly under revision (although that's what I think a post-Marxist left actually should be willing to do).
If I had to identify one book that, in recent years, has struck me as offering something genuinely hopeful, ethical, and relevant, it would have to be Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. It isn't relevant to every topic that the anti-authoritarian Left needs to discuss, but it immediately came to mind the moment I read your post. I'll go back now through my bookshelves and see what else might be there. And if anyone has any suggestions, my hunger for more reading matter doesn't need any encouragement! ;-)
Ooh, I see David Graeber has a new book out: Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. I'd definitely recommend his stuff, even though it's a bit heavy going and difficult to understand in places (and relevant in only the most theoretical of ways).
Of course, these are really the books that are interesting me at this point in time. How relevant they are to the construction of a new Left remains to be seen, but if Schell and Graeber are anything to go by, then other people are already doing that. :-)
Obviously, that was meant to read "I genuinely wouldn't know where to begin."
Freudian slit.
And, of course, since we've already mentioned him, Michael Albert's Parecon.
I agree with John: Graeber is excellent. Perhaps I may suggest you start with his article in the excellent new journal here:
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/journal.htm
I also agree that, of course, subsequent scholarship and developments mean that we must ditch much of what is in Marx. It would be pretty extraordinary if that weren't the case!
And I agree that the test of whether an abstract model is any use is the extent to which it can explain reality. You say Marx's doesn't. I say it does. Which leaves me with the challenge of saying why. I'll try to take up that challenge in the essay.
By the way, one of the reasons I love The Economist magazine is that it is economic-determinist, without being gloomy or cynical about political action. And they're talking to the people who rule the world, so I'm sure there must be something in this!
Cheers
Hi Stuart--
You think I haven't downloaded that before now?!!! ;-)
That's an interesting point about the Economist, Stuart. As someone who is required by his job to read every issue of Forbes, Fortune and Business Week (pity me!), what often strikes me is how reactive rather than pro-active so many of the so-called "masters of the universe" are. Their business have to respond to ideological developments in the world (the rise of feminism, Islamic fundamentalism) demographic and social developments (the increase in education leading to a decline in the birth-rate), political developments (conflicts between nation-staes concerned about access to resources or shifts in the balance of power), not to mention more traditionally "economic" problems such as worker's autonomous activities and resistance, as well as any number of other unpredictable natural occurrences. They do everything they can to manage or control these things, but at every point they meet with some degree of resistance. My point being, I suppose, that to call them the rulers of the world endows them with too much power, one of Jonathan Schell's points in The Unconquerable World. They might have the upper hand in some respects, but the battle is never-ending; their domination is never uncontested, secure, or complete, nor indeed can it be.
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