Collectivism vs. Individualism

As usual, the question of "individualism vs. collectivism" presents a false binary. These are terms not used much anymore, but in the early 20th century, it was a common framing (and often used to compare “free but selfish” capitalist countries to “controlled by unselfish” socialist countries). The assumption was we could have individual freedom or a commitment to communal welfare (sacrifice and find meaning in a collective cause “greater than oneself”). This appears to have been a false framing. We can have a political system committed to protecting individual freedom and then, with that freedom, have individuals choose participation in micro communities, such as family, church, and mediating institutions. A great error was assuming that freedom and collectivism were on a scale, rather than complementary, and that a political unit, such as nationalism, would be the “community” in which individuals would sacrifice and find meaning (through coercion). Ultimately, I think we should remain individually free so we can choose community good. Public individualism for private collectivism. A recent study referenced by Brad Wilcox gave support to this view, showing there was a correlation in well-being between individualism on the national level, but collectivism on the personal level. That sounds right.

The problems with conspiracy theories

1. Vanity: They operate on the false assumption that a cabal of wicked people are oppressing the rest of us, and only the “heroic” conspiracy theorists can see through the illusion. It is self-congratulatory and makes the conspiracy theorist the hero in his own narrative. Although there is absolute good and absolute evil, people are rarely absolutely good or evil. It’s generally not helpful to think in terms of the completely good guys (us) vs. the completely bad guys (them, e.g., the conspirators).

2. Collusion: they require thousands (perhaps millions) of people to cooperate in a lie, without any of them ever leaking their participation in this lie. Real conspiracies unravel quickly as people come clean (e.g., John Dean in Watergate).

3. Facts: Senator Moynihan once pointed out that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. The biggest problem of conspiracy theories is that they deny facts. While it is common for millions of people to come up with a mistaken narrative that ignores or misinterprets facts (e.g., that the New Deal ended the Great Depression), it is extremely unlikely that millions of people would cooperate to lie about facts. Every conspiracy theorist must also rely on “new facts” to debunk the “old facts,” but wouldn’t the new (marginal) facts be at least as problematic as the old (mainstream) facts they are trying to debunk? It’s self-defeating (like trying to put out fire with a flamethrower). So we can disagree about how we interpret the rise and fall of GDP (Tax cuts? Public investment? Charismatic leadership? Expanded trade?), but it’s unwise to disagree with the GDP numbers themselves. Once we do that, we have jumped from the realm of legitimate debate (disagreement of interpretation/narrative) and into the realm of illegitimate conspiracy theorizing.

Humility and Science

I just read this quote from M. Scott peck, which echoes what Karl Popper emphasized a century ago: "Humility is the very basis of the scientific method." Indeed and since humility has, by just about any measure, plummeted in public life, our political discourse has gotten unquestionably less scientific. Sacrificing the education and well-being of millions of students by clinging to a discredited "Close schools to prevent spread of COVID" notion is a case in point. I’m one of those who wrote an angry letter to my local school administrators last March demanding they close our schools, but I've since apologized and admitted my error. Both political tribes fire the charge "anti-science" at each other, but inasmuch as society as a whole and, in particular, ideologues of both tribes, are more given to doubling down than admitting error, then our society has become--at the public level at least--extremely "anti-science."

Three Keys to Civil, Productive Debate

Below are three rules that seem to help discussions of controversial topics remain civil and productive: commonality, charity, and humility.

• 1. Commonality: Identify, emphasize, and leverage whatever it is you agree on. Even if people disagree about means (on how to help the poor or get to heaven), they generally agree about ends. Focus on that agreement.
• 2. Charity: Don’t work to “destroy” or “own” the person you are talking to. Reframe it in terms of a partnership: you are both working together to get at the truth. Give your discussant the benefit of the doubt and assume they are operating in good faith.
• 3. Humility: Be willing to learn and even change your mind. Hopefully, your discussant can learn something from you, but be willing to learn something from them. So important is this third one that it has some sub-steps:

• a. Separate what’s certain from what’s not. There are a few things that we are certain about, but almost everything else is, in the words of Thomas More, “capable of question.”
• b. Only debate what’s uncertain (empirically open). It’s OK to be closed-minded about something we are certain about (e.g., that it’s wrong to torture innocent children), but “fixed, final” truths are few and unempirical. Everything else is open to debate and able to be altered as we become aware of more empirical evidence.
• c. On those uncertain points, make sure to put truth (what’s right) ahead of victory (who’s right)

Two Moral Facts

As I see it, the below are two incontrovertible moral facts:

1. It is wrong to steal

2. We are obligated to help the less fortunate

Sadly, many of us tend to deny one or the other of these moral facts in the name of political ideology. Many in tribe blue, for instance, claim that it’s OK to steal as long as it’s done democratically or by the government, while many in tribe red deny our obligation to help the less fortunate on the grounds that the poor “deserve it” or that there is a “virtue to selfishness” (e.g., Ayn Rand). Far better than denying these two moral facts is to recognize and harmonize them, and this, I think, can only be done in a classical liberal order with voluntary charitable giving.

Trusting the Experts?

Does it make you a conspiratorial fringe figure if you reject the consensus of elite opinion? Many of the experts themselves believe so, hence the (thus far successful) move to silence opinions outside the mainstream on, for instance, the efficacy of lockdowns. Is it too cliché to point out that the consensus of experts was against Galileo and Copernicus? Or that the political and academic elites were the most zealous witch-hunters in 1690s Massachusetts? Or that the “best and the brightest” of the 1960s got us into Vietnam? Or that most elite institution backed the war in Iraq (those who denied that there were WMD could have been called “anti-science” on the same grounds that anti-lockdowners are called “anti-science” today). I’m afraid that always trusting the experts (however we want to define that), is a bad life strategy. The experts can be and often are wrong. They are at least as given to groupthink and social conformity as are the rest of us. Critical thinking, including a proper understanding of science, remains crucial in the 21st century and when one must choose between the science or the scientists, choose the science. The science, incidentally, shows that lockdowns are largely ineffective—will we recognize this with time the same way we now recognize the errors in Salem, Vietnam, and Iraq? It’s important to keep that in mind when experts tell us, for instance, there is no soul or that abortion is a human right—are these opinions the result of expert findings or elite conformity? Since both impulses are at work, a healthy skepticism of experts is in order.

Action bias and the presidency

An intrinsic cognitive flaw is action bias: humans tend to view action more favorably than inaction, even if the inaction would be preferable. This is likely the biggest bias in presidential rankings. Historians and the public give greater veneration, in general, to the presidents who “did something” even if it turned out to have negative overall consequences. The presidents who preside over the most violent deaths tend to get the highest scores from historians (Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt), while those who avoided foreign wars (e.g., Adams, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Clinton) are generally dismissed as “do nothings.” From a classical liberal point of view, this is backward. Given the inherent tendency for tyranny among governments, inaction is almost always preferable to action, and yet our presidential rankings system rewards the opposite. As long as presidents are seeking historical greatness (inevitable) and we define greatness in terms of action, we will likely continue to get unnecessary wars and other illiberal policies from our executives.

Peak University?

There are many surface reasons for the possible collapse of universities in the near future (ideological capture, lack of viewpoint diversity, rising tuition costs, etc.), but there may be a deeper reason that relates to the post-industrial revolution. In the agricultural age when nearly everyone lived in small towns, credentials were not required since people generally knew those they did business with (the doctor didn’t need a license because people had come to trust him as able and competent on a personal level). The industrial age changed all this. As people moved to cities and their interpersonal networks multiplied, they needed information signals beyond those they could get from personal interaction. They needed credentials, particularly college degrees. The question is, will these credentials still be necessary in the information age? As newer sources of information on human capital become available (web-based tests, aggregated reviews, brain scans), will licensing or even college degrees serve a function? There is a mania to graduate from colleges to signal ability and disposition to potential employers (and, at elite colleges, to signal prestige to the world—I watched the interesting Netflix documentary on this the other day), but if the information age can supply more accurate and less costly indicators of competence, we may see this mania subside and universities collapse for want of use.

"Science"-- a much-abused term

We constantly hear the refrain “follow the science” or “trust the science.” The word “science” has become totemic and “anti-science” is invoked as a casual epithet these days much as “anti-Christian” was in the Middle Ages. To know when to label something “science” or “anti-science,” we must know exactly what science is. Science, by definition, is a method (not a conclusion or body of knowledge) consisting of three elements: 1) scientists, 2) developing hypotheses, and 3) testing them. We need all three elements for something to be “scientific.” If a group of scientists say something (e.g., “go to an anti-abortion rally”) that doesn’t necessarily make it science. If a bunch of scientists develop a model/hypothesis (“luminiferous ether carries light waves”), that doesn’t necessarily make it science. Much of what people call “science” today is mistaking one element of the three for science itself. The Imperial College Covid-19 model was not “science” because it had not been tested (and now that we have submitted its predictions to empirical testing, it has been falsified), and the claim by scientists that we should attend certain political protests was not science—just the non-scientific political opinion of certain practicing scientists.

Progressing Towards Equality

When asked to define their ideology, progressives often say that they believe in “moving forward towards greater equality” (hence the “progress” in the label). The problem is that there are two concepts here and they might contradict one another. Notice, for instance, that the USA has become more economically unequal since the 1960s—Progressives talk about aligning with trends to be “on the right side of history,” but what do they do with this trend towards inequality? If we want to make our moral stance “aligning with trends” that’s one thing, but if we want to make it “greater equality,” that’s another thing entirely. Society can and does become more unequal so if we tie our morality to fads (if it's a trend it must be good), we can, by their own criterion, find ourselves opposing what is objectively good.

The New Orthodoxy

For the first two hundred years of American history, Judeo-Christianity was orthodoxy—the background ethos of society—but in the past generation a new woke orthodoxy has displaced it, particularly among elites. Most Christians are troubled by this, not only because it means their views are now becoming marginalized, but also because those who advance the new orthodoxy don’t seem to be able to make a distinction (as most Christians could) between accepting/teaching the orthodoxy and compelling others to accept it (e.g., through state sponsorship, censorship, condition of employment, etc.). Whereas few Christian employers would have fired non-Christians, woke employers are firing non-woke employees quite routinely. Most Americans would have opposed requiring federal (or even corporate) employees to undergo Christian training, and yet they are routinely required to undergo woke critical race training. Samuel P. Huntington talked of a cultural “clash of civilizations” among the peoples of the world, but he didn’t anticipate that it would play out domestically. This is happening as the old cultural orthodoxy finds itself being replaced in all of the elite sites of power by a new cultural orthodoxy. This seems a key to understanding the high degree of polarization and violence in America today.

The basis of classical liberalism

The simplest justification for classical liberalism is: 1) We are free and 2) restriction is wrong. 1. We are Free: Humans are free beings unique in their capacity to choose and control their own destiny independent of material forces, such as instinct. This makes them morally responsible for choices in ways that nothing else living or unliving is. 2. Restriction is wrong: it’s immoral for people to restrict the freedom of others. Antebellum slavery was wrong because it restricted the freedom of an entire class of people (African Americans), forcing them, against their will, to work for another (with or without recompense is irrelevant here: I can serve someone freely without recompense or work for someone freely with recompense). Notice that we can’t prove either of these propositions—they are axiomatic atomic facts that are the beginning point, rather than ending point, of political reasoning. Since most people accept these two points (since most people accept that slavery is wrong—slavery would be OK if either proposition was not correct) then the key for politics is getting people to accept the implications of this view, i.e., to keep sight of the basic facts of politics and then use this as the rational basis for political decision making. There is near universal agreement that these two facts are correct, therefore nearly everyone is philosophically a classical liberal, they just lose sight of this in moments of emotion or the distorted thinking caused by partisan tribalism. The illiberalism of our time is a failure to reconnect with self-evident fundamentals as we get caught up in social media-fueled frenzies of anger and tribalism.

Illiberalism in 21st century America

Throughout the 20th century we had one political tribe (left) committed to social liberalism—free speech, due process, judging people as individuals and not part of racial groups—and another (right) committed to economic liberalism—free markets, private property, contracts. While it would have been preferable to have two tribes committed to both, having at least one tribe committed to both parts of liberalism meant that there was always a check/pushback against illiberalism of any form (the right would push back on economic illiberalism, the left against social illiberalism). The tragedy of 21st century American politics is that both tribes have surrendered their commitment to their half of liberalism. With the move to big government conservatism and economic nationalism, tribe right is now as fiscally illiberal as tribe left and with the move to cancel culture and wokism, tribe left is now as socially illiberal as tribe right. The productive institutional checks on liberalism appear to be gone and this doesn’t bode well for the future.