Why intellectuals fail - part 2
Sartre, Beauvoir, and the long history of brilliant minds excusing the unforgivable.
In a Seinfeld episode, the characters are driving around, desperately searching for a parking spot. At last, a spot opens up - but it's a disabled parking space. Should they take the spot anyway? Kramer, impatient to get to dinner, tries to convince his friends (and himself) that they should. His winning argument: “People with disabilities don’t want to use these spots! They want to be treated like everyone else! That’s why these spaces are always empty!”. Is Kramer rigorously weighing the pros and cons to determine whether it is truly preferable to park in this spot? Of course not: he starts from the conclusion he is determined to reach, and then piles up arguments in its favour, displaying staggering bad faith. He isn’t reasoning; he is rationalizing his desire to break a rule so he can get out of the car faster.
Unfortunately, the smarter we are, the more we resemble Kramer.
How we use our intelligence
Since the 1970s, a substantial body of research has suggested that the most intelligent individuals are the least prone to cognitive biases. People with the highest IQs, for example, are the best at handling orders of magnitude, estimating probabilities, or resisting the pull of an arbitrary piece of information[1]. Does this mean, however, that they are the best at rigorous reasoning when they face problems on which they already have a preconceived opinion? In 1991, three psychologists gathered a group of students and asked them yes-or-no questions (for example: would increasing school budgets improve the quality of education?)[2]. The researchers then instructed them to write the arguments supporting a “yes” on the left side of a sheet of paper, and those supporting “no” on the right. A (strong) correlation emerged between a participant’s IQ and the number of arguments they produced… but only for the column that allowed them to defend their initial judgment. The most intelligent participants did not come up with more counterarguments than the less intelligent; they displayed no greater capacity for reasoning except insofar as it helped them rationalize their initial opinion. The researchers’ conclusion: “People invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than exploring the entire issue more fully and even-handedly[3].” That wouldn’t matter if, to begin with, the opinions in question were formed through an objective evaluation of the arguments on both sides. Unfortunately, it seems that members of the intellectual elite often arrive at their ideas under the influence of factors they are unaware of (mostly social factors), and only afterward retrofit an argumentative framework to legitimize those ideas socially, to convince themselves, and to convince others, that they reached these conclusions through reasoning. Is there evidence for this? It is among the elite that adherence to one opinion most often predicts adherence to another[4]. For example, if a high-IQ individual opposes same-sex marriage, there is a high probability they will also oppose immigration. Among less intelligent individuals, one finds more people who favour same-sex marriage but not immigration, or the reverse. This suggests that intellectuals often do not evaluate issues one by one; instead, they buy into a “bundle” of beliefs - the one that matches the social and political identity they have adopted. Only afterward do they align themselves with the arguments that allow them to rationalize these beliefs effectively. The problem, of course, is that if we don’t use our cognitive abilities upstream (to reach the best possible judgment) but downstream (to effectively defend the beliefs that have taken hold of us), reason does not prevent irrationality from winning.
The phenomenon of intelligence in the service of bad faith is illustrated in the following study. A researcher polled Americans about the decision to halt immigration from five Muslim countries[5]. He presented them with two pieces of information: (1) the probability that an immigrant coming from one of these countries is a terrorist is 0.00004%; (2) given that someone is a terrorist, the probability that they come from one of these countries is 72%. He then asked: which of these two pieces of information is more relevant? Progressives, opposed to the immigration policy, chose the first; the others chose the second. Next, the researcher asked participants to choose which of two pieces of information would be more relevant for assessing whether banning the sale of automatic weapons is justified: (1) the probability that an automatic weapon will be used to commit a mass shooting is 0.00004%; (2) given that a mass shooting has occurred, the probability that the perpetrator used an automatic weapon is 72%. Once again, those who opposed a firearms ban declared the first piece of information to be more relevant while those who supported the ban picked the second. The catch here is that the people who had picked the first option in one context now picked the second in the other, and vice versa. More surprising still: the people with the highest IQs were the ones most likely to give two different answers to essentially the same problem. The takeaway: smart people are the best at understanding which piece of information can be turned into an argument for the policy they favour. And they put their cognitive abilities in the service of defending their partisan view.
In other words, intellectuals are not the people who choose the best ideas, but the ones who defend their ideas with the greatest skill. The writer Michael Shermer puts it this way: “Smart people are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons[6].” How could Jean‑Paul Sartre, one of the most brilliant minds of his era (who placed first in the fiercely competitive national philosophy agrégation, who graduated from the prestigious École Normale supérieure, and who produced a major literary and philosophical body of work), have been so often mistaken, so deeply compromised in the defense of the most murderous totalitarianism? Raymond Aron offered this answer:
“He used his dialectical virtuosity and generous sentiments to justify the unjustifiable. He deployed vast treasures of ingenuity to demonstrate that one could not oppose Stalin, and that one had, at the very least, to stand close to him[7].”
An example? In 1954, when Sartre returned from the USSR, a journalist asked him why Soviet citizens so rarely vacationed in France. Sartre’s reply: they have it too good at home—they don’t feel like leaving[8]. Three years later, on her return from China, Beauvoir likewise deployed treasures of ingenuity to persuade herself—and persuade Western opinion—that the Maoist regime, while totalitarian in appearance, was democratic in practice. How do you reconcile the absence of voting rights with popular sovereignty? Simple: “The people want what the regime wants insofar as the regime wants what the people want, for example, that everyone should become rich[9].” How do you present the banning of opposition newspapers as a form of pluralism? “For the Communist Party, newspapers are an instrument of self-criticism: they signal deviations and errors that leaders intend to correct. They also seek the collaboration of their readers. If someone wants to protest an abuse or a wrongdoing committed by an administration, they write to the newspapers […]. The press therefore allows the base to exercise serious oversight over those in power[10].” How do you play down the erasure of the individual and the transformation of Chinese peasants into slaves serving a collective project? “For my part, I find the French elite terribly monotonous, uniformly molded in their language, their manners, even their voices by a good upbringing; and because the concern with asserting one’s personality is common to all, it only heightens their resemblance. The Chinese individual, by contrast, escapes this conformism: he doesn’t care whether he resembles others or not; his behaviour is natural, and therefore unpredictable, like life itself[11].” Because of their differences, Beauvoir explains, the French look alike; by their uniformity in misery, Chinese peasants stand out. Orwell’s line inevitably comes to mind: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe [absurd] things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool[12].” Or recall the words of Simon Leys’s (formulated precisely regarding Mao’s Western admirers): “You really have to be a superior intellectual to say UTTER NONSENSE, to fail to see that rain is wet and that a stone is hard[13].” The problem of investing one’s IQ in defending absurdities is all the more difficult to correct because the more intelligent an individual is, the more persuaded he becomes that others are subject to reasoning biases, and that he himself is immune[14].
As proof that they are gifted at rationalizing their prejudices, intellectuals have often been able, in defense of a single belief, to deploy one argument and then… its opposite. (Which suggests that arguments are often not the cause of adherence to a position but its consequence.) For example, for pro-communist intellectuals, was capitalism blameworthy because it failed to create wealth or, on the contrary, because it created wealth too efficiently and corrupted souls? Both! In the early 1950s, Raymond Aron recalls, defenders of communism “accused the West of being incapable of withstanding economic competition with planning and Soviet socialism[15].” Twenty years later? “With the contest of growth rates won by Westerners, they judged it derisory; they dismissed it as insignificant.” Eliminating scarcity, Jean‑François Revel adds, was “the goal that communists boasted of being the only ones capable of achieving. Admittedly, their program mainly produced famines. But abundance nonetheless remained the ideal toward which their system claimed to be moving[16].” Yet when the capitalist West succeeded in eliminating scarcity, “‘consumption’ turned […] into a scourge, a prison in which we rot in spiritual captivity.’” During the Cold War, Revel observes ironically, the mere news that the West had reached a goal “sufficed to have it declared worthless : the liberation from human labour was likened to technological slavery and the end of misery was rebranded as the consumer society[17].”² By being able to radically change arguments to defend the same thesis, intellectuals protect their ideological postulates from a potential refutation by reality, a talent that those without their rhetorical virtuosity do not possess[18].
How time compounds mistakes
Because they are often more attached to their conclusions (for example, the defense of communism) than to the reasons for which they adopted them, or believe they adopted them (for example, that communism would reduce poverty more effectively than capitalism), intellectuals tend to remain loyal to those conclusions even as the case in their favour deteriorates. To justify this fidelity, they often pivot to new, sometimes fallacious arguments (for example claiming that material prosperity is irrelevant or even corrupting). The passage of time, therefore, can drive them into error twice over: first, by rendering their original beliefs obsolete; and second, by forcing them to embrace dubious arguments so as to keep clinging to the beliefs in question. Pro-communist intellectuals, for example, were probably more profoundly mistaken in 1970 than they were in 1950: by then they were no longer wrong only about the desirability of the system, but also about the standards by which a society’s success should be judged (having decided to assign zero weight, or even a negative weight, to material prosperity). In a similar vein, an individual might have justifiably supported tax hikes and increased public spending in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and then, despite the passing of decades, shifting circumstances, and skyrocketing public spending, continued to defend the need for higher taxes, having to subscribe to increasingly far-fetched economic theories to do so. Of course, it need not be the same intellectual carrying the idea from one era to the next. An opinion may spark enthusiasm at a certain time due to a strong case and a favourable climate, only to remain fashionable in intellectual circles through generational transmission. Decades later, its proponents justify it with arguments entirely different from (and sometimes worse than) those that drove its initial success. Perhaps the broader example is that of loyalty to a political identity. In a given context, people may rightly support the implementation of left-wing (or right-wing) public policies, vote and campaign accordingly and integrate this political allegiance into their social identity. Eventually, however, they begin to reason backward to rationalize this belonging. Decades later, because they have remained faithful to a position on the political spectrum rather than to values, they find themselves defending ideas that are the inverse of those they once held dear[19].
In a similar way, intellectuals who waged a necessary battle in one era may continue fighting long after their struggle has lost its purpose. To legitimize their continued action, they advance postulates that drift ever farther from reality and brandish demands that are increasingly questionable. As Thomas Sowell puts it:
“The problem, when an institution has an objective, is that once that objective has been achieved, it doesn’t say, ‘All right—we’ll throw a retirement cocktail party.’ It continues. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists to prevent discrimination. But as discrimination has declined, it has had to expand the definition of discrimination, so that now, if an employer doesn’t want to hire ex-convicts, it considers that discrimination[20].”
This probably explains the expanding range of things considered “problematic” (fatphobia, microaggressions, grammar, and so on): individuals within institutions, schools of thought, or
networks dedicated to progressive activism must continue to justify their existence even as their battles are gradually won[21]. Here, we have a key to understanding Tocqueville’s famous paradox (the more conditions improve, the more the gap between reality and the ideal is felt as intolerable). As the situation improves, intellectuals who have built their social identity around denouncing the situation find themselves with nothing real to denounce and are thus compelled to fabricate problems and inflame passions. The Australian philosopher Kenneth Minogue speaks of the “Saint George in retirement” syndrome. After slaying a dragon, Saint George wanders the land searching for fresh glorious battles. Having exhausted himself hunting ever smaller dragons, he eventually descends into madness, waving his sword at empty air, raving as he imagines towering creatures rising before him[22].
The incentive for an intellectual to hunt imaginary dragons is compounded when he is valued by his audience precisely for his alarmism. Marc Edwards, an American scientist who refused to hunt imaginary dragons, would have something to say about it[23]. In 2015, he became a hero to the city of Flint, Michigan, by proving that the water was contaminated with lead, which explained the health issues plaguing its residents. Thanks to him, the city replaced 95% of its lead pipes. As the water grew cleaner, Edwards continued to test it and report his results honestly. He declared that things were improving, then that lead levels had dropped to the national average, and finally that the State of Michigan no longer needed to distribute bottled water because the tap water had become drinkable. (In other words, Edwards wanted to throw that retirement cocktail party.) Flint residents turned on him. An open letter criticized his “changes in stance,” claiming they deprived residents of their voice; some accused him of embracing the government narrative over that of the city; members of the newly formed “ Flint Water Advisory Task Force” (whose very existence hinged on the water being polluted) called him “irresponsible.” NGOs questioned his scientific integrity, and on social media, he was accused of having “a disdain for people of colour and low-income folks.” Those who refused to accept that the dragon had been slain waged such a vicious campaign against Edwards that he - now a pariah in the city where he had been a hero - filed a defamation suit to restore his reputation. While many intellectuals, like Marc Edwards, are capable of intellectual honesty even when it runs against their social interests, it is easy to imagine others letting their reason guide them down the path leading to the conclusion their audience wants to hear. And good news is not always welcome.
This example also illustrates how certain ideological discourses may exist not because of present-day factors, but because of past ones. Just as the success of an Apple product (say, the iPod in the early 2000s) could produce consequences (the lock-in of consumers within the company’s ecosystem) that later became causes of the brand’s subsequent success, a specific political situation can trigger social and institutional dynamics that feed ideological passions in the present. In Flint’s case, the creation in 2015 of NGOs and water-focused think tanks, the dispensing of financial compensation tied to certain lead concentrations, and the distribution of free bottled water created institutional, administrative, and psychological conditions that generated—years later—a continued need to believe the water was unsafe. The mathematician Arthur Stinchcombe uses the term “historical causality” to describe the possibility for a phenomenon to reproduce and accelerate after the disappearance of the factor that initially produced it[24]. According to sociologist Karl Mannheim, an ideology often consists of a set of propositions adapted to a historical situation that survive after losing their reason for being. He gives the example of the taboo against interest-bearing loans. In an economy of reciprocity, where social relations were limited to interactions among intimates, the taboo made sense: by lending money to a neighbour, you ensured you could count on his financial support in the future. But as exchanges expanded, granting an interest-free loan to a stranger became a risk with no compensating return. It therefore became logical to compensate for that risk. Yet “the more the real structure of society changed, the more this ethical principle [the taboo on interest-bearing loans] took on an ideological character[25].” The moral value attached to the interest-free loan persisted for a long time—defended notably by the Church, through religious arguments—illustrating, for Mannheim, the transformation of an outdated ethical norm into ideology.
Intellectuals, as we have said, are probably the most gifted at rationalizing obsolete ideas. The story of the Moriori genocide is illuminating in this respect. When this small Polynesian people settled on the Chatham Islands around the year 1500, a bloody war broke out. Traumatized, the Moriori chiefs decreed the moral principle of Nunuku-whenua, which forbade violence under any circumstances. The rule was respected for three centuries, and those who disobeyed it were ostracized[26]. One day, Maoris arrived on the islands and began massacring the Moriori. Could the Moriori defend themselves? Should they allow an exception to Nunuku? The young Moriori were in favour of reseisting, unenthusiastic about the prospect of remaining passive while being exterminated. Since they outnumbered the aggressors two-to-one, they argued, they could win the war and ensure their people’s survival. The Moriori elders (notably Tapata and Torea, the tribe’s influential intellectuals and moral authorities) met urgently to decide. And they handed down their verdict: the Nunuku was a sacred moral imperative and could not be broken! The Moriori were conquered, massacred, and enslaved without offering resistance. “The Morioris were taken prisoners,” recounted a survivor. “The women and children were bound, and many of these, together with the men, were killed and eaten, so that the corpses lay scattered in the woods and over the plains. Those who were spared from death were herded like swine and killed even from year to year.” “We were terrified, recalls another lucky survivor. “We fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed, men, women and children indiscriminately”[27].” A principle inherited from the past, suited to an entirely different context, was rationalized by influential intellectuals even as reality had rendered it not only obsolete but absurd and suicidal. Today, perhaps some of our collective political passions, somewhat anachronistic themselves, represent the persistence of ideas adapted to a historical situation, but no longer to our own.
Understanding polarization
Because intellectuals are gifted with superior cognitive abilities and an intimate grasp of the debates of their time, they understand better than most which facts - were they to be confirmed - would strengthen the case for their own convictions. What if, indulging in wishful thinking, they were prone to accepting those facts as established truth? “Men who like administration,” joked Bertrand Russell, “think that it is good for the populace to be treated like a herd of sheep, men who like tobacco say that it soothes the nerves, and men who like alcohol say that it stimulates wit[28].” Russell was correct.
In one study, researchers asked subjects to give a moral verdict on the torture of terrorists, the death penalty for serial killers, and the distribution of condoms in middle school[29]. The question was: assuming these measures always achieved their stated aims (deterrence, STI prevention, and so on), would they be immoral? Once participants had delivered their moral judgment, they were invited to estimate the likelihood that these actions would achieve their objectives. It turns out that the more someone was convinced that an act would be immoral even if it had beneficial consequences, the less likely he was to believe the act could actually have beneficial consequences. Those who condemned condom distribution even if medically effective tended to deny that it was medically effective at all; those who rejected torture even if it saved lives tended to doubt it would yield useful information, and so on. Pursuing this line of thought, the philosopher Michael Huemer notes a similar polarization in debates about the death penalty[30]. On the one hand, some people believe the death penalty has little deterrent effect (1–0 against it) and that many innocent people are wrongly convicted (2–0). On the other hand, some believe the death penalty deters strongly (0–1) and that few innocents are wrongly convicted (0–2). Almost no one thinks the death penalty deters little (1–0) but kills very few innocents (1–1), or that it deters strongly (0–1) but kills many innocents (1–1). Orwell had identified this mental mechanism: he observed that when we dislike a book for ideological reasons (1–0 against it), we convince ourselves it has no literary merit whatsoever (2–0)[31].
These cognitive patterns may shape history.
Raymond Aron recounts the public debate in France before the Munich Agreement, just as Hitler was preparing to annex the Sudetenland. He observed that all the intellectuals who, in the name of France’s moral duty, urged military resistance against Hitler (1–0 against capitulation) swore that Hitler was bluffing, that if resistance were offered, he would not attack Czechoslovakia (2–0 against capitulation). “Those who supported the bluff thesis,” Aron writes, “gave themselves a clear conscience: peace through courage, and without war—who wouldn’t choose that enthusiastically[32]?” Aron, for his part, believed that while capitulation was probably a mistake (1–0 against it), the alternative really was war (1–1). He marvelled that so few intellectuals managed to oppose capitulation while acknowledging that such a choice implied at least some unpleasant consequences. “I was very irritated by those who advocated resistance over Czechoslovakia with the major argument: ‘Resisting is the best way to avoid war.’ I said at the time: ‘Perhaps, but we know nothing about that[33].’” Similarly, Aron explains that because some people rightly supported an alliance with the USSR to fight Nazism (in the 1930s, and then again after the German–Soviet Pact was broken), they deluded themselves about the nature of the Soviet regime to make the pill easier to swallow. “It was difficult to admit that we were facing two satanic threats simultaneously, and that it was necessary to be allied with one of them. It was not pleasant, but it was the historical situation we struggled to accept[34].”
In other words, even the ideas intellectuals form about reality (for example: the death penalty does not deter, Hitler is bluffing, the Soviet regime is respectable) can be shaped by the conclusions to which they are attached (the death penalty is immoral, France must not abandon the Sudetenland, the Allies must form an alliance with the USSR). Once attached to an opinion, we are inclined to embrace - without examining them - the beliefs that allow us to defend it most effectively.
Why polarization grows over time
First, polarization probably intensifies over time. Separated at the outset by a modest disagreement, two intellectuals will adopt a set of beliefs designed to best rationalize and protect their initial position. The sum of the beliefs acquired along the way widens the gap between them. Suppose, for instance, that A considers severe criminal penalties for mid-level offenses to be excessive, while B supports them. Because it makes his stance easier to defend, A adopts the view that prison is not only immoral but also counterproductive because it fuels recidivism. Reconciling these two people becomes perilous, because now, they would have to reach an agreement not only on principles but also on empirical claims. Conversely, disagreement about facts can generate moral disagreement. For instance, if A sees immigration as economically beneficial and B does not, A may redefine restrictive policies as morally wrong, and begin to question B’s moral integrity. Notice that this pattern reveals a more general mechanism: if a person’s view is initially shaped by one particular assessment (here, the economic effect of immigration), the assessment may change (the economic data could shift) without the individual changing his mind. The rationalizations adopted along the way (here, the moral argument) operate independently, preserving the belief even after its original justification has dissolved.
Second, an ideological evolution is effectively mandated by an initial belief (much like buying an iPhone mandates the purchase of a charger, insurance, and Apple headphones). If an intellectual believes that the cost–benefit ratio of a public policy (say, resisting Germany rather than abandoning the Sudetenland) is slightly positive, he gradually adopts the beliefs that allow him to defend it effectively – and therefore revises its benefits upward, or its costs downward (persuading himself, for example, that Hitler will not carry out his threat if met with resistance). He eventually comes to believe that the policy’s cost–benefit balance is overwhelmingly positive. Conversely, someone who estimates that the opposite policy (here, the Munich Agreement) offers a slightly favourable cost–benefit balance will adopt the beliefs that make that policy easier to defend, for instance downplaying its costs (convincing himself that Hitler will stop after the Sudetenland, that capitulation secures lasting peace on the continent). He ends up believing that the cost–benefit balance is overwhelmingly favourable[35].
Finally, we observe a feedback loop by which errors feed on themselves. How so? Well, rationalizing an erroneous belief often requires subscribing to other erroneous beliefs. For example, those convinced that the Covid vaccine causes massive and severe side effects need to believe in a broader conspiracy theory to explain why the phenomenon is not reported in the media. The historian Robert Conquest, an expert on communism, wondered why Marxist intellectuals displayed “a strong tendency to accept pseudosciences.” Marx himself believed in phrenology (the idea that the external shape of the skull reveals a person’s intellectual dispositions), and was enthusiastic about Pierre Trémaux’s theories (which offered far-fetched alternatives to the theory of evolution). In the USSR, scientific quackery was widespread, ranging from Lysenkoism to psychotronics (the study of telepathy and telekinesis) to the Kirlian effect (the notion that we are all surrounded by an invisible halo reflecting our spiritual aura). Meanwhile, Maoists promoted swallowing tadpoles as a method of contraception and encouraged all kinds of esoteric medicine. Conquest advances an explanation: because communist intellectuals all subscribed to a false premise (the belief that there exist “final answers to all the problems of history and of society”), they sought such solutions everywhere. And as it happens, those are “more commonly found in the pseudosciences than in the sciences proper[36].” In the economic sphere, Ayn Rand argued that communist intellectuals were forced into a kind of magical thinking: only then could they “demonstrate” the veracity of something false (the possibility of a prosperous collectivist society). Educating them on economic mechanisms would have been pointless, Rand thought, since their inability to understand those mechanisms was the consequence - not the cause - of their moral attachment to collectivism[37].
How intellectuals rationalize immorality
A growing body of research in cognitive science suggests that the justifications we give for our decisions (and for our opinions) are often rationalizations established post hoc; they are not what causes those decisions[38]. In particular, the reason we invoke to justify a behaviour is often merely a pretext designed to conceal (from others and from ourselves[39]) our less noble motives (social conformity, selfishness, cowardice, etc.). As the maxim goes, a man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and a real reason. In one experiment, participants were asked to split a sum of money between themselves and a partner, while also reporting whether they thought that partner had acted altruistically in the previous hour[40]. The result was telling: those who chose to keep all the money were also the ones who (everything else being equal) were most inclined to judge their partner selfish. In other words, they rationalized their own lack of charity by framing it as a legitimate, even virtuous, response to someone else’s bad behaviour. “One of the chief human arts, Jean‑François Revel observed, is to invent moral motives for our dishonest acts[41].”
One might surmise that the brightest minds are those capable of justifying the widest range of behaviours. Intellectuals make the best hypocrites. As Benjamin Franklin famously observed, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do[42]”. In one study, researchers asked progressive students whether it would be moral to sacrifice one man to save a hundred[43]. Some students were led to believe this involved killing a Black man to save a hundred White people; others were led to believe that it meant killing a White man to save a hundred Black people. In the first case, students tended to answer negatively, justifying their choice by appealing to the categorical imperative “Thou shalt not kill.” In the second case, they tended to answer positively, invoking utilitarian moral arithmetic. A principle, or the exact opposite of that principle, was pressed into service to defend the “anti‑racist” position[44]. Perhaps intellectuals, because they command moral reasoning better than most (being able, for instance, to juggle consequentialist and deontological justifications), excel at rationalizing immorality. In the 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir defended the “purges, deportations, and abuses” in the USSR on the grounds that “one cannot judge the means without the end that gives them meaning.” Stalin’s assassination of political opponents, she wrote, “is certainly a scandal, but it may have a meaning, a rationale, if it serves to maintain a regime that increases the quality of life of an immense mass of men. […] Perhaps these events represent only that necessary share of failure that every constructive project entails[45].” George Orwell recounts that during the Second World War, the News Chronicle, a daily paper favoured by the progressive intelligentsia, published photographs of Russians hanged by Germans, denouncing the practice as barbaric. Two years later, the very same paper published, this time with warm approval, photographs of Germans hanged by Russians, encouraging its readers to go watch the film of the execution. “There is almost no kind of outrage”, Orwell added, “torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.[46]”
Incidentally, the human capacity to twist reality to our advantage is a powerful argument in favour of a Kantian morality—one grounded in an uncompromising fidelity to certain principles—rather than a consequentialist morality founded on calculating the outcomes of our actions. Why? Because we all tend to believe that the consequences of our own deeds - whatever they may be - are positive (injustice is fought with violence; capitalist greed is chastised by theft, and so on)[47]. “A man who desires to act in a certain way,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “will persuade himself that by so acting he will achieve some end which he considers good […]. And he will judge quite differently as to matters of fact and as to probabilities from the way in which a man with contrary desires will judge[48].” These rationalizations, of course, operate on a collective scale as well—which is why evil is always committed in the name of good, and why, as Jean-François Revel puts it, “one must not judge a society by the ideology that serves as its justification, any more than one must judge a man by the opinion he has of himself[49].” When she legitimized the assassination of political opponents in the name of the communist “constructive project,” Beauvoir did not say who (nor by what criteria) was to perform the cost–benefit calculation or arbitrate between the value of lives taken and the political objective. This seemed to be left to the tyrant’s discretion. She was therefore legitimizing the violence of every dictator who subjectively believes he is acting in the service of a noble cause (which is to say, all of them). Another flaw of consequentialist morality is that even without ill will, one can be a lousy calculator of consequences. Beauvoir imagined that communism in the USSR “increased the quality of life of an immense mass of men”; in reality, it killed twenty million people.
More broadly, we should probably be wary of certain kinds of rhetoric which may, at times, constitute a rationalization of dubious passions (or at least provide them with moral cover). Resentment and envy are legitimized if those who succeed the most are said to “exploit” others. (According to Robert Conquest, Marxism had a major psychological utility: it “gave an apparently scientific and doctrinal form to the simple notion that the rich rob the poor.[50].”) Hatred of a group becomes virtuous if that group is portrayed as pulling the strings of society for its own benefit. Physical violence becomes an act of resistance if the status quo is oppressive. Destruction and looting become laudable if they are framed as a cry of alarm against injustice. The fight against freedom becomes admirable if it is recast as a revolt against the prison of bourgeois conventions. Cowardice becomes valorous when it disguises itself as pacifism. The invasion of a sovereign nation becomes a form of self-defence if the war is depicted as a “denazification” operation. Until the very last moments of his life, Otto Ohlendorf, one of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen (he was responsible for the murder by firing squad of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but he was also a brilliant economist), rationalized his atrocities, passing them off as… legitimate self-defence: “The Soviet Union intended to attack us. We had to act first to prevent this attack. […] [Besides], everyone knew that the Jews were favourable to the Bolsheviks. So we had to kill them too. […] And since we wanted lasting security for our country, we also killed the children[51].” “Throughout history,” noted Horkheimer and Adorno, “the blind assassin has seen in his victim the persecutor against whom he desperately had to defend himself, and the most powerful empires have always regarded their weaker neighbour as an intolerable threat before attacking him. Rationalization was an inevitable ruse[52].”
[1] Stanovich et al. (1998).
[2] Perkins et al. (2012).
[3] Cited by J. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 94–95. These results have been frequently reproduced. See for example Toplak and Stanovich (2003).
[4] Mason (2018); Weeden and Kurzban (2016).
[5] Van Boven et al. (2019). In another study (Kahan et al., 2017, a), the better the participants were at math, the more they managed to correctly interpret statistics on the efficacy of an anti-acne cream. However, the better these same participants were at math, the more they displayed bad faith in interpreting statistics on politically charged, polarizing subjects (such as the ban on firearms). They used their intelligence to twist reality, to find a way to read the statistics so that they confirmed their prejudices. See also (Kahan et al., 2017, b).
[6] M. Shermer, The Believing Brain, p. 43. Or, as Jean Tirole and Roland Bénabou, conducting a literature review on motivated reasoning, write: “Analytically sophisticated and better-educated individuals should be less prone to mistakes and biases. Such is indeed the case for the endowment effect, loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting, and even visual illusions (Frederick 2005). However, when it comes to rationalizing away contradictory evidence, compartmentalizing knowledge, and deluding oneself, more educated, attentive, and analytically able people often display greater propensities toward such behaviors.” (Bénabou and Tirole, 2016.)
[7] R. Aron, Mémoires, p. 961.
[8] J.-P. Sartre, “La liberté de critique est totale en URSS”, interview with Libération, July 1954. “They don’t have much desire to leave their country. [...] That doesn’t particularly tempt them. They have no desire to travel at the moment. They have other things to do there.”
[9] S. de Beauvoir, La Longue Marche, p. 477-478.
[10] Ibid., p. 239.
[11] Ibid., p. 481.
[12] G. Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, p. 28.
[13] Capitalization is his. Quoted in the documentary Simon Leys, l’homme qui a déshabillé Mao, directed in 2024 by F. Gardel and M. Weschler for Public Sénat.
[14] Stanovich et al. (2012).
[15] R. Aron, Mémoires, p. 871.
[16] J.-F. Revel, La Grande Parade, Pocket, 2001 (2000), pp. 27-28.
[17] J.-F. Revel, Ni Marx ni Jésus (Without Marx or Jesus), 1970, in a collection of the author’s works published in 1986, Robert Laffont, “Bouquins”, p. 80.
[18] In his book Les Bienveillantes, Jonathan Littell tells the story of the Second World War from the Nazi perspective. As the Wehrmacht advanced eastward, it killed Jews and communists remaining in the conquered cities. For the Germans, there was no doubt that the Jews served the Bolsheviks. But then, why did the Communist Party organize only the repatriation of communists, not of Jews? High-ranking SS officers found an explanation: if the USSR abandoned the Jews to their fate, it was... to better hide the Judeo-Bolshevik alliance! Nazis put their intelligence in the service not of the quest for truth, but of the rationalization of preconceived ideas, challenged by reality.
[19] This applies to all political identities, including the centrist identity. A centrist too, can reason not to remain faithful to values, but to rationalize a geographic position on the political spectrum—criticizing each political side symmetrically, judging speeches based on the speaker’s political colour, and eventually forgetting that “arithmetic impartiality leads to moral partiality” (J.-F. Revel, La Connaissance inutile, p. 118).
[20] Interview on April 24, 2013, for the Hoover Institution.
[21] In fact, since it is easier to join or lead an existing association than to create one, there is an institutional inertia, and thus sometimes a misalignment between the missions assigned by the associative fabric and social reality, which evolves rapidly. In the United States, 61% of popular associations active today were already active in the 1940s (P. Pierson, Politics in Time, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 34).
[22] Referenced by D. Murray, The Madness of Crowds, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 8.
[23] See K. Drum, “Marc Edwards Is a Sad Victim of Our Modern Political Era,” Mother Jones, January 2019; P. Stein, “They helped expose unsafe lead levels in Flint’s water then they turned on each other,” Washington Post, January 2019. Brought to attention by blogger Cremieux on his Substack: “Who Gets Exposed to Lead?”, 6 March 2023.
[24] P. Pierson, Politics in Time, p. 46
[25] Quoted by R. Boudon in L’Idéologie ou l’Origine des idées reçues, Points Essais, 1992 (1986) p. 70.
[26] M. King, Moriori: A People Rediscovered, Penguin Random House, 1989, Chapter 1.
[27] Ibid., Chapter 3.
[28] B. Russell, Essais sceptiques, p. 58.
[29] Liu and Ditto (2013).
[30] Huemer (2016).
[31] G. Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, p. 6.
[32] R. Aron, Memoirs, pp. 203–204.
[33] R. Aron, Le spectateur engagé, Livre de Poche, 2005 (1981), p. 44.
[34] Ibid., p. 69.
[35] Because they are better than others at adjusting their perception of reality to convince themselves that the ideas they support have only benefits (and those of their opponents only have costs), intellectuals perhaps struggle to think in terms of trade-offs or cost-benefit calculations. For example, Stanovich and West (2008) show that individuals who believe pesticides are dangerous to health (1-0 against pesticides) also tend to believe that they provide no significant increase in agricultural yield (2-0). Consequently, these people are incapable of recognizing the existence of a complex trade-off between multiple objectives (purchasing power, public health, agricultural independence, etc.) and tend to side with absolutist solutions (a total ban on pesticides). Yet, the Latin etymology of rationality (rationalis) is the same as that of ratio in the mathematical sense: a decision is rational when its benefit-to-cost ratio is greater than 1.
[36] R. Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 52.
[37] Ayn Rand, Letter to Leonard Read, February 28, 1946.
[38] In the 1960s, neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry studied individuals whose right brain hemisphere no longer communicated with the left (often epileptic patients). In one experiment, they covered one of the participant’s eyes and instructed him to obey a command displayed on a screen. When the order “Smile” appeared, the participant smiled. The researchers then asked why he had smiled. His answer: “Your joke was funny,” or “I wanted to signal that everything was fine,” etc. The left hemisphere of his brain (which controls language) did not know why the right hemisphere (which controls action) had chosen to smile, yet it constructed a narrative to justify it and legitimize it socially! These studies have been corroborated by others, including on individuals without neurological disorders (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). The case of split-brain patients appears to be merely an extreme example of a universal tendency to delude ourselves about the motives behind our decisions.
[39] Indeed, we tend to swallow our own confabulations, the best liar being the one who does not know he is lying. See the classic works on hypocrisy and self-deception by Robert Trivers (The Folly of Fools, Basic Books, 2011).
[40] Di Tella et al. (2015).
[41] J.-F. Revel, Mémoires, p. 128.
[42] Quoted by J. Weeden and R. Kurzban, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind, Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 44.
[43] Uhlmann et al. (2009).
[44] The authors of the study highlight that conservatives possess this mental flexibility as well. Many adopt a deontological position to oppose embryonic stem cell research, arguing that medical progress (and thus potential lives saved) does not justify the sacrifice of a fetus, while simultaneously adopting a consequentialist position in the context of armed conflict, arguing that the pursuit of a legitimate military objective justifies collateral casualties.
[45] S. de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, Gallimard, 1947, p. 204.
[46] G. Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, p. 13. For corroboration, see Walter and Redlawsk (2019). This study reveals that the magnitude of our indignation depends less on the type of moral transgression than on the involvement of “our” side. These results tend to fragilize Haidt’s hypothesis (Haidt et al., 2009) that innate moral predispositions lead some to become progressives (e.g., those who, due to their cognitive architecture, care particularly for the vulnerable) and other conservatives (e.g., those who, due to their cognitive architecture, are most loyal to their community). Our moral concerns appear to be the result of our ideological affiliations rather than their cause.
[47] French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff recalls, for example, that for a long time, rumors of ritual murder committed by Jews were not the source of antisemitic sentiment; rather, they served to rationalize it, to morally legitimize primal impulses (Taguieff, 2019). Orwell, for his part, writes that Jews are often “accused of specific offenses (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalize some deep-rooted prejudice“. This is why, he writes, “one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.” (G. Orwell, Antisemitism in Britain, pp. 34-36.)
[48] B. Russell, Essais Sceptiques, p. 58.
[49] J.-F. Revel, La Grande Parade, p. 126.
[50] R. Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 45.
[51] Quoted by P. Sastre, Ce que je veux sauver, Anne Carrière, 2024, p. 153. In 1933, it was in the name of “the great defensive struggle of the German people against Jewish propaganda” that the Nazi Minister of Justice declared that Jewish magistrates must be banned from practicing. (R. Gellately, Backing Hitler, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 26.) As for the word “Wehrmacht,” it translates into English as “Defense Force.”
[52] Quoted by Taguieff (2019).