On Political Humility and Scepticism

How much political knowledge do we really have?

I have previously written about political knowledge, or the lack of it. This post is about another book, Blake Roeber’s Political Humility: The Limits of Knowledge in Our Partisan Political Climate, which argues for scepticism about political knowledge. As Roeber puts it:

“This book defends a conclusion that I sincerely wish were false … we have very little political knowledge” (p. 10).

What does “political” mean here? Roeber’s definition is, read literally, quite strange:

“By ‘political,’ I mean something specific. I mean useful to either the Democrats or Republicans for capturing or maintaining political power” (p. 10).

If we assume, charitably, that Roeber recognises that people who don’t think about American politics have political beliefs, then we get a more sensible definition: political knowledge would be knowledge that is useful to political parties or factions for capturing or maintaining political power. His claim is that we have very little of this sort of knowledge.

This is a conclusion with which I, by and large, agree; indeed, I have defended an argument for scepticism about political knowledge which is very similar to Roeber’s. But I have come to be a bit dissatisfied with the route by which I—and by extension Roeber—reach our sceptical conclusions. Let me start by explaining how Roeber reaches his sceptical conclusions, before explaining why I don’t think his argument can take him as far as he thinks it can. (If you want a slightly different take on Roeber’s book, check out this post by my fellow Substacker Michael Hannon).

Roeber’s Argument

Roeber’s argument is very simple.

First, we form our political beliefs by relying on testimony (on what others tell us about political matters). The “expert” (the economist, the political scientist, the statistician) is not in a fundamentally different position from the ordinary citizen. Any expert is going to have to rely on the testimony of other experts. If I want to get statistics on immigration and its impact on the economy, I need to rely on data, reports, and other forms of evidence produced by others, and the people producing that data will, in turn, need to rely on others. (And so on). The same goes for the journalist, for whom “fact-checking” really just means checking one report of what “the facts” are against other reports.

Second, political testimony is unreliable. There are several reasons why political testimony is unreliable. The first is that people often have an incentive to lie or bullshit about politics: to say things we know are not true (lying) or don’t care whether they are true (bullshitting) in order to advance our political aims as we see them (to defend our favoured party, to destroy our political enemies in debate, to convince people to vote the way we want them to). The second is that it is hard to have true political beliefs even if we sincerely care about the truth of our political beliefs: truly understanding things like the economy, immigration or foreign policy is difficult. The third is that, as Roeber puts it, we are “incapable of thinking straight about political issues” (p. 52): we are subject to myriad biases and prone to identity-protective cognition or motivated reasoning (reasoning in ways designed to preserve our political identities). Both the second and the third reasons lead to the same conclusion: political testimony is unreliable because many of our political beliefs are simply false.

Third, we lack the ability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable political testimony. While Roeber spends less time on this part of his argument than the first two parts, it is important. The fact that political testimony is unreliable wouldn’t matter that much if we were good at discriminating between reliable and unreliable political testimony. But Roeber thinks we are not good at it, for much the same reasons that he thinks that political testimony is unreliable: we aren’t very good at detecting lies and bullshit, discriminating between reliable and unreliable political testimony is also hard, and—perhaps most importantly—we are often motivated not to really try. Rather than setting aside our political convictions and objectively evaluating political testimony, we tend to pick and choose according to whether the testimony supports our existing political convictions (which, remember, Roeber thinks are likely to be wrong).

Roeber concludes that we have very little political knowledge. As he puts it:

“People simply aren’t trustworthy when they are talking about politics. They aren’t trustworthy as speakers, because they’re too likely to say false things, and they aren’t trustworthy as listeners, because they are too likely to believe false things” (p. 61).

You (yes you, the reader) might think “quite right; people are really stupid when it comes to politics”. You might think this because you think you are less prone to bias and identity-protective cognition than other people. Or you might think this because—at least when it comes to certain political matters—you are an expert. But Roeber intends his conclusion to apply to everyone. Or at least he intends it to apply to almost everyone. He certainly thinks it applies to anyone who is a partisan of a political party, and that includes many subject-matter experts.

I think that Roeber’s conclusion is a bit too strong. I’m not convinced that his argument can be extended to experts as easily as he thinks it can, and I suspect there are quite a lot of people who do not approach politics in the way he seems to assume (political partisans are ubiquitous in political discussions and debates because political discussions and debates attract political partisans, not because everyone is a political partisan). Still, I think his argument might support a weaker conclusion that is still interesting and worth considering: we have far less political knowledge than we typically assume. In the rest of this post I will raise two concerns for Roeber’s argument, which will arise whether we use it to establish my weaker conclusion or his stronger one.

Two Kinds of Political Scepticism

While Roeber has several reasons for thinking that we have very little political knowledge, it is very clear that the main reason is that we do not inhabit a political climate that is conducive to “thinking straight” about politics. At least in the contemporary US (and Roeber’s book is incredibly focused on the contemporary US), political issues are closely connected with questions of cultural and social identity, with the result that we typically engage in politics as a way of preserving and maintaining our cultural and social identities.

For what it’s worth, I think he’s largely right about this, though at least outside the US it doesn’t necessarily take the form of aligning with specific political parties (I know a lot of people with leftish politics—I’m an academic—but I don’t know many people who really *identify* with the UK Labour party, or for that matter with any political party). Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Roeber’s defence of scepticism has a hopeful note to it:

“our political speech would be much more reliable if we did not identify with our politics. In a political climate where we do not identify with our politics, trusting someone who is talking about politics might resemble trusting someone who is telling you her name more than it resembles trusting someone in a poker game. In this political climate, there would be much less reason to worry about our political beliefs” (p. 77).

If the main reason why we lack political knowledge is simply that we identify too much with politics, then it stands to reason that, in a world where we identify with politics less, we will have more political knowledge.

I must admit I am not really sure what it would mean to identify with politics less. If political knowledge is fundamentally knowledge that is relevant to holding on to or gaining political power, then refraining from identifying with politics would be tantamount to refraining from caring about whether you have any political power; not an attractive option for many people, I suspect. But perhaps Roeber has something a little easier in mind. The book very much gives the impression that the problem is not so much caring about politics as identifying with political parties, so perhaps it’s enough to tear up your membership card and stop viewing being “into politics” as akin to supporting a football team.

Anyway, my real issue with this is that I’m not convinced that the main reason we lack political knowledge is that we identify too much with politics. I am more inclined to think that the main reason is simply that political knowledge—or at least the sort of political knowledge that Roeber focuses on in his book—is just hard to obtain.

Roeber’s view seems to be that the fundamental difficulty in political epistemology is not with the subject matter (the body of facts out there waiting to be understood) but with the subject (the person or people trying to understand the facts). My view is that, while there are difficulties on the subjective side, the fundamental difficulty is with the subject matter. Political knowledge is (or would be, if we had any) knowledge of the social world—knowledge of human relations, of how societies work, of how the economy works, and so on. I think that knowledge of the social world is orders of magnitude more difficult to obtain than knowledge of the natural world.

One of Roeber’s recurrent examples of (the failure of) political knowledge is knowledge about the impact of increasing the minimum wage on employment rates. The way Roeber tells it, the main obstacle to knowledge here is that one side will interpret the evidence (whatever the evidence is) in such a way as to support increases to the minimum wage whereas the other side will interpret the evidence in such a way as to not support an increase. But another obstacle is the fact that most people haven’t got a clue what the evidence is, much less evaluate it. For the economists, who presumably can evaluate the evidence, there is the difficulty of fitting economic models in which, when the minimum wage goes up, employment goes down to the real world where real actors (employers) might not react to increases in the minimum wage in the way that economists expect. Even if someone can work through all these difficulties and achieve knowledge, it is not going to be easy, even setting aside any bias on the part of economists. (This is a simplified version of an argument from this excellent book).

Another of his recurrent examples is knowledge about the impact of immigration on the economy. Again, the way Roeber tells it, the main obstacle is that each side will interpret the evidence in a way that fits with what they already think. One side will argue, citing various bits of evidence, that immigration is bad for the economy, or at least for certain parts of the economy; the other will argue, citing different bits of evidence, that it is good for the economy, or at least certain parts of it. (The fact that these views are not necessarily inconsistent with each other will not occur to anyone on either side). But, again, another obstacle is the fact that most people haven’t got a clue what the evidence is, or how to evaluate it. Those who can evaluate the evidence are going to face similar issues to economists when they try to compare their economic models with the real world. Even if they can figure it all out, it will take a lot of work to do so, even setting aside any bias on the part of the experts.

A good way to distinguish between Roeber’s view and mine would be to imagine what would happen if we get to the point Roeber would like us to reach: our political climate is now one in which people no longer identify with their politics, or at least they do not do so to anything like the same extent. Is this a world where we have a lot more political knowledge than we do right now? I would certainly expect there to be a lot more agreement on certain political issues. But your views on whether there will really be a lot more political knowledge are probably going to align with your views about the prospects for the social sciences becoming more like the natural sciences. As a sceptic, albeit a somewhat half-hearted one (hence why I prefer my weaker conclusion to Roeber’s stronger one), my best guess is that you’d have more political knowledge in this imagined future, but not a huge amount more. This is because the fundamental obstacle to political knowledge is not our propensity to biased and motivated reasoning but the inherent difficulty of knowing anything about the social world.

Political Humility

Roeber thinks there are important practical consequences that follow from his conclusion. First, because we have very little political knowledge, we should have very few political beliefs. The basic thought is intuitive: if, after reading Roeber’s book, you are convinced by his argument that it is very difficult to get political knowledge, you should abandon your existing political beliefs (because they are very likely false) and refrain from forming any new ones (because they will most likely be false).

Second, this does not mean we should refrain from engaging in politics. But it does mean that we should engage in politics in a different way. We should engage carefully, and with a high degree of humility. For example, we shouldn’t go around loudly proclaiming our political beliefs (because we shouldn’t have many political beliefs). But we can go around making what Roeber calls “educated guesses”: instead of saying “these tarifs will seriously damage the economy” we should say things like “I think that these tarifs will seriously damage the economy, based on what I’ve read by various economists”. We also might want to consider whether we should vote in elections, if none of the candidates have platforms that appeal to us, and focus on forms of political action other than voting (or telling people what we think).

It is hard to disagree with a lot of this. We are prone to over-confidence, especially when it comes to politics. It is hard to spend much time on social media, or at least the corners of social media where people talk about politics, without recognising that one of the basic problems is that the people who spend the most time talking about politics often know very little about anything. Or at least very little about substantive political issues. A lot of “talking about politics” is really just talking about what other people are saying about politics: the stupid thing your political opponent just said, the media circus around certain prominent politicians, the tweet that expresses an opinion so stupid or downright mad that no reasonable person could really think it.

One objection to Roeber’s call for more humility is that it will be heeded by those who don’t need to hear it, and ignored by those who do. As W.B. Yeats wrote, in more poetic language:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

The post on Roeber’s book I mentioned earlier, by Michael Hannon, expands on this point. I agree with Michael that we might need the best to retain a bit of arrogance, if only to balance out the passionate intensity of the worst.

Another objection, and the one I want to focus on, concerns how we think about humility. Roeber seems to think of humility as a matter of the degree of confidence with which we hold our political attitudes: the humble person may have some political opinions—or educated guesses—but they don’t have much confidence in them. If they’re a Bayesian, they might attach figures to their attitudes and say things like “I’m 0.6 on lab leak”. If they’re normal, they’ll just say things like “I think it is likely that Covid escaped from a lab, but I’m not sure”. What they will not say is something like “We know that Covid escaped from a lab” or just “Covid escaped from a lab”.

This is a perfectly sensible way to think of humility, but it doesn’t lend itself well to practical advice. The problem is that, if trying to be humbler means trying to lower your degree of confidence, it is very hard to properly calibrate your degrees of confidence. You need to avoid having a degree of confidence that is too high, given your actual evidence, but you also need to avoid having a degree of confidence that is too low, given that evidence. Roeber’s book is addressed to someone who is in the first position: they are far more confident that, say, immigration is good for the economy than they should be given their actual evidence. But I worry that someone who is convinced by his arguments is liable to become less confident of all sorts of things than they should be.

Imagine someone who is encountering these sceptical arguments for the first time: they have never even considered that their thinking about politics might be biased, or driven by their social and cultural identity. If they are convinced by Roeber’s arguments, they are liable to go too far in the other direction—to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and give up on the prospects of having any good grounds for their political attitudes.

Let me suggest an analogy to try and make this point clearer. (It is quite a close analogy, so hopefully this will work). Think back to when you first heard about the heuristics and biases tradition in psychology: confirmation bias, the availability and representativeness heuristic, and all that stuff. If you were anything like me, you jumped from accepting (if only implicitly) a naively optimistic picture of human rationality to accepting an overly pessimistic picture. It takes time—and a good bit of careful thinking—to arrive at a more measured view of things. Even then, it is hard to be particularly confident that you have got the balance right. Calibration is hard, both when it comes to taking on board the lessons of the heuristics and biases tradition and when it comes to recognising the human propensity to engage in identity protective cognition.

There is another way of thinking of humility that might avoid this problem. We can think of humility not in terms of having a low degree of confidence in your beliefs (or guesses) but rather in terms of the stance you take towards those beliefs. On this understanding, the humble person can have many political beliefs, held with whatever degree of confidence they think is merited, but recognise that many of those beliefs may well be false. Crucially, though, this is not because they can pinpoint which of these beliefs are false (if they could, they would be in the somewhat incoherent position of believing both that, say, immigration is good for the economy and that their belief that immigration is good for the economy is probably false). They know that many of their beliefs are likely false, but they can’t say which ones.

This sort of humility may well be better supported by Roeber’s argument than the sort he advocates for. Roeber’s sceptical arguments are based on general considerations about political beliefs: how we get them, why they will often be false, and so on. They are not, on the whole, based on reasons for thinking that any particular political beliefs are likely to be false. This makes it difficult to know what we should conclude about the particular political attitudes we happen to hold. Should I, after reading Roeber’s book, downgrade my confidence in all my political attitudes by the same amount? Should I look at each attitude individually and decide what to do with it? Far simpler to instead just recognise that, while I may have my political beliefs, many of them are very likely going to turn out false, but not for reasons that really help me to adjust my degree of confidence in any particular attitude.