Intellectual Myopia

I often give the human intellect more credit than it deserves.

A friend of mine, whom I have not seen for some time but with whom I have remained connected through Facebook, once  posted a link on his wall depicting an outrageous act committed by people identifying themselves as religious Christians. The details of the incident are not particularly important to the point I want to make, but suffice it to say that it involved a grotesque imitation of crucifixion. Predictably, the incident was either ignored by the mainstream Christian world or broadly condemned by Christians who saw it for what it was: the behavior of extremists and fanatics rather than an expression of Christianity itself.

My friend then drew what he apparently considered to be an obvious parallel. If we can look at an isolated act of violence or religious fanaticism committed by Christians and immediately recognize that the perpetrators do not represent Christianity as a whole, he argued, why can we not extend precisely the same reasoning to Islam? Why, for example, should the attacks of September 11 be treated as evidence of something significant about Islam rather than simply as the work of a fringe group of extremists?

At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable argument. Upon closer examination, however, the analogy begins to fall apart.

The crucial question is not simply whether an act is committed by a person who identifies with a particular religion. The question is whether that act is isolated, how it relates to broader religious and political movements, how it is interpreted by other adherents of that faith, and whether there exists a sustained pattern of similar behavior. An equivalence cannot be established merely by placing two disturbing events side by side and giving them the same label: "religious extremism."

That distinction seems particularly important when discussing Islamist terrorism after September 11. The subsequent history of jihadist violence, the persistence of organizations committed to Islamist political or militant objectives, and the existence of competing interpretations of Islam all complicate any attempt to characterize September 11 simply as an isolated aberration. Groups and movements associated with different strands of Islamism have exercised considerable political, social, or military influence in different parts of the Muslim world. Whatever one's interpretation of their relationship to Islam itself, their existence makes it difficult to dismiss the phenomenon entirely by pointing to the fact that most Muslims do not participate in terrorism.

This brings me to the part of my friend's argument that troubled me most.

My concern was not merely that I disagreed with his conclusion. What disturbed me was how easily an intelligent, highly educated person could construct an analogy that seemed, at least to me, to collapse under relatively straightforward scrutiny. I found myself wondering how he had arrived there in the first place.

Was it wishful thinking? Was it a form of denial? Was he beginning with the conclusion he wanted to reach and then searching for an analogy capable of supporting it? Was there something else at work?

His liberal worldview may have made him reluctant to give serious consideration to arguments made by people who have spent years warning about Islamist extremism. Acknowledging that some of those warnings contained legitimate concerns could create an uncomfortable conflict with a broader commitment to religious tolerance and opposition to prejudice. A person can hold those principles sincerely while nevertheless allowing them to influence the way evidence is interpreted.

That possibility raises a much larger question, and ultimately it is this question that interests me more than my friend's particular argument.

If a highly educated person can become so invested in a preferred interpretation of reality that an apparently weak analogy seems persuasive to him, how many other people are doing exactly the same thing?

Human beings like to think of themselves as rational creatures. We pride ourselves on our ability to analyze evidence, recognize patterns, distinguish correlation from causation, and revise our beliefs when confronted with contradictory information. Much of the time, however, our reasoning seems to operate in the opposite direction. We form an intuitive or emotional conclusion first and then deploy our intelligence in its defense.

Intelligence may actually make us more vulnerable to certain forms of persuasion rather than less. A clever person is not necessarily someone who is better at discovering the truth. Sometimes he is simply better at constructing an argument for what he already wants to believe.

That possibility is what I find genuinely unsettling.

Propaganda does not necessarily succeed because its audience is stupid. It can succeed because people are remarkably good at rationalizing information that conforms to their existing assumptions, identities, and moral commitments. Give someone an argument that reinforces the way he already understands the world, and he may scrutinize it far less rigorously than he would an argument that threatens that worldview.

This may be one reason extremist movements have historically been able to make effective use of propaganda. The propagandist does not have to persuade everyone. He only needs to provide a sufficiently compelling narrative to people who are already predisposed to accept it and exploit the psychological tendency we all possess to protect our existing beliefs.

My concern, therefore, is not simply whether my friend is right or wrong about Islam, Christianity, September 11, or religious extremism. Those are questions that require evidence and careful distinctions. The deeper issue is whether any of us are as intellectually independent as we imagine ourselves to be.

The most humbling realization is that education does not immunize us against bad reasoning. Intelligence does not guarantee intellectual honesty. A sophisticated vocabulary or an impressive résumé does not necessarily mean that a person has learned how to challenge his own assumptions.

I suspect that, in this respect, I am no different from anyone else. I often give the human intellect more credit than it deserves, including my own.

That is precisely why we should be more skeptical not only of the arguments we disagree with, but also of the arguments that tell us exactly what we want to hear.