As a card-carrying member of the "bitter block", I have a number of bones to pick with an intellectual trend on the left that I like to call the "psychologization of belief." I’ll define it as a rhetorical move which dismisses opposing claims by relegating to the status of signs and symptoms of underlying mental illness. The hard-core psychologizer will insist, therefore, that all supporters of authoritarianism experienced childhood trauma , that all oppenents of gay-marriage are irrationally homophobic, etc., etc.
The trouble with this sort of speech-act, as I explained in an earlier defense of Helen’s " ground rules of blogging, " is that when used inappropriately it effectively shuts down discourse. The more nuanced question naturally arises, then, as to whether psychologization can be deployed appropriately and effectively against an opponent who is actually arguing in bad faith; i.e. an interlocutor who constructs ad-hoc and dishonest arguments in support of a proposition which that person holds unconditionally. (I use the value-neutral term here in order to avoid wading into the shark-infested waters of what constitutes an irrational or "psychologically driven" belief. As y’all might have surmised by now, I’m a pretty big fan of irrationality.) In other words, can psychologization, properly deployed, force us to lay all our cards on the table and thereby improve discourse?
I have a strong inclination towards a "no" answer, and it doesn’t just come from the fact that a regime of psychologization would take much of the beauty and flourish out of rhetorical combat. The simple fact is that certain kinds of emotional reactions and associations are more acceptable to the arbiters of "reasonability" than others. Thus, notions of universal brotherhood are uncontroversial in a way that prejudice in the Burkean sense is not, despite the almost unimaginably greater amount of suffering caused by the former. Until we win the meta-battle, conservatives will be stuck with making bad-faith arguments in the interests of electoral success. Call it another casualty of the awful provincialism of the Left.
