The Psychology of Error

Recently, I have discerned a certain hubris on the left which I have also recognized in atheists. Both somehow seem to forget that their beliefs are (i) deductions (ii) which are subservient to facts and logic. Their beliefs (i.e. conclusions) seem to harden in their minds as if they were first principles. I think this is the fundamental psychology of error--the less you know, the less you know it. Jesus said that those who seek, find; because even as their beliefs are objectively wrong, they desire to know the truth, making them open to reality which will eventually hold sway. On the other hand, those who give their beliefs primacy over the reality they purport to measure have quit seeking and have cut themselves off from reality. They have become their own truth.

Just as atheists regard religious believers, the left regards conservatives as narrow-minded. Why? Because they disagree with the left? Why aren't liberals regarded as close-minded when they disagree with conservatives? It seems to me that those on the left regard themselves as more intellectual, open-minded, and tolerant not because they necessarily seek out these virtues, but merely because they have joined a club which labels itself as such. And I think this has something to do with why they, ironically, dispose of competing views as if from a position of unchallengeable neutrality. For some reason, they don't recognize that their beliefs, just as competing beliefs, are conclusions subject to being fallible.

I'm not saying that every individual on the left is this way. But I do sense these things as a tendency on the left as a whole.

• What used to be "the highest form of patriotism"--dissent (against Bush)--is not tolerated when they are the recipients of it.
  
• Conscience clauses are not recognized by those who pride themselves on "choice".
• Tolerance is for everybody...except those who disagree. The left takes disagreement with their values as an act of intolerance, but its disagreement with your values is deemed a prerogative of personal choice.
  

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Critics of theism were not, as they liked to think, disposing of it from a position of unchallengeable neutrality, but proposing an alternative metaphysics of some kind or other which it was incumbent upon them to acknowledge and defend.
Basil Mitchell
—“War and Friendship”, from James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe

He forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation… But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the Solar System.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Atheism is not a philosophy. It is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious.
—Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

"Morality" becomes at best an assertion of the prevailing (and in principle ever-shifting) sensibilities of the majority, or at least of those with the loudest mouths. It has no ultimate basis in objective fact or in reason, but only in sentiment and existing custom. This is, as I say, inevitable once one abandons realism of the Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic sort.
—Edward Feser, The Last Superstition

I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”.
—Plato, Apology

What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state in which men do not know of the alternative. It is something which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep, so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all. It is not the state in which he says, “I see what you mean; but I cannot think that because I sincerely think this” (which is simply rational): it is one in which he has never thought of the other view; and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it… The thing I mean is man’s inability to state his opponent’s view; and often his inability even to state his own.
—G. K. Chesterton, The Thing

For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.
—G. K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce

Like most of the left since Marx, the American left today has created an image of the world to which reality is subservient. Left-wing theories define reality, not vice versa. And in that closed world, left-wing dissent is patriotic, while dissent against the left is fascistic at worst, or paid for by the greedy at best.
—Dennis Prager, "I Thought 'Dissent Is Patriotic'"

Liberals always place themselves in a higher position than their interlocutors, and from that position they have an irresistible urge to dominate. What they usually say is something like this: We are not interested in deciding any particular issue; all we want to do is to create a system within which you will make your own decisions. By saying this they do two things which I find rather dubious. First, they always usurp for themselves—without asking anyone for permission and without any permission being granted—the role of the architectonic organizer of society; thus they always want to dominate by performing the roles of the guardians of the whole of the social system and the judges of the procedural rules within the system.
[. . .]
Not only is liberalism not modest, its ambition to have a decisive voice is unquenchable: because it is the result of self-deception. The socialists, the conservatives, the monarchists are ambitious too, but they all know very well how far they want to penetrate the social fabric, and at least some of them are well aware that reality often resists and that giving in to reality is sometimes a sound decision. The liberals, however, live in a world of self-delusion about their mildness and modesty, believing that even their most arrogant interference somehow does not touch moral or social “substance.”
[. . .]
Learning from others is something liberals never do.
[. . .]
Classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill believed that enlarging freedom by encouraging eccentricities would result in an explosion of human creativity. Liberals today are less interested in creativity. They are on the one hand pedantic doctrinaires who never tire of constructing ever more complex and ever more dubious ideologies of inclusion, and on the other hand they are ideological commissars who have acquired remarkable abilities to silence their critics. For whoever disagrees with them is a potential candidate to become a new Adolf Hitler.
—Ryszard Legutko, "What’s Wrong With Liberalism?"