Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture by Michael P. Lynch & Michael P. Lynch

Author:Michael P. Lynch & Michael P. Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epistemology, Philosophy, Politics & Social Sciences
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2019-08-13T03:00:00+00:00

It is not equally true as its denial that women’s uteruses wander around in their bodies when they take math courses, that only Man the Hunter made important contributions to society . . . that targets of rape and battery must bear the responsibility for what happens to them. . . . Standpoint theories neither hold nor are doomed to hold [relativism about truth].17

So, identifying identity politics—and associated epistemological theories like standpoint theory—with relativism is simply a mistake, but it is a mistake that the Left has paid dearly for making. One cost is the arrogance of belief that it has inspired, an arrogance that encourages some progressives to feel that because their truth is their truth, they—and the social groups for which they believe they stand—have nothing to learn from conservatives, or anyone else for that matter. That’s the sort of arrogant ideology that leads progressives to turn their nose up at even talking to Trump voters, or makes some college students unwilling to debate with conservative intellectuals when they come to their campus.

Another cost of linking identity politics with relativism is that it has inspired imitators on the Right—perhaps best epitomized by the Trump administration’s penchant for talking about “alternative facts.” And there is no getting around the fact that the current and frightening resurgence of the Alt-Right is due to a renewed commitment to tribal politics on the Right. Indeed, in the United States the ur-tribal politics has always been the politics of white supremacy, which pits tribe against tribe in the most explicit way possible, and which brooks no truth other than its own dark light.

It is a confusion to blame identity politics for intellectual arrogance on the Left. More to blame is the relativism about truth and knowledge that is sometimes associated with such politics—even though it is not essential to them.

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