THE CERTAINTY TRAP WITH ILANA REDSTONE (053)

JAKE BROWN: Hello, this is Jake Brown, furniture Designer Craftsman and owner of Platypus Builds here in Minneapolis, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. One thing that's clear to me from following the news is that we have got to get better at talking to and listening to each other, which includes being a lot less certain that we are right all the time. I'm looking forward to Pete's conversation with Professor Ilana Redstone, author of The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More—and How We Can Judge Each Other Less. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, let's get ready to stretch our thinking.

ILANA REDSTONE: Pick an issue that you feel strongly about—it could be political, but it doesn't have to be—where you feel like no reasonable person could possibly come to another conclusion, and challenge yourself to come up with a version of that argument that would make sense to you. And by “make sense,” I mean that you can't hang on any assumption about their intent or knowledge or lack of knowledge. And just see how far you get.

[VO]: That's Ilana Redstone, sociology professor and author of The Certainty Trap.

REDSTONE: People don't like to be treated with contempt: as sort of like, You are just—morally, you're not even worth me considering, not worth me engaging with. And in this case, in the political sphere, racist, et cetera. There's something very human and about not wanting to be viewed that way and being resentful when you are, especially for a political opinion that you feel like you have arrived at reasonably.

[VO]: We do some talking about the current president, so let this be your trigger warning!

REDSTONE: The idea that there's no explanation—other than stupidity or resentment—why someone could support Trump, his policies, et cetera: It's a corrosive idea. It's corrosive in terms of social trust. It's corrosive in terms of trust in institutions, and it's corrosive in terms of just our broader political conversation.

[VO]: But there's a whole lot more. So let's get to it!

[VO]: In this first year of Trump 2.0, by which I mean February—just kidding, kind of—I’ll be focusing more than usual on the podcast on how we can have better conversations, especially with people we disagree with. I’m honored to kick things off with someone whose new book I really love. Ilana Redstone is the author of The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More―and How We Can Judge Others Less, published in September 2024. With a joint Ph.D. in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, she’s a sociology professor at the University of Illinois, where her course about the sociology of political polarization is called “Bigots and Snowflakes.” In January Redstone gave the John Hanly Lecture on Ethics and Morality at The Pingry School in New Jersey, where I had the opportunity to meet her. I am so glad she made time to talk about her work on the show so we could continue our conversation! We spoke via video call on February 10th, 2025.

[3:48]

HORN: Ilana, the morning after the 2024 election, social media feeds and certainly my own text message threads began to feature messages like, “I can't believe half of Americans really want …”—fill in the blank for whatever terrible motivation we ascribed to voters who voted for Trump—or, I suppose, Harris, though that sentiment wasn't prominent in messages to me. So leaving aside the fact that almost 90 million eligible voters did not vote—something I care about as somebody who thinks about things like civic engagement—it seemed very easy for folks on the left, for instance, to conclude that half of their fellow Americans were racist, for instance. So how is this conclusion an example of the Certainty Trap?

REDSTONE: Well, that's such a good question. I think that what you're describing is probably not that unusual in terms of an experience that people had. I mean, it's interesting. I'm not sure how it differs from the 2016 election because it had a very similar feel to it. I think that the Certainty Trap piece is There's no reason other than racism, racial resentment, et cetera, why anyone could possibly support Donald Trump, his policies, et cetera. That's certainty right there! There's another sort of layer to it, which is that sometimes you'll hear people say, “Okay, well maybe they're not racist, but clearly his racism, xenophobia, whatever, is not a deal breaker” —which is kind of a version of the same thing. I think people, when they say that are trying to be more generous; it amounts to the same kind of question: What kind of person, what kind of moral monster, what kind of horrible person would either get behind this or think that whatever it is—whatever sort of hateful thing that he stands for, is doing—is not a deal-breaker? And that is certainty. Certainty is the thing that is largely why we are where we are. I don't mean to suggest that any complicated problem has a single factor. I think this is an important one, which is this sort of feeling of contempt for people who disagree, that there's no possible other reason other than hatred, racial resentment or ignorance, why someone could come to the conclusion that Trump is their guy, that DEI policies are bad, that gender-affirming care is a bad idea. All of these—you go on down the line and that comes from certainty. So let me pause and let you respond.

HORN: One thing that caught my ear was what's different from the 2016 election, and certainly the result was the same in that Trump was elected. But I think the surprise of that, and also the fact that it was certainly an electoral college victory but not a popular victory—

REDSTONE: In 2016.

HORN: In 2016. I think there was a feeling of people knew that it could happen [in 2024] because it had happened: We knew that Trump could be elected, but then there was this idea that it wasn't just some sleight of hand that came from this weird [Electoral College] system that the Founders implemented and that many people have had their issues and questions with. It was also [in 2024] that there was a straight-up, albeit narrow, popular victory—not quite 50% for either candidate. So that part I think felt maybe a little bit different to people. But as far as the conclusions or the assumptions that were being made, absolutely that part is similar. So you would jump to the worst thing that you might believe about somebody who disagrees with you as opposed to just saying, Maybe some people were just really upset about inflation and trying to get costs under control. And they remember that things cost less when Trump was [in office] and they've got busy lives and they don't follow politics very closely, and they believe that this would be better for their pocketbook. Like, Hey, I'm concerned about the economic realities and I have reason to believe that Trump's policies are going to cost less and save more, whereas Harris's policies, they seem like they're going to cost a lot of money, and so maybe that's going to be more taxes in addition to this inflation that I'm dealing with. And so that's how I'm making this choice. It's not my opinion, it's not the way that I look at it, but it seems like a reasonable judgment for somebody to make that doesn't include these other factors that can be objectionable about Trump. So that would be a little bit less “certain.”

[9:02]

REDSTONE: Yeah, I think that's fair. I think sort of raising questions about economic policies, inflation, et cetera, I think that's fair. And I also think that I could say what I said and make it even more pointed. So for example, some people will say that, No, actually the support for Trump—people say that it's economic anxiety, but it's really sort of racial resentment, racial anxiety. It's just a fig leaf that's covering this more sinister motive. One of the most common theories that gets put forward for Trump's popularity—but I mean frankly it's not unique to the U.S. at this point in terms of what are viewed as right-wing populist leaders—is this idea that there was a lot of racial and ethnic changes in migration toward the end of the 20th century, the first part of the 21st century, a lot of demographic change through immigration, a combination of both changes in our immigration system—the last time we overhauled our immigration system was in 1965—and also changes in fertility rates. So you have these things that are changing at the same time that basically amount to large-scale racial and ethnic change, demographic change, different percentages of different populations. So the thinking is that actually the response to Trump is that Anyone who says it's about economic anxiety, what they're really doing is they're masking this fear about losing their power, losing their status, et cetera, because of this racial and ethnic demographic change. That’s an explanation that a lot of people on the left have hung onto. There's a couple problems with it: One is that it's basically an assumption; there's no space for anyone to prove it wrong. (This is kind of going back to the problem of certainty.) There's no space for someone to actually prove that wrong, because every attempt to defend themselves becomes more evidence that they're trying to hide their true motivations. I say, “No, I'm not racist. It's actually this other thing over here. I'm concerned about national cohesion, I'm concerned about ethnic enclaves, I'm concerned about immigrant integration …” Whatever. And that all becomes just an excuse, just a sort of fig leaf for whatever my true motivations are. And that creates, it's in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy—Let me back up. That may not be the best word for it, but it creates more resentment every time that we say Trump is the product of racial resentment without engaging with what the left has done to contribute to where we are now. And I can clarify that in a minute. I do think we're actually making things worse. The idea that there's no explanation—other than stupidity or resentment—why someone could support Trump, his policies, et cetera: It's a corrosive idea. It's corrosive in terms of social trust. It's corrosive in terms of trust in institutions, and it's corrosive in terms of just our broader political conversation. And so every time—I mean, I was just looking at the news this morning, and you can see this in the New York Times and the Washington Post—every time that people stand up and say, This man is a monster—I'm not saying that they shouldn't say that. I am not saying that he should be exempt from criticism. I'm saying that when you do that without simultaneously saying, I get that part of the reason we got here is because we—the left, whatever—have not created space to allow people to disagree and not call them racist, transphobic, sexist—right? When you say the criticism without saying, and at the same time I get that this is part of why we're here and that needs to change, you're just hammering on the very thing that was a major factor contributing to this problem in the first place. Does that make sense?

[13:07]

HORN: It does. And I wonder, you mentioned a moment ago “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” I was thinking actually of the problem or the fallacy—we'll get to more fallacies in a second—of the self-sealing envelope, where you kind of move the goalposts depending on what kind of answer that you're really looking for. And so if you say, for example, in the case of like, Well, this is a fig leaf for racism: I'd be like, “No, I don't believe that's the case because I really have these economic concerns.” You'd say, “Well, but maybe you don't recognize the racism that you're being exposed to. So even you're not aware—” How do you respond to that in good faith? It's not possible to really engage that, because you're telling me I'm reacting to something that I'm not consciously aware of. Maybe that's [introspective] work for another time, but I can't deal with this right now in the context of this discussion that we're having!

REDSTONE: Well, the argument that it's a bias and it's a sort of racial resentment that you're not aware of—I mean, I get it and I'm not here to say that I don't think that's possible. But I think when you use it in the context of a political conversation, there is no way out of it … If I say I oppose affirmative action, or I think DEI is a bad idea, and you tell me that you think that that's racist or that it's driven by racism, and I say, “No, I don't think it is.” Once you can say, “Well, I think that's because of your unconscious bias” … I mean, maybe. So what are you saying? Are you saying that there's no non-racial-resentment-related reason why I could be opposed to DEI? There's no way out from there! And so part of what I'm trying to do—and I do this with groups and students, et cetera—is to say: if you're the person saying—and I don't mean to suggest that everybody says it this clearly or articulately or intentionally—but if you say something like, or even think, Well, that's just racism, then my challenge to you is—in fact, I did this with students last week: Can you come up with a version of why people would have concerns about DEI? (This is what we were talking about last week because of all of the executive orders.) I said, Come up with a version of [a rationale for concerns about DEI] that has nothing to do with any assumptions about their racial resentment or ignorance, or that they just don't have the right information. Because there's value when you come up with it yourself. When you're generating it yourself, you're less likely to sort of constantly be looking for ways to undermine it because you are generating the idea. It's not about what's coming out of the other person's mouth. It's about how you are thinking about the problem on your own and in your own mind.

[16:14]

HORN: I think that's a wonderful example. Was that for the “Bigots and Snowflakes” course?

REDSTONE: Yes. I love teaching that class.

HORN: Do you want to say anything about that class? Besides having a fantastic title!

REDSTONE: Yeah, it used to just be called “Bigots and Snowflakes,” and then when it got a regular course number, I had to give it a slightly more formal-sounding name. So it's like [SOC 230] “Sociology of Political Polarization: Bigots and Snowflakes.” And so this is the sixth time I've taught this course at the University of Illinois, and this is actually the first time that I've taught the course since The Certainty Trap book came out last September. And so it's been fun actually. I can make it more focused and use the book as a source. And so yeah, it's been fun to sort of watch students go through it.

HORN: Well, the book includes a number of excellent scenarios that with just a tiny bit of tweaking could be wonderful for a wide variety of students to engage with. And I was thinking of one where we were talking about DEI because it connects so much to affirmative action (speaking of 1965 legislation). You have an example—this is on page 91 for folks following at home!—of a line where you hear somebody say, I think the most qualified person should get the job. And for students often you could say, I think the most qualified person should get the admission slot—if you were working with high school juniors and seniors, for example. And so you ask students to think of what are possible reasons for this. Because this sounds like an objection that could be based on veiled racial animus: do you have some concerns about DEI that you're really concealing? But you also offer some of the possible rationales that somebody could say. One of them is We should not give members of minority groups a leg up because if people don't succeed in life, it's their own fault. A person's lack of success stems from their own stupidity, laziness, and bad choices.

REDSTONE: Just for the listeners, this is not the argument I was endorsing! I was saying this is one possible interpretation.

HORN: But you also offer, We shouldn't treat identity categories such as race or gender as job qualifications. If you do so, it's unfair. It creates resentment and leads people to question the capability of the people who benefit, who do get that slot—that job or that space in the school, which is a viewpoint that somebody could have that would not be activated by racial animus. And you talk about there's always greater power in having students get there on their own, but this is a nice example of providing an example for what else could subtend this claim that you think is so objectionable on the surface. It's really nice.

REDSTONE: Yeah. Well, thank you. I'm glad. I mean, I think that's right. And one of the things that I try to make clear is that it's a separate question. So let's take affirmative action, just as an example—and I know affirmative action gets defined differently in different settings, but let's say it's actually the idea of putting your thumb on the scale for different groups based on their historical disadvantage, rooted in different identity traits. So you could say, Here are multiple possible explanations. Just like you said, here's the first one about Well, if you didn't succeed, it's your own fault. And I mean, I don't know, it sounds a little callous to most people! And then there's this other one that sounds like a more principled concern that most people would recognize. Not everyone, I'm sure, but many people would recognize as sort of a principled concern. There's a separate question that you could ask about, Well, if all I know about somebody who presents in front of me is that they're opposed to affirmative action, how do I know if it's this thing over here on the one hand? Or how do I know it's this [other reason], in terms of explanations? How do I know if it's this versus this? That's a separate conversation. But the first part of it is understanding that once you have multiple possible explanations, the chance that it's not the hateful one—that it's the principled one—is not zero. And so how do you want to—that's the certainty [element]. Okay, well now we've generated multiple possible explanations, and so now what do we do? And so you could ask the question, Well, which one is the most likely one? That's a different question, but we've already determined that the probability of this sort of principled one applying is not zero. And that's powerful because you can ask the question, Well, what if you're wrong? And what are the implications of that?

[21:45]

[VO]: So this is a strong example of what Professor Redstone has named the Fallacy of Known Intent, i.e., when we assume we know someone’s  intent, that is, when we assume we understand the motives behind someone’s actions or words, this can lead to oversimplification and misjudgment. If someone says they oppose affirmative action, all I can really responsibly conclude from that statement is that they oppose affirmative action. In order to understand why they oppose affirmative action, I need more information. Especially if I can’t get that information immediately, it’s important to remember there’s some chance—a non-zero chance, to phrase it more statistically—that I might find their reason … reasonable.

REDSTONE: I mean, what we're doing when we say, Either I'm going to assume that it's this hateful, sort of callous/hateful explanation, or it doesn't matter to me—what that is is saying that your intent doesn't matter, your motivations don't matter. And the idea, this actually will be the next book, but the idea that intent doesn't matter, in political discourse particularly, has very predictable outcomes. One of the main ones is resentment. And you can see that pattern repeat across lots of different settings.

HORN: Because we've mentioned terms like “racist,” “racism,” I think “xenophobia” came up, maybe briefly, “sexism” and so forth. I like part of the attention that you give in the book to recognizing that these names, these labels, will often, actually, I believe, almost always alienate the other person as soon as it's applied. You’ve brought out this big gun of painting somebody with this broad brush. And so how do you expect them to negotiate? You have given real attention throughout the book to trying to be as precise as possible in your language and being sensitive to the power of language. And this brings me to another point that I really liked, which is that I believe that I probably got more excited than many readers of your book when you begin to describe some of the fallacies that you coined in order to define common errors related to certainty. And some of these have names like the Settled Question Fallacy or the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge. And I told you when we met a couple of weeks ago that when I used to teach high school seniors a unit on reasoning, I relied heavily on fallacies, because it's difficult to demonstrate how to construct a reasonable argument, I think, from the ground up in a proactive forward-looking direction, but it's much easier to show some of the common ways that arguments are likely to run into problems.

REDSTONE: That's a really good point.

HORN: So I always thought it was useful for kids, especially as they're learning to think about this to know a dozen or so common fallacies like Cherry Picking or Hasty Generalization or the Appeal to Popularity. And they work because of the ways that either humans are wired or socialized. These things seem attractive on the surface: I found this example of this happening over here. This is the cherry that I see over here. You're like, “Okay, but you're ignoring all these other things that did not happen in this particular way.” And yes, that's an example that's really salient and maybe juicy, but there are these other things too. So we're wired to find [fallacies] attractive, but they do get us into trouble. So I wanted to ask if we could, because we got into the thick of it pretty fast, which is exciting and fun, but maybe we could slow things down a second by working through one of the tenets that you have, one of the fallacies that you discuss and have surfaced. So could you pick one of the fallacies that you write about that feels especially important maybe right now, and walk us through it so we get a little feel for the kind of stuff that you do in the book?

[26:11]

REDSTONE: Yes, yes. And before I lose the thread, I wanted to come back to something that you said. So in the book, and you just commented on this as well, that when you use those labels and you said you bring out the “big gun,” which I think is a good way to put it. Now, some people, what they'll say is they'll say some version of the following, which is, Okay, but we have a moral imperative to call out racism, to stand up for what's right, to not be silent, to stand up for justice, et cetera. And so you can talk blah, blah, blah, about civil discourse, et cetera, but we have to call out racism every place that we see it. And this is actually a much deeper problem. There's the surface, actually, you could think of it as a surface level problem and then a deeper problem. The surface level problem is kind of: okay, well if that's what you want to do, then that's fine, but it doesn't make sense for you to really then tell me that the thing that you're concerned about is political polarization, a loss of social trust, et cetera, if that's what you want to do. The deeper problem of that is how are we defining racism? And I'll just use [racism] as an example in the first place. Are we defining it in a way that makes intent irrelevant, and what are the implications of that? I imagine some of your listeners might think, as we're going through this idea, Okay, well, but we have this imperative to do that! So for the fallacies, there are three fallacies, and then I'll pick one and talk about it a little bit more. One is the Settled Question Fallacy, as you said, which is just the idea that what we know is definitive, final, can never be modified or changed: the idea that we could never learn something tomorrow that would upend everything that we know today. Another one is the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge, which is something that we often fall into when we're trying to be charitable, in some ways, to somebody who disagrees. And so that first step in a charitable interpretation is Well, they just don't have the right information. But the underlying assumption, which we don't really pay attention to very often is that, Okay, well if that's my idea, then what I'm really saying is that if the other person knew what I knew, then they would think what I think. And that underlying assumption that if we all had the same information, we would all agree on abortion, gun control, Black Lives Matter, immigration, everything else. That assumption doesn't hold. Once you sort of lay it out like that for people, they understand that it doesn't even make sense. No one has ever really tried to argue to me that if we all had the same information, we would all agree. It's just sort of, intuitively, We get it: People have different values and different morals and different priorities. And so even if we had all the same information, we wouldn't necessarily come to an agreement on all of these topics. And that can, I think, be eye-opening for people.

HORN: But I feel like for that one, especially—and maybe it's because I tend to listen to more commentary on the left and more opinions on the left. I try to balance my consumption diet, but I hear it more from people on the left: If you just knew what I know, if you had access to my facts … or These people just don't know. And I can't help feeling it's part of the reason that that thread can feel so patronizing to people who don't share those ideas: You don't know. Because in one way you could just be [saying], You're just ignorant. Effectively: You don't know the information. But on the other hand, it belies a real understanding for the way that human beings work, which is that, just as you said, we don't necessarily agree, even if we have exactly the same educational experience and we've taken all the same classes about a particular topic that we both didn't know anything about before, we follow the same curriculum of study, we do the same experiments, what have you. That doesn't mean that we will think the same things about a new problem that comes up.

REDSTONE: Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and I think it can be sort of a real shift in how we think about, I mean, there's a lot of training programs. Frankly, a lot of the DEI stuff—not all of it, but a lot of the DEI programming—like workplace or higher education, et cetera, programming—was based in this fallacy, which is that I'm going to give you information about whatever, about microaggressions, about the causes of inequality, about how we should think about identity, et cetera, and then I'm going to give you this information and then you will go forth with this information and you will get with the program. And these are fundamentally moral and value-based claims that don't work that way. So the failure to recognize that this assumption was kind of operating, it was sort of whirring in the background whole time—yeah, it can come off as extremely condescending, alienating, and create resentment. The third fallacy I would say—

[32:10]

HORN: I just wanted to call attention and flag for our listeners that we have an example in the back catalog of a program that did not fall into the trap that Dr. Redstone just flagged.

REDSTONE: Oh, cool.

HORN: It's called [The National] SEED [Project]: Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity. And the episode's called “SEED Folk,” and people can check it out. I'll put it on the show page to link to it. But part of it was trying very hard not to make those assumptions by foregrounding people's own experience and bringing it to the conversation and modeling ways to do that so that it was not just, I'm going to give you a bunch of nuggets and you go out and do it. But it was something that, by its program design, gestated over a long period, relied on people really getting to know and trust each other, and share more and more so that they could challenge, they could think about some of these things more deeply, but not all come up with the same conclusions at the end. So I just wanted to flag some ways because I agree there's some problematic practices that I think are the things that have made it very fashionable to throw this baby out with the bath water. And there's some things to critique, but that's what we're trying to do here, is to open up and to say, just because it pursued a goal that many people would agree with doesn't mean that the ways that it was done and the ways that it was implemented were always ways that let people pursue the major aim and may have been in fact counterproductive in some situations.

REDSTONE: Right. No, I think that makes sense. I think that's totally fair. The other thing that happens with the Fallacy of Equal Knowledge is … imagine a scenario where you and I disagree about immigration and build a wall/don't build a wall, whatever the policy is. And let's say you spend 20 minutes telling me why I should be opposed to building a wall or whatever. And let's say that I don't change my mind, so you tell me everything that you think I should know and I don't change my mind. Then, what conclusion are you left to draw about me? And that's where we get to the third fallacy, which is the Fallacy of Known Intent: You have nothing left other than to make an assumption about my intent. Okay, well, if that's where we start now—I've given this person all this information and they know they have the right information now and they still aren't on board … so now what's left is making an assumption about their intent. The other thing that sometimes happens is, again, if you just run the same example, say you and I disagree about immigration. Let's say we have a conversation and let's say I demonstrate to you that I actually am quite knowledgeable about immigration and I have all kinds of information. I know all kinds of things. So again, you would end up with this assumption about somebody's intent.

[35:29]

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REDSTONE: Part of what certainty does is it makes us not so—at one level, it can be quite obvious: It makes us not question our knowledge, not ask questions, not sort of push the boundaries of knowledge. We make all kinds of assumptions. It also makes us really sloppy in our thinking. So if I say, for example, it's important to be nice to people, certainty is the thing that keeps me—whether I think that that statement is more true than not true, or more false than true, or wherever—however I think about that statement is really going to be a function of what my goal is. So am I trying to create a workplace where everybody feels like they can talk about their ideas or something, or your workplace culture, or mentoring program where we're mentoring new employees. You could imagine that Being Nice to People is really important. I could imagine a different scenario where let's say my goal is something totally different. My goal is to develop a response plan for a crisis or disaster management or something. I can imagine an argument that says actually Being Nice to People is not the most important thing right now. We're trying to manage a crisis and that's not the most important thing. Avoiding the problem of certainty is not the same thing as saying it doesn't matter where we put that on our Being Nice to People is important [continuum]. What I'm saying is that certainty makes us not be clear. You talked earlier about my love of precise thinking. It makes us not be clear about what the goal is. And so we don't even get to have a conversation about whatever the topic is because we can't. Again, that's the sloppy thinking that I was talking about before.

[39:08]

HORN: In any given situation—I was thinking about … you are going to get your car repaired, you really need your car repaired, and your mechanic makes an offhand comment that you find very politically complicated, or fraught, right? You can decide in that moment that you want to engage with that person on the question of politics or just say, I'm going to ignore this for now because I really need to get my car fixed. I think it's important when we're thinking about and talking about conversations, to think about how we either implicitly have a sense for, or make explicit, as is the case with students: Here's the point of this conversation. Here's what we're doing right now. When we have a fire drill, this is what you need to do. I'm imparting this information to you. That could be a kind of exchange that you have with students, or you could flag it as a truth seeking endeavor and say, Here are the topics that we want to talk about, or Here's the thing that I want us to engage right now. I feel that this is important for this reason, and here are some ways that we're going to need to proceed in order to make sure that we all know that we were really engaged in a truth seeking exercise right now. These are some ways that we need to be prepared to listen to one another and not to form judgements because we're in the business right now for the purpose of this exercise of trying to hear some things that may be a little bit discomfiting, for example. And I'm always an advocate of setting the ground rules and so forth for that. But that was just an example of saying we want to remember that we use conversation, that we use discussions, we use interactions, toward different purposes. And if I really want to just get my car fixed or if I really just want to get along with my in-laws in this particular situation, I can decide maybe I'm not going to pick this battle. But it's important that everybody understands, especially if you want to try to go deeper, to have that spirit of saying, Look, here's something that's hard to think about. It's maybe even hard to talk about sometimes. We're going to engage it together and I want you to help me think through where I'm coming from on this or to think through this idea because I'm not sure what I think, but I value your opinion. I value you. And so, let's go!

REDSTONE: Yeah. I mean, here's another scenario. So to take your car getting fixed example and somebody says something politically objectionable that you are deciding whether or not to engage. There's actually a third—I mean, so there's [1.] engage in the conversation, or [2.] don't engage, but there's also [3.] don't engage if you don't want to, and just think about it—think about what this is and why: the Certainty Trap stuff. You don't actually need another person. It's not about the interaction; it's about your own thinking. So if somebody says the thing that you don't like, you don't even have to talk to them, but you could ask yourself the question, Can I come up with a version of how that person got there? What would have to be true for that person? What kinds of assumptions would they have to make to get there? And don't make any assumptions of your own about, again, intent, or not having the right information. And that doesn't involve talking to anybody.

HORN: And it'll give you something fun to do while your car is getting worked on.

REDSTONE: Exactly. There you go.

HORN: I mean, it's engaging as you're looking at the stale granola bars or the whatever kind of flavor of coffee is left in the Keurig …

[43:30]

REDSTONE: People don't like to be treated with contempt. If you look at data on relationship demise, I mean, you've probably seen the famous study at the Gottman Institute which finds that when it comes to relationships, the number one predictor of divorce is contempt. I don't have empirical evidence supporting this, but intuitively and just as part of the human experience, people do not like to be treated as worthy of contempt: as sort of like, You are just—morally, you're not even worth me considering, not worth me engaging with. And in this case, in the political sphere, racist, et cetera. There's something very human and about not wanting to be viewed that way and being resentful when you are, especially for a political opinion that you feel like you have arrived at reasonably. One way that I think about democratic stability, and I know we talk about in our broader conversation, there's a lot of discussion about this: I think about democratic stability and what a robust democracy needs as kind of a tower with three blocks. And at the top block we have—and hopefully maybe this will get back to what you were saying. The integrity of each block depends on the integrity of the one below it. So they can all crumble; if one crumbles, they all crumble. At the top is what I think of as the machinery of democracy. So this is free and fair elections, separation of powers, limits on executive power, an independent judiciary. All of these things that we think of as the norms and the machinery that make democracy work.

HORN: Or we used to!

REDSTONE: Used to, used to, right! To be fair, I'm not saying those things aren't under attack. I am saying: in an ideal world, this is what you would need to have a robust democracy. You would have this machinery of democracy. Right under that you would have the second block: you would need an unwavering commitment to political pluralism. Because as soon as we start to chip away, and there's a lot of organizations and institutions that are sort of focused on that middle block—and I don't know if maybe this is some of your own work, reinvigorating our commitment to political pluralism. And the reason for that is because if we don't have this unwavering commitment to political pluralism, it's very easy to start to chip away at one of the foundational premises of democracy itself, which is that every voice gets to participate in the political process. Everyone has an equal voice in the political process. And if you don't have a commitment to political pluralism, [some people would say] Okay, but not those [objectionable] ideas because those don't count. And again, each of these is important. The bottom one, which is often ignored, is people think about it in terms of, you might think of it as empathy, tolerance, whatever—I can talk about the limitations of those. What it really is, is the ability to disagree without contempt. That is a problem and that is a problem of certainty. That is a problem of how we think. So my brother actually described this as, you could think about it as how we think [bottom block], what we say [middle block], and what we do [top block]. If you think about something like civil discourse, which is really at that middle level, which is incredibly important—

HORN: Night and day, that's what I do!

REDSTONE: Yeah. I mean it's important. It's important stuff. All of these are important. And part of what I'm saying is that if we don't also address the thinking underneath, you can have a room—and I'm sure there are people who do this with more and less attention. You can have a room full of people following norms and protocols of civil discourse who are in their own minds just waiting for the opportunity to make a comeback, who are still drawing their own conclusions about the person who disagrees, sitting quietly following the norms. And what I'm saying is actually there's work to be done. Yes, this matters, and it's not enough because addressing the thinking that actually drives the judgment in the first place. That's really the starting place, right?

[48:16]

HORN: And you actually got at my next question for you, which is that there was a little bit of a drive-by shot on page 41 that what was formulated a little bit like that when you said, “One way of understanding the limits of civil discourse as a remedy”—that is to say, to some of the issues that we've been talking about­—“is that a person can be practicing all of its best norms and still be mired in certainty.” And this would be a place that I would just raise the question about one of those norms, and it's a definitional situation. People often do think of civil discourse—and this is one of the problems of being a civil discourse specialist—to be like, What do you mean when you say “civil discourse”?

REDSTONE: Totally fair.

HORN: They could think of “civility” as niceness, and sometimes that gets totally complicated by being associated with whiteness and European sensibilities.

REDSTONE: How do you think about it?

HORN: There are lots of ways that it could be problematic. Well, I think of it as truth-seeking, respectful conversation about an area of shared concern. And I've made sure to put the “truth-seeking” in there as I talk about it recently—

REDSTONE: True-thinking? Say it again?

HORN: It's truth-seeking respectful conversation about an area of shared concern. In other words, for me, in the way that I talk about it, in the way that I work with kids and adults in civil discourse, one of those norms has to be intellectual humility. In other words, it's not just waiting your turn to talk. If you're waiting your turn to talk but thinking about what you're going to say instead of actually listening, assuming that you have the best answer, and everybody's just waiting for you to put it out there, as opposed to saying, What we're actually doing here in this situation is making space for the possibility of our mind to be changed or moved a little bit, or to give us something to think about later. The intellectual humility has to be part of it. And I appreciate that. That's not how everybody thinks about civil discourse, but that's one of the reasons that clarifying that purpose of the discussion, in addition to setting the ground rules, because I do believe that those are important, and if you have enough time, you can do those together, especially for students. That's a great way for them to get in on it to say, What makes a conversation go better or worse for you? What [norms] would you like us to observe here? That's critical, but to clarify this purpose, to say, What are we actually doing? In other words, This isn't about you necessarily trying to convince me or me necessarily trying to convince you. In fact, that persuasion part of it, if we're really going to think about this, shouldn't be there because that is premised on the idea that you already know what the position to take is! You should bring out these tools, you should bring out this kind of attention to do this work for a situation that is necessarily complicated. And when you are necessarily able to admit that you don't have all the answers about it and that you really want to explore it, that's the point of it.

REDSTONE: That makes sense.

HORN: And that is absolutely where is absolutely where I think the work remains to be done is figuring out how we can get more people actually in a room, and parties and social gatherings— those aren't bad places to start. (I'm responding to some of the isolation literature that's becoming more popular right now. Derek Thompson’s cover piece in The Atlantic for this month [“The Anti-Social Century,” February 2025].

REDSTONE: Oh, okay. I haven't seen it.

HORN: Thinking about just places where we can get out and practice that first block as you just named it, where we can be in the same room with somebody else and recognize, Wow, they didn't vote for who I voted for, but they're okay and this is what they were thinking about, or We don't agree about this, but they're okay. There's not contempt. And I would say patronizing is probably a form of contempt that those of us on the left can be so guilty of sometimes. We are coming toward the end of our time, which I want to be respectful of. Did you want to circle back to anything, or is there anything that you would have liked me to ask that I didn't ask? Or is there another idea that you just kind of want to throw in?

[53:13]

REDSTONE: Is there anything else? I mean, I guess maybe I would say that—and this probably overlaps with your own work—the goal is not agreement. Maybe two things! One is the goal is not agreement; it's to be able to live with disagreement. And the other is that everything that I'm describing in the book and in my own work—kind of like with the car mechanic example—you can do this sitting in a room by yourself. Pick an issue that you feel strongly about—it could be political, but it doesn't have to be—where you feel like no reasonable person could possibly come to another conclusion, and challenge yourself to come up with a version of that argument that would make sense to you. And by “make sense,” I mean that you can't hang on any assumption about their intent or knowledge or lack of knowledge. And just see how far you get.

HORN: And there are exercises at the end of every chapter. There's a chapter summary, but then there is one of those kinds of exercises that say Hey, try it out right now, which I did appreciate.

REDSTONE: Oh, good. Good. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

[54:30]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! My great thanks to Ilana Redstone for joining me. A link to her excellent book The Certainty Trap is available in the show notes. More about Professor Redstone may be found at ilanaredstone.com. Thanks as always to Shayfer James, who provided all the music for today’s program. He’ll begin the tour for his new album right here in Sunny Buffalo, New York, in April, because he’s good like that. Info about music and tour dates is at shayferjames.com. Thanks also to you for listening, rating, and reviewing this podcast. If you know someone who would especially resonate with this conversation, please share it with them. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me. I’m Peter Horn, and I want to give a special shout-out to a hero of today’s episode, Jake Brown, who sprinkled such a delightful lode of bloopers in with his takes of promotional recordings that I asked his permission to share a supercut. That’s coming up in about 6 seconds and, you’re welcome! I’ll be back in two months with another fresh episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!