Cue Claude Raines.
Okay, to be fair, it was a a two-bit phrase for collective close-mindedness, whose coiner, Julian Sanchez, a Cato libertarian, distinguished it thus in a summing-up post:
What I had meant to describe specifically was the construction of a full-blown alternative media ecosystem, which has been become more self-sufficient and self-contained as it's become more interconnected....Also, perhaps slightly less obviously, the "closure" I'm talking about is above all a collective or systemic property, not a property of individuals: It is not primarily about the propensity of conservative persons to be "closed-minded" or "dogmicatically rigid" or anything like that.? I wasn't really trying to coin a phrase in the original post, but this was part of my rationale for not going with these more familiar terms. Closure is the universal tendency toward confirmation bias plus a sufficiently large array of multimedia conservative outlets to constitute a complete media counterculture, plus an overbroad ideological justification for treating mainstream output as intrinsically suspect.
(Of course, the discussion did not stay limited to Sanchez's original meaning, but thanks in part to his persistence, the addition of related topics did not overwhelm his original focus.)
Since the discussion was primarily centered on the right, there was naturally a sort of bias to the entire discussion that placed some rather noticeable limits on it. For example, not a whole lot of discussion of the large academic literature on cognitive factors contributing to a substantial assymmetry between rightwing tribalism and close-mindedness and it's pale leftwing immitation, much less the tribalism and close-mindedness of the center. Still, there were some rather insightful observations, particularly in the post that started it all, "Frum, Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt" (by Sanchez), a bit less so in the follow-up "Epistemic Closure, Technology, and the End of Distance" (which did feature an interesting section on the culture-shock impact of how Facebook served to turn the tables on local homophobes mocking and attacking Constance McMillen, the teenage lesbian in Fulton, Mississippi who sued to attend the high school prom with her girlfriend), and in "Liberty and Tyranny and Epistemic Closure", a scathing review of conservative best-seller Liberty and Tyranny, by Jim Manzi at National Reviews "The Corner", focused intently on its chapter on global warming:
I get that people often want comfort food when they read. Fair enough. But if you're someone who read this book in order to?help you form an honest opinion about global warming, then you were suckered. Liberty?and Tyranny does not present a reasoned overview of the global warming debate; it doesn't even present a reasoned argument for a specific point of view, other than that of willful ignorance. This section of the book is an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.
Commenting from outside the fold--and drawing on several others' insights--Jonathan Chait's "The Great Epistemic Closure Debate" also covered a few extra bases.
But if I might summarize, I found three things largely missing. First, as already mentioned, was the 60 years or so of cognitive science research, starting with the obviously crude Authoritarian Personality in 1950 and running right up to the present, with a pretty good summary overview back in 2003 in the meta-analysis "Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition". Second was the lack of a determinedly multi-causal approach. As so often happens, most of the discussion was slanted toward advocacy of single primary causes on the one side, versus outright denial on the other. This is not to say that people weren't open to multiple causes, they just tended to heavily favor one above all others--at least in terms of arguments presented. The third problem was the lack of a particularly convincing answer to the question, "Why Now. If Now?
Epistemic Closure Is Nothing NewI've written before--will shortly write more--about the first two short-comings. (In particular, more about "Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" this week.) So for now, I' like to concentrate on the last of these, which actually has two distinct aspects. First of all, I would argue that there's nothing at all new about epistemic closure on the right. Indeed, there's an entire major stream of Western conservatism, derived from Joseph de Maistre and those allied with him, which is all about defending epistemic closure and denouncing open-mindedness and critical inquiry--either overtly or covertly. How's this for a defense of epistemic closure as opposed to critical inquiry:
Unlike earlier monarchists, Maistre did not simply invoke the divine right of kings, but also argued for the social utility of the belief in such a divine right: any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to the questioning of those grounds and to unsolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government. This, in turn, will lead to violence and chaos. The social legitimacy of government must therefore be based on compelling non-rational grounds, which its subjects should not be willing (or allowed) to question. Furthermore, all government must ultimately depend on a single, supreme authority, not subject to any appeal. For Maistre, such ultimate authority had to be tied to religion, and could in Europe only be provided by the person of the Pope.
A popular narrative closely related to Maistre's position was the myth of the Bavarian Illuminati--in real life, a politically powerless secret (because of potential political repression) salon of intellectuals, but in a conservative mythology the shadow elite of Rosecucians and other religious non-conformists who conspired to destroy European civilization by destroying the authority of the divine right of kings. Although it had antecedents stretching back thousands of years, this narrative's popularity and political importance made it in many ways the fountainhead of all modern conspiracy theories. It was popular amongst Federalists after they lost the watershed election of 1800, even though there was no trace of the Bavarian Illuminati in America, but it became the template for the later emergence of the Anti-Masonic movement, which even became the foundation for America's first third party, and which enjoyed a resurgence in 1990s as part of the welter of conspiricism that erupted around the militia movement and the Republican's 1994 congressional election victories.
The right has never stopped weaving its reality-denying fantasies, frauds and cons, and promulgating them through various propaganda media as far and wide as possible. Of course there's considerable fluctuation throughout the years and from country to country as to how these efforts play out, and how they interact with other politiccal developments. But the presence of collective close-mindedness on the right, supported by a conservative movement infrastructure (however weak or strong it may be at different times) is pretty much a constant feature of Western politics since at least the French Revolution.
What's Different Now: The Epic Fail of Conservatism
What's different now--getting into the second aspect--is not so much the growth in conservative media scope and insularity (exponential growth always dwarfs what came before), but rather the fact that this has bothered certain conservatives (or libertarian fellow-travellers) enough that even they are complaining about it. That's what really needs explaining here. Fortunately, I think that the explanation is blindingly obvious: the utter and catastrophic failure of the conservative project, which up till now has been able to hide itself behind the cannibalization of achievements built up over decades of liberal governance (1933-1968) and its mostly moderate aftermath (1969-1980 in some respects, 1969-1994 in others). While epistemological closure may be strong enough to shield most on the right from this reality, it cannot do so without considerable strain. The simultaneous failures of 9/11 and the "War on Terror" response as well as the Reaganite deregulatory, financial and social agendas have simply proven to be too much to handle without an epic break from reality, involving the wholesale demonization of Barack Obama and similarly-minded Democrats whose policy positions are generally to the right of George Bush, Sr., and sometimes even to the right of George Bush, Jr. (drone assassinations of American citizens, anyone?)
When the Heritage Foundation's rightwing alternative to Clinton's corporatist health care reform is hysterically rejected as socialist death panels--and that was but the most prominent example--cognitive dissonance somewhere on the right was almost inevitagble. Add that to the unicorn-like status of conservative policy solutions (see, for example, the myriad non-existent GOP budget proposals with numbers that add up), and some conservatives with an ounce of remaining interest in actually governing are bound to feel a certain unease. Sanchez put it like this:
It's fair to ask why a libertarian would burn cycles on this when it's the left that's high in the saddle, growing government and guarding the executive's prerogatives as zealously as Bush ever did. The answer is that, while I've never called myself a conservative, I'd like there to be a functioning opposition to that--an opposition that's capable of governing if it gets good enough at opposing. I think Ramesh Ponnuru nails it in a videoblog with Jon Chait: A closed right stops being concerned with persuading? outsiders by serious argument and contents itself with revving up the base.
Of course, ever since 1929 conservatives have manifestly shown that they aren't capable of governing, and really aren't even interested in it. They're interested in ruling, which is something altogether different, deeply implicated in hegemonic warfare, and the exercise of raw power.
None of the concerns about governing make a damn bit of difference when it comes to campaigning, of course. Campaigning, as conservatives well know, is all about mythos and nothing to do with logos. Give folks a comforting view of the world and what it means, and you can coast to victory. It doesn't matter a damn how realistic it is. In fact, in certain situations, the more unrealistic, the better. When the truth hurts, nothing is more popular than being anti-truth. It even beats being anti-the people who caused the hurt in the first place.
Such is the wisdom of mice with human brains. They know whereof the cheese doth come. However poisonous it may ultimately be.
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