Posts Tagged ‘Common Sense’
“Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world”*…
We live in a time when a certain kind of status– expertise– is under attack. Dan Williams suggests that by celebrating “common sense” over expert authority, populism performs a dramatic status inversion. It gifts uneducated voters the power of knowledge and deflates those who look down on them…
… As Will Storr argues in The Status Game, humiliation is the “nuclear bomb of the emotions”. When ignited, it can fuel everything from genocide to suicide, mass atrocities to self-immolation. There are few parts of human nature more chaotic, dangerous, or self-destructive. And yet, there is often a rationale underlying these reactions rooted in the strange nature of human sociality.
If humans were solitary animals, we would have evolved to approximate the behaviour of Homo economicus, the idealised rational agent imagined in much of twentieth century economics. We would act in ways that are predictable, sensible, and consistent. The characters depicted in Dostoevsky’s novels would be unintelligible to such a creature, except as victims of mental illness.
But we are not. We are social creatures, and almost everything puzzling and paradoxical about our species is downstream of this fact.
For one thing, we rely on complex networks of cooperation to achieve almost all our goals. Given this, much of human behaviour is rooted not in ordinary material self-interest but in the need to gain access to such networks—to win approval, cultivate a good reputation, and attract partners, friends, and allies. Human decision-making occurs within the confines of this social scrutiny. We evaluate almost every action, habit, and preference not just by its immediate effects but by its reputational impact.
At the same time, much of human competition is driven by the desire for prestige. In well-functioning human societies, individuals advance their interests not by bullying and dominating others but by impressing them. These high-status individuals are admired, respected, and deferred to. They win esteem and all its benefits. Their lives feel meaningful and purposeful.
In contrast, those who fail at the status game—who stack up at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy—experience shame and humiliation. If their position feels unfair, they become resentful and angry. In extreme cases, they might take vengeance on those who look down on them. Or they might take their own life. In some cases, such as mass killings by young men who “lose face” and run “amok” (a Malay word, illustrating the behaviour’s cross-cultural nature), they do both…
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… The name of this newsletter, “Conspicuous Cognition”, is inspired by Veblen’s ideas about economics. Just as he sought to correct a misguided tendency to treat economics through a narrowly economic lens, my work and writings seek to correct a similarly misguided tendency to treat cognition—how we think, form beliefs, generate ideas, evaluate evidence, communicate, and so on—through a narrowly cognitive lens.
Much cognition is competitive and conspicuous. People strive to show off their intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom. They compete to win attention and recognition for making novel discoveries or producing rationalisations of what others want to believe. They often reason not to figure out the truth but to persuade and manage their reputation. They often form beliefs not to acquire knowledge but to signal their impressive qualities and loyalties.
Placed in this context of social competition and impression management, what might be called “epistemic charity”—the free offer of knowledge and expertise—takes on a different appearance. Although this charity can be driven by disinterested altruism (think of parents educating their children), it can also result from status competition and a desire to show off.
In some cases, people are happy to receive such epistemic charity and heap praise and admiration on those who provide it. The wonders of modern science emerge from a status game that celebrates those who make discoveries. However, we sometimes recoil at the thought of admitting someone has discovered something new, or—even worse—that they know better than we do. When that happens, we are not sceptical of the truth of their ideas, although we might choose to frame things that way. Rather, their offer of knowledge carries a symbolic significance we want to reject. It hurts our pride. It feels humiliating.
On a small scale, this feeling is an everyday occurrence. Few people like to be corrected, to admit they are wrong, or to acknowledge another’s superior knowledge, wisdom, or intelligence. On a larger scale, it might be implicated in some of the most significant and dangerous trends in modern politics.
Many of our most profound political problems appear to be entangled with epistemic issues. Think of our alleged crises of “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “post-truth”, and conspiracy theories. Think of the spread of viral lies and falsehoods on social media. Think of intense ideological polarisation, vicious political debates, and heated culture wars, disagreements and conflicts that ultimately concern what is true.
A critical aspect of these problems is the so-called “crisis of expertise”, the widespread populist rejection of claims advanced in institutions like science, universities, public health organisations, and mainstream media. Famously, many populists have “had enough of experts.” As Trump once put it, “The experts are terrible.”
This rejection of expertise goes beyond mere scepticism. It is actively hostile. The Trump administration’s recent attacks on Harvard and other elite universities provide one illustration of this hostility, but there are many others. Most obviously, there is the proud willingness among many populists to spread and accept falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and quack science in the face of an exasperated barrage of “fact-checks” from establishment institutions. Why are these corrections so politically impotent? Why do so many voters refuse to “follow the science” or “trust the experts”?
Experts have produced many theories. Some point to ignorance and stupidity. Some point to disinformation and mass manipulation. Some point to partisan media, echo chambers, and algorithms. And some suggest that the crisis might be related to objective failures by experts themselves.
There is likely some truth in all these explanations. Nevertheless, they share a common assumption: that the “crisis of expertise” is best understood in epistemic terms. They assume that populist hostility to the expert class reflects scepticism that their expertise is genuine—that they really know what they claim to know.
Perhaps this assumption is mistaken. Perhaps at least in some cases, the crisis of expertise is less about doubting expert knowledge than about rejecting the social hierarchy that “trust the experts” implies… some populists might sooner accept ignorance than epistemic charity from those they refuse to acknowledge as superior…
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… If this analysis is correct, the populist rejection of expertise is not merely an intellectual disagreement over truth or evidence, even if it is typically presented that way. It is, in part, a proud refusal to accept epistemic charity from those who present themselves as social superiors.
In the case of populist elites and conspiracy theorists, this refusal is often driven by objectionable feelings of grandiosity and narcissism. However, for many ordinary voters, it may serve as a more understandable dignity-defence mechanism, a refusal to accept the social meanings implied by one-way deference to elites with alien values. It is less “post-truth” than anti-humiliation.
This would help to explain several features of the populist rejection of expertise.
First, there is its emotional signature. In many cases, the populist refusal to defer to experts appears to be wrapped up in intense emotions of resentment, indignation, and defiant pride, rather than simple scepticism.
Second, the rejection of expert authority often has a performative character. Experts are not merely ignored. They are actively, angrily, and proudly rejected. Like Captain Snegiryov, the populist publicly tramples on the expert’s offer of knowledge.
Third, there is the destructive aspect of many populist sentiments. If the issue were merely scepticism of experts and establishment institutions, the solution would presumably involve targeted reforms designed to make them more reliable. As recent Republican attacks on elite universities make clear, many populists prefer to take a sledgehammer to these institutions. The explosive hostility towards public health experts during the pandemic provides another telling example.
Finally, there is the fact that populists often embrace anti-intellectualism as an identity marker, a badge of pride. The valorisation of gut instincts, the proposed “revolution of common sense”, and the embrace of slogans like “do your own research” affirm the status of those who prioritise intuition over experts. The demonisation of “ivory tower academics”, “blue-haired”, “woke” professors, and the “chattering classes” are crafted to have a similar effect. This all looks more like status-inverting propaganda than intellectual disagreements over truth and trustworthiness.
To understand is not to forgive. Just as we can empathise with Snegiryov’s refusal of much-needed money whilst condemning it as short-sighted and self-destructive, we can try to understand the populist rejection of expertise without endorsing or justifying it.
To be clear, there are profound problems with our expert class and elite institutions. They routinely make errors, sometimes catastrophic ones, and often wield their social authority in ways that advance their own interests over the public good. The Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the many failures of policy and communication throughout the pandemic provide powerful illustrations of these expert failures, but there are many others.
Moreover, the social and political uniformity of experts today creates legitimate concerns about their trustworthiness. When scientific journals, public health authorities, and fact-checking organisations are obviously shaped by the values, partisan allegiances, and sensibilities of highly educated, progressive professionals, it is reasonable for those with very different values and identities to become mistrustful of them.
Nevertheless, there is no alternative to credentialed experts in complex, modern societies. To address the political challenges we confront today, we need specialised training, rigorous standards of evidence, and coordinated activity within institutions carefully engineered to produce knowledge. Although these institutions must be reformed in countless ways, they are indispensable.
Given this, the populists’ rejection of expertise does not liberate them from bias and error. It guarantees bias and error. Gut instincts, intuition, and “common sense” are fundamentally unreliable ways of producing knowledge. As we see with the MAGA media ecosystem today, the valorisation of such methods means returning to a pre-scientific, medieval worldview dominated by baseless conspiracy theories, snake oil medicine, economic illiteracy, and know-nothing punditry.
And yet, the dangers associated with this style of politics underscore the importance of understanding its causes. If the crisis of expertise is partly rooted in feelings of status threat, resentment, and humiliation, this has significant implications for how we should think about—and address—this crisis.
Most obviously, it suggests that purely epistemic solutions will have limited efficacy. You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition. And as long as the acceptance of expert guidance is experienced as an admission of social inferiority, there will be a lucrative market for demagogues and bullshitters who produce more status-affirming narratives.
Moreover, it suggests that rebuilding trust in experts means more than improving their reliability, as crucial as that is. Institutions dominated by a single social class and political tribe will inevitably face resistance and backlash in broader society, regardless of their technical competence.
We do not just need better ways of producing knowledge. We need to rethink how knowledge is offered: in ways that respect people’s pride and minimise the humiliations of one-sided epistemic charity…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Status, class, and the crisis of expertise,” from @danwphilosophy.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Buddha (Ittha Sutta, AN 5.43)
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As we dig dignity, we might send classy birthday greetings to George Bryan “Beau” Brummell; he was born on this date in 1778. An important figure in Regency England (a close pal of the Prince Regent, the future King George IV), he became the the arbiter of men’s fashion in London and in the territories under its cultural sway.
Brummell was remembered afterwards as the preeminent example of the dandy; a whole literature was founded on his manner and witty sayings, e.g. “Fashions come and go; bad taste is timeless.”
“There’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”*…
Trevor Jackson on Martin Wolf‘s new book, The Crisis in Democratic Capitalism, and a fundamental question it raises: if globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?…
Something has gone terribly wrong. In his 2004 book Why Globalization Works, the economics journalist Martin Wolf wrote that “liberal democracy is the only political and economic system capable of generating sustained prosperity and political stability.” He was articulating the elite consensus of the time, a belief that liberal democratic capitalism was not only a coherent form of social organization but in fact the best one, as demonstrated by the West’s victory in the cold war. He went on to argue that critics who “complain that markets encourage immorality and have socially immoral consequences, not least gross inequality,” were “largely mistaken,” and he concluded that a market economy was the only means for “giving individual human beings the opportunity to seek what they desire in life.”
Wolf wrote those words midway through a four-decade global expansion of markets. Throughout the 1980s in Britain, the United States, and France, governments led by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and François Mitterrand set about privatizing public assets and services, cutting welfare state provisions, and deregulating markets. At the same time, a set of ten policies known as the “Washington Consensus” (because they were shared by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury) brought privatization, liberalization, and globalization to Latin America following a series of sovereign debt crises. In the 1990s a similar set of policies, then known as “shock therapy,” suddenly converted the formerly Communist economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to free markets. Around the Global South, and especially in the rapidly industrializing countries of East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis, “structural adjustment” policies that were conditions for IMF bailouts again brought liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline. The same policies were enforced on the European periphery after 2009, in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain, again, either as conditions for bailouts or through EU fiscal restrictions and restrictive European Central Bank policy. Today there are far more markets in far more aspects of human life than ever before.
But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. Or, as Wolf writes in his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites.
What happened?
Martin Wolf is probably the most influential economics commentator in the English-speaking world. He has been chief editorial writer for the Financial Times since 1987 and their lead economics analyst since 1996. Before that he trained in economics at Oxford and worked at the World Bank starting in 1971, including three years as senior economist and a year spent working on the first World Development Report in 1978. This is his fifth book since moving to the Financial Times. The blurbs and acknowledgments are stuffed with central bankers, financiers, Nobel laureates, and celebrity academics. The bibliography contains ninety-six references to the author himself.
Wolf’s diagnosis is impossible to dispute: “Neither politics nor the economy will function without a substantial degree of honesty, trustworthiness, self-restraint, truthfulness, and loyalty to shared political, legal, and other institutions.” But, he observes, those values have run into crisis all over the world, and, especially since about 2008,
…people feel even more than before that the country is not being governed for them, but for a narrow segment of well-connected insiders who reap most of the gains and, when things go wrong, are not just shielded from loss but impose massive costs on everybody else…
He describes in detail the mistaken policies of austerity in the US and Europe, the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion, and the general accumulation of decades of elite failure…
Read on for Wolf’s proposed remedies and Jacksons critiques: “Never Too Much,” from @nybooks.com.
And for an interview with Jackson that elaborates on his thoughts and their historical context, see here.
* Warren Buffett
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As we assess systems, we might send provocative birthday grretings to Founding Father Thomas Paine; he was born on this date in 1736 (O.S.; on February 9, 1737 per N.S., which accrued in Britain and its colonies in 1752). He is best known for Common Sense and The American Crisis, two influential pamphlets that helped to inspire colonial era American patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain.
But relevantly to the article above, in 1797 (after witnessing the birth and early years of the U.S. and spending time in France) he wrote Agrarian Justice, in which he proposed remedies for several of the (then nascent) ills discussed by Wolf and Jackson…
In response to the private sale of royal (or common) lands, Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax land owners [the “capitalists” of their day] once per generation to pay for the needs of those who have no land. Some consider this a precursor to the modern idea of citizen’s dividend or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances, those not going to close relations, at a somewhat higher rate. He estimated that to raise around £5,700,000 per year.
Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of 50, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy.
Most of the remainder would be used to make fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of 21, then the age of legal majority.
The small remainder of the money raised that was still unused would be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind.”
For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.
Paine’s proposal presaged the social safety net of later eras and governments, proposing seven entitlements to protect the poorest citizens from the ravages of market capitalism:
- Grants to subsidize schooling of 4 pounds per annum
- One-time payments to adults on reaching maturity
- One-time payments to newly married couples and new parents
- Eliminate taxes on working poor
- Back-to-work schemes
- Pensions for seniors
- Burial benefits to surviving spouses
and also provided a scheme of how to pay for them.
– source
“One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived”*…
Even if 2020 [and indeed, the events of January 6, 2021] felt apocalyptic, it is reasonable to think we have not yet hit rock bottom. The threat of climate disaster and resource wars, the building of walls and refugee camps, the exorbitant wealth of powerful oligarchs alongside poverty and precarity—these will not go away with vaccines or new presidents. Amidst all this, no wonder Niccolò Machiavelli has returned to our reading lists. In his new biography of the Florentine Secretary, Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching the People What to Fear, originally published in French in 2017, historian Patrick Boucheron reminds us that there is always interest in Machiavelli in turbulent times “because he’s the man to philosophize in heavy weather. If we’re reading him today, it means we should be worried. He’s back: wake up.”
Born in 1469 in Florence, Machiavelli is a central figure in the Western canon of political philosophy. Though he is best known in the popular imagination as the conniving mastermind behind The Prince (written in 1513), which so many think of as a kind of House of Cards how-to guide for seizing and maintaining political power, we miss what is crucial when we reduce his political thought to the simplistic thesis that the ends justify the means. It is not this misunderstood consequentialism that is noteworthy in Machiavelli’s philosophy; what really makes his writing so radically distinctive is his class-based, materialist outlook. He came from an impoverished household, and his philosophy disrupted naturalized hierarchies and the hegemonic ideas that reproduce them. John Adams would rightly describe him as the founder of a “plebeian philosophy” that marshaled strong arguments for embracing popular control over government…
The introduction to the English edition of The Art of Teaching the People What to Fear, written in June 2019 for readers in the United States, begins with the theme of fear in politics and an issue of Time magazine with Trump on the cover. Boucheron argues that the United States had entered a “Machiavellian moment”—“the dawning realization of the inadequacy of the republican ideal”—in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and that today, under “Trumpian America,” a fusion of politics and fiction has allowed for techniques of domination to be perfected, setting “a general disregard for the ‘actual truth of the matter.’” Referencing George Orwell’s 1984, Boucheron sees the United States as captured by a propaganda machine that has undermined reality and common sense—“that sixth sense Machiavelli spoke of, the accessory knowledge that the people have of what is dominating them.” Given the pervasive lack of realism in U.S. politics today, it is clear that the republic would appear to Machiavelli as a corrupt order, not because the powerful few break the rules or because a faction attempts to undermine the integrity of elections, but because the people have been “either deceived or forced into decreeing their own ruin.” Perhaps the most important part of Machiavelli’s wisdom for our own time is that republics tend to become oligarchic, giving the powerful few indirect control over government…
Much maligned as a mere tactician of power, Machiavelli was in fact a philosopher of the people. His critique of oligarchic domination remains essential today: “Our Machiavellian Moment.”
* Niccolò Machiavelli
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As we ponder populism, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that Thomas Paine first published (albeit anonymously) his pamphlet “Common Sense.” A scathing attack on “tyrant” King George III’s reign over the colonies and a call for complete independence, “Common Sense” advocated immediate action. America, Paine argued, had a moral obligation to reject monarchy and declare independence. An instant bestseller in both the colonies and Britain (over 120,000 copies in just a few months), it greatly affected public sentiment at a time when the question of independence was still undecided, and helped shape the deliberations of the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration of Independence.
“Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins”*…
From 1936 to 1966, Victor Green, a postal worker who worked in New Jersey but lived in Harlem, published the directories known today as the Green Book. (The actual titles were variously: The Negro Motorist Green Book; The Negro Travelers’ Green Book; The Travelers’ Green Book.) These listed hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, nightclubs, bars, gas stations, etc. where Black travelers would be welcome. In an age of sundown towns, segregation, and lynching, the Green Book became an indispensable tool for safe navigation…
The NYPL Labs’ Brian Foo (another of whose projects featured in an earlier post) has made the Green Books available– and interactive: you can map a trip or plot the books’ data.
* from Mary Torrans Lathrap’s poem “Judge Softly”- the probable origin of the now-proverbial “before you judge someone, walk a mile in his shoes”
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As we live like a refugee, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that Thomas Paine first published (albeit anonymously) his pamphlet “Common Sense.” A scathing attack on “tyrant” King George III’s reign over the colonies and a call for complete independence, “Common Sense” advocated immediate action. America, Paine argued, had a moral obligation to reject monarchy and declare independence. An instant bestseller in both the colonies and Britain (over 120,000 copies in just a few months), it greatly affected public sentiment at a time when the question of independence was still undecided, and helped shape the deliberations of the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration of Independence.
There Will Always Be a Britain, Part 27…
The first installment in illustrator and craftswoman Gemma Correll‘s reflection on British Cuisine:
[TotH to Curiosity Counts]
As we ponder our pantries, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that Thomas Paine first published (albeit anonymously) his pamphlet “Common Sense.” A scathing attack on “tyrant” King George III’s reign over the colonies and a call for complete independence, “Common Sense” advocated immediate action.. America, Paine argued, had a moral obligation to reject monarchy and declare independence. An instant bestseller in both the colonies and Britain (over 120,000 copies in just a few months), it greatly affecting public sentiment at a time when the question of independence was still undecided, and helped shape the deliberations of the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration of Independence.
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