Political conviction, intellectual humility, and quietism

ABSTRACT

In his overview of recent work on intellectual humility, Nathan Ballantyne (2021) highlights some of the potential ‘dark sides’ of intellectual humility (IH) and calls for a critical study of the ‘value-theory’ of IH. In this article, we sketch out three ways that IH may threaten political conviction. We end our response by arguing that some forms of IH include different kinds of quietism about political convictions, which do not necessarily equate with a lack of conviction.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidence
• conviction
• intellectual humility
• political psychology
• quietism

1. Humility and political conviction

Recent empirical work suggests that intellectual humility is associated with various desirable political goals: reduced affective polarization, fewer tendencies to derogate political outgroup members, a greater openness to learning about rival positions, and empathy for political opponents (cf., Bowes et al., 2020; Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Porter & Schumann, 2018; Johnson, 2020). Yet there appears to be a conflict between two democratic ideals: a healthy democracy needs citizens with convictions and, concurrently, humility (Lynch, 2020, p. 139).

The standard view is that intellectual humility (IH) and political conviction do not conflict. As Lynch says, ‘[i]ntellectual humility is not an opponent of conviction’ (2019, p. 150). Other representatives of the standard view are Pritchard (2021), Porter and Schumann (2018), and Krumrei-Mancuso and Newman (2020). We agree that IH does not automatically lead to hesitancy, apathy, and timidity. However, the standard view arguably ignores empirical and theoretical work indicating that IH does often result in apathy or lack of political conviction. In this article, we sketch out three ways that IH may threaten political conviction. We end our response by arguing that some forms of IH include different kinds of quietism about political convictions, which do not necessarily equate with a lack of conviction.

1.1 Exposure to diversity

Intellectually humble people may be more open to learning about rival positions and to befriending their political opponents; however, citizens also tend to become less politically engaged as a result of those interactions. Mutz (2006) presents this as a tension between ‘participatory’ and ‘deliberative’ democracy. She writes, ‘Although diverse political networks foster a better understanding of multiple perspectives on issues and encourages political tolerance, they discourage political participation’ (Mutz, 2006, p. 3). This indicates that humility can conflict with the democratic ideal of an engaged public. There seem to be difficult and unavoidable trade-offs, arguably obscured by a sanguine confidence in the compatibility of humility, conviction, and engaged publics (cf., Lynch, 2019, pp. 150–1).

We think this tension could be mitigated. We suspect that different disciplines use terms like ‘political engagement’ and ‘apathy’ in different ways, which leads to conceptual conflation. This means that certain prima facie conflicts may vanish upon clarification. For example, Mutz (2006, pp. 102–122) considers two explanations for why exposure to diverse perspectives tends to discourage political participation: It leads to intrapersonal uncertainty (where one is no longer confident in one’s belief) or it leads to interpersonal conflict (where one avoids taking sides on an issue to preserve social harmony). If political ambivalence is primarily due to social concerns, then IH may not diminish the strength of one’s political views. Further empirical research is needed to assess these different explanatory possibilities.

1.2 Empathy

Intellectual humility is taken to facilitate empathy, generally defined as the capacity to take on or share the perspective of another. Several positive moral and epistemic outcomes are seen to flow from enhanced empathy in politics (see, Hannon, 2020; Morrell, 2010). If democratic societies generally value empathy and political conviction, however, a further tension may come into view. Bailey (2018) argues that empathy typically compels us to see another’s perspective as fitting or appropriate in ways that may be in tension with our own convictions. We can manage this tension by rejecting the operative account of empathy in favour of another (see, Ratcliffe, 2017). Alternatively, we may seek finer distinctions between agreeing with, understanding, and endorsing some rival perspective. But suppose we take Bailey’s account on its own terms. We then have a tension: humility facilitates the deployment of empathy, which may lead one to agree with the perspectives of those with rival views to one’s own. Humility and conviction are once again strained.

We can distinguish between two claims: (a) empathy requires us to judge some target perspective as appropriate (to some degree), and (b) empathy inclines us to regard the target view as appropriate (to some degree). We can also ask for a more fine-grained spectrum of subtly different positions. Only on some accounts would empathy conflict with conviction. Moreover, there are other moral and epistemic values that structure how we can experience and evaluate different perspectives. My deep conviction in the sanctity of human life could be so foundational to my overall moral sensibility that it could not be threatened by my sincere empathy with those who feel driven to political violence (cf., Cassam, 2018).

1.3 Epistemic calibration

Many theorists maintain that intellectually humble people are better epistemically calibrated, viz. better able to assess the plausibility of evidence for their beliefs, and possess greater self-knowledge of their epistemic limitations (e.g., Hazlett, 2012; Snow, 1995). Of course, the well-calibrated person can have real conviction, since being epistemically conscientious need not entail a loss of conviction. Calibration and conviction can, in fact, reinforce one another (Kidd, 2016; Pritchard, 2020). The intellectually humble person who works hard to be well-calibrated can, therefore, have deep conviction in their political beliefs.

Attractive as this claim might be, it turns on the prior question of whether we are justified in having confidence in our political beliefs. We think that in many cases the answer should be ‘no’. Here are two epistemic defeaters for political belief that provide reasons to think one’s political beliefs are false (or likely to be false):

1. The immense epistemic complexity of many political problems (Friedman, 2019; Lippmann, 1922). For any issue one cares to choose, there are moral, social, economic, historic, political, and technological issues with stakeholders maintaining differing concerns and approaches, and all sorts of long-term uncertainties.

2. Many political beliefs cluster around two main camps, even though the issues are rationally orthogonal (Joshi, 2020). Since there is no plausible explanation why one political side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues, an intellectually humble person should regard the fact of clustering as an epistemic defeater for these beliefs. Orthogonality makes it likely those beliefs are the result of problematic irrelevant influences or a biased subset of evidence or both.

These two epistemic challenges are problems for all of us, not just the intellectually humble. But the humble may find these worries more salient due to their active effort to be well-calibrated (Deffler et al., 2016; Leary et al., 2017). Here, again, intellectual humility can threaten forms of political conviction.

We have briefly described three ways that intellectual humility might conflict with various kinds of political conviction. None of this shows that one cannot be humble and have political convictions, but we believe it challenges the sanguine confidence of the standard view.

2. Humility and quietism

In the second part of our response, we want to sketch out forms of political quietism based on other forms of intellectual humility. People have different stances: generally stable clusters of attitudes, commitments, beliefs, and styles of interpersonal interaction (cf., Van Fraassen, 2002). We want to suggest (a) there are distinct political stances that (b) are plural, (c) embed different kinds of intellectual humility, and (d) often take a quietist character. Political stances can be agonistic or cooperative, subtly nuanced or crudely polarized, and emotionally intense or coolly equanimous – and these are just some of the ways that stances could differ in their constituent attitudes, commitments, beliefs, and other features.

Conviction can express itself in a variety of different stances, making it a mistake to assume it must take the form of public declarations of robust certitude. It is also contestable whether conviction must involve active engagement or confrontation with the different convictions of rivals. Associating conviction with public and confrontational styles of political activity might actually be describing certain kinds of stance. To see why, we want to sketch out a different set of stances – those of political quietism.

A political quietist has different attitudes towards engagement, participation, debate, interaction with rivals, passionate expression of one’s values, and other staples of political life. A quietist may still value these things, yet at the same time have other values which serve to assuage the temptation to indulge in them. Some of these values concern certain kinds of intellectual humility that are often absent from modern political discourse.

2.1 Diffidence

Diffidence can be defined as a principled commitment to reserve – or cautiousness when it comes to taking on – epistemically complex goals or commitments. For a diffident person, the epistemic costs of participation are highly salient. Confronted with political events or decisions, they value the procedural epistemic virtues – like assiduousness, carefulness, and fairmindedness – that manifest epistemic conscientiousness (cf., Montmarquet, 1993, p. 23). The diffident go slowly, think carefully, and work diligently. This sets them against the modern tendencies towards rapid judgment on unfolding situations and the self-serving tendency to ‘attribute to our enemies a homogeneity which in fact they do not possess’ (Oakeshott, 2004, p. 162).

2.2 Reticence

Reticence entails a principled reluctance to debate complex or charged issues due to appreciation of the epistemic demands of preparing for and performing such debates (Smith, 2006, 2016). The reticent are reluctant to any underprepared participation in debates about topics which are complex or contentious. They will confine themselves to a well-defined set of issues, insisting on sufficient time to prepare for debate as a condition of participation, using all of this to create a guard against what Hume called ‘enthusiasm’, the zealousness typical of those ‘excited by novelty’ and ‘animated by opposition’ (Hume, 1994, p. 48). A reticent person could still voice and defend positions, of course, but they resist offering snap judgments, incautious ‘hot takes,’ and ‘universal punditry’ (Kitcher, 2011, pp. 34–36).

2.3 Modesty

Modesty about one’s epistemic abilities will be a further aspect of a quietist political stance. It is (a) hard to achieve and maintain detailed, up-to-date, critically-tested understanding of issues of political significance, and (b) political understanding and judgment often require long, careful ‘initiation’ into traditions of thought and sensibility (Oakeshott, 1989, pp. 59, 66). The modest quietist feels acutely this deep epistemic complexity and the investment costs of becoming properly epistemically positioned relative to it. They know understanding will be fragile and liable to become outdated, and they are therefore averse to arrogance and hubris. A clear statement of quietist modesty was Edmund Burke’s warnings against rapid kinds of political change: the operations of current ‘arrangements’ are not always obvious, and we are not always aware of their ‘remoter benefits’ and therefore it is only with ‘infinite caution’ that we should ever ‘venture upon pulling down’ their complicated ‘edifice’ (Burke, 2004, p. 152).

Clearly this is only a bare sketch of diffidence, reticence, and modesty. It should hopefully be clear, however, that these three values do point to genuine forms of intellectual humility which can be built into a quietist political stance. This means there can be other styles of humility that were modelled by philosophical conservatives like Burke and Oakeshott. If so, there are other options for those who want to (a) explore ways of relating humility to politics, (b) take up more diffident and reticent styles of political life and engagement, and (c) assay the varieties of intellectual humility.

3. Conclusion

The conservatism represented here in political quietism is specifically epistemological and offers us an alternative way of thinking about political life. Perhaps Oakeshott was prescient when warning about ‘dauntlessness’ – practically ambitious ‘plans that involve the transformation of the world’ that presuppose remarkable kinds of degrees of epistemic confidence. He was emphatic that dauntlessness is ‘the intellectual vice against which we have to guard at the present time’ (Oakeshott, 2004, p. 161). If so, we have a good reason to seek out alterative and more quietist types of political stance. Whatever one thinks of these stances of political quietism, they offer alternative ways to think about IH in political life. Some people, not merely conservatives, will find a more reticent or diffident stance on the world a compelling way of coping with the complex, contested character of the social world and the polarised and pugnacious mood of political discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).