Why I am Skeptical of Skepticism

Why I Am Skeptical of Skepticism

Today’s emphasis on the weakness of human reason, our cognitive limits and unconscious biases, has become destructive. It’s the go-to story for anyone who wants to explain away things that other people are doing that they don’t like, or justify their own prejudice. The battering rams of ‘criticism’ have done their work well. Fifty years ago it was a mark of educated liberal sophistication if you pointed out that the media were pawns of corporate masters or reflected the class interests of Ivy League editors; today Fox News and every man in the street believe some version of the same thing.

The Big Idea of classical Western philosophy was ‘nature’, an objective reality independent of human beings but knowable by human beings and governed not by capricious deities but by impersonal and regular patterns or laws. We are part of it but also able to stand outside and observe it, analyze it, comprehend it. This idea clashes with most religions and a view of the world controlled by multiple gods or one god. It weakened under Christianity and almost disappeared, but survived and eventually was renewed more or less successfully in the acts of synthesis of medieval scholasticism. But it was a forced balancing act and eventually broke down with modern science and Enlightenment thinkers exploring nature as an independent reality while—initially—paying lip service to religion.

Science and objective inquiry, however, eventually turned on themselves. Many modern philosophers who looked at human beings as natural phenomena concluded we had huge built-in limitations. Hume and Kant defined unbridgeable limits to reason—we could describe Nature mathematically, but never really ‘know’ it. Darwin and his successors told us we were packages of drives and chemicals designed to survive and with brains optimized for reproductive success, not objective knowledge. Nietzsche questioned the premise of philosophy, that human life was improved by the use of reason. Freud and countless others tried to probe our hidden depths, finding we had all sorts of unconscious biases, goals, prejudices, and instincts that often overwhelmed our little frontal cortexes. Wave upon wave of sophisticated Marxists and neo-Marxists taught us to be suspicious of accepted political, social, and personal positions as nothing but justifications for power and privilege. Thomas Kuhn explained that even the natural sciences are warped by ambition and resistance to new truth. Today growing branches of social psychology and behavioral economics have popularized what is now almost a given for many, that no matter how ‘rational’ we think we are, we are caught in a spiderweb of biases and cognitive limitations.

This is a pretty well-trodden story by now.  What has become clear is that  this rejection of the possibility of agreeing on an objective reality has now penetrated so deeply that it has become an unquestioned article of faith that corrodes the possibility of common discourse. We see this in our current politics. We are having bitter fights now about science and the role of experts in politics and policy. Populists and conservatives are lining up against scientific findings like global warming, the need for childhood vaccinations, and other similar exercises in truth denial. The Trump budget drastically cuts government funding for scientific research, and Trump himself regularly asserts things that are manifestly untrue, while equally regularly claiming that all his critics are liars. The Republican tax bill that passed in December assumes future economic growth from tax cuts that is contradicted by experience, economic theory, macroeconomic models, the vast majority of economists, and many businessmen and investors.

More generally, an influential sect of conservatives opposes the role of “experts” and professionals in government and public life generally.  Steve Bannon’s famous pronouncement some months ago about rolling back the “administrative state” articulates this view. Regulations promulgated by “unelected bureaucrats” are a major target (never mind that most of these have been mandated by Congress), but the disagreement goes deeper. Many of the conservative thinkers who have banded together behind Trump demonize Woodrow Wilson as the arch-enemy who symbolizes what has gone wrong with America. Wilson was an academic and a political scientist—first President of the American Political Science Association—who thought good decisions should be informed by professional experts drawing on the latest scientific research.

In the Bannon perspective argument and discourse are exclusively about the will to power: undermining other people’s views and advancing the interests of your own tribe. There is no point in fighting bias, prejudice, instinct or whatever—this is who we really are. This is the nihilistic position that now seems to animate American (and Russian) internet trolls who have weaponized these critiques: it’s fun to weaken all norms and social bonds and ‘play’ at being irrational haters.

The American founders by and large supported what they saw as new, scientific discoveries in politics, as Hamilton tells us in Federalist #9: “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.” This new science did not assume that human beings were always reasonable in understanding and working for the common good. Quite the opposite: it was built on the assumption that men are not angels and usually act for their own narrow and selfish ends. Scientific institutions and laws, however, can take this into account and convert normal self-interested behavior into decent government.

The difference between then and now, in a nutshell, is that we are less and less sure that people are rational in even the narrow sense. Our democracy doesn’t assume that voters are high-minded and disinterested; but it arguably does assume that voters have a good idea of what they want and can map political candidates and policy proposals onto their wants and choose accordingly. Certainly this is possible for a literate, informed, educated citizenry. This allows for the formation of coherent political parties and political platforms.

But the election of Donald Trump is only one arrow in the quiver of skepticism about voter rationality. Much research on both the macro level (voting patterns, public opinion surveys) and the micro level (how individual choices can shift or change due to cues and circumstances that have nothing objectively to do with a political choice) suggests that we do not know our own minds. We do not have stable preferences, do not connect preferences to policy options, do not vote or choose in accord with any recognizable ideology or set of principles. We are ridiculously easy to manipulate and confuse. We pick our tribes or parties first, and make our goals and principles fit.

In the eyes of many advocates of these theories, the problem these findings point to is not that we don’t know our own minds, but that we don’t really have minds to know. In this the findings of political science and social psychology seem to agree with much of modern philosophy. The ‘self’ is an illusion, an unstable fiction of coherence that is belied by actual human behavior. Much of what we like to think our ‘selves’ think, believe, and do is done to us by unconscious drives and internal mental modules and genetic makeup. Or it is shaped by idiosyncratic external factors—upbringing, language, culture, geography, what we ate for dinner, a random TV show.

You don’t have to be a philosophy major to accept these conclusions. They are baked into most of our education in the humanities and social sciences, and increasingly into popular discourse.  An appropriate response to this framework would seem to be humility: “don’t believe everything you think.” Even if we reject the more radical implications, we should have a healthy skepticism of our own opinions. But inevitably it is most often used to cast doubt on what other people think, people we disagree with or dislike.

Accepting that there are limits to individual reasonableness doesn’t have to do this—it can reinforce the need for dialogue if people agree that each of us by ourselves has limits and blinkers, but collectively we can approach closer to what is true and good for all. The argument for democracy as the best, or at least a defensible, form of government largely rests on judgments about the role of uncertainty and unpredictability in human affairs. If the world is terribly complicated and full of complex interactions, and human beings are inherently limited, no human being can fully unravel the lines of causality, or predict the outcomes of what we do and don’t do. This means in some basic sense that we are all equal. Each of us is just as flawed and partial as anyone else. There is good reason to think that joint judgments that get the benefit of many individuals contributing their experience and views, and that guarantee the decision will be made with an eye to the well-being of the many, will be better and fairer than the judgments of a few.

This was Aristotle’s argument for democracy. We are better together. We don’t have full access to the truth but we can discern more and check one another’s excesses and mistakes if we agree on processes and institutions to manage conflict, and accept that the results of these deliberations are legitimate.

It is not clear that most Americans accept this anymore. It may be that democracy “cannot bear very much reality.” Today we have an unprecedented class of commentators, analysts, and explainers operating ceaselessly 24/7. Deploying the multiple access tools of social media, close examination of every law, every election, every public figure, every tweet, reveals too many warts. Each voice wants to gain our attention and our dollars by stoking our fears. Our naïve faith is overwhelmed. The reaction is often, I don’t trust any of you. Or, I trust the ones who reinforce what I want to believe.

Popular culture reinforces our pessimism. Americans today are not optimistic about their future, and the airwaves (an anachronistic image, but you get the idea) are full of dark and dystopian tales. Today’s Batman is not your father’s superhero. From the Matrix to Westworld, reality is something to be manipulated and reshaped, usually by nefarious governments or corporations. Orwell’s 1984 is back on the best-seller lists.

Today, defenders of democracy must go deeper than reiterating the arguments made in 1789. We were founded at a high point of optimism about the ability of reason to craft laws and institutions to steer us in a positive direction—a belief that normal people with all their frailties can, if well-organized, make good decisions. Americans now tend to believe that their most important institutions conspire to deceive and manipulate them, while many of their fellow citizens cannot be trusted because they are deceived and manipulated, whether by fake news or the deep state or wealthy oligarchs or Silicon Valley techies or all of the above.

I have no easy solution, but I can say that nowadays I try to be skeptical of skepticism. The United States has, by any historical or comparative measure, had a damn good run these last 250 years. We need some major housecleaning, however, to have another 250. We seem to have collectively decided that making serious changes to our institutions is just too hard. We can’t get rid of the stupid Electoral College, we can’t restrict money in politics, we can’t do something about our crazy Senate and its bias (the worst in the developed world) in favor of the rural few at the expense of the urban many, we can’t lift up African-Americans, we can’t fix gerrymandering. And much, much more. Let’s do some of these things, and we won’t need to make so many excuses for our bad behavior by blaming hidden drives and unconscious biases.