Abstract
How does a person think, when she’s thinking like a citizen? Does she think like a “man of the people”? Where those “people” are opposed by populists not generally to “the elites” but specifically to “the experts,” does the citizen think like an expert, defending facts against popular feelings? I argue that the citizen thinks otherwise. She inhabits neither the “reactive attitude” typical of populists, nor the “cognitive attitude” prized by experts. Both are forms of anti-pluralism; but a citizen is above all a pluralist. I draw this argument from recognition theory, mindful that some kinds of populism have been described as “pathological” forms of the politics of recognition, and that recognition itself has been understood as the exercise of that “intellectual virtue” which makes pluralism possible. The argument elaborates these suggestions with a thesis about the political “priority” of recognitive over cognitive (or reactive) attitudes.
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Notes
- 1.
The full quotation is important. Gove said: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong” (Islam 2016). His complaint is not actually that experts are in charge, but that their expertise is not reliable. Still, the raw sentiment strikes precisely the nerve that interests me here, a sentiment often expressed without Gove’s qualification.
- 2.
As Martha Nussbaum puts it, “cost-benefit analysis does not seem to do any very profound work on its own: all the work of evaluating has to be done beforehand” (Nussbaum 2000, 1031-32).
- 3.
Performing this task often involves creating new words designed for this purpose. Bauman, for example, champions the word “audism” as “a basket that gathers disparate experiences with one thing in common: the discrimination against individuals based on hearing ability” (Bauman 2004, 240). The point of the coinage is not just to appear in the dictionary, but rather “to diminish audist beliefs and practices.” It does this precisely by bringing these hidden imprints of power to the surface, to “detect the privilege allotted to hearing people” (ibid., 241). To do this, it will often descend to the depths of metaphysics, as Bauman recommends: in this case audism detects the imprint of power on the meaning we give to language itself. “Language” has traditionally been defined (confined) as spoken language; and when the ability to use spoken language is thought to define humanity itself, then those without this ability (the Deaf) can be seen as diminished by a medical problem. This is “metaphysical audism,” and the antidote is terminological. The structure of Bauman’s argument is instructively typical. Areheart suggests it is because Bauman’s insight is not more widely accepted that the medical model persists. He explains, “Perhaps this is due to the fact that disability and its theoretical underpinnings have not received the same degree of scrutiny as other aspects of identity, such as race or gender” (Areheart 2008, 183).
- 4.
Readers familiar with work in philosophy, psychology, or even neuroscience on “second-person cognition” may recognize (pun intended) this account of recognition.
- 5.
I draw on Darwall to make this general point about recognition as response to value, because his attention to the possibility of feigning respect sets up my later argument that sometimes we must feign respect in order to show it. But Darwall makes a distinction here between two types of recognitive attitude, and his distinction is not necessary for my argument. Without getting into the details, my general view of respect as responsiveness to value seems closer to Raz, who faults Darwall for “multipl[ying] unnecessarily types of respect” in order to isolate respect for the value of persons. Respect for persons is distinctive, but for Raz this is because persons are different from things (like storms)—not because storms lack value, which requires a response that can be more or less appropriate. It is simply convenient here to reserve the term “recognition” for the attitude of respect directed specifically at persons. See Raz 2001, 137n17.
- 6.
Drawing on Gadamer, Wendy Martineau makes an argument for a politics that is more sensitive to this cultural variation in what counts as respect and disrespect, and to the fact that our current discourse of recognition may itself produce new forms of misrecognition. Yet she defends the continued usefulness of the language of recognition, as I would also do (see Martineau 2012).
- 7.
Strawson calls them the “reactive” attitudes. I wish to avoid Strawson’s implication that these attitudes are basically instinctive. The important point is that they are not emotions that we decide to employ, and in this sense they are a reaction. But reactions can certainly be learned and shaped, even if the result of the shaping is that they settle into the unconscious. Thus, I prefer “response” to “reaction,” in order to allow that they may be as much the fruit of culture as of nature. However, just because they may be learned responses, rather than instinctive reactions, does not in itself mean that they have no moral legitimacy. That is the point I want to retain from Strawson, even if Strawson himself is not clear about it (or simply wrong about it). I agree with Fischer that “we can give sense to the claim that the reactive attitudes are emotions that people are naturally susceptible to, without simply conflating the natural and reactive emotions” (Fischer 2005, 147).
- 8.
Thus, the priority thesis has much in common with the approach to ethics taken by thinkers like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, and Iris Murdoch. On this view, ethics is not grounded in a non-ethical reality, but this does not entail the conclusion that ethics is an illusion or a projection of subjective values onto neutral facts. Rather, ethics is an independent practice. For a good overview and development of this position, see Pihlström 2005.
- 9.
Paul Brodwin, for example, uses Ricoeur’s well-known distinction between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of faith to describe the arguments of DeBruin et al. about risk and the medicalization of pregnancy. Brodwin writes, “The authors delve into the broad cultural conversation about the morality of medical intervention during pregnancy and the ways it shapes women’s subjective experience. But their argument then takes a more skeptical turn. They interpret lay conceptions of the risk of pregnancy as a mystified ideology that sustains an oppressive social order. Paradoxically, and despite women’s goals, the lay discourse on risk often puts women and children in harm’s way. The authors thus launch a normative critique of popular notions. In the end, they give interpretive priority to systematic philosophies of social justice over lay understandings” (Brodwin 2016, 191). My point here is not necessarily to defend Brodwin’s interpretation of DeBruin et al. (see DeBruin et al. 2016, 181), but to use Brodwin’s formulation to explain what I mean by the hermeneutic of suspicion in the study of medicalization. The hermeneutic of suspicion, with the interpretive authority it awards to systematic theories, is at odds with the priority thesis. My own approach is closer to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of faith. Properly political, democratic critical distance should be situated. Walzer’s description of “immanent critique” is useful here. The right kind of critical distance allows citizens to press for change from the inside, not the outside (because they are citizens with attachments, not detached observers). Walzer explains, “Perhaps [the citizen] has some new vision of what justice entails. If the new vision is to be persuasive, however, it will have to be connected by argument to the old one” (Walzer 1994, 43).
- 10.
It is Mouffe’s description of the challenge, and not necessarily her description of the solution, that I find useful here.
- 11.
I leave aside the important question this raises about the proper scale of a political community. Personally, I suspect that the peculiar virtue described here is difficult to develop and practice at the level of the nation-state, and that the locus of citizenship is more literally local. In terms of structure, this need not mean a return to the polis, but it might recommend significant decentralization.
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Smith, A. (2022). The Populist’s Feelings, the Expert’s Facts, and the Citizen’s Peculiar Virtue. In: Peterson, G.R., Berhow, M.C., Tsakiridis, G. (eds) Engaging Populism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05785-4_13
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