Political Beliefs: An Impressionistic Reflection

This month, I visited the offices of The Critic for our summer party. Sat outside the office, waiting for someone to let me in, I looked up and saw police officers striding towards me.

With faultless professionalism, they explained that they had had reports of a suspicious man wearing a beanie, with a bag. As it was the opening of Parliament, they feared I was an anti-royalist agitator.

This seemed ironic when I was working for one of Britain’s more right-wing magazines. When I said this to a friend, though, he frowned and said, “Well, you look a bit left-wing.”

We all know what he means. But a naive person might find it perplexing. Why should your beliefs about, say, the rightful ordering of governmental power be at all associated with your appearance?

Oliver Traldi’s Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction reflects not just on what we believe but on why we believe it. Of course, it is tempting to maintain that we believe in X, Y and Z because of painstaking, objective analysis of their ethical and epistemic rights and wrongs (unlike our opponents, of course, who are liars and fanatics). But identity, experiences and ambitions — among other things — can also have a role. They almost certainly do.

In fact, a huge variety of internal and external influences can affect our decision-making. Many is the thinker, for example, who has condemned the irrational effects of “tribalism” while evidently being influenced by their sense of themselves as a bold contrarian.

The good news is that an irrational influence on an opinion is not like a drop of arsenic in a casserole. An irrational element, in other words, need not entail an irrational whole. I’m sure that my beliefs have been affected — and continue to be affected — by bias. But I’m equally sure that I have adopted beliefs which were — and sometimes are — inconvenient enough that some sort of rational thought process was involved. When I first wandered to the right, for example, it was slowly and painfully — which is not to claim that my beliefs are necessarily rational but that accepting them at least involved a workout for my rational faculties.

Of course, there’s some extent to which bias is an inevitable — even necessary — feature of political life. I care more about Polish and British lives than Uruguayan or Nigerian lives — though of course I completely respect Uruguayan and Nigerian people placing the most emphasis on the lives of their compatriots. As Traldi writes, there is a difference between ethical disputes and empirical disputes, and we should try to avoid our biases affecting the latter. (Clearly, they also should not be the sole guide to the former. I would not support the brutal Anglo-Polish occupation of Montevideo or Abuja.) But they are inescapable, and we’d be living in a strange world if we could reject them.

Traldi reflects on debates around partisan media, misinformation and “fake news”, and is mildly sceptical of the idea that we live in a “post-truth” age (my sneer quotes, not his). Journalistic dishonesty, in the mainstream and alternative media spaces, is a problem, of course. But as Traldi rightly notes, the term “fake news” could itself serve “a propagandistic function of undermining and even censoring opposing views”.

Nonetheless, Traldi ends up feeling quite pessimistic about political beliefs. He emphasises “the value of independent thought” and justifiably suspects that politics pollutes it. “Be political as little as you can,” he writes, “Either avoid politics, or do politics in the least political way you can manage.” I’m sympathetic. I stubbornly describe myself as a writer before, say, “pundit” or “opinion columnist”. I don’t want to sacrifice truth, humour and beauty to political expedience, and the sad fact is that political success depends to a great extent on being disingenuous and cold. It always has. It always will. I’m no deep political thinker, but if I have a mission in opinionating it’s to try and be persuasive while also being honest and self-aware. Of course, I’m sure I often fail. But I hope I fail better than whoever else would have had my spots. We can try and opt out of politics, after all, but that will make it no less consequential for everybody else.

Traldi is excellent at illuminating the complexities of a problem while writing clearly enough as to make it seem ultimately comprehensible. His chapter on expertise in politics, for example, is a gem. For all that one might begin it with a sense of mounting horror as to the scale of the questions that it raises, one ends it with a decent sense of how they might be answered.

The book was written with students of philosophy in mind, and those of us who are more impressionistic — or just lazy — might find some of it a bit too definitionally granular. There are also occasional sentences such as this:

Dorst explicitly argues that an agent A can be rational in, for instance, believing p at some time t even knowing that at some future time t* (a) they will have more evidence about p, (b) that additional evidence will be good evidence, and (c) they will rationally disbelieve p.

This is in no sense a criticism — just a friendly warning. But it is worth wading through the denser paragraphs, my fellow non-academics, both because of the elegance of the prose elsewhere and because of the volume of insights you will encounter. This book won’t tell you what to believe but it will leave you productively questioning your beliefs.

Finally, I want to make a little note that Traldi — who, in the name of full disclosure, I’ve known online for years — paid to have the book be made open access as the print version was prohibitively expensive. Practically applying your values like this will always mean more than your abstract political beliefs.