The world is full of babbling fools. It always has been. They’re babbling about religion, science, politics, private consensual behavior, and everything else. Everyone thinks that he’s got it right and all who disagree are wicked or crazy. Alas, clear thinking and sound policies are very rare things, and even when they exist, they’re often ignored or disputed. So we’re all messed up. But why?
Well, some things aren’t messed up. At the most basic level we have our biological senses. They work fairly well. They have to or we wouldn’t be alive. What’s great about them is that we don’t have to think to receive sensory input. You know when you’ve put your hand on a hot stove. If not, you’re in a mess o’ trouble. If we don’t know we’re walking off a cliff — well, we’re gone. Goodbye, little mutant. You were cute, but your scrambled genome is automatically filtered out of the gene pool. The feedback is fast and final.
It’s where we have to think that we often blunder. What’s the problem with our thinking? With philosophy and politics and punditry, feedback is often delayed. Sometimes a government doesn’t know it’s gone wrong until it’s smacked by economic collapse, regicide, mutiny, civil war, revolution, or foreign conquest. Maybe all of the above. But that historical judgment takes time, and the lessons, although harsh, aren’t permanent. The same errors reappear again and again. Is it hopeless?
First, let’s look on the positive side. We have a few — very few — intellectual areas where there’s little or no disagreement — arithmetic, plane geometry, and Aristotelian logic are the best examples. (Science too, but we’ll get to that.) Although reason doesn’t function automatically, like our senses, it prevails in such endeavors because they’re limited in scope, well understood, and errors are readily observed. Only a few stray lunatics dispute that two and two are four. and no one disputes the Pythagorean theorem. Formal logic, although not sufficiently taught, is undisputed by those familiar with the subject. But what about everything else we think about? What’s the problem?
Unlike our most elemental sensory apparatus, and a few limited, exceedingly rigorous and well-defined areas like math and logic, everything else requires thinking about a myriad of variables, many of which are difficult to know and quantify. Even where the basic principles are understood, the data are often incomplete or elusive. The murkiest areas are in philosophy and theology, where fundamental concepts are sometimes in dispute. That uncertainty spills over into practical applications — especially politics, a derivative of philosophy.
In philosophy, how does one know if, say, Plato’s ideal forms are literally real? Similarly, in theology, there’s no way to verify someone’s claim that he’s the recipient of a supernatural revelation about the soul or the afterlife. If a prophet is challenged — as all doctrines eventually are by competing systems — there’s the eventual judgment of history. Nations rise and fall, and when they fall their gods fall with them. That’s an agonizing way to resolve such issues; and even then the issues aren’t resolved. Their champions may vanish, but similar doctrines reappear elsewhere.
Everyone thinks his philosophical and theological ideas are correct, notwithstanding that his ideas conflict with those of others who are equally certain. Why is there such disagreement? It’s because such ideas are untestable. There’s no immediate feedback from reality. The supernatural view has no dispute resolution mechanism when it encounters a competing supernatural view. There is no way for a Zeus-believer to resolve his differences with an Oden-believer. They must either agree to disagree (which is rare), or one must somehow convert the other (usually by the sword). The only advantage to this method of persuasion is that it makes for interesting history.
In contrast, science uses real-world testing. Geocentrism, the recent global Flood, creationism, the luminiferous aether, phlogiston, and so many other wrong ideas have all failed the reality test. The rational world has therefore abandoned them. In science, we have the technique of turning to the natural world for answers, and when one idea turns out to be incompatible with reality, everyone drops it. Through mechanisms such as publication of research in scientific journals, peer review, and reproducibility of results (where applicable), scientific progress is achieved through the falsification of incorrect theories and the adoption instead of theories which are progressively closer to truth.
And then there’s capitalism. Correctly practiced, it flourishes in free markets. Capitalism doesn’t literally decide right and wrong, but the cumulative results of voluntary transactions clearly resolve competition among products and practices by rewarding those which succeed and discouraging those that fail. The free enterprise system — again, when correctly practiced — thrives on competition. The results speak for themselves. No coercion is necessary. Indeed, coercion, fraud, and political interference guarantee failure — in economics and in science too.
The few human activities that provide reasonably certain resolution of disagreements are science, engineering, and free enterprise. (Military tactics too, but that’s a kind of engineering.) What those activities have in common is rapid, readily perceived feedback from the real world. As for the rest of human affairs, by the time errors are detected (if they ever are) and generally acknowledged (which is rare) it’s often too late to make corrections.
So the problem in human affairs (mostly philosophy, religion, and politics) is that those unresolved activities lack systems for: (1) rapid error detection; and (2) verifiable dispute resolution. The only exceptions would be those rare instances when clergy make very specific predictions, such as William Miller‘s prophecy about the end of the world. He was wrong, no doubt about it. That’s why prophecies are usually trumpeted only when they’re retrofitted after the events have occurred. Politicians, pundits, and journalists also make predictions, but their frequent failures (about jobs and economic growth, for example) are usually explained away, somehow. Lack of rigor is rampant in such cases.
What’s the solution? Except in cases like Miller’s, there probably is no way to resolve issues about supernatural or highly theoretical philosophical claims. The best that can be done is to reject all attempts to coerce compliance with such doctrines. In most of human history, that kind of coercion has been the cause of incalculable misery.
The Founders did brilliantly in grasping the necessity of limiting the function of the national government. With a few lamentable exceptions, they basically limited the government’s functions to national defense and the protection of life, liberty and property. As for all other things, including the governance of the states, the general rule was KYFHO — the first word of that acronym is “keep” and the last two words are “hands off.”
The Founders had it right. Where there is no realistic error detection or dispute resolution mechanism, government must be forbidden to coerce acceptance of any doctrine. Except for the protection of an individual’s life, liberty, and property (the value of which really is self-evident), coercion must be eschewed.
Unfortunately, we see government not only moving to compel support of exotic doctrines — something the Founders knew to be wrong — but we also see them imposing demonstrably disastrous doctrines in areas like economics and science where they are clearly in error and where they’re constitutionally forbidden to meddle.
How will it get resolved? Ultimately, reality decides everything. Unfortunately, by the time a nation has brought itself to ruin, it’s too late to reconsider. Reality always has the last word. But for those of us who see what’s happening, it’s rather distressing. Reality doesn’t care.
Copyright © 2011. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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B. F. Skinner, the famed behavioral psychologist once said, “Why should we care if the world of a hundred years from now is mainly Russian, or mainly Chinese, or mainly American? The only answer is that there is no good reason, but if your culture hasn’t convinced you there is, so much the worse for your culture.” Bad ideas come and go, sometimes taking their cultures with them. Good ideas, the ones that stand up to reality testing, generally hang around. Sometimes the culture that originates them will reverse itself and abandon them but another culture will take them up and they will flourish there. Many in the United States right now, in a spurt of religious enthusiasm, seem to be in the mood to set science aside and embrace myths derived from a literal reading of their holy texts, but fortunately, most of the rest of the world is not so inclined, so I trust that scientific reality testing will survive as a virtue in the quest for understanding. If that happens more successfully somewhere other than here, so much the worse for us. But I intend to keep cranking anyway. Good ideas are always worth pushing for.