Beliefs and interests

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his job depends upon not understanding it.” The spectacle of rightist and centrist journalists trying to absolve the MSM of blame for the rise of Islamophobia reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s famous quip.

They, of course, are by no means the only people at whom one might direct this accusation. Many of you us might also point it at: fund managers who deny the efficient market hypothesis; mainstream economists who reject some heterodox approaches; managerialists who stick to using crude targets; or centrist MPs who fail to see the need for new economic policies. And so on.

But I wonder: what exactly is the mechanism that Sinclair and those who quote him have in mind?

I doubt that many of us deliberately and consciously adapt our beliefs to our interests. We don’t think “X is false but it serves my interests so I shall believe X”. For example, a Tory government is probably more in my financial interest than a Labour one, but I struggle to find sympathy for the Tory party.

I suspect instead that other mechanisms are at work.

One is wishful thinking. This is not a deliberate process. Instead, as Jon Elster has said, it operates behind our backs, subconsciously. An experiment by Guy Mayraz has shown just how easy it is to induce this. He asked subjects to predict future moves in the price of wheat. Before doing so, he randomly divided them into two groups: "farmers" who would profit from a rising price, and "bakers" who would profit from a falling one. He found that farmers predicted higher prices than bakers. And they continued to do so even when they were given incentives for accurate predictions.

We all want to believe we are the good guys, and the wish is father to the belief; nobody really wants to believe they have contributed to mass murder. The joke in David Mitchell’s famous question “are we the baddies?” is that he and his comrades had not asked that before.

A second mechanism is that we can distort our evidence-gathering. Jon Elster describes this:

Initially, let us assume, the evidence does not support the belief that I would like to be true. I then proceed to collect more evidence, adjusting and updating my beliefs as I go along. If at some point the sum total of the evidence collected so far supports my preferred belief, I stop. I can then truly tell myself and others that my belief is supported by the available evidence (Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, p 37-38)

This is one reason why many clever people can (perhaps) be just as biased as stupider ones: they have more ways of gathering evidence and rationalizing it.

A third mechanism is professional deformation. This is the tendency for our training – into all professions, including economics – to inculcate not only techniques and knowledge but also biases, groupthink and blind spots.

Take, for example, Andrew Norfolk’s reporting of the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. Here, there was a trade-off, between a strong and important story on the one hand against the danger of stoking up Islamophobia on the other: Mr Norfolk saw at the time that his story was “a dream for the far-right” and the Christchurch murderer wrote “For Rotherham” on his ammunition. Journalists’ professional upbringing is to favour publishing the story. And rightly so: it was true, and only a warped mind would see it as a reason to hate Muslims.  

If that case is clear cut, though, what about Newsnight inviting Generation Identity onto their programme. Does the desire for “good debate” overcome the risk of publicizing fascism? And what about countless comment columns disparaging Muslims? Does the truth-value of these really outweigh the danger of encouraging the far-right. 

In all these cases, journalists’ professional presumption is to “publish and be damned.” This is often a laudable instinct. But it is only a partial perspective, one which a journalist’s training perhaps exaggerates*: journalists are often selected for and socialized into a strong belief in free speech. That biases them against seeing that such speech has a cost - and they are especially slow to see this if they don't want to. 

My point here should be a trivial one, but I fear is overlooked in our histrionic environment. We are all prone to countless biases: yes, all, not least me. Sinclair’s remark should be seen not as a description of a conspiracy, but of how these biases can operate together.

* The cost of trashy right-wing columns isn’t just (or even perhaps mainly) the stoking of Islamophobia. It’s the denial of space for discussion of other issues: if we’re debating fascism we are not debating other things.

Comments

[cjcjc]

This is of course nonsense. Those defending the MSM are correct.
Even at its height, The Times's coverage of Rotherham was a very small percentage of that paper's output. Nothing was being crowded out.
Rod Liddle - a supposed leading villain - has one page in The Spectator and a page in the Sunday Times. That's it.
While people in NYC were apparently blaming Chelsea Clinton FFS.
Nothing is more likely to stoke Islamophobia than crying wolf over Islamophobia.

[Jim]

"We all want to believe we are the good guys, and the wish is father to the belief; nobody really wants to believe they have contributed to mass murder."

A question the Left should be asking of themselves rather the the Right I suspect.......there is one side of the Left/Right divide that has consistently claimed the moral high ground, that they are indeed 'the good guys', and that side is not the Right.

[Ralph Musgrave]

Chris’s claim in his first couple of paragraphs that Islamophobia derives from MSM journalists’ “jobs depending” on spreading an Islamophobic message is plain bizarre. Possibly that’s the case with the Daily Mail, but at the other extreme, the idea that journalists’ jobs at the Guardian or Independent depend on them spreading the latter message is hilarious.

Moreover, what exactly is wrong with Islamophobia? As Rowan Atkinson put it, “What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?”

[Scratch]

"Possibly that’s the case with the Daily Mail, but at the other extreme, the idea that journalists’ jobs at the Guardian or Independent depend on them spreading the latter message is hilarious."

Their insane partiality, special pleading, barefaced hypocrisy and anathematisation of dissenters seeks to reinforce it too. The Guardian (and the bourgeois current it springs from and represents) too is almost explicitly a machine for seeding and curating division.

[georgesdelatour]

Imagine a parallel reality Britain. It has exactly the same Muslim share of the population, growing at exactly the same rate. It has exactly the same varied experience of Muslims, both good and bad, from delightful bake-off winners to vile jihadis and grooming gangs. It has exactly the same rate of mosque attendance, halal meat consumption, hijab wearing, you name it. Everything is the same, except one thing:

In this parallel reality Britain, every single Muslim is a white convert.

Would this change your attitude to Islam in Britain?

If so, why?

[Scratch]

Damn, that's a good question.

I suppose the absence of a preexisting cultural tradition ought to make a difference but allowing this strikes me as fundamentally at odds with current liberal ideology.

[georgesdelatour]

I think it would change everything.

There are religious movements which grow largely by converting whites; e.g. Mormonism, Scientology. The MSM will attack both in ways they’d never dream of attacking Islam. This is partly because MSM journalists are "Islamophobic" in the most literal sense; they’re straight up frightened of Islam in ways they’re not frightened of Mormonism (think Charlie Hebdo vs The Book Of Mormon). But the fact most UK Muslims are non-white is massively important. It gives Muslims victimhood points on the progressive stack they wouldn’t have if they were white.

Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion, the world’s second largest religion, and is on course to become the world’s largest religion within the next 30 years. It may even be the world’s wealthiest religion, if you count all the petrodollars available for Dawah. Yet the whole “Islamophobia” narrative portrays this most confident and self-assertive global religion as if it’s as beleaguered as Falun Gong. We even have the absurdity of Hindu Nationalists in India being described as “White Supremacists”, simply because they dislike it.

I’ve become increasingly resigned and fatalistic about Islam. It’s very far from my favourite faith, but I know once it reaches critical mass our ruling class will simply convert en masse and take it over. The Roman aristocracy started off by feeding Christians to lions; once they could see Christianity was going to win they got their act together and took over the Papacy. Leo I, the heroic Pope who talked Atilla the Hun out of invading Rome, came from just such an aristocratic background.