How do we fight past our partisanship to become truly curious about the truth? For me, the answer started with the first principle of my conservatism: Human beings possess incalculable worth. If that is true, and my neighbors and fellow citizens are crying out about injustice, I should hear their voices and carefully consider their claims.
My initial inability to see the truth is related to the second principle, that human beings are deeply flawed. I had no trouble applying that principle to my opponents. But it also applies to those I generally admire. It applies to police officers. It applies to me.
The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.
[In Gregory Burns’s 2005 study on social conformity,] the conformists showed less brain activity in the frontal, decision-making regions and more in the areas of the brain association with perception. Peer pressure, in other words, is not only unpleasant, but can actually change your view of a problem.
…It’s not that you’re saying consciously, “Hmm, I’m not sure, but they all think the answer’s A, so I’ll go with that.” Nor are you saying, “I want them to like me, so I’ll just pretend that the answer’s A.” No, you are doing something much more unexpected—and dangerous. Most of Bern’s volunteers reported having gone along with the group because “they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer.” They were utterly blind, in other words, to how much their peers had influenced them.
Burns refers to this as “the pain of independence,” and it has serious implications. Many of our most important civic institutions, from elections to jury trials to the very idea of majority rule, depend on dissenting voices. But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
“The pain of independence” might be a suitable name for the purposes of Burns or Cain. But a better name, and one more fitting for what David French has in mind, might be something like “the pain of authenticity,” which does not require independence. Or “the pain of virtue.” Or, even better, “the pain of tzaddikim.”
It’s worth pointing out here that no film has ever done more justice to the pain and loneliness this crisis can bring than Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.