Exposing the Hidden Bias in Political and Historical Questions

“If I have an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution,” Albert Einstein is reported to have said. The importance of identifying the relevant question applies equally to political discourse. Many political interventions depend entirely on how the problem is framed in the first place.

In any debate, the side that gets to define the question enjoys a significant advantage over their opponents. There is often ample room for manipulation in posing the question. 

Thus, for example, the debate about illegal immigration is framed as a debate about “racism.” Framed that way, whoever defends the side designated as “racist” is always fighting with one hand tied behind his back.

As the New York Times frames it, the question in relation to immigration control is, “Can ICE stop people solely based on their race?” This question implies the obvious answer, which they proceed to give:

Targeting people for immigration enforcement based on race or ethnicity alone was forbidden by the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision 50 years ago. After all, it’s impossible to determine the immigration statuses of people simply by looking at them. So for decades, agents seeking to question people about their citizenship were supposed to rely on more than just appearance.

Progressives have the upper hand in many political debates precisely because they get to decide what the debate is “about.” This strategy gives progressives a walkover victory in most political debates, and society moves inexorably leftwards.

Further, they frame issues in emotional terms that are difficult for their opponents to dispute without provoking outrage. Most people’s reaction to such a question would instinctively be, “No, we should not arrest people simply for their race.” The answer is not wrong—the problem lies in the question itself. A better question might be, “Should a country have the right to defend its borders?”

A similar problem arises in historical inquiry. By framing all historical questions as questions about “racism,” progressives are virtually guaranteed to yield answers that justify any government interventions they seek to help end racism. This is a task to which the “scholarly consensus” has devoted itself in recent decades—framing American history as a history rooted in racism.

The answers offered by court historians to their own questions may indeed be the “correct” answers to the questions they have posed, but the questions are posed precisely in order to yield the desired answer. Problem-solving then merely serves as an excuse to design problems to fit the solutions they already have in mind.

This is why leading questions are traditionally deemed incompatible with fair trials. The classic example is, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Answering “yes” implies having once beaten her, and answering “no” implies still beating her. Even saying, “This isn’t a yes or no question, permit me to explain” raises doubts among Kafkaesque listeners who believe that denying a crime is probably evidence of having at least done something worth denying.

One might think that this does not stop anyone from framing their own, and better, questions. Here lies the catch. The battle immediately commences to reframe the issue as one more favorable to a progressive outcome.

In more serious cases, the cancel mob descends. The political scientist Bruce Gilley discovered that when he asked if there were any benefits to colonialism. You can’t ask that!

You might ask, as Robert Fogel and Stanely Engerman did in their book Time On The Cross, “What was the frequency with which slave families were broken up by the interregional slave trade”? Such questions infuriated the progressive “consensus” who accused Fogel and Engerman of “detaching economic issues from their political context.”

These distinguished economists were accused of being “academic hucksters.” The New York Times reported that “‘Time on the Cross,’ has raised hackles among blacks and sociologists who doubt the value of playing the numbers game on a problem that was, primarily psychological.” To progressives, all questions are emotional or psychological—this immediately enables them to seize the moral high ground.

Kenneth Clark, the black sociologist, tangled with Professor Fogel in an emotional debate on the “Today” television show Tuesday. Dr. Clark called the methodology “curious” and proceeded to blast the authors for painting slavery “as a benign form of oppression.” The statistical findings did not impress the sociologist.

…

“The main fact is that slavery was barbaric,” Dr. Clark said. “What’s the point of discussing all the alleged benefits… Would the authors recommend a return to slavery?”

Professor Fogel, an energetic man who bubbles with enthusiasm for his work and who for 25 years has been wed to a black woman, seemed visibly chagrined by the attack.

It was at least noticed that there might be potential downsides to this approach. If the aim of historical inquiry is primarily to express contrition for racial oppression, the full picture may be obscured:

“The traditional historian,” [Professor Woodard of Yale] said, “relies heavily on individual experiences – which are also true, but could misrepresent the over-all picture. For a historian, deeply engaged in the slaves’ plight – as most are – there is a tendency to pick out examples of the horrible experiences of individual slaves and to emphasize them.”

Since then, the idea that historical inquiry must not “harm” those suffering from “legacies of oppression” has become even more entrenched. All questions about American history must be framed as questions about psychological aspects of racism—the better to express sympathy and sensitivity.

Examples of acceptable questions are, “What type of racist was General Forrest?” or, “What did Alexander Stephens the Confederate Vice President say to show that the cause of the civil war was slavery?” or, “Did slaves in the American South exercise free will and autonomy over their own lives?” or, even worse, “So, you’re saying slaves were very happy to be oppressed?”

These may seem superficially to be objective and open questions and a starting point from which historical documents may be approached, but—on closer inspection—it becomes clear that the answers are embedded in the premises of the questions themselves. The answer is always going to be that the “evidence” shows history to be “about” racism and slavery because that is the premise of the question as framed.

Framing political and historical questions is very different from framing scientific questions. In the natural sciences, cherry picking the subject of inquiry in that way would not produce any scientifically worthwhile answers. It would not be “science” in the first place, if it poses questions that are not replicable beyond the specific facts. For example, the force of gravity cannot be proved just by dropping an apple—it is proved only if it can be shown also to apply to things other than apples.

The same strictures do not apply to historical discourse. The cause for which the South fought is often “proved” by citing one paragraph from the speech of Alexander Stephens—in which he did not even mention the war because war had not yet broken out.

Alexander Stephens’s speech dominates the debate about the causes of the war precisely because it contains language that can answer the question as framed: “What evidence is there that the war was about slavery?” If they asked, for example, “What evidence is there that the war was about the tariff question?” they might look elsewhere for answers.

In political and historical inquiry, questions cannot be tested in a scientific way because the subject of the study is the values, motivations, and intentions of human beings and draws upon our knowledge of human nature. It is not the same type of inquiry as trying to see what happens when an apple falls from the tree.

Hence, in the interests of honesty, it is important to avoid the pretense that historical and political questions are “objective” and can be answered simply by looking at historical documents. “How do you know the cause of the war?” is not the same type of question as, “How do you know the length of this object?” Yet court historians pretend they can answer such questions by saying, “You just need to read the Savannah speech of Alexander Stephens.”

This is a form of scientism. It pretends that political and historical questions are no different from questions in scientific research. As Murray Rothbard explains in “The Mantle of Science,”

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action… Stones, molecules, and planets cannot choose their courses; their behavior is strictly and mechanically determined for them. Only human beings possess free will and consciousness; for they are conscious, and they can, and indeed must, choose their course of action.