Loyalty, Not Merit; Confidence, Not Data

The fight for common sense in everyday life, after social science

The western bourgeois notion of respectable opinion was invented 200 years ago by the French intellectual Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Among other things, Comte is the founding father of sociology. His key contribution to modern thought is the philosophical concept of positivism: a method in which the truth of any idea can be measured by formulating a statement by which it could be—but isn’t—shown to be demonstrably false. Why or how is X happening? Could it be this? (No.) That? (No.) This other thing? (Nope.) The best remaining possibility, then, is Y.

In crystallizing this style of thinking, Comte laid the foundations for what we have come to know as social science. This was an intellectual project designed to confer the clarity and legitimacy of mathematics and the hard sciences upon the realm of human behavior. So it is that we have disciplines like economics, political science, and a series of subfields in psychology—all hatched and developed in research universities that displaced liberal arts colleges at the vanguard of intellectual life. 

It quickly became apparent that developing airtight notions of, say, anthropology, would be a much trickier proposition than discerning the laws of quantum physics (as elusive as that could be). But for 150 years now that hasn’t stopped scholars from trying—with some real success, however finite and mutable. And their ideas have sometimes filtered into common discourse.

In an important sense, the real achievement of positivism was less an evolving set of intellectual conventions than the way it shaped notions of reality for what was regarded as intelligent opinion in everyday life. From the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth there were shared principles by which ideas could be articulated and legitimated. This involved positivist building blocks like evidence, expert opinion, and empirical forms of measurement. The results might be less decisive than those who invoked them might hope—what evidence and which experts could be the rub—but such were the tools by which one could, and should, build consensus for a particular climate of opinion.

The force and appeal of this way of thinking—secular, empirical, meritocratic—obscures how novel it really was in the wider sweep of human civilization. For thousands of years, the authority and legitimacy of any number of societies has rested on alternative propositions, whether as a matter of religious doctrine, dynastic succession, or the primacy of family in determining rights, responsibilities, and policy. These criteria have persisted in various forms. But the positivistic, social science framework has held the upper hand in terms of credible opinion for well over a century.

That moment may be ending.

One can see the signs in multiple arenas in American society. It’s discernible, for example, in the rise—and in some cases, the hegemony—of postmodern thought, which has long challenged positivism’s search for objective truth. This is apparent in some realms of gender ideology, where the sexual realities of biology are marginalized or ignored in the service of affirming subjective identities as a matter of preference or lived experience. But the most obvious domain in which one can see the summary rejection of positivist understandings of the world today is on the Trumpist Right, where we have a candidate who regularly reverses himself on matters of policy as well as his own factual statements. 

Actually, this competing notion of reality is most obvious in trying to understand the appeal of Donald Trump in the first place. For most people since the era of Andrew Jackson (the best antecedent to Trump in the way he overthrew the Establishment of the Founders’ generation), a man who brags about sexual assault would not be considered fit to lead its citizenry. Nor a man who refused to release his tax returns as a show of financial good faith. Or one who could be heard on a phone demanding a bribe in the form of investigating a rival as the price of helping a foreign leader. None of these are matters of social science, of course. But the basis upon which one would evaluate him—even more than as a matter of morality—would typically fall into the realm of categories like evidence, relevant precedents, and predictive outcomes from patterns of behavior. And on the basis of such criteria, he would have long since been deemed a bonfire in the making.

Clearly, the tens of millions of once and future Trump voters do not regard such considerations as primary. Instead, they are thinking in terms of things like loyalty, not merit; confidence, not data. It’s possible to imagine one making a case for Trump on the basis of statistics or a consistent ideological outlook. And there are some people who do—and, in some specific instances, can. (If you work in some segment of the fossil fuel industry, for example, this could well be the case.) But that is not the typical argument one hears for Trump. Instead, it’s about vibes, hopes, fears. 

Which is by no means stupid, or even necessarily wrong. At the end of the day even the most enlightened progressive is likely to fall back on such categories. (Remember: Barack Obama banked on Hope.) And, again: This is in fact what most people have done for most of human history—people who, on average, no more or less intelligent than we are. That anyone reading these words is likely to have a deep-rooted commitment to positivist form of thinking should not blind us to their peculiarity.

If, then, this avenue of communication is effectively blocked to us as a matter of civic discourse, what do we do? The obvious alternative has always been a moral one—more specifically, a religious one. Secular progressives often underestimate the degree to which religious values gird their own worldviews. (Go ahead: Try and justify opposition to slavery without it.) But this raises another problem, namely the broad decline in religiosity generally in western societies, even its last bastion, the United States. 

This God-shaped hole is anthropological: Human beings need a sense of meaning, and will tend to fill it one way or another. (Marxism, which began as a science of history rooted in economics, was one option.) We’re at a peculiar moment when we’re losing faith not only in science but in faith itself. This seems unsustainable: Something will fill the void. Trumpism—increasingly cast in messianic overtones—is clearly one of the available options, embraced by evangelicals who betray the soul of their faith. Nor are the other alternatives likely to be pleasant. 

This is one of the times and ways history matters. For the last generation the American past has largely been treated as a cautionary tale of hatred and failure requiring active repudiation and articulating alternative mythologies. That can and should be part of the story. But, like the 1930s, when a revival of interest in American history accompanied, and justified, the response to the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism, we need a new Reconstruction and a language of renewal and reform to go with it. To squint through this dark glass and glimpse a path forward.

Jim Cullen teaches history at Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut. He is the author most recently of the third edition of Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen in American Life. 

^{Image: Wikimedia Commons}