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Why Things Get Worse: Dogma and Coherence 

By Joel Levin

We look around and are disconsolate. Societies in disarray, social cohesion collapsing, old ideas appearing too old, and, all the while, hope for a prosperous and optimistic civil society looking ever more distant. The 21st century has not eliminated the self-made scourges of humanity – war, refugees, poverty, inequality, preventable disease, crime, and pernicious discrimination – when preventing or at least limiting much of this is within our grasp. We have the scientific knowledge, technological tools, liberal principles, and cultural know-how to do so. The Agricultural Revolution, followed by the Industrial Revolution, followed by the Technology Revolution, interspersed with the Medical Revolution, followed by the Computer and Cyber Revolutions, and whatever other game-changers one wants to add or subdivide or re-characterize, have given us the ability to allow all in the world to have enough to eat, to be sheltered and clothed, and to lead a decent life, at least, as far as that is within human control. Many parts of the West seem to have gone a long way toward doing that. However, again in the West, amid prosperity, there is slippage, a yearning for what one should never want: universal grievance, never-ending conflict, general distrust, the collapse of democratic institutions, and a celebration of parochial and tribal interests. 

So much is well-known. It is viewed 24/7 in the news, is constantly online, dominates social media, and is too often apparent in our streets and neighborhoods. What ought to be straightforward is put into doubt. Fair elections are challenged as unfair, miraculous vaccines are feared as guises for mind control, and prudent practices to save the destruction of a planet – for the benefit of our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren – are dismissed as unfounded. Alternate expressions of life, from being Hispanic to Islamic, from gay to trans, to embracing globalism, are seen as threats. What might be considered the blandest and least controversial of any science directly put into the public discourse, the weather report is attacked, along with the weather presenters and forecasters, viciously online. They are considered part of conspiracies that aim to mislead about the actual health of the planet, even at times part of a network of terrorists who seek to destroy the Earth through mysterious vapors and toxic airplane fumes. Evidence is no longer a requirement to challenge belief.

The debate is between what we might see as the more liberal, better educated, more prosperous, and scientifically informed parts of the West and those traditionalists who challenge what they see as the cultural smugness and ascendancy of that view. These traditionalists are more anti-globalist, pro-nationalist, suspicious of science, wary of journalists, susceptible to conspiracy theories, and local in their interests and sources of information. These two views are sometimes seen as the left and right, although this is terrible labeling for almost every reason. It could be considered an optimist and a pessimist about human and global progress. What the two views have in common, though, is fundamental. It consists of two basic beliefs. First, we should return to the first principles, which will solve the problem of disagreement among us, as we can begin anew every day. Second, once we put this plan in place, based on these agreed (if perhaps modified and tinkered with) first principles, we can replace the old foundation with this new one, and all will be well. Both of these things are false.

I am crediting two thinkers who spent much of their careers showing why this is so. Each, unfortunately, passed away this Spring. Their insights, in general, were regrettably buried either in journals of epistemology or journals of econometrics, two places one can safely be sure they still need to be read. The first, William Talbott, a professor at the University of Washington, showed how the quixotic search for first principles is not only likely to be unsuccessful; worse yet, if somehow, the search is successful, we are almost certainly going to be even worse off than before.

Talbott showed, roughly, that what we ought to do is put together a smaller set of intuitions and constantly test them against the actual world, looking around to see how well they fit, are successful, and are consistent, allowing us to understand where we are and where we want to be.

The second thinker, Robert Lucas, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, became famous for what has since been called the “Lucas Critique.” As with Talbott very roughly, Lucas showed that, often, when we create a revisionary social blueprint, economic policy, market program, or other change in our way of conducting ourselves, humans will change their behavior in light of the new circumstances. Such a situation often causes those revisionary circumstances to end in failure, mischief, catastrophe, or war. Again, more later. The Talbott-Lucas program, at its simplest, asks us to be flexible, move carefully, keep asking for more evidence, expect and even celebrate (rather than regret and become despondent about) mistakes and assume people will figure out how to move through and even manipulate new ideas and programs, so build that idea into any changes you make. It also says unrelenting reason – not faith, not old texts, not customs, not brilliant models – leads to truth.

Let us set forth the problem. We live in a diverse society, one increasingly larger, more complex, more unwieldy, and more tied to other cultures, and, unfortunately, with greater inequality—size matters. The perhaps illusory idea of the New England Town Hall village governance, where most people, or at least a reasonable cross-section of people, personally make decisions about a society they understand, experience, and want to improve, disappears when the village crosses the 330 million mark. Even that 330 million is hardly representative, given the ties of so many in the business sector to industry and commerce worldwide and the large number of immigrants or offspring of immigrants who have links to other countries across the globe. More people mean more voices and more different kinds of voices. That is the non-technical, technical side of it. Technology has changed us from a reasonably consensus-based, or at least convergent, culture, where many, if not most, of the people cared about a significant number (perhaps most) of the same things. 

We no longer do. We do not see the same news, watch the same entertainment, or go to the same websites. We find our friends, information, and culture on divergent social networks with no necessary overlap. We live in homogeneous communities, go to siloed institutions, and interact with our same political and economic group. We know each other less every day. We also seem to trust each other less.

This fragmentation of knowledge and shared culture has notoriously broken down consensus at the individual and group levels, threatening civil society. Institutions that work by consensus, including, for example, both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court, have become dysfunctional, separate enclaves, showing little interest in reaching a convergent view. There is no view they have, or think they have, in common. Moreover, as there is no central view to anchor beliefs and conspiracy theories, from the election rigging to vaccine tampering to Capitol storming to QAnon, beliefs become legitimized. They are now considered part of a national if parochial and untethered, consensus. White nationalism reappears. Pejorative name-calling of various groups – from Muslims to Mexicans to Chinese to Progressives to gays to Jews – is part of the conversation, a conversation pre-textually meant to allow people to express themselves, but not meant to be heard by those outside their group. It’s all about yelling, none of it about listening.

 Bill Talbott suggests that part of this, perhaps, even most of it, begins with the search for first principles, principles that will invariably and infallibly get us where we want to go. Talbott argues that to think that first principles will do that work is a fantasy. Even if we take certain first principles as worth having, there is very little agreement on what they would be, and the effort to find them would defeat any project of cultural and social cohesion before it gets going. Consider just a few floating candidates for first principles floating around the legal and cultural landscape: everyone has a right to a gun, life begins at conception, the offspring of enslaved people have a right to reparations, the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, capital punishment is always wrong, a woman’s right to choose is absolute. Put forward, nothing further happens. Talbott suggests it would be useless even if we could find a first principle.

Take the right to a gun. That right is hardly a moral right. There is nothing to do with ethics, duties or obligations, or simply considerations one owes or ought to try to contribute to another. A claim to ownership of a gun hardly implicates those moral considerations. In that there is a right, it is a political or legal right, considered necessary for personal safety and welfare, and perhaps, for recreation and protection, but nothing involving ethics. As a legal right in the United States, it is tenuous under the relevant law, namely, the Second Amendment. The plain language of the Amendment ties, in a reasonably unambiguous way, to the right to bear arms to the existence of a state militia. The grammar of it, which involves a comma in apposition, is a linking comma that was recognized for most of the Supreme Court history but is ignored in recent decisions. Here, two of Talbott’s concerns are raised. First, the exact text is being read dramatically differently, almost night and day, a text of only one sentence, by lawyers and jurists supposedly well-educated, astute, competent, able, careful, and well-experienced. There is no consensus and no overlapping convergence of views, and people are using plain English to mean two diametrically different things. For Talbott, choosing a first principle gets nowhere in the debate. 

Second, what does that entail even if one accepts the first principle of a right to bear arms? Does it mean one can have automatic weapons, missile launchers, tanks, and fighter planes in their backyard? Does it mean that the cognitively impaired, children, those with criminal records, or those the subject of protective orders involving domestic violence can bear arms, any arms at all? Does it mean such weapons can be carried into churches, schools, funerals, movie theaters, neighbors’ houses, courthouses, or a legislative session? 

Talbott argues that holding first principles as essential for anchoring a society puts things the wrong way. They are all about an immovable foundation. The fitting metaphor should not be ‘foundation’ but ‘framework,’ with that framework always being tentative and allowing any particular piece of that framework – a brick, a pipe, a bit of timber, a steel beam – to be replaced when it turns out to be a mistake. There are no immovable or reliable first principles, only an evolving sense guided by relentless reason as to what works best. Indeed, this is the way we have figured out for thousands of years how to raise crops and cattle, build houses and bridges, form local governments, and operate armies, how to live our life through friendships, marriage, family, neighborhoods, clubs, churches, sports, jobs, and every other form of social organization. There are no infallible first principles worth having, only tentative standards to be tested against experience, judged against different criteria and revised and modified as needed. Reasoning and experience should be our guides, not first principles, and indeed not first principles embodied in ancient texts or traditional dogma.

This idea is both radical and obvious. Instead of trying to discover infallible first principles and saying that that search is the rational one, Talbott suggests that we should have tentative principles – first, second or third – and when they yield mistakes, learn from our mistakes. Mistakes are victories for a reason, not defeats. We progress through discovering errors, not postulating perfection. Recognizing fallibility, rather than promoting infallibility, is the secret of success. We can look back in history and see ideas that might have appeared as arguably infallible first principles – the divine right of kings, the singular perfection of a particular religion, the superiority of men over women or one race over another, biblical creationism, egocentrism (the sun goes around the Earth), or bloodletting, to name just a few. These ideas were not terrible candidates for first principles. Kings once were seen to possess divine powers and privileges due to their physical strength, men were considered superior to women r, the sun did not (and still does not) appear to go around the Earth to any observer, and using leeches to rid the body of bad blood might allow the patient to make themselves free of disease. 

However, all these were mistakes. When we free ourselves from thinking of them as foundational, the first principles must serve as our bedrock. However, instead of initial frameworks that might be altered (rebuilt) in favor of better candidates, we have moved along. We get better science, medicine, politics, social relationships, and hopefully better lives. 

If Talbott uses theory to caution against rooting our beliefs in first principles and thinking mistakes are mistakes rather than insights into reality, John Lucas is the empirical enforcer of those insights. Essentially, Lucas put forward (in a very technical and elegant way that I cannot do justice to here) that well-laid plans for economic improvement, say through changes in monetary policy, could, by their very terms, rest on the problematic economic behavior that gave rise to the difficulty in the first place. We need to be suspicious of looking at economic history and trying to lay a more secure foundation. History is not driven just by first principles, but by social behavior, with individuals acting, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, sometimes selfishly, sometimes altruistically, often in what they thought is their own best interest, but with vast and often predictable miscalculations based on everything human culture makes possible. Thus, the solution may fail because its historical and data-driven bases were accurate. People would then consider the new, change their behavior following it, and cause the new to self-defeat. 

Consider an irrationality dressed up as prudence and, second, an example of historical failure. The economist Richard Thaler (a colleague of and fellow Nobel Prize winner with Lucas’) writes about a friend of his, a long-time wine collector, who owned bottles that had appreciated from the $10 he purchased them for to $100. A wine dealer offered to buy them at that $100, but he refused. Moreover, when Thaler questioned him, the wine collector said it was ridiculous to buy any bottle for $100 and that he would never do so under any circumstances. Thaler’s friend thought himself to be a rational consumer (he had been, in fact, the head of the economics department where Thaler had previously taught). If he did not think wine was worth $100 a bottle, he should sell it. He valued what he already owned disproportionately to what he thought the market value was. The appreciated wine was, to him, both worth more than $100, as he wouldn’t sell it, and less than $100, as he wouldn’t buy it. This common error is one Thaler uses to show widespread behavioral irrationality in discussing his economic analysis. Any theory that ignores individual social behavior under changing circumstances is likely to be a poor predictor of those circumstances on the one hand and a poor producer of rational economic policy on the other.

The second example is from an interpreter of Lucas himself. Tim Hartford sets out the following scenario subject to the Lucas Critique: Fort Knox security. As the repository of the gold that in large part, at least in theory, backs the American dollar, Fort Knox undoubtedly spends hundreds of millions of dollars to protect that gold. The efforts of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger aside, Fort Knox has never been seriously threatened. An econometric Lucas analysis would then show that the chance of robbery is independent of the amount spent on security. Such analysis suggests that the amounts paid on security should be severely reduced. However, for several reasons, such a solution is flawed, starting with the obvious one that, regardless of historical behavior, the psychology of criminal behavior would be such that potential robbers would be incentivized, given the reduced security, to attempt what Auric Goldfinger failed to accomplish, namely, a successful robbery of America’s gold from Fort Knox.

What does all this show, other than we should beware of dogma and consider that people adapt to new conditions, making predictions problematic? It is a plea for rationality, empiricism, evidence, and reconsideration. It is not, in any way, an excuse for generalized skepticism, relativism about the truth, shoulder-shrugging in despair about discovering reality, or default in the face of error, mistake, miscalculation, or unexpected result. It is the opposite of collapse into grievance politics, conspiracy theory, or Revelation or Armageddon beliefs. 

At a grand level, it incorporates a more significant philosophical theory, perhaps even a grand scientific theory, called ‘reflective equilibrium.’ Reflective equilibrium is part of a coherence theory of assessing truth, reality, and evidence. It does not necessarily look to establish what it considers almost impossible to prove, an infallible connection between what is in our mind and what is outside our mind, between the empirical and the mental. 

Instead, it is the belief that one should continue to adjust and reconsider and modify one’s original principles, one’s tentative ideas, and one’s original viewpoints in the light of inconsistencies among and between them on the one hand, with consideration of them in light of the evidence in the world and the troublesome dilemmas such judgments and beliefs present on the other. Thinkers like Nelson Goodman have used this method to justify inductive logic and John Rawls to justify moral judgment.

What is more precise and less theoretically complex is a practice of modesty and iconoclasm about belief and a determination to consider what we are presented with every day in the world around us. In that we need to think more closely, we are too likely to agree more often, as the fragmented beliefs need to be squared with one another and with other beliefs outside our normal domain of consideration. Siloed beliefs are inaccurate beliefs, and parochial first principles are poorly considered first principles. In America, where dogma is prized, compromise reviled, and reconsideration abhorred, we have lost our way of getting things right. Talbott’s epistemology and Lucas’ Critique are the first steps in sorting out the larger world and our conduct and getting to be right, more accurate, rational, and just.