Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles: How Yankees are Blockheads

Bruce Lerro

Orientation

The mismatch between the complexity of the world and the simplistic manner in which we think about it
The social, economic and political world in which we live is extremely complex, but most of the Yankee population does not have the thinking skills that can make intelligent decisions about this world and what to do about its problems. At the micro level, we find the same shortcoming in how we solve individual problems if we can tolerate learning and appreciating that thinking goes through stages of judgment. The choice of the word “how” instead of “why” in the title is intentional. I am not asking why the Yankee population thinks in simplistic ways because that involves a comparative knowledge of other cultures. I am only describing a cognitive style which contributes to Yankees being blockheads.

Introduction to stages of reflective judgment
In their book Developing Reflective Judgement Karen Kitchener and Patricia King claim that many adults clearly have trouble thinking intelligently about ill-defined problems. For many years they have been asking adolescents and adults of all ages and occupations where they stand on questions on the objectivity of news media, safety in food additives and the use of nuclear power. They are not interested in the content of what these subjects believe or how much they know. They are interested in the process of how they came to their conclusions, their method, whether conscious or unconscious. They interviewed more than 1,700 people ranging in age from 14 to 65. First the researchers provide the interviewee with statements that describe opposing viewpoints on various topics. Then the interviewer asked: “What do you think about these statements? How did you come to that view?”. What they found is that people go through seven stages in their attempts to solve problems. The first three stages are non-reflective followed by a transition stage, leading to two relativistic stages followed by the highest, seventh stage of reflective judgment.

The authors define reflective judgment as a highly developed thinking skill which makes defensible judgment about ill-structured problems by the manner in which they weigh and discover evidence, uncover underlying rules, generate multiple solutions, accept probabilistic results or judge expert opinion. As it turns out, most people do not show evidence of reflective judgement until their middle or late 20s, if at all. You might glance at Table 1 which defines their seven stages of judgement. I will comment in more depth about the table later on in the article. You don’t need to completely understand the table before you continue to read.

Purposes of this article
One purpose of this article is to introduce you to Kitchener and King’ seven stages of judgment. Secondly, I want to apply them to six areas of our lives:

• Religion, paranormal and scientist
• Romance
• History of anthropology
• Problem solving
• Individual development
• The political spectrum

Furthermore I want to briefly compare and contrast the seven stages of judgment to my four styles of thinking model. I will attempt to synthesize Kitchener and King’s stages with what I call the spectrum of styles which includes naïve absolutist, relativist, dialectical and cynical. I will make a comparison between the two systems later in this article. For now, let’s explore the four kinds of judgment.

The Spectrum of Four Kinds of Judgment
What is the difference between someone who is skeptical and one who is cynical? A skeptical person is one who says “show me” but is open to the results, especially if the evidence is scientific. A cynical person is not only critical but is closed. No amount of evidence will convince him. What is the difference between someone who is open and someone who is gullible?  A person who is open takes in some information but not everything. They draw the line at the far-fetched or outlandish claims. In other words, they are open but not so open that their brains will fall out. Gullibility means you believe anything. Let us apply these types of thinking to religious, paranormal and scientific thinking.

The Spectrum of Religion, the Paranormal and Science
Naïve absolutist
When we apply the differences between absolutist, relativist and dialectical thinking we can see that Yankee religious fundamentalism conforms to what I call the naïve absolutist thinking. Here the answer to the ontological question of what I can know is that knowledge is objective and certain. Further, knowledge is concrete and not abstract. By what process is knowledge acquired? Knowledge is passive, poured into people as a result of religious conversion. As a kid in a Catholic school religious training through the catechism was like this.

Relativist
But what about if someone believes in the paranormal – ESP or telepathy? Many Americans are very interested in psychic phenomena. Think of a 16-year-old bright thinker who wants to explore the mystery of haunted houses. For New Agers as opposed to fundamentalists, knowledge is subjective and created by them through experience, not objective based on a holy book as with the fundamentalists. Knowledge for the relativist starts with the individual and is uncertain. Unlike the fundamentalism, this New Age relativist says that the knower actively creates knowledge by processing it autonomously. Lastly, relativists understand that how they acquired knowledge needs justification, but not beyond personal experience. New Agers are critical of what I call naïve absolutists who simply obey religious authorities. For relativists Religion (for them “spirituality”) has to be personal. Relativist New Agers do not have a method for how to know things. They proceed by eclectic trial and error. From a class point of view naïve absolutists with their fundamentalism are more likely to be working class. Research shows relativists whose interest is in the paranormal are more likely to be middle or upper-middle class Yankees.

Dialectical
Now suppose someone is neither religious nor believes in the paranormal. Like the naïve absolutist, the dialectical scientist understands knowledge as objective, but not absolutely objective. For the dialectical scientist knowledge is only relatively objective because it is impacted by history, the economic system and social class of the person. Just as for the relativist, the scientist sees knowledge as an active process of experimentation, not experiential. It discovers events that are already there and discusses them with other scientists. Unlike the New Ager, his mind does not construct events. For the scientist, knowledge needs to be justified using objective standards of scientific method.  Furthermore, scientific standards themselves evolve. Yankee communists or socialists think this way at their best.

Cynical
For the cynical scientist, knowledge is objective but must be worked through and evolving and subject to universal scientific laws. The cynic is less sensitive to historical changes, economic systems and social class as the dialectician in science and is less settled about probability. He is after universal causal laws if he could find them. A cynic is dismissive of both fundamentalist religion and New Age relativist and is less likely to view them as themselves products of evolution. He is less likely to see anything positive in them. A cynic can be an upper-middle class scientist or a working class person who is bitter and has given up on their lives.

So what we have is:

• Religious fundamentalist; naïve absolutist
• New Age paranormal; relativist
• Scientist – dialectical
• Scientism – cynical

Spectrum of Judging Applied to Romance
What is the difference between the following statements about romantic relationships? “I’ve found prince or princess charming.” The second person is lucky enough to have three relationships at the same time. When pressure is applied to choose one, they can’t decide. “Why do I have to decide?” they say. Let’s assume them to be polyamorous. The absolutist disapproves of their lifestyle and wants them to hold out for their "soulmate”. The third person says, “there are no princes or princesses. Everyone has their pros and cons. We must set up a spread sheet, list the pros and cons of each person. Assign qualitative weights to each and then choose.” The relativist sees this as too harsh and judging of other people. The absolutist thinks the dialectical way takes all the romance out of relationships. The fourth Yankee cynic says, “Everyone is damaged. There is no use in trying”. The dialectical thinker believes the cynic has given up too soon or their standards are too high. The first and the fourth way of making sense of relationships appear to be opposite. One is Pollyanna and the other is bitter. But as we shall see, they have some unsuspected commonalities.

The naïve absolutist is slavish to the ‘authorities’ in helping them find a partner, whether he trusts his parents, his priest or his therapist. The relativist is cynical about the authorities, feels they are untrustworthy and believes you just have to trust your “gut feelings”. He trusts his personal experience in romance. While the dialectical thinker is skeptical of the authorities he will listen to them about weighing the pros and cons  only if they prove themselves. The dialectical judger is less trusting of his personal experience.  He trusts the research done of other groups and trusts the demographics about what are the ideal match-ups. The naïve absolutist does not understand why the dialectical judger does not trust the authorities and the relativist is amazed at the lack of trust in personal experience. For the relativist, personal experience is much more valuable than demographics. A cynical scientist may be not only skeptical of personal experience he is also skeptical of the demographics of groups. Because his standards are so high, he wants to be much more certain than what is yielded from statistics on groups. He doesn’t want to take any chances and may wind up single. A Yankee working class cynic just says “romantic relationships are too hard to bother with”.

History of Anthropology
Naïve absolutist: theories of progress
Let’s switch from the micro to the macro world. Around the time when anthropology began about 1870, the first theoreticians gathered information from missionaries and explorers and arranged their findings into stage theories – savagery, barbarism and civilization. This followed the trajectory from primitive societies, to agricultural states to industrial capitalist societies. They claimed that this arrangement constituted “progress”. That means that the later in time in history we go, the better societies get. The criteria includes political complexity, happiness, morality, science and intelligence. The theorists of progress assumed that all hunting and gathering societies were the same, the agricultural states were all the same. Their sweep was universal and insensitive to time and place differences between cultures. They asked questions which emphasized commonalties, not differences.

Relativists: all societies are equal
Around the turn of the century, the American anthropologist Franz Boas attacked the theory of progress as racist. Unlike the first wave of anthropologists, Boas was not an armchair anthropologist. He did field work and his conclusions were that “primitives” (who were mostly Native American) were by no means less intelligent, less moral, less happy or more superstitious than white Western Europeans. His students like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead claimed that there was no basis for comparing or judging societies. All societies were equal. These anthropologists were called “cultural relativists”. They held sway in anthropology for well over 100 years to today.

Unlike the absolutist theorists of progress, relativists are very sensitive to specific times and places. They are splitters rather than lumpers. They ask questions which emphasize differences. They are hard-pressed to find commonalities across cultures and view generalization as a kind of cognitive imperialism.

In 1959 at the centennial of Darwin’s birthday a new school of anthropology emerged. People like Leslie White argued the societies can be compared and studied scientifically. White claimed that societies can be organized hierarchically based on the degree to which they harnessed energy. Others such as Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins had other materialist criteria. But it was Marvin Harris and Gerhard Lenski who claimed that while societies couldn’t be meaningfully structured according to progress, Harris in particular noticed something else.

Dialectical: improvised evolutionists
On the one hand, dialectical judgers like Marvin Harris and Gerhard Lenski said that the reason societies changed was not due to discovering a new technology or being suddenly enlightened as theories of progress assumed. They argued that societies changed because of necessity. These necessities included as populations grew resources being depleted that produced crises. It was new technologies, along with economic and political reorganization that pulled societies out of the crisis. But the same crises grew back hundreds or thousands of years later. Unlike the cultural relativists, Harris didn’t say all societies were equal. He argued that more complex societies created greater crises, but also produced greater material wealth to solve their problems. Harris called his school of anthropology “cultural materialism”. I call these anthropologists improvised evolutionists. These theorists understand that hunter-gather societies are different from each other because their ecological settings are different. Yet they were able to say that all hunting and gathering societies face many of the same problems. Dialectical thinkers ask questions that are both differences and commonalities but also ask themselves and their colleagues Socratic questions.

Cynics
In the field of anthropology there are no scientific cynics. What we have are cultural cynics of post modernism who don’t dare ask questions about commonalities across cultures. They are not interested in science and simply studying individual societies. They think that studying other societies is just a projection of what exists in the society of origin.

See any patterns?
So, do you see a pattern between attitudes toward romance on one hand and the evolution of anthropology on the other? Do you see any commonalties between the individual who is looking for prince or princess charming and the anthropologists who organize societies in a progressive manner? Is there a commonality between the person who can’t decide among partners and the cultural relativist who thinks all social formations are equal? Does the individual who wants to organize relationships into spreadsheets have anything in common with Harris’s cultural materialism? 

Problem Analysis and Problem-Solving
What are well-structured and ill-structured problems?
A well-structured problem is like solving a jigsaw puzzle or a word problem. There is one right answer, you know when you have found it and you don’t have to search for evidence because it is all given in the problem. This is how Yankee naïve absolutists think about politics: two choices, Democrat or Republican. More on this later.

With an ill-structured problem there could be many answers. You have to search for evidence outside the problem and you often don’t know if your answers are right because all answers are in varying degrees of probability. An example of an ill-structured problem is a vocational counselor helping a worker find a new occupation. The counselor can give them an assessment test which matches their interests to occupations. But a worker has to join vocational organizations which show them available jobs. The worker may do an internship as a welder, shadow working to see how they like it. However, they might not know if this is a good match for them as a field until they commit to the job and then see what happens. In critical thinking a well-defined problem is like formal logic or rationality. An ill-defined problem requires informal logic or reason.  Let’s see how our four types of thinkers do with these problems.

Naïve absolutism
A Yankee naïve absolutist would expect ill-structured problems to fit into well-structured problems because he expects personal or world problems to fit into his fundamentalist type of religion or his expectation of finding a single soul-mate, prince or princess charming. For the naïve absolutist there is only one right answer.

Relativist
Our relativist would be cynical that any problems could ever be well-defined. He might say, two and two makes four but in the world of non-linear geometry this would not be the case. For the relativist there are an infinite number of answers.

Dialectical
The dialectical thinker would be able to differentiate well-structured from ill-structured problems and be able to use formal logic rationality for one and informal logic or reasoning for the other. For the dialectical thinker there are a few right answers that roughly correspond to the five or six theoretical schools of thinking in sociology or psychology. The dialectical thinker chooses the best of lot and sets out to take action. Communists and socialists at their best in groups think this way.

Cynical thinker
A cynical thinker, like the naïve absolutist prefers the one right answer of a well- defined problem. However, unlike the absolutist the cynical scientist can suspend judgment and hold out for the best solution to the problem. A cynical thinker will know there are a few answers but will hold out for the perfect one and bypass taking action. A Yankee cynical working-class voter might give up on all politics thinking that if all the choices are Republicans or Democrats what is the point in voting. Neither party speaks to their needs.

Reflexive Judgment revisited
Have a look again at Table I. The stages of judgment are listed down the left-hand side of table 1. The first four stages are relatively simplistic. King and Kitchener call these stages pre-reflective. Stages 5 and 6, the relativist categories are more sophisticated and the last stage is the most complex. Each of these stages is described in detail under three categories; metaphysical assumptions, epistemological assumption and the concepts of justification.

What is the relationship between the stages of reflective judgment and the four styles of thinking?

• The first three stages of pre-reflective judgment correspond to the naïve absolutist form of thinking.
• There is no correspondence between the fourth transition stage of judgment and the styles of thinking.
• Stages 5-6, quasi-reflective can be matched up with the style of thinking I am calling relativist.
• Stage 7, reflective judgment goes with dialectical thinking.
• There is no stage of judgment which corresponds to the cynical style of thinking.
• My styles of thinking table (see Table 2 if you dare!) adds many categories of comparison that are not in the seven stages of judgment table.

 Application to Individual Development.
It is not far-fetched to group the Yankee naive absolutist judgment into childhood, relativist judgment to adolescence and dialectical open-skeptical thinking into adulthood as well as cynical thinking. However, in adulthood there can be Yankees who think in a naïve absolutist way or relativist manner. In the case of naïve absolutist, the individual would probably be very low functioning because they would be thinking too simply for the complex social world we live in. Sadly, many Yankees fall into this category politically. In their personal lives these Yankees would have difficulty sustaining mature relationships or holding jobs that require managing people. Relativists can function well as adults in friendships, romance and work but would have problems with major life decisions because of their difficulty prioritizing.

Naïve absolutists
How do the four types of thinking fare in understanding the relationship between thinking and emotions? As we might expect, naïve absolutists are both irrational and unreasonable. They let their emotions rule. They are likely to be guilty of scapegoating because they see the world in either-or terms. They are likely to be superstitious because naïve absolutists don’t understand probability. They are almost always surprised that the claims of other people about a problem may be just as valid as are their own.

Relativists
The relativists might understand cognitive psychology in that emotions are driven by thoughts but they might not be able to abstract thoughts completely from emotions because they think in a concrete operational way. They are not likely to be able to use Piaget’s formal logic.  Relativists can put themselves in the place of others’ claims. However, they do this so well that they become enmeshed and get lost in the hearts of others so that they lose their claim.

Dialectical
Dialectical thinkers are reasonable. They allow their emotions a place at the table, but they don’t let them decide. They know the existence of other claims and they will compare and contrast them to each other according to a justified criterion, knowing that some claims are better than others, but no claim is perfect. They can enter the heart and mind of another, but they will not be swept away by them. Their claim may be affected by the input of another, but not likely to be completely upstaged. Communists and socialists at their very best relate to their personal life this way.

Cynical
Cynical thinkers are cut off from their emotions and will try to use rationality to muscle their way to a conclusion. They will not be moved by the emotions of others so their decision-making process is linear. Once their mind is made up, that is the end of the line. They are isolated in using the scientific method but will hold out for the perfect solution which never comes. Consequently, they are detached and disappointed. In my experience, socialists at their worst often conduct their personal lives this way.

The Linear Political Spectrum
Dictatorship and democracy
In the United States we have some very peculiar ideas about what democracy is. What is supposedly the opposite of democracy? We are told it is a dictatorship where only one-party rules. Examples of dictators are trotted out and virtually they always have something to do with socialism. But something extraordinary happens when we add one more political party! In this country now we have two parties to vote for and that is the maximum we can hope for democracy – Republicans and Democrats. But if democracy is “the rule of the people” wouldn’t more parties mean even more democracy? Some other countries see it this way and have many parties. But not here in Mordor. The rulers tell us more parties makes things too complicated, unwieldy and more drawn out. We are told by Colin Woodward (American Nations) there are eleven regions of the country and only two parties speak for them. Sociologists tell us we have between six and eight social classes, but two parties is plenty to represent us. So what we have is:

• One party – dictatorship
• Two parties – democracy
• Five parties – too complicated, unwieldy, maybe even a mobocracy

 Democrats and Republican voters are naïve absolutists
So we have an “election” in three months in which we are told that democracy means we have to vote for one of two parties. Voting for a third party is called a waist of a vote but then we are told that if the Democratic candidate loses that our votes decided the election. What about not voting? According to the Democratic and Republican ruling circles not voting shows ignorance, lack of education, apathy or maybe being on drugs. What I am claiming is the insistence only voting for a Democrat or a Republican is a form of naïve absolutist thinking. For example, Democrats naively think that those of us who vote for a third party are choosing between a Democrat and a Green. The truth is that most of us who vote for a third party are really facing a choice either voting for a Green or not bothering to vote.

Cynics don’t bother to vote
Not bothering to vote is a higher form of judgement than naïve absolutism, a form of cynicism which understands both these parties represent the upper classes and have nothing to do with middle class, working class or poor people. Some of these same people understand that the lords of capital own both parties and control what they say about dualistically framed issues through think tanks and lobbyists.

Dialecticians vote for a socialist third party
Those who vote for third parties aspire to think about politics in a dialectical way. For example, most naïve absolutist Democrats are myopic. Every four years they claim that this election is the most important in history. A voter for a third party understands that building and sustaining a political party is a 15 or 20 year project. That means you build up a base of loyal voters over the long haul. We don’t expect to win an election every four years any more than a sophisticated baseball owner expects to win the World Series every year. Secondly, naïve Democrats and Republicans think that having a political party is synonymous with voting. But there are many socialist parties that never expect to be voted in. They use the opportunity to run a campaign to present a program for what they will do when capitalism collapses. The Bolsheviks were a political party that was not voted in yet they successfully seized power.
So far:

Naïve absolutists – Democrats and Republicans
Cynical – not voting at all.
Dialectical – voting for a third party

Complexity of analysis
In its complexity of analysis both Democrats and Republicans present the issues as a choice between black and white solutions to black and white issues carried out by good guys or bad guys. Those who don’t bother to vote because there is no one to vote for understand that their issues like raising the minimum wage, having a health care system and educational system, that make being in debt for life are not anything either party is interested. Those who vote for a third party are even more dialectical. They see that wars, stock market instabilities, inflation, extreme weather and ecological degradation  are all connected and can only be addressed in a systematic way as part of a transitional plan.

Precision and quantification
In her book Eloquence in the Electronic Age, Kathleen Jamieson pointed out that in the 19^th century before the electronic age, politicians made speeches just as lawyers make cases. They defined key terms and set out to show four of five ways of making a claim. Democrats and Republicans today do not define their terms. Like naïve absolutists they think their use of the term is universal and understood by everyone. Those who do not vote are not in any position to define their terms since they are either working class or poor and no one would care about whether they strove to define terms. Those who are dialectical are devoted to defining terms because they understand the same words mean different things to different people. A cynical member of the third party might get preoccupied with the definition of a word and get carried away with the purity of having the right word. Race and gender politics within third parties have had bitter conflicts in identity politics, sad outcomes of cynical insistence on one term.

Capacity to suspend judgement
Republican Donald Trump is a great example of a naïve absolutist who will say the first thing that flies into his head rather than to appear hesitant. Can you imagine this blowhard saying something like “I need to think about it”? A dialectical thinker understands the difference between a surface “I don’t know” and a depthful “I don’t know”. The surface I’d don’t know is the result of a lack of information. A deep “I don’t know” is having evidence that is equally balanced where it is truly wise to wait and see how things play out. A dialectical thinker in a third party is not pressured to have an immediately canned reaction.

Decision-making
The Democratic and Republican parties are in no position to hold out for the perfect answer to a political problem. The truth is these parties are not deciding anything of consequence. They are thrown hither and yon by conflicts between ruling class capitalists, the deep state FBI and CIA, the neocons controlling foreign policy and the powerful Israeli lobby, AIPAC. All these political actors have overlapping but conflicting interests. The heads of parties are figureheads. Those that are relativist/ cynics might understand the complexity of issues and their interconnectedness, but because they don’t set priorities, they wind up solving a couple of problems in watered down way and then kick the can down the road. Democrats typically do this when it is their turn to assume power.

Makes claims falsifiable
Just like the naïve absolutist, Democrats and Republican candidates make promises but they never state the conditions under which they can be proven wrong. Unlike real scientists Mordor politicians are not held to any consequences if they fail to deliver. And sadly, the public does not demand falsifiability and does not track the contradictions between what is promised and what is delivered. The same is true for naïve absolutist economic advisers, mainstream economists. These folks claim to be scientists but fail to predict either crises or prosperity. Politicians who are relativists, who may well be in Green party or some communist party, might develop a program but they don’t relate to their program in a scientific way. At their very best, third party candidates in other countries who are fortunate enough to come to some representative power would have dialectical relationship with their base. This means that if claims made by elected politicians that were not followed up on, or came to ruin, they would have to account to the people who voted for them. In the case of economics, real scientific economists, whether Marxians or Post-Keynesians, make predictions and the following year write assessments of what they got right and wrong. Jack Rasmus is one political economist who does this.

Monitoring feedback
Naïve absolutists of either party pay no attention to feedback. When the size of the homeless population grows, instead of a structural solution like expanding low-cost housing, they drive the homeless to the outskirts of the city. When bridges collapse the Republicrats do nothing. They claim they have no money. But they have money for wars that they continually lose. When the national debt grows to 35 trillion dollars, is this a sign for them there is a problem? No – the Fed just prints more money. There are signs everywhere that Mordor is collapsing and these naïve absolutists look the other way. They specialize in secondary rationalizations. The relativist politicians outside the party are open to feedback but relativists lack the skills of prioritizing, setting goals and making a feasible plan so they never take the bull by the horn. At its best, a dialectical third party meets with its members and reads scientific reports together about what has happened politically and economically on a regular basis. They reorganize accordingly and come up with a new plan.

How to Navigate Through the Spectrum of Thinking Styles
The table below tracks the engagement of the four styles of thinking across 20 categories. All these categories have been applied partially to the topics of religion, paranormal and scientific thinking; to romance; history of anthropology; problem analysis, problem-solving; individual development and life on the linear political spectrum. Moving from left to right on the table, on the extreme left are the categories that are being compared. The stages of judgment move across vertically down from the most simple (naïve absolutist) to the most complex (dialectical). In terms of complexity, the cynical thinker lies somewhere between the relativist and the dialectical thinker. Beginning with category one, the types of categories proceed from the simplest kinds of input (knowledge); analyzing sources of evidence;  evaluation of answers to making decisions; taking action and monitoring the actions taken. Lastly the table can be studied in two ways. If you read this vertically you will get a “snapshot” of how each kinds of thinking answers the processes of thinking questions across the 20 categories. I would start with this. When you read across you are comparing and contrasting each form of judgment to its rivals across the categories.

Conclusion
The main purpose of this article is to try to explain how the Yankee population has difficulty analyzing complex problems of our social world, politically and economically, at both domestic and at international scales. I argued that those people who feel compelled to vote for one party or another are naïve absolutists. Of those 40-45% who don’t vote many can be categorized as cynical. Those who understand a third socialist party needs to be built are thinking dialectically. In the stages of reflective judgment, naïve absolutists correspond to King and Kitchener “pre-reflective judgment”. Those who are politically open relativist are called “quasi-reflective”. Those who use stage 7 reflective judgment correspond to dialectical thinkers.

In terms of social class, surprisingly it is middle and upper-middle class Yankees, even with their higher formal education, who think like naïve absolutists when it comes to the two-party system. A higher percentage of working-class people, many whom don’t bother to vote can be characterized as cynical.

As a second purpose I attempted to show how absolutist, relativist and cynical thinking affects the Yankee population in micro-problem-solving abilities, romance and individual lifecycle development.

Table I Kitchener and King’s 7 Development of Reflective Judgment

Table 2 The Spectrum of Thinking Styles