Liner Note 9. BONFIRE OF THE KNOWLEDGES (PART 4): Interpretation as Counterpower

Santa Barbara on December 31, 2013

While pondering how to demand a pro-knowledge culture without being a boring, elitist jerk, I read a tweet by a fellow elitist jerk. It was written by Matthew Sheffield, a former right-wing activist who's flipped.

Since Donald Trump began his political career, a [lack of a ] college degree has become a sort of proxy for "Trumpiness." But education is not the primary divide. It's cognition. Intelligence and cognition are often mistaken for each other, but they are not the same thing.

Yes, I thought. Hell yes. The knowledge bonfire isn't caused by Trumpers being dumb.  They aren't.  But it does come from their bad cognition—really their knowledge refusal. And the challenge remains how to target bad or refused thinking without this being a way to call Trumpers dumb.  

A few of you responded to my last post by saying the second half overdid the stress on thinking at the expense of emotion, which rules politics.  

I certainly agree that thought and feeling are constantly intertwined. But in the list of factors behind Trump’s disastrous return to power, two are neglected that I’m stressing in this set of posts: an entitlement not to think (through) issues; and a tolerance or even celebration of ignorance as heartland authenticity. 

Still on this track, I went and read the paper Sheffield cites.  It's by a quantitative sociologist of religion named Darren K. Sherkat, and is called "Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote." 

Sherkat notes that “sectarian” Protestants were much more likely to vote for Trump than mainline Protestants, members of other religions, or the non-religious (3/4^th of sectarians voted for Trump while 1/4^th of Jews and the non-religious did; other Christians were split). 

But what is it about sectarian Protestants that makes them more MAGA even than other practicing Protestants not to mention everyone else?

The normal explanation is that sectarian Protestants are more conservative, and conservatives are more likely to vote for Trump than are centrists or leftists.  

Secondly, sectarian Protestants appear prone to white Christian nationalism, and in all his campaigns Trump validated white supremacist ideas and depicted white Christians as under siege.

Sherkat suggests that these terms are more opaque than we think. Also, the causal links are unclear.  Does white conservatism push people towards evangelical “identity” or the reverse?He’s certainly right that we need to separate out various factors. 

In my reading—I’ll reconstruct his piece more than summarize it—Sherkat seeks a common source of being a sectarian and/or white nationalist and/or authoritarian Protestant and finds limited cognition.  He contrasts limited cognition with “cognitive sophistication.” 

The paper doesn’t define this term clearly, and it seems almost custom-made to offend MAGA voters. But it is suggestive. 

I associate cognitive sophistication with the learned ability to assemble disparate elements of a problem under conditions of ambiguity. The elements probably don’t come from the same disciplines and likely don’t match, but must be bridged through interpretation. The person with cognitive sophistication sees non-matching as a positive call to high-effort thinking, and the result is a facility with complexity and perhaps with systems thinking. 

Sherkat measures cognitive sophistication as “verbal ability.” This is of course reductive, but it does get at a capacity for interpretation that will turn out to be important.

Trump voters are indeed “conservative,” but studies suggest that conservatism may be an effect of limited cognition.  Here’s a rather brutal passage from Sherkat that I quote at length:

Beginning with Adorno’s classic study of the authoritarian personality, empirical works have linked low levels of cognitive sophistication with right-wing orientations. . . . including authoritarianism, social dominance, ethnocentrism, dogmatism, and general conservatism (Choma and Hanoch, 2017; Heaven, Ciarrochi, and Leeson, 2011;McCourt et al., 1999; Onraet et al., 2015; Pennycook and Rand, 2019b). Indeed, Onraet and colleagues performed a systematic meta-analysis of 90 studies relating measures of cognitive sophistication to authoritarianism, conservatism, prejudice, dogmatism, and ethnocentrism and found a consistent substantial negative relationship (Onraet et al., 2015).

Experimental studies also suggest that “…conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought” (Eidelman et al., 2012:808). Stereotyping and prejudices enable cognitive short cuts that are useful for those whose mental faculties are taxed. This low-effort approach to information is also echoed in studies of receptivity to false information, where studies have found that lack of reasoning leads to acceptance of false information and is also associated with a preference for Trump in the 2016 election (Choma and Hanoch, 2017; Pennycook and Rand, 2019a, 2019b). Trump’s campaign may also have been more attractive to people with low cognitive sophistication and a preference for low-effort information processing because compared to other candidates Trump’s speeches were given at a much lower reading level (Kayam, 2018; Wang and Liu, 2018).

The point is not that conservatives who vote for Trump are dumb and can’t think. The point is that they engage in “low-effort thought” towards politics (leaving room for strenuouos and sustained thinking about their job, their sports teams, their family relationships, and other things they really care about). 

Over time, low-effort thought about politics leads to a lack of cognitive sophistication about politics.  This will likely translate as “can’t think” about those issues at crunch time. This is because thinking well depends on knowledge and methods that are rehearsed, interconnected, and accumulated week after week, year after year. 

Thinking well also depends on being relatively unrepressed about one’s emotional life and how emotions are affecting impressions and decisions.  The low-effort state makes that unnecessary or impossible.  

Trumpism offers a cognitive shortcut that bypasses the unpleasant ambiguities resulting from not thinking about issues that seem to be making your life worse.  You don’t have to work through anything--evidence, arguments, or feelings--because his answer is fully charged and waiting for you.

What about the second issue, sectarian / nationalist Christian faith? Sherkat tells a similar story:

Religious factors have also been associated with cognitive sophistication, and the overwhelming consensus is that the relationship between religiosity and cognitive sophistication is negative (cf. Kanazawa, 2010; Pennycook et al., 2012; Reynolds et al., 2020; Sherkat, 2010; Stagnaro et al., 2019. Zuckerman, Silberman, and Hall, 2013, 2020). Importantly for this study, several examinations of the negative relationship between cognitive sophistication and religiosity have also implicated conservative political and social values in the relationship (Ludeke, Johnson, and Bouchard, 2013; Reynolds et al., 2020; Saribay and Yilmaz, 2017). Most of these studies approach the relationship between cognitive sophistication and religiosity from a distinctively psychological angle, viewing intelligence as a cognitive trait that inoculates against irrational beliefs. However, exclusivist sectarian religious groups may create isolated networks and deficit networks that hinder the development and maintenance of knowledge (Sherkat, 2010, 2011).

Sherkat is not interested in “intelligence as a cognitive trait” that stands alone and affects political choices. He’s interested in cognitive sophistication as an effect of functioning information networks.  To put words in his mouth, functioning information networks circulate generally accurate information in relation to other information networks that enable (and require) ongoing acts of active interpretation.  These networks constitute (local) cultures, with which individual continuously engage. 

For Sherkat, the problem is not conservative Protestantism or Christian identity as such. The problem is that “exclusivist sectarian religious groups may create isolated networks and deficit networks that hinder the development and maintenance of knowledge.”  

In other words, the Christians who vote 3:1 for Trump are not simply conservative or racist or patriarchal white Christians, but Christians who live in a culture that has normalized “low-effort thought” and knowledge deficiency.  This then enables feelings (distrust of Democrats, dislike of immigrants, unease with autonomous women) to crystallize as white patriarchal voting in part because there is no mediation, no potential deterrence, from high-effort thought.  

I was especially interested as a lit person in Sherkat’s measuring (“proxying”) intensity of thinking as a specific relationship to textual interpretation.  

He uses a classification system that allows people to choose among three different understandings of scripture.

“(1) the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word; 

“(2) the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word; and 

“(3) the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men” (185).  

The first two groups consist of believing Christians, but members of the first group believe in Scriptural “inerrancy.” This belief skewed voting towards Trump.  

People in the second group are religious in the sense that they believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, but they also believe that it cannot always be taken literally, that is, it must be interpreted by people (churches, ministers, the faithful themselves).  Moving from an inerrant to an interpretative understanding of scripture reduced “the odds of a Trump vote by 52 percent” (189).  “[T]he difference between people with secular Bible beliefs [group 2] compared to inerrant believers remains significant even after controls for partisanship and political ideology.” 

This is an important finding. It suggests that seeing language, even scriptural language, as requiring interpretation is likely to shift voters away from Trump.

The importance of interpretation may also explain the correlation between college completion and not voting for Trump. College attendance moves people away from Trump not because it makes people less likely to be religious (they aren’t)  but because it increases their “verbal ability.”  

As Sherkat puts it, “The baseline model shows that verbal ability has a significant and substantial negative impact on the odds of voting for Trump, even after controls for education, rural origins, southern residence, and other factors. In the baseline model each point increase on the verbal exam reduces the odds of voting for Trump versus Clinton/others by 14 percent” (189). 

This is a big finding. Greater verbal facility or verbal experience, let’s call it, enables a non-authoritarian relation to texts, even when one regards it as God’s text:  one’s active cognitive engagement is required to generate understanding of the text.  One’s consent is required to establish its meaning. 

I posit that it’s a short step from seeing interpretation as normal and inevitable (or even enjoyable and interesting) to feeling comfortable with democratic negotiations of political authority. The same goes for preferring democracy as a mode of governance to authoritarianism.

Of course it’s very hard to disentangle these factors and they indeed work together. Causality also works in multiple directions. This is culture after all, so interrelations are very complex. There are issues with this paper that Sherkat acknowledges and that I set aside in noting that much more research needs to be done.

But within the familiar political issues lurks this possibility: the refusal of hermeneutics is the Trumpian superpower.  This power grows as a refusal becomes a standing incapacity with hermeneutics. 

This refusal of or incapacity with a hermeneutical stance toward the wider world and its people may in turn underlie the MAGA rejection of the radical diversity of the actual world—the queer planet, the Black planet, the godless planet, the Gaia planet. For without a capacity for interpretation, one’s understanding and one’s sense of safety do indeed become more elusive across various forms of difference.

Then there’s our flip side:  insistence on hermeneutics is Trumpian kryptonite.  

The question then is how to spread this outside already well-structured anti-Trump domains. How do we make hermeneutics a fun and interesting as well as inevitable part of everyday life across the whole society?

That’s the question we’re going to have to start answering and implementing in 2025. 

Universities are a big part of the answer. They enable the practice in making knowledge, in not being alienated from it, in wielding knowledge as personal agency, in having knowledge being a fun thing you do with others.  If we call the result “cognitive sophistication” we have to insist it’s not an elite capacity but a general one, and obtainable though but not only through the university. 

 

2024 has been a great year for violence, coercion and knowledge destruction in all their forms. 

2025 is going to be just as difficult. But it will be better that I at least expect if we can help reconnect more people to the inglorious power of thinking in the construction of their society. 

My warmest wishes for your 2025.