One of the primary struggles of our time has to do with who can know what. Among even the minimally educated, the belief that, for example, a person’s identity confers special knowledge or makes understanding impossible is basically taken for granted. Relatedly, there is a growing list of “experts” we hear about whenever we read the news, and the implication is that the areas of human knowledge or experience that may previously have been thought of as available to the common person are now areas of specialization—and not to have specialized knowledge means that you’re not qualified to formulate your own opinion. We are seeing, then, a new epistemology emerge. And this epistemology is authoritarian.
The way knowledge supposedly works is taking on an authoritative structure. All forms of identity politics are susceptible to this epistemology, and the one example that illustrates this epistemology most thoroughly and forcefully is transgenderism.
According to the tenets of transgenderism, a person’s gender is known only to that person, which means once that person announces their identity other people should affirm it—no medical interventions required. The epistemological consequences are worth unpacking: Your sensory experience, which tells you that, for example, the person in front of you is a man, must be set aside as a reliable way for you to know the world. And now your knowledge of (at least this part of) reality depends on an authority (in this case, the “woman”). Moreover, the authority on which you must depend to understand the world is one that is absolute: this authority’s claims are not an appeal to an already-available truth that you simply failed to notice, but rather an appeal to their own inner experience, an experience to which you have no access and that you have no standing to challenge. In other words, it is an authority that understands its own power in zero-sum terms: the more power you have to determine what is true on your own, the less power this authoritative person has to make their own truth claims. For that reason, this authority requires you to submit; you cannot freely concur because you have no independent, immediate access to the truth. All that you can do is submit your intellect to receive as absolute truth what is otherwise unintelligible, by which I mean that you would never come to such a conclusion apart from submitting to this authority, and it is only sensible to you because the authority tells you that it is.
By collapsing a subjective experience into an identity, and by abolishing the conceptual difference between who a person is and what a person is, so that a person’s subjective experience is now the truth of what that person is—this conceptual move is captured in the trans-affirming slogan “believe people when they tell you who they are”—transgenderism has asserted an authoritarian epistemology.
Logically prior to any authoritarian tactics that activists may use to discipline people into going along with social change (e.g., job loss, or being labeled as transphobic, as though trusting your own senses instead of what someone says to you means that you hate them), there is the authoritarian shape of the person-to-person relationship that this epistemology enforces.
Because politics is the deliberation and decision-making involved in determining common life, epistemological authoritarianism proposes effectively to disenfranchise those who must submit by confining their moral and political reasoning to “solidarity” with those who possess the special knowledge that gives authority. (“Believe what I tell you to believe. Now go vote accordingly.”) That is: every person who consents to describe themselves as “cisgender,” who participates in pronoun-sharing rituals, who uses the “preferred pronouns” of people whose gender identities aren’t empirically discernable, who recites the creed that “trans women are women”—these people are not exercising their political agency, but abdicating it and handing it over to the one who knows best. “Trans women are women” is the authoritarian political version of “Jesus take the wheel.”
While I think transgenderism exhibits this epistemology most thoroughly and with the farthest-reaching social consequences, this authoritarian structure of knowledge is not limited to the trans movement. It is present in every identity politics right now.
Two quick points of clarification: I am not saying that society is free from moral obligation to trans people or women or racial minorities or the disabled, etc. I’m describing a particular posture that identity movements have been taking. Second, precisely by rejecting zero-sum epistemology, I am affirming epistemological humility. Of course, for example, I have no idea what pregnancy is like, but that doesn’t mean I’m disallowed from holding opinions about abortion. Each person and each group of people has insights and blindspots. Denying the absoluteness of someone’s point of view is threatening only to a fragile absolutist.
This epistemological absolutism of the DEI regime and the “experts say”-ideologue journalists is recognizably religious in nature. In the story that the modern sciences like to tell about the Copernican Revolution and the subsequent Enlightenment, religious authority is understood as authoritarian—as making claims that cannot be challenged, but only submitted to. Faith, so the criticism goes, makes knowledge into a passive activity: only reception, only submission, an act of the will instead of an act of the intellect, or, in the words of Mark Twain, “believing what you know ain’t so.”
And indeed, many critics of “wokeism” and trans in particular have made just this point, that it expresses a religious fervor and a religious immunity to facts. Yet what is generally unacknowledged when this critique is made—and often enough, people correctly observe that wokeism is a child of a specifically Christian ethics—is that this religion-like ideology arose in a deeply secular environment. More to the point, this religion-like ideology has wielded incredible authority in the very institutions that have most notably broken with religious authority: the university, medicine, psychotherapy, law.
The flip-side to epistemological authoritarianism is that scientism is failing. There’s no such thing as physics without metaphysics. The people who claimed they were just doing science were totally susceptible to metaphysical and epistemological demagoguery.
Modern science reacted against the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church by insisting that truth claims must be tested and that truth is publicly available, not realizing that attempting a totally non-metaphysical account of reality lays the groundwork for superstition. But the solution is not simply submission to ecclesiastical authority for scientific truth—and to be clear, no church wants that.
In the Christian tradition, there is a double-commitment: the belief that total authority of the truth, and the belief that the human mind is ordered to the truth. We don’t decide what to believe with our wills, but rather truth takes hold of our intellects. The truth is not ours; we belong to the truth. All truth coheres because God, the author of truth, is one. These commitments make the Christian the real intellectual populist, unafraid of the radical authority of the truth. Christianity (at its best) trusts the intelligence and ability of everyday people to discern truth from falsity, right from wrong because Christians believe that the truth makes itself known.
A person does not need to be a Christian to be an intellectual populist. Intellectual populism is what makes science possible. But maybe this is a gift that Christianity can give once more to our decaying culture. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that the alternative to intellectual populism is the tyranny of “experts,” a situation where the cost of peace is the suppression of truth, and the abdication of basic human dignity to worship at the altar of identity.
This: "Christianity (at its best) trusts the intelligence and ability of everyday people to discern truth from falsity, right from wrong because Christians believe that the truth makes itself known." I could not agree more.
Also, this editorial brought to mind something Abigail Favale pointed out in a recent podcast. The question to keep in mind when listening to other people's lived experiences is whether the experience matches with what we believe to be true about human flourishing. Just because someone says a certain way of being brings them flourishing is not sufficient to judge that way good. There could be -- and always are -- people who feel otherwise about said way of being. So an ideal of flourishing remains necessary.
Hello Matt,
A friend pointed me to this post, and I thought it worth some reflection.
1. Reading between the lines, it sounds like you prefer some version of Thomas Reid’s common sense realism over, say, Nancy Hartsock’s standpoint epistemology. If so, fair enough. Standpoint epistemology is, indeed, problematic for some of the reasons you’ve said. But for someone who wishes to reject one-sided, incorrigible claims to epistemic authority common sense realism isn’t the only view available. Why would you prefer that view (if you do), over, say, some version of the view that knowledge is the fruit of participation in social practices where authority in adjudicating between true/false claims is acknowledged reciprocally? Robert Brandom and Sally Haslanger come to mind as examples, both of whom affirm versions of realism. So why prefer common sense realism? I assume it’s because you hold some/all of the relevant, classical metaphysical commitments that cohere more easily with common sense realism. But (and this is key) one doesn’t need those metaphysical commitments in order to ward off epistemic authoritarianism (as Brandom and Haslanger's views demonstrate). In fact, as I see it, those commitments (the strong metaphysical ones) tend to lead to epistemic elitism (because authority is located all on the object side of a supposed subject-object divide when it comes to adjudicating between true/false claims about objects; and the people who see themselves submitting to this one-sided authority of the object tend to assert a similar sort of one-sided authority in the name of bringing others into alignment with it). In light of that liability, why should someone concerned about epistemic authoritarianism prefer common sense realism? That's a question for you on the assumption that I'm reading between the lines rightly.
2. I think your account of “transgenderism” misrepresents the views of many transgender people. On the one hand, some transgender people do speak of their own gender identity in essentialist, binary terms (e.g., “I felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body”). And some might use a slogan such as “believe people when they tell you who they are” to indicate that they think gender identity is something about themselves to which only they as individuals have epistemic access. But, on the other hand, people often use slogans like that (e.g., "speak your truth") to indicate something else -- namely, (a) that an individual is entitled to a high degree of deference (albeit not absolute deference) when it comes to the accuracy of what they say about their own experience and (b) that a person's particular experience is part of what gives them authority (albeit not one-sided or absolute authority) to describe themselves in particular ways, esp. where the public meaning of those descriptions tracks patterns of experience. Part of the purpose of the slogans, on this other view, is to shore up people's confidence in asserting the relevant sort of authority when others have denied that they have it in the first place. The way you talk about transgenderism obscures this latter view.
I think that's a problem because the latter view seems quite common. Many (most?) transgender people today would say that gender is fluid and that it is a (very real) social construction rather than an independent, individual discovery about one’s self that trades in stable categories. So they would deny that gender is something stable or essential about themselves to which only they as individuals have epistemic access. As such, I think you’re misrepresenting the sort of claims one might reasonably expect a transgender person to make about epistemic authority vis-a-vis gender identity, esp. when pressed to be precise about it. So the account of "transgenderism" here looks like a strawman to me. I suspect that most transgender people, if pressed to give an answer to these questions about knowledge and authority, wouldn't say that they have one-sided or absolute (incorrigible) authority to use whatever self-descriptions seem best to them as expressions of qualities about themselves that only they can know. They would, however, disagree with you when you suggest that there's a wholly-external, mind-independent, immediately-available standard for adjudicating between true/false claims about one's gender identity. In suggesting that all/most transgender people affirm some version of standpoint epistemology, you're misrepresenting your opponents's views.
I'm not saying that I think your argument needs more neutrality, tentativeness, or circumspection. Rather, I think what the argument needs (to correct for the misrepresentation problem) is the interpretation of more substantial evidence along with more charitable consideration of counter-evidence and more detailed reflection on the experiences of transgender people. Ironically and inadvertently (I am sure), in the absence of those things, the post has an authoritarian vibe. It's hard to hold an author accountable when the presentation and interpretation of evidence is thin. Implicitly, the post seems to deny the need for democratic, reciprocal accountability in the adjudication of knowledge-claims. Which is striking, since the topic is epistemic authoritarianism.