AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION:

"Notes on Nationalism" is not an ideal title, as Orwell was not talking only about loyalty to country. Rather, he used nationalism as a short-hand for any type of group loyalty--to a country, but also to a religion, a political party, or an ideology itself. A nationalist may be defined by his membership of a group, or by his opposition to one, which Orwell called "negative" nationalism. Orwell used anti-Semites as an example of the latter, as well as the "minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism." He then set out to explain how everyone--no matter how reasoned and level-headed--is capable of irrational and biased thinking when our sense of group identity is challenged.

He identified three characteristics of "'nationalistic' thinking." First, obsession--the ideologue's need to filter everything through an ideological lens. Entertainment is not entertaining unless it is orthodox. Second, instability--the ability of the ideologue to go from believing one thing to quickly believing another to follow the party line. And thirdly, indifference to reality. One of the most interesting aspects of "Notes on Nationalism" is the "inadmissible fact"--something which can be proven to be true and is generally accepted but cannot be admitted by the adherents of a particular ideology. Or, if the fact is admitted, it is explained away or dismissed as unimportant.

The ideas explored in "Notes on Nationalism" run through much of Orwell's writing, most obviously his anti-totalitarianism and hatred of hypocritical pieties. But central to his argument is how nationalistic thinking exposes our inescapable biases. "The Liberal News Chronicle," he wrote, "published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians." This anticipated the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which atrocities "are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious." The first step down the deceptively short road to totalitarianism is believing that our political enemies pose such a grave threat that defeating them takes precedence over truth, consistency, or common sense.

The limits of reason

Man is a rational animal, as Aristotle put it. Not that he is always rational, but that he is capable of reason. Reason, trained, leads to happiness. Orwell wasn't the first person to observe that this didn't always work in practice.

"The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it" wrote Francis Bacon in his 1620 "Novum Organum," one of the major early works of the European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Today, we call this confirmation bias. We don't form opinions based on the evidence--we often shape the evidence to suit our opinions. We attribute importance to facts which back our preferred theory and dismiss as unimportant those which do not. "It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike," Bacon added. We continue to cling to ideas which have been discredited, a phenomenon called belief perseverance. Or worse, our faith in discredited ideas becomes even stronger when we are presented with contrary evidence--the backfire effect. Or we focus on successes and ignore failures, a phenomenon called survivorship bias. Bacon reminds us of the story of Diagoras of Melos, who was shown a picture of those who had escaped shipwreck after making vows to the gods hanging in a temple. Diagoras asked where he could find a picture of those who made vows to the gods but drowned anyway.

Bacon wrote that humans are afflicted with "idols of the mind," and he identified four. The first are idols of the tribe, flaws in thinking common to all people that come from human nature itself. Second are idols of the cave, or den. All of us, Bacon argued, have a cave in our mind where the light of reason is dimmed, and this cave varies from person to person depending on his or her character, experiences, and environment. Third are idols of the marketplace, associated with the exchange of ideas. As language can never be perfectly precise, it's possible for falsehoods to develop and spread as a concept as explained by one person to another. Finally come idols of the theatre, ideas which have been presented to us and taken root so deeply and firmly they've become hard to remove. In Bacon's time, this was the philosophy of Aristotle, which had become so fundamental to Western thought that even parts of it which could easily be disproven remained unchallenged for centuries. To manage the effect of the idols, Bacon proposed "radical induction"--the forerunner to the modern scientific method.

Other Enlightenment thinkers commented on the same theme. "Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries: and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, and keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturb them" wrote John Locke in his "Essay on Human Understanding." "Tell a man passionately in love that he is jilted; bring a score of witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, it is ten to one but three kind words of hers shall invalidate all their testimonies." This applies to the falsehood of political candidates, pundits, and quacks as much as to the falsehood of mistresses. And, of course, David Hume reminded us that reason can only ever be the slave of the passions.

Understanding cognitive bias

Modern research has vindicated Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Orwell, and shone some light on why our brains are so strangely susceptible to cognitive bias. In one study, Geoffrey Cohen was able to get different levels of support for a proposed welfare policy from Republicans and Democrats depending on whether he told them it was a Republican or a Democratic policy. Funnily enough, everyone claimed they were not influenced by the party which proposed the policy, but insisted those on the other side would be.

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