Know-It-All Society

Reviews – Know-It-All Society by Michael Patrick Lynch

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This is a sad book. It is sad because the author, Michael P. Lynch, thinks he is showing us how to avoid the traps of cognitive dissonance but all he manages is to show how cognitive dissonance is done. Lynch says quite a bit about humbly seeking truth and listening to both sides, but in practice, he stacks the deck like a crooked cardsharp. Thus, while he acknowledges that not all conservatives are racist, he treats all conservatives as if they were. Similarly, while he acknowledges that liberals are not Simon-pure in their goodness, he quickly explains that their positions are misunderstood and not all that bad. It is all very reassuring for those who are part of the cultural, bicoastal elite.

The book is even sadder when we consider the agony that Lynch had to go through to make even the tame criticisms of the left that he makes.

Lynch's brief is to explain the current cultural moment. He finds that the current state of mind of the politically involved is arrogant and dogmatic. He points out that it seems that the “tenor of our political discourse” communicates that we are to believe as “dogmatically as possible.”

That was page 2 of the book, and by page 3 the book was going off track in a silly direction. On page 3, Lynch takes the obligatory shot at President Trump because “we were told crowds were bigger than they were.” I had just finished the Pop Culture and Philosophy book on “1984” where this statement had been repeatedly offered as the sine qua non of Orwellian doublespeak, so I decided to look into it. It turns out that Trump's statement was made from his perspective at the podium where one might charitably think that the speaker would judge crowd sizes as very large. It's a trivial point, actually, but making this trivia so important seems “dogmatic.”

In addition, Lynch makes sneering references to “fake news” which he defines as “news that one doesn't like,” but this is question-begging, particularly after the last three years where Washington and New York media have repeatedly reported false news. For example, in the same stories that carried Trump's claims about “crowd sizes,” the media falsely reported that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to paint Trump as a racist. That story is not “news we don't like” – many New Yorkers loved the story – it was patently false and is part of a pattern of false to fact stories being printed without editorial control. Sharyl Attkisson has done a yeoman job of collecting a list of 95 fake news stories about Trump.

So, the book starts off with so many things going wrong at the same time.

With that unpromising start, the second chapter on “Montaigne's Warning” was good and is a useful incentive to read some of Montaigne's essays for self-improvement. Montaigne's warning is against arrogance and the sense of superiority that “we see...in the marches of neo-Nazis on college campuses.”

At which point, we have to wonder about the author's grip on reality. We don't see Neo-Nazis marching on college campuses. What we see on college campuses, we mostly see leftists “deplatforming” conservatives and even running insufficiently woke college professors off campus. (Google “Evergreen College/Brett Weinstein.”) The only neo-Nazis who get close to college campuses are the fabrications of hate crime hoaxes. (See Hate Crime Hoax by Wilfred Reilly.)

Good heavens, but this is painful. I assume that Lynch has to sell books to his tribe.

The problem, of course, is that we are incentivized to be confident. We want the flattery of agreement. We associate facts.

All of which is nicely illustrated by the fantasy of Neo-Nazis marching on college campuses.

The third chapter is the “Outrage Factory” in which Lynch explains Dunning-Kruger. People think they know more than they do because they can Google when they want, but they don't do the hard work of understanding things. People are more prone to conspiracies. They are more prone to emotions and outrage. Lynch's example is, of course, someone who showed up at a pizza restaurant to check out a claim that a pedophile ring was being run out of the basement. (Lynch, of course, doesn't touch the much larger bit of conspiracy chasing about Trump being a Russian mole since that fabrication was one adopted by this tribe.)

Honestly, so far, the analysis is superficial and obvious. All the reader gets is a rehash of cognitive theory being used occasionally to reinforce some dodgy political point that Lynch believes in, which is ironic because in chapter four, Lynch shares that “the hard truth is that while we all like to think of ourselves as open-minded and intellectually humble, most of us find uncomfortable, or even morally problematic, the prospect of changing our mind about something that matters.”

In chapter four- “Where the Spade Turns” – Lynch makes some worthwhile observations about how our convictions play a role in our self-identity. Lynch observes that “A conviction is a commitment that reflects the kind of person we want to be.” Interestingly, this seems like a completely different perspective than the classical Thomistic understanding. Lynch is making one's virtue depends on one's propositional commitments. In Thomism, virtue is act dependent: choices make habits make virtues make character.

Reflecting on the polarization of the modern age, it seems that this may be the heart of the polarization. If convictions make virtues, then those who have the right commitments are virtuous and those without the right commitments are base and ignoble. This seems an apt description of the attitude we see which induces physical attacks on Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats and hysterical efforts to deplatform conservative speakers on college campuses.

Lynch then turns to politics. He first takes on the “Arrogance and the American Right.” Naturally, he starts with Hannah Arendt and a discussion of the Nazis, because, you know, Nazis and conservatives, jada, jada. Then, there is Trump who is nasty and unseemly. Finally, we have “status threats”; conservatives didn't support Trump because he validated their attitudes but because they are are “frustrated with an economic system rife with inequalities.” Apparently, conservatives have false beliefs that they refuse to revise because of their needs to maintain their mythic past, etc.

Frankly, the whole chapter is an exercise in bafflegab that makes no effort to do anything but link conservatives to Nazis, such as the Neo-Nazis who chanted about “Jews will not replace us.” This seems like yet another good example of what Lynch warned the reader against earlier in the book than any kind of real discussion of real people. There are many far more serious book about the conservative mindset after 2016. Check out White Working Class by Joan C. Williams, who is a liberal and far more perceptive than Lynch.

When we turn to “Liberalism and Identity Politics,” we don't see the linkage to extremists. Instead, we get a lot of tender loving care. This introductory section is unintentionally funny:

“Google this topic, or roam around social media, and you'll find lots of pieces that talk about liberals as intolerant, smug and disdainful. And those are the polite words.
Most of my fellow liberals are apt to shrug their shoulders at this. Sticks and stones, they say: after all, reflection and open-mindedness are core liberal virtues. The fact that others don't appreciate our virtuousness, or project their own arrogant attitudes onto our values, is their problem, not ours.
Indeed, but one might wonder whether that reaction is part of the problem.”

I love that “indeed.” It's like Pepe Lepew saying “A skunk? Moi???”

Lynch allows that liberals may have a problem with identity politics and that this may lead to some tribalism, but he assures his friends that this is a misunderstanding. Liberalism is all about “Identity as Recognition,” not “Identity as Tribalism.” Unless, of course, it involves a “conservative provocateur defending the idea that “it is okay to be white,'” to which Lynch archly says “Which seems, frankly, like getting up to defend that idea that it is okay to like ice cream. No one really has been worrying about that have they?”

Good grief, where has this guy been? This week, Michelle Obama accused all whites of fleeing minorities in fear, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez implied in questions to a witness that “whites” were responsible for “climate change,” and a professor explained to the New York Times that when Indians beat up on blacks they were “enacting whiteness.” He has never heard about “white privilege”?

His next book should involve something about “living in a bubble.”

The chapter was painful in so many ways.

Speaking of bubble, Lynch offers this insightful observation on his own standing within the bubble. After acknowledging “liberal dominance” in university faculties - actually, the percentage is more like the numbers that Totalitarians role up in fixed plebiscites - Lynch suggests that the problem is that liberals are tempted to believe that conservatives just can't measure up to scholarship. In a footnote he offers the following:

“The solution, I think, is not going to be as simple as calling for more “viewpoint diversity” on faculties (a term I don't really understand) or as drastic as calling for affirmative action policies for the hiring of conservative academics. These latter proposals, while setting off alarms around liberal academy, are particularly unserious, since (1) it is not clear that they would be constitutional; (2) they are deeply impractical, since, ironically it would fall largely on liberal professor to judge whether a colleague is “conservative” or not; and (3)conservatives largely oppose them anyway.” (p. 181.)

A few observations:

First, he doesn't understand the meaning of the term “viewpoint diversity”????? Deliberate obtuseness is never a good look.

Second, it is weird that he finds constitutional problems in not discriminating based on First Amendment grounds, but I assume he thinks racial discrimination in the form of “affirmative action” is non-controversial.

Third, obviously, there are no problems in deciding who is “Black” or “Hispanic.” No one games that system, ever.

Fourth, conservatives oppose discrimination because they champion individual merit. For a liberal to make this argument is deeply hypocritical.


The reason that liberal professors oppose a rule that would end “viewpoint discrimination” - actually, retaliation for exercising First Amendment rights - is that it is their sinecure that is threatened. They are more than happy to act like social planners when it is merely the children of working-class whites being aced out of college slots in favor of the children of their professional-class peers. They are also willing to live with the “mismatch effect” that condemns those same students who they have acted as fairy godmothers with being forced to compete out of their league.

In short, this footnote is a classic example of unthinking, uncritical, arrogant, group-think.

His observations about the contempt that liberals feel toward conservatives seemed accurate, however.

Toward the end, Lynch suggests that “reflective practices” should be institutionalized. He advises “the news media can combat arrogance by reminding us of the fallibility of the powerful.

Indeed. The problem is that the media went completely AWOL during the Obama years. We had pictures of President Obama with a halo. Obama was hailed as the lightworker. Problematic stories about Obama were killed.

The last three years have shown the media completely in the tank for one side of the political equation. The media hardly covered itself in glory over the Mueller Investigation/Report. We've seen journalists explaining that they are excused from journalistic ethics because Trump is so very bad. We have also heard the owner of the Washington Post tell his reporters after the Mueller Report misfired that they needed to make every story about Trump being a “racist.” It is not surprising that the media is polling lower approval numbers than Trump.

Ultimately, the problem with this book is that it is written from within the bubble. If it had taken a fair an objective book that challenged leftism from the inside, it would have been honest and worthwhile and would have made the critique of conservativism more believable. But, instead, it is obvious that the author wants the applause of his peers and has the arrogance of his convictions which renders him unwilling to listen to anything outside the bubble he inhabits.