One of my favorite quotes is from the Roman playright Terence. He asserted: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I know of it through the English translation, “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”
This truth was brought home to me in the early 2000s when I read Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Atran has a long section where he critiques a dominant mode of analysis and interpretation within American cultural anthropology which emphasizes differences in cognitive frameworks and paradigms, to the point of incommensurability. The simplest reduction of Atran’s critiques are that the logical conclusion of this line of thinking would make even the interpretive scholarship of this school of cultural anthropology totally worthless.
A more concrete issue where this form of thinking has crept into the broader discussion is confusion of terms for reality, and the reconceptualization of reality through diversification of terminology. Consider the discussion about democratic forms of governance. One can assert, with credibility, that the Greeks “invented” democracy. But, I think this masks the reality that the democratic impulse existed across many cultures and societies (e.g., the republics of ancient India). The Greeks had a genius for systematizing and formalization of social and political structures. But the basic elements and dynamics were already there.
Similarly, people are wont to say that one can’t understand Chinese or Indian religion from the Western perspective of religion. I understand where people are coming from when they say this (and in fact, it’s not a “Western perspective,” but often a post-Calvinist confessional Protestant conceptualization that they have in mind as “Western”), but the reality is that the broader category of religious phenomena is easy to identify. That is the reason that Portuguese Catholics initially though Indian Hindus were Christian. It is the reason that the Chinese and Japanese in the 16th century often confused Roman Catholicism with a sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Religions differ a great deal across cultures. But they are pretty recognizable.
But there is the reverse side to this equation: thinking that you understand the psychology of others so well that you misconstrue their motives and intentions.
Two concrete examples come to mind. My liberal friends often talk about conservatives in ways that seem totally wrong-headed, but, they behave as if they understand the conservative mind as experts, despite not knowing any conservatives besides myself or reading much about conservatives in a way that takes ethnography seriously. There is some evidence that liberals, in particular, have problems modeling conservative motivations, but the issue is general and not specific to any ideology.
To illustrate this, on the Say Goodnight Kevin YouTube channel, there is an analysis of Christian* films and media from a skeptical perspective. Kevin himself is an evangelical Christian who was homeschooled. One of his major criticisms is that in evangelical Protestant Christian media nonbelievers, especially atheists, are depicted in a way that is totally unrealistic, and in keeping with the prejudices of evangelicals about the low moral character and motives of nonbelievers.
Obviously, there is a spectrum here. Humans are not total islands from each other. The limits of my comprehension are not the limits of my culture. But neither are cultural and subcultural norms and idioms so transparent that one can always make very precise and deep inferences about the intentions of outgroups. Any analysis of human psychology and culture must always wrestle with this reality.
* “Christian” here refers to the American evangelical Protestant subculture.
I think the issue with liberals and evangelical Christians is more that they define themselves in opposition to a kind of straw-man, which they have perhaps convinced themselves is actually real. The psychology they are imputing to the Other is not their *own* psychology but something different, and inferior.
The first axioms of conservatism are that human nature exists and has no history. Terence states it elegantly. Progressivism believes that everything is convention and contingency.
Conservatives can create a cultural anthropology. They think there is an entity that can be seen and studied. “The proper study of mankind is man.”
Progressivism cannot stand the idea of an anthropology. There is nothing to study. Since the progressives have taken over the academy, they have destroyed academic anthropology. They don’t regard it as a loss.
The second axioms of conservatism are those of epistemological modesty. Hayek wrote: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” David Hume was in many ways the first great conservative philosopher. His epistemology was very skeptical. Or as William Golding wrote: “Nobody knows anything”.
Progressives can be epistemological skeptical, but they never take Golding or Hayek to heart. If they did that, they would have to quit and go home.
Which gets us to the last topic — understanding other people. It is very difficult to understand people from other cultures, but consider this. It is very difficult to understand yourself. Just ask any experienced psychotherapist.
Not only that but we spend much of our lives trying to figure out what the people who are nearest and dearest to us are thinking and why they are acting the way they do. People for whom there is no distance of language or culture from us.
The problem is not that other cultures are incommensurable, it is that human beings are hard to understand. After 300 years of Civilization the number of authors who have created realistic meaningful literary characters is a handful. There is only one Shakespeare, only one Rembrandt.
“After 300 years of Civilization” should be “After 3000 years of Civilization’
What’s 27 centuries among friends?
I suspect that one of the reasons because progressives have more difficulty understanding conservatives than the opposite could be that conservatism (specially in USA, where “conservative” is usually applyed to all right-wing, without the European distinctions between liberals, christian-democrats, conservatives and nationalists) is much more here heterogeneous than progressivism: basically, everybody who disagree with one point of the progressive agenda is a conservative.
@Miguel: Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind” has a good description of the reasons behind the asymmetry. He explains it in light of his theories of moral psychology — briefly, conservatives make moral judgements on a wider range of “axes” than liberals do.
@Razib: For what it’s worth, media in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community also routinely portray the outside world (including non-Orthodox Jews) as being completely depraved. Near-universal adultery and casual sex seem to be common “criticisms”.