On Harvard and Belief

Donald Trump’s assault on Harvard and other institutions of higher learning is part of a broad and multifaceted strategy to upend those institutional spaces that are perceived to be strongholds of the American left. For much of the eighties and nineties, I remember hearing conservative cries about the liberal bias of the media and the radical left’s capture of American colleges and universities.

Sesame Street warped the minds of our young, they declared. NPR pushed liberal drivel. And universities no longer taught the classics of Western civilization. Instead, students were indoctrinated by Marxist scholars, content to take classes in “identity studies,” and were lost in a kind of moral relativism promulgated by the skepticism of postmodernism or poststructuralism or post whatever.

All the while, as conservatives claimed the left’s ideological capture of cultural institutions, Reaganism and its twin, Clintonism, shredded the social safety net, destabilized American workers as they transferred wealth to the richest of the rich, and built the largest carceral state of any independent democracy in the world.

In a sense, what Donald Trump is doing is the culmination of a decades-long effort to undo the New Deal and the Great Society. We tend to exceptionalize him as if he is a singular figure. When, in fact, what Trump is doing has deep roots in American political life. Just a quick glance at Joseph Lowndes's From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Joseph Crespino’s In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Counter Revolution, Seth Blumenthal’s Children of the Silent Majority: Young Voters and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980 or Bruce J. Shulman and Julien E. Zelizer’s edited volume, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s reveals how well sourced the Trump agenda actually is.

One can think of MAGAism as one might think of fashion: the return or recycling of a style with different stitching or detail – a citation of the past (the 1920s and 1950s) that authorizes its power in the present.

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This approach keeps us from thinking that the problems we face as a nation rest solely with Trump. That, if only we got rid of him, the country will find its footing once again. Magical thinking. Our problems cut to the marrow of the bone.

The one thing that is clear to me, even as I acknowledge the historical roots of Trump’s agenda, is that not only do these people want to control what we believe (with the ban on books and the like) but how we come to believe (with the assault on colleges and universities as well as scientific knowledge). They are attacking every arena that can cultivate a critical disposition towards authority.

We might see this, and reasonably so, as a reflection of Trump’s desire for absolute power. But that, I believe, is a bit shortsighted. This effort is part of an agenda aimed at making Americans pliant and malleable – willing to concede to the demands of capital without a mumbling word. (Just look at how they are talking about the immediate disruption of AI. How AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. No talk about why this must be inevitable. No serious discussion of the ethics – the human costs – of the choice corporations are making in their manic pursuit of profit. Only the assumption that we will concede to what’s coming.)

As I was thinking about this, and it offers a glimpse into how my mind works, Charles Sanders Pierce’s classic essay, “The Fixation of Belief,” came to mind. I won’t go into the particulars of his argument (and this will be a rather crude rendering of his claims), but he identifies four ways in which we fix believe in the face of doubt: 1) the method of tenacity, 2) the method of authority, 3) the a priori method, and 4) the method of science.

With the method of tenacity, we cling to what we believe. Facts be damn. Our minds are already made up no matter what confronts us. We believe what we believe. The method of authority reflects how we come to accept beliefs by way of our assent to institutions and persons we hold as the authority. We follow the church’s teachings, for example, or some political figure. The a priori method, to put it crudely, involves following what seems reasonable to you or intuitively obvious. “It makes of inquiry something similar to the development of taste; but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion….” And the scientific method, well, is an approach that isn’t reducible to what we cling to, or an authority to which assent, or a matter of taste. As Peirce wrote,

If I adopt the method of tenacity, and shut myself out from all influences, whatever I think necessary to doing this, is necessary according to that method. So with the method of authority: the state may try to put down heresy by means which, from a scientific point of view, seem very ill-calculated to accomplish its purposes; but the only test on that method is what the state thinks; so that it cannot pursue the method wrongly. So with the a priori method. The very essence of it is to think as one is inclined to think…. But with the scientific method the case is different. I may start with known and observed facts to proceed to the unknown; and yet the rules which I follow in doing so may not be such as investigation would approve. The test of whether I am truly following the method is not an immediate appeal to my feelings and purposes, but, on the contrary, itself involves the application of the method.

Hypotheses, experimentation, falsifiability, a community of inquirers all come into view with this particular method. As Peirce put it, “bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.”

No wonder Trump and his minions seem skeptical of such an approach. The science of vaccines doesn’t matter. The research at universities does not matter. Our doubts are best dealt with, on their view, by conceding to authority or clinging to our prejudices. Adam Serwer suggests that such an approach, if successful, along with the assault on the institutions that cultivate critical dispositions will hurl the country into the dark ages. I completely agree.

Our task, among other things, is to insist on a critical disposition towards the world. To ask rude and hard questions. To think historically so that we do not fall for the noise and illusions of carnival barkers. To resist the temptation of tenacity and the ease that comes with handing over our responsibility for critical thinking to those who claim authority as their own.

The assault on our democracy consists of much more than the usurpation of power by an executive gone mad. Forces are trying to capture all of our cultural and political institutions. They are attempting to dictate what we believe and how we come to believe with the aim of snatching our freedoms and making of us what they will.

We must refuse for the sake of our babies, for the future of American democracy itself.

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