Evidence and ideology

Sandy Levinson

Mark Graber's post explaining his otherwise inexplicable devotion to a team I have loathed for roughly 55 years actually raises interesting issues about commitments far more important (if such is possible) than one's devotion to the Yankees, Red Sox, or any other team. Jack's Yale colleague Dan Kahan has energetically argued (often in articles with Donald Granham), with regard particularly to the debates concerning gun policy, that evidence is basically 'irrelevant," that one's commitments concerning the extent to which firearms should be regulated have far more to do with one's underlying values, or ideology, that with the evidence submitted by either side of the debate. (E.g., proponents of gun control, who often cite the number of children killed by guns, simply refused to confront seriously the fact that more children die in backyard swimming pools every year than are killed by guns; opponents of gun control policy tend to dismiss the importance of the fact that guns do in fact account for the death of X number of "innocent" persons every year, and so on.) It may be that the discussion going on right now on another thread about "1% solutions, civil liberties, environmentalism, etc." is an illustration of Kahan's basic point. (What sort of empirical evidence, if any, would persuade a strong civil libertarian to bend his/her principles or Christopher Caldwell that one should indeed continue to honor the rights of criminal defendants even when they are suspected of terrorism. Indeed, I suggested in an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review responding to one of Dan's pieces that his argument might well apply to the debate about Iraq more generally, particularly in 2003, when I wrote the reply. What now seems clear to almost everybody--that the Bush Administration was basically indifferent to evidence, that their zeal to invade was based on the same kind of emotion and ideology that describes Mark's commitment to the Yankees--seemed absolutely clear to me then, but, of course, many people, perhaps plausibly, would have argued that I was too consumed by loathing for the hBush Administration to credit them as making a good case. We want to believe that our political commitments are "evidence based" and not comparable to our decisions to root for sports teams. But Kahan, who is not alone, would challenge this. I take it that no amount of evidence about the "objective" awfulness of George Steinbrenner and the loathesomeness of the Yankee's using their market dominance to crush the opposition could overcome the emotions generated by his youth as a New Yorker.

One wants to believe--or at least I want to believe--that Kahan is wrong, and that we can make public policy arguments on the basis of "rational evidence." Paradoxically or not, I think the evidence is far too mixed to allow any confident conclusion that Kahan is wrong. But if he is not, then we have to reconceive what we think "democratic deliberation" is really about.
Posted 7:37 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]