In Praise of "Luxury Beliefs"

The truth of an idea matters more than the status it confers.

Today we are excited to publish Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, biographer of John Henry Cardinal Newman, and a highly original columnist for The New York Times. Perhaps Matthew’s biggest claim to fame is having come up with the name, “Barstool Conservative,” which has become popular among political commentators and even has its own Wikipedia page. Today, he writes — critically — about another neologism: Rob Henderson’s “luxury beliefs.”

Henderson defines “luxury beliefs” as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” He cites “defund the police” as an example of a luxury belief. Below, Matthew picks apart the concept, arguing that it is not as descriptive or coherent as Henderson believes. Moreover, Matthew argues, when it comes to persuading people, the prestige of an idea is ultimately less important than its truth.

Enjoy!

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

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Half a decade ago Rob K. Henderson introduced the world to the concept of “luxury beliefs.” This neologism has enjoyed a remarkable career; it has its own Wikipedia entry, for example.

For Henderson, luxury beliefs are the opinion equivalent of luxury goods; they are epistemic Fendi purses, the sorts of things that we can only believe because we have the requisite social capital to “afford” them. Among his examples are support for the decriminalization of drugs and opposition to the use of standardized tests in college admissions. Henderson argues that only people who will be protected from the negative social consequences of heroin use could possibly want it to become quasi-legal; others, whose friends or relations have died of a heroin overdose or who live in neighborhoods affected by the drug trade, may well take the opposite position. Likewise, he says, it is easy for those who have already earned prestigious degrees (often on the basis of their high test scores) to say that standardized testing should be done away with; high school students whose good SATs might be their only means of distinguishing themselves will be inclined to disagree.

Others have applied the phrase “luxury belief” to all sorts of things. Opposition to the candidate who has promised to construct a border wall as part of a broader “tough on crime” package along with a new set of tax cuts is considered a luxury belief in some circles — so is refusing to support Donald Trump.

As it happens, I agree in some cases with Henderson; many of the beliefs he criticizes are pernicious. Nevertheless I am skeptical of the idea of luxury beliefs — or rather, of the notion that one should reject or abandon a given belief simply because others say that it is a “luxury” belief.

My first reason is simply that most beliefs in the ordinary humble sense of the word —which I take to mean something like “deeply held convictions that are the result of some period of reflection or consideration”— are “luxury” beliefs. To put it bluntly, lots of people go about their day without having “beliefs” in the sense that I have described above. Most of us lack both the time and the inclination to consider abstract questions.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. “It is a mistake,” Macaulay wrote, “to imagine that subtle speculations touching the divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of intelligent children and of half-civilized men.” By his reckoning, everyone reading this is either an overgrown baby or a barbarian. (Perhaps he was right!)

Sneering aside, I think it is fair to say that from the vantage point of the sorts of people Henderson seems to think of as insufficiently “privileged” and thus unlikely to hold luxury beliefs, speculation is in itself a kind of luxury good, and one to which they do not necessarily aspire. Both liberals and conservatives with enough time on their hands might adopt luxury beliefs. The reverse of Henderson’s image of the clueless Ivy Leaguer who favors the vaguely defined set of policies associated with the slogan “Defund the Police” is not a person living in a crime-ridden neighborhood who after examining the evidence in City Journal believes we should increase the police budget; it might well be someone who accepts the absence or presence, the competence or incompetence, the help or hostility, of the police as a kind of brute social fact. Forming beliefs — including those which Henderson would not class as “luxury” beliefs — requires leisure time that many people either do not possess or choose to devote to other activities. One might say that having any kind of belief — including the belief that certain beliefs are luxury — is evidence of the sort of privilege that, according to Henderson, is tainted by luxury associations.

The second reason I am skeptical of luxury beliefs is one at which I have hinted above — namely, that the “luxury” designation depends very much upon one’s vantage point. During my childhood I was taught by my UAW grandfather that immigration was promoted by the Wall Street Journal to hurt unions and lower the wages of hard-working Americans and thus something that we should oppose — in other words, it was a “luxury belief” for wealthy capitalists. My farmer grandfather, meanwhile, told me that immigration was both inevitable and necessary — without it, Americans would find themselves with no food to eat, to say nothing of the fact that many decent hard-working men from other countries would be unable to better their lives — a luxury belief for union layabouts who had no idea how the stuff in the grocery store got there. With which of my relations ought I to have agreed? From the perspective of each grandfather, the other’s position, grounded in his own experience, seemingly justified by his honorable desire to provide for his family, was a “luxury belief” — the sort of thing that only someone in the other’s position had the privilege of subscribing to.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the same opinion might be elevated to luxury status by different persons for wildly different reasons. Some Americans consider support for immigration a luxury belief for broadly economic reasons as I learned at my grandfather’s knee; a racist would no doubt agree with them that only namby-pamby liberals could favor “open borders” even though he opposes collective bargaining.

In other cases persons of wildly disparate backgrounds will offer more or less the same reasons for calling something a luxury belief, but with what will look to many of us like varying degrees of credibility. Imagine two farmers, one in Iowa, the other in India. The former will likely argue that objections to genetically modified foods are luxury beliefs because they are part of how he earns his living, which in his case is well above the median income; a subsistence farmer in India, whose family has known famine in living memory, might also consider such opposition pollyannaish. Are they really saying the same thing?

The third reason for my skepticism of Henderon’s position is related to my first. I’ve argued that those who do not share certain ostensible luxury beliefs do not necessarily subscribe to their opposites. This does not mean that they cannot hold them. A person who lives in a crime-ridden neighborhood may have deep-seated views about the efficacy of “stop and frisk” policing and believe that law enforcement requires more resources. But — and this is the crucial point — he might also agree, pace Henderson, with some version of “defund the police.” In this case, since he would not be meaningfully protected from what Henderson presents as the negative repercussions of his belief, and would instead find himself forced to confront them on a daily basis, one could argue that his support for defunding the police is some kind of “ultra-luxury belief.” Unlike the Harvared-educated professional who can only fantasize from within the safe confines of his gated community about what living in a bad neighborhood with an underfunded police force might look like, the person I am describing would have the rare privilege of seeing his beliefs put into action in a situation where they have tangible consequences. How lucky he must be!

My own view would not of course be that he holds “luxury beliefs” but rather that he holds beliefs he considers true, even if he sees their downsides. He might, for example, think that graffiti or loud noise or petty theft are preferable to police brutality. One need not agree with his position. He might well be mistaken. My point is simply that it is, or should be, possible to support something that does not benefit us personally or even something that makes our lives meaningfully worse, just as it should be possible to oppose something from which we stand to gain.

Another way of making my point would be to say that “luxury” belief is the only form of luxury that is, at least in theory, available to everyone. It is true, of course, that many people are uninterested in thinking through abstract philosophical or political questions; it is also true that digital technology, the pace of modern life, and many other things have created conditions that are unfavorable to contemplation. But these and other structural problems should not blind us to the fact that people can and do believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. While it is obviously the case that things like political philosophy and metaphysical speculation tend to track with higher incomes and fancy educations, they need not. People who will almost certainly never live in expensive neighborhoods or attend prestigious universities can profess beliefs at almost no cost. A designer bag costs thousands of dollars; a “luxury” belief can be arrived at, held, and shared for nothing. Because anyone can hold them, I think, luxury beliefs are ennobling. They are agreeably non-utilitarian (in the sense that they can be held without regard for their immediate consequences, positive or negative).

Which brings me to my fourth and ultimately principal reason. It is always possible that a luxury belief is nevertheless true. Truth is, as they say in the world of libel law, an “absolute defense.” It ultimately does not matter whether a given belief is something that I advocate due to my social or economic position; if it is true, it is true without regard to my own circumstances. 

(One of the many issues I have with luxury beliefs as Henderson presents them is that in addition to thinking them false himself, he also seems to be under the impression that their proponents do not actually believe them. Instead they either pretend to do so while allowing their actions to suggest otherwise or they give them no thought at all. Hypocrisy, equivocation, cognitive dissonance, and naivete are not new things; we do not need new words for them.)

It is worth repeating that at least some of Henderson’s examples of “luxury” beliefs are wrongheaded. I do believe that it is better for children to be raised by their mother and father; I do not believe that religion in the vague sense in which he refers to it is either bad or false. Nevertheless, I think that his framing of the issue as a question of epistemic privilege is misguided. Surely his real problem with luxury beliefs is not that only certain sorts of people tend to hold (or seem to hold) them but rather that they are false.

Responding to a negative review of one of his books that had appeared in the London Review, the English historian Maurice Cowling wrote:

Argument is not what it seems to me suitable to do with opinions. What one does with opinions — all one needs to do with them, having found that one has them — is to enjoy them, display them, use them, develop them, in order to cajole, press, bully, soothe, and sneer other people into sharing (or being affronted by) them. To argue them is, it seems to me, a very vulgar, debating-society sort of activity.

Cowling himself enjoyed any number of what even I might be tempted to call luxury beliefs (e.g., that politics had no moral basis), but for sheer audacity, his argument about arguments might be the best one I have ever heard. When it comes to belief, I agree with Zero Mostel: “If you got it, baby, flaunt it.”

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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