I asked an AI for a brutally honest assessment of what my writing suggested about me, and found myself agreeing with the criticism. I’d asked for a judgement of a person on the basis of some essays, so there were going to be limits to what that judgement could tell me. The criticism was that I sometimes make judgements of people on the basis of considerably less than I seem to think I know about them.
I just feel like sometimes I don’t employ the principle of charity in assessing my own and others’ epistemic positions. Ultimately this comes down a little bit to hubris, but also a lack of empathy. It isn’t that I’m unaware of the possibility of being wrong. I can accommodate that possibility quite happily in the abstract, while continuing to write as though the relevant uncertainty concerns everyone else’s understanding. I get to explain where I came from and why something matters to me. Somebody else can be dispatched as an example of a worldview. They probably wouldn’t recognise themselves in it, although that alone wouldn’t establish that I’d misrepresented them. People don’t always recognise accurate criticism either.
One fairly indefensible example is in my blog post from Christmas last year, where I described feeling the truth of a sermon more deeply than the people who had known its words all their lives. I don’t know how I could know that. I could know that it moved me. There was a dismissive encounter outside the church, which I wrote about as well, and perhaps this made the comparison seem justified. But someone being unkind after a sermon doesn’t even establish that they disagreed with it. They might agree with everything in it and behave badly anyway, as people quite often do. In any case there was a whole congregation there, about whom I knew very little, and I somehow got from being moved myself to knowing what it meant to them. The welcome from Eva’s family is also in that essay. It’s a much more complicated account than the comparison towards the end allows for.
People are complicated beings, and I think lionisation and self-flagellation can be two sides of the same coin: an inflated sense of self-importance in relation to the wider world. If I now decided that the whole thing was vanity, I’d have to dismiss the gratitude too. Why should I do that? I don’t think an account of my motives becomes more reliable because it makes me look worse. Being uncharitable towards myself is still being uncharitable, and it seems quite possible to waste a lot of time deciding whether you’re a good person when you could be reconsidering the particular thing you’ve said. There is actually something there to reconsider. Whether I’m good is a question to which I can keep inventing answers.
Even just considering yourself to somehow be an ideal observer (or an idealised counterpart if we want to get philosophical), or thinking you’ve managed to put yourself behind the veil of ignorance to borrow from Rawls, involves a confidence in your own judgement that is probably misplaced. I still think the attempt is worthwhile. But I have my doubts about how reliably I can tell which of my assumptions I’ve managed to put aside and which ones I’m still carrying around without noticing. Finding out is going to be quite hard, and I don’t see why studying the problem would exempt me from it. If anything it gives me more ways of explaining why my particular decision was reasonable.
I think in my writing I’m often guilty of this good-versus-evil thing. Which is funny given my effective worship of Adam Curtis’s dismantling of the fake ghost of nostalgia that embeds itself in our personal stories of the past. I haven’t suddenly stopped believing everything I wrote before. That would just be another way of pretending there was a clear before and after, with me somehow having become a better person in the interval. I’d rather say that I don’t agree with that particular comparison any more. I don’t have to decide what it says about my character, and I certainly don’t have to decide what it says about everybody who was in the church that evening.
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