Defending Conservatism, Part 2: The Problem of Modernity

A proposition, to begin: there is a true reality about the world around us. We may not always know it, but the truth exists. We attempt to use our cognitive faculties to ascertain what the truth is.

It is possible to disagree with that assertion, or to argue that not being able to comprehend the truth is functionally equivalent to there being no truth at all. But for the purposes of this series, I am going to assume that truth is real.

But instead of delving into this from the perspective of politics and government, a better place to start is from a seemingly-more complicated domain: particle physics.

I never quite understood even the hints at particle physics in my high school classes, and I so feared studying a STEM subject in college that I majored in history and took a class on diseases as a way to fulfill my general science request. I was probably right to avoid it, for what it’s worth; it’s incredibly complex, so much so that it took a $10 billion investment in a gigantic particle accelerator to do the necessary research on it. We’ve learned a fair bit about the way that the universe functions, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider. Among other things (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• The “Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 115–130 gigaelectronvolts.”
• There exist two previously-undiscovered subatomic particles. They are “baryons that are composed of one bottom, one down, and one strange quark.”

My friends who majored in hard sciences often expressed envy for those of us who chose the humanities, or business, as our fields of study. After all, they were doing complex math and experiments, and we were writing papers on subjects of our choice, essentially. Particle physics may be the most complicated thing we study, but students of the “hard sciences” deal with higher levels of complexity than do students of the “liberal arts.” Organic chemistry requires more esoteric knowledge than political science; microbiology requires more esoteric knowledge than economics; astrophysics requires more esoteric knowledge than history.

But we draw the wrong conclusions from this. Intuition suggests that because something is harder to study, it is actually harder to comprehend the “truth” in that subject. But this is precisely backwards. It is, in fact, the opposite: the truth underlying politics, policy, and economics is much more complex than the truth underlying physics and chemistry. But because our tools to measure the truth in those areas are so (comparatively) ineffective, there is a lot more wiggle room for debate, disagreement, and competing interpretations. You cannot build a Large Hadron Collider for studying economics. You can do some rudimentary experiments, which helps, but those experiments cannot be fully regulated, in the sense of having complete control over your dependent variables and constants. Conclusions are always tentative, and always subject to change. Paradigms are more fragile, with less consensus.

Note, too, that it’s much harder to “fake” your way through the hard sciences. In contrast, it’s very easy to fake your way through politics and policy: you can make bold assertions with selective evidence, and at best, the response will be debatable. (In a field where the truth is more opaque, “faking it” works a lot more effectively.) Try doing the same in a physics lab. They will laugh you out of the room, or, if they’re feeling polite, ask you to leave.

All of this makes sense, if we think about humans in a material sense: humans, after all, are the synthesis of billions upon billions of those very same scientific processes, acting through their own logic. What we study in economics, political science, and history is merely the effect of the outcomes of those particles, not those particles themselves and how they affect actions and decisions. It’s infinitely more complex, because we are not merely studying the particles themselves, but how the particles combine to form a consciousness, and how the consciousness interacts with its surrounding environment. Everything we study there is a mere approximation of reality, not reality itself.

This very same pathology--that we study approximations, not realities--infects all fields. But it is worse in fields that are associated with the “social sciences”--a misnomer if there ever were one--and the humanities. But this leads us to the key point: we live and breathe in the world of the liberal arts, not the world of the hard sciences; politics and economics, not physics and chemistry, are the levers we use to change the world, when discussing public policy. With apologies to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the problem of modernity is thus: we live in a world that we do not fully understand.

Unfortunately, we see the effects of this all the time when we study and review politics and policy: we treat the knowlege of those fields as if they were as solid as the knowledge that we learn in the hard sciences. A few examples:

• The “Great Moderation” of monetary policy in the 1990s and 2000s--where we thought that we had learned to control the business cycle through the wise stewardship of the Federal Reserve--was merely an exercise in hiding risk, rather than eliminating risk. Brilliant people like Alan Greenspan underestimated the risks of a calamity (though Greenspan personally gets more blame for this than he should).
• It turns out that democracies are much more prone to war than was assumed by the pervasive “Golden Arches” theory (popularized by Thomas Friedman) of the late 1990s.
• It turns out that party structures have less control over the outcomes of presidential nominating processes than was argued in the leading book on the issue, The Party Decides.

F.A. Hayek nailed this in his 1974 Nobel Prize address, and it remains correct today:

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process... will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

The more important piece is this: not only do we not really understand the world, we aren’t particularly likely to “understand” it anytime soon. We’ve been making mistakes for centuries, and we should expect that it will continue. The pretension that we do understand the world leads us towards grave errors.

It is both terrifying and liberating to accept that we live in a world that we cannot and do not fully understand. It’s terrifying, in that we have invented or discovered thousands of things that can kill us, from bacteria to nuclear weapons, and we don’t fully understand the space in which we interact with those doomsday devices. But it is also liberating, in that admitting that we have a problem is the first step towards figuring out an approach to solving it.

The remainder of this series is going to focus on how we deal with a world that we don’t understand. Below will follow five suggestions, each of which will get its own writeup this week. In a world we don’t understand:

1. Decentralization is better than centralization.
2. Social harmony is an intrinsic good, and apolitical spaces are an important way to foster it.
3. We should strive for a system built on predictable rules, rather than reliance on individuals.
4. Tradition and the “old ways of doing things” deserve some deference, though we should not slavishly adhere to them.
5. We should be wary of demagoguery and populism, though not reflexively dismissive.

Finally, I will attempt a synthesis, and I'll recommend some (better) writers.