Rescuing h-traits via the gadfly, curiosity, and solitude

Just as generosity without thrift or honesty without tact can fail to be fully virtuous, so ingroup- oriented h-traits without outgroup-oriented h-traits (and vice versa) can fail to be fully virtu­ous.

How should we respond to the antinomy between myside and ourside biases? We believe the answer resides in a joint understanding of both the h-traits themselves and the social structures in which they are embedded. In this section, we canvass three mutually-compatible strategies: the gadfly, curiosity, and solitude.

41.4.1 H-traits and the gadfly

One approach to reducing ourside bias relies on the Socratic figure of the gadfly.² In Plato's Apology 30e, Socrates famously compares himself to a gadfly and his community (Athens) to a sluggish horse. Here we quote at length:

[I]f you kill me you will not easily find another like me. I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly.

The idea behind this metaphor is that, despite the pain he causes to his ingroup, Socrates mani­fests an other-regarding moral and intellectual virtue. He systematically and repeatedly provokes members of his ingroup to examine not only their own lives and values, but also the values of their shared community. He forces them to consider the extent to which they understand their own motives, customs, and norms, as well as the rationale for these motives, customs, and norms. He prompts them to reconsider whether their own local customs are indeed best. Furthermore, he approaches only members of his ingroup in this way. Socrates does not play the role of the devil's advocate (to use a more recent metaphor) with every interlocutor he encounters; instead, he focuses his critical energies on the most (over-)confident members of his ingroup: adult male citizens of Athens. In so doing, he undermines their confidence (sometimes) and makes them less secure in their own parochial smugness.This is the sort of thing that should have a salutary effect in reducing ourside bias, since it makes the ingroup default less appealing and seemingly obvious.

However, being a Socratic gadfly—someone disposed to turn a critical eye to their own com­munity's conventional wisdom in order to goad the community into reflection and reform—is challenging and risky. It can easily shade over into contrarianism for its own sake. And a com­munity composed entirely of gadflies would hardly be a community at all. Socrates here assumes that there is a division of moral and intellectual labor in his community: the vast majority together are represented by the figure of the horse, whereas he alone is the gadfly. This prompts the question whether there might be dispositions other than that of the gadfly that are worth cultivating and manifesting in other parts of a community.

41.4.2 H-traits and curiosity

If we ignore social context, it might seem that there is nothing in the h-traits to worry about. After all, wouldn't someone who embodies humility, modesty, and intellectual humility be just as disposed to defer to or conciliate with an ingroup member as an outgroup member? The prob­lem only arises because humans tend to cluster socially into groups of like-minded and like-val­ued individuals, a process known as homophily (Centola et al. 2007). Even if I am equally likely to conciliate and defer in each particular encounter, if most of my encounters are with people who share a common set of opinions and values, I will end up gravitating toward their views.

This is where curiosity, understood as a drive to encounter new people, places, things, and ideas, comes into play (Alfano 2013; Iurino et al. 2018; Inan et al. 2018). Someone who man­ages to combine curiosity with the h-traits will make a point of learning about the opinions, values, customs, and norms of people who do not belong to their ingroup. Such a person will be attracted to novelty and strangeness. As a stranger they will, in Hamlet's words, give it wel­come. In so doing, they employ a social strategy to put themselves in a position to encounter information and testimony that they might not otherwise have encountered. Unlike someone in the grip of confirmation bias, then, they actively seek out those whose views are liable to differ from their own.

From the point of view of social network theory, curious agents can be understood as those who go out of their way to establish heterophilic connections, i.e., to connect with those who do not belong to their ingroup. This does not mean that they necessarily shun their ingroups, just that they make a point of engaging with, learning about and from, and attending to peo­ple who belong to other groups.

41.4.3 H-traits and solitude

The problem of ourside bias arises from the ratio between homophilic and heterophilic con­nections. If someone has vastly more homophilic than heterophilic connections, they are liable to suffer ourside bias. An extremely imbalanced ratio can be solved either by addition or sub­traction. Whereas curiosity helps rescue the h-traits by leading its bearer to establish new het- erophilic connections, the Nietzschean virtue of solitude helps by leading its bearer to sever or weaken homophilic connections.³

Solitude is a complex disposition that involves someone taking a distant and elevated per­spective on their own community and ingroup. It protects it's bearer's psychology from being overwhelmed by the pressures and expectations of their community, from conciliating too easily and too often with their ingroup. And it prevents its bearer from provoking too much easily internalized disapprobation from their community (this is why Nietzsche frequently associates solitude with politeness). Finally, it makes possible a collective version of the self-contempt that Nietzsche associates with both the pathos of distance and having a sense of humor.Whereas the latter two dispositions make it possible for someone to improve their character through criticism of the I, solitude makes it possible for someone to improve their community through criticism of the we—that is to say, through cultural criticism.

When Nietzsche talks about solitude, he typically has in mind emotional rather than physi­cal distance. For example, in Human, All-too-human Assorted Opinions and Maxims 386, he declares that “wisdom is the whispering of the solitary [Einsamen] to himself in the crowded marketplaces.” Solitude is the drive to get away from, and often above, one's ingroup or local community, to view that community and its values critically, and to divorce oneself from aspects of the community that one might otherwise adopt uncritically and by default.

For Nietzsche, solitude is a penchant for challenging the doxastic and axiological truisms of one's community, for “indict[ing] the people's favorites” (Ecce Homo Books.UM2). Likewise, Nietzsche congratulates himself for writing books that “contain snares and nets for unwary birds and in effect a persistent invitation to the overturning of habitual evaluations and valued habits.” (Human, All-too-human Preface 1). Solitude is a sort of instinctual aversion to the familiar and an attraction to the strange and new. In a later passage (Beyond Good and Evil 212), Nietzsche points to an important philosophical precedent for his sort of solitude: Socrates the gadfly, who, as a philosopher, “needed to be at odds with his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today.” Philosophers tend to feel like “disagreeable fools and dangerous question-marks.” Gadflies like Socrates are “the bad conscience of their age [who apply] a vivisecting knife directly to the chest of the virtues of the age.”

But solitude differs from the gadfly in being more selective. Solitude is practiced not in the marketplace but in the library. It is therefore less liable to instigate the kind of collective punish­ment that ended Socrates's philosophical career (and his life). In terms of social network theory, whereas curiosity is about establishing new, heterophilic connections, solitude is about severing or weakening extant, homophilic connections.

We believe that the gadfly, curiosity, and solitude all have a role to play in rescuing the h-traits from the antinomy between myside bias and ourside bias.They seem prima facie consistent with one another, and they answer to different aspects of the problem.

Notes

1 Face validity is a property of a psychometric instrument.When an instrument is valid “on its face” that means it intuitively taps into the construct that it allegedly measures. For example, an intelligence test that in no way required someone to solve a problem, answer a question, draw an inference, or exhibit a skilled behavior would lack face validity. Likewise, a psychometric test of open-mindedness that in no way tapped into actively open-minded thinking would lack face validity.

2 There is some controversy about how to translate μυ'ω, which could also reasonably be rendered as ‘spur' in this context (Marshall 2017). For our purposes, either translation makes sense, and spur may even be more appropriate, as it implies a pedagogical function rather than merely causing annoyance.

3 See Alfano 2019, chapter 10 for a fuller account and interpretation of Nietzsche on solitude.

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