Author’s note: This is Part Four of a series of conversations with J. Budziszewski, a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and author most recently of Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy. See Parts One through Three here, here, and here, and my review of the book here.
Questions and Answers
I’d like to follow up on the idea of “status signaling.” It tends to show up in politically contentious subjects, but it also does so in debates related to science. Where have you seen that, and what do you think is going on there?
I’ve seen it in my own field, classical natural law theory, and I’ve certainly seen it in intelligent design theory. University-type people, as well as many other professionals, think they’re being scientific when they reject ID, because “all scientists say” that Darwin is a great guy and that the intelligent design movement is a bunch of yahoos who say, “The Bible says …” and leave it at that.
That’s of course a false view of intelligent design theory. But it isn’t important to these critics to find out what the ID theorists actually say, because all too often, the way they come to hold their opinions isn’t about trying to find out the truth. It’s about signaling to others, “I’m one of the smart people who believe what they’re supposed to believe.”
The eminent Phillip Johnson once gave a talk at my university [the University of Texas at Austin]. He was debating someone from our physics department. I’m sure the physicist was good at physics. His remarks were amazing, though, because he admitted that he knew nothing of the arguments for ID. He hadn’t read any of them. Nor had he read Phil Johnson’s own work. But he knew it was all wrong, because he’d been informed by his smart friend — a chemist, I think, or perhaps a biologist — that ID was all crazy.
Here is Johnson, giving a very studious argument for ID, and the other fellow thinks it’s sufficient to say, “I know it’s wrong because my friend told me.” Here’s what he was really saying: “I’ve got the right friends. This Johnson guy, he’s got the wrong friends. He’s the wrong sort of person. I’m the right sort of person. And among our sorts of persons, we don’t really need arguments, because we tell each other what to think.” It’s a very strange thing.
Doubling Down
We’re social beings. It’s a way of identifying with the perceived right group.
Yes. And once you identify with the “right group” on questions of origins, then you have to systematically filter out all the information which might suggest that your view of that group or its view may be mistaken.
You will ignore the diversity of people on the ID side — their theological diversity, their scientific diversity, their diversity of fields of study. You’ll say they’re just a bunch of hicks from the sticks, revival-meeting snake handlers. Concerning most topics, people are not quite that naïve, but this isn’t mere naïveté. It’s driven by the need for protection against anything that suggests your peer group is wrong. Because if you were to have more respect for ID, then it might lead to your being rejected in your peer group.
The people who sneer at ID leap to the conclusion that they’ve got the right peers. Now I don’t think it’s bad to care about what your peers think. We are social beings, as you say. Although we tell young people to resist peer pressure, what we should be telling them is, “Have the right peers.” The sneerers are not wrong about that. But do they have good peers? Do we? We need to be self-critical, just as they are. We need to think not only about whether we, ourselves, are considering the claims of the other group, but also about whether our peers are considering the claims of the other group, because our peers influence us. Sometimes we need to push back a little bit.
That calls to mind the ancient proverb, “He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm.”
Yes, I think that’s true.
Othering
When it comes to contentious issues, a lot of it does trace back to people groups and “othering,” doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
A gentleman at one of the other Texas universities, a professor in one of the sciences, got in trouble a few years ago. He announced publicly that he would never recommend a student for a job or for graduate study if the student had any doubt about the Darwinist theory. Not even if the student had done splendid work and received A’s in all biological work.
I have a few good friends who buy the Darwinist argument hook, line, and sinker. They do excellent work in biology. They’re very smart. I like them. But they won’t read any of the ID literature. I once tried to get them to read some of it. I would ask, “What do you think of this argument?” Or, “What do you think of that argument?” But because I’m not an expert in their field — because I’m not a biologist — they would sort of look down their nose and patronize me a little: “Oh, you just don’t understand, J.” It’s funny, because they’re not in the habit of patronizing, at least not in most areas. But in this one, they are. It’s their field of expertise.
So it’s hard. And I know people are afraid. Agreeing with the wrong people might tank their career.
There could be a cost for that.
There is a cost, a very serious cost. People do lose jobs. People lose promotion cases. They get dissed in the popular media. In certain communities, they may become pariahs. Now please don’t get me wrong. Sometimes the minority views are crackpot views (just as sometimes the majority views are). For instance, we have very good evidence that the world is round. It isn’t flat. I’ve actually looked a little at the flat earth literature. I asked, what are its arguments? And I could see that its arguments were spurious.
I don’t see why we can’t look at the claims of the intelligent design movement. Why is that so hard? Why is that so threatening to us personally?
Sometimes, the issues are about more than just the issue.
Yes, they are. You can believe that species developed by natural selection without being an atheist, without rejecting all versions of the claim of divine guidance. But in the standard form of the narrative, Darwinism is part of a materialistic paradigm which says that nothing is real but matter, that we are meaningless and purposeless results of a process that did not have us in mind, that all those things which seem to suggest that there is more, such as meaning and morality, are merely illusions. You might think the suggestion that meaning and morality are real and not illusions would not be threatening to anyone. But to some people, the suggestion is very threating. As Aldous Huxley wrote in 1937, “For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.”
Pandemic of Lunacy is an excellent resource for helping workaday thinking people realize that they aren’t crazy. It’s the convoluted world that is crazy. You can read the Table of Contents and Introduction here, and Creed & Culture is offering a 15 percent discount through the end of April. Use discount code PANDEMIC15.