Highbrow Propaganda
Ideological power, populist distrust, and the strongest rational case against rationalism
“…while we usually give lip service to the idea that we are open to letting anyone persuade us on anything with a good argument, by the time folks get to be my age they know that such openings are in fact highly constrained. For example, early on in my relation with my wife she declared that as I was better at arguing, key decisions were just not going to be made on the basis of better arguments.”
It’s a funny anecdote. It also contains the seeds of a deep insight about power, rationality, and trust.
In some sense, the insight is simple. When the ability to construct persuasive arguments is unevenly distributed, an agreement to settle decisions by argument can end up ceding power to those who are better at arguing. This wouldn’t matter if argumentative abilities were used only to identify “good” decisions, but they can also be deployed to rationalise biased, self-serving, and flawed ones. Given this, those who are worse at arguing face a dilemma. When they can’t convincingly refute an argument whose conclusion they dislike, should they defer? Or should they simply refuse to play the argument game altogether?
In the context of a marriage, this logic is fairly simple and commonsensical, but one can generalise the basic lesson to other contexts where it becomes more interesting.
Rational Persuasion and Ideological Power
Roughly, one can identify two general factors that determine the stock of persuasive information circulating in a society at a given time.
The first is reality. More persuasive claims and arguments typically better track evidence, survive objections, explain what we observe, and help us predict or control the world around us.
The second is the traits of those who wield the power to produce and disseminate this persuasive information: their motives, interests, biases, allegiances, and incentives.
In modern societies, this “ideological power” is mostly concentrated among an intelligentsia of highly educated professionals who staff universities, media outlets, think tanks, government agencies, NGOs, cultural institutions, research centres, and so on.
This creates a challenge for many people who dislike or disagree with the arguments and recommendations advanced by this intellectual class. If they can’t convincingly rebut those arguments, should they defer, or should they simply refuse to let political matters be settled by those with the strongest arguments?
My thesis in this essay is that this challenge helps to illuminate important features of our modern political situation, especially when it comes to populism and populist hostility to our established institutions. I will also argue that many intellectuals think about this issue in a simplistic and self-serving way.
Highbrow Misinformation
To approach this topic, it helps to begin with something I have written about before, drawing on a term introduced by Joseph Heath: highbrow misinformation.
When people think of misinformation, they often imagine stupid falsehoods, fabrications, and distortions. The Pope endorses Donald Trump for president. Immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Vaccines contain microchips.
This misinformation has distinctive features. It involves unambiguous factual misrepresentations. It originates outside our most prestigious knowledge-producing institutions (science, academia, legacy media). And it is highly legible to the cognitive elites—the academics, journalists, fact-checkers, etc.—within these institutions. (Some academic research literally defines misinformation at the source level: if it appears in the New York Times, it’s reliable information; if it appears in Breitbart, it’s misinformation.)
So understood, misinformation is something “they” produce: populists, foreign disinformation campaigns, grifters, conspiracy theorists, cranks, and alternative media. This model of misinformation, therefore, misses subtler forms of misleading communication that originate and circulate within our prestigious institutions.
Consider claims that are true but predictably create false impressions.
For example, one might argue that the world will likely be much poorer as a consequence of climate change (true), without mentioning that this forecast is relative to a counterfactual world without climate change, not to the present.
Or one might respond to claims that certain immigrant or minority groups are over-represented in certain crimes by pointing out that most of those crimes are committed by the country’s white majority, which might be true but might also be perfectly consistent with the claim it is deployed to rebut.
