J33 - Manifesto on Humility

*This journal came out much less elegantly than it appeared in my head, but hopefully the delicate point I'm trying to make will still find its way through the verbosity.*

In my last journal, I discussed (somewhat briefly) the importance of humility in the learning process. I explained that to learn anything new requires an implicit admission that one had previously been wrong in his or her understanding of a phenomenon. We all have our theory of the universe and how it works, and learning is a series of revisions to this theory, rendering it more complete and more correct through exposure of our beliefs to the external world and our interactions with the theories of others. This process, of learning, involving a low level of humility as it does, is rather easy for many people and comes to us naturally, as we are frequently exposed to new information and desire to gain more knowledge such that we may apply a more correct understanding of the world in the pursuit of our chosen ends. However, a pattern that I’ve noticed is that the less frequently one revises one’s theory, the harder it is for one to do so. That is, someone who is constantly revising their understanding of the world is obviously quite aware of their ignorance, and are regularly practicing the process of learning. Others, who have reached a level of preeminence in certain fields of knowledge and who have accumulated vast amounts of experience under their belts, are less likely to admit that they are wrong and revise their understandings. Children for example, are constantly learning, because everything is new to them, and they are eager to do so. Older college professors, on the other hand, are rarely learning, and have, in fact, developed a level of hubris that makes learning far more difficult for them. They are almost certain to not admit their mistake in the face of a new, better theory, and throughout history have tried to suppress many of the innovations in their fields because they believed that they couldn’t possibly be wrong.

I also discussed in my last journal a particular way of viewing the various theories of the world that different people hold. There is a tendency in many people to view the world in black and white, in absolutes. Assuming that there is truth in the world, that X does mean X and that the universe is subject to certain laws which are comprehensible, then there is, in theory, one correct and complete theory of everything. Many people believe this much. But then many people go on to assume that there is this one theory (often subconsciously their own), and that all the other theories are simply wrong. This is true, to some extent, but it misses something important. Not all wrong theories are equally wrong. There is a scale, a spectrum, upon which different theories may be ranged and determined to be more correct or less correct, more complete or less complete. It’s not so much that all of these theories are wrong, but that they are all right to different degrees. Viewing the state of knowledge in this way does two things: First, it helps one see that their theory, while seemingly the most correct and complete, may not be totally correct and complete. Being closest to the destination does not at all mean that you’ve reached the destination. There is, therefore, a possibility that one’s understanding might be improved. Second, it allows us to see value in other people’s theories. Just because someone is wrong about something doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything. Indeed, they could be less right than you in their explanation of one phenomenon and more right than you in another phenomenon. Therefore, their arguments should not be discounted outright. 

[Note that no one thinks that they’re wrong in their beliefs. Bring wrong in one’s understanding of the world is extremely unhelpful, and anyone who consciously found themselves in such a position would seek to rectify the situation with haste. And yet, despite this confidence, everyone holds a slightly different theory. This is because everyone has different knowledge and different experiences and different minds. My point, however, is that all of these people live in the world of reality and yet still somehow believe what they believe, even though what they believe is probably wrong, so it seems that there must be something about each of their theories that makes some sort of sense. The ideas of primitive peoples, such as the idea that dancing to the rain god would help the crops grow, may not be reasonable in light of our present state of knowledge, but they were certainly rational in light of the primitive world-view. Similarly, today, there is a basis for every theory, an argument that can be made in support of every proposition. This doesn’t mean that everyone is right or that there is no objective truth, merely that disregarding another person’s conclusions without due consideration seems like a dangerous practice when that person is just as certain in their conclusions as you are in yours. If you think the resolution of some issue upon which many great minds have debated is obvious or “clear,” then you haven’t thought enough about the issue. If there is any disagreement on a subject, then it is not clear, and a conscientious scholar should be mindful of that fact.]

Finally, I also explained in my last journal the process by which knowledge and understanding is advanced, through argumentation and analysis among a community of intellectuals. I define an argument as a defense of a proposition (a truth-claim), using accepted premises to support a more controversial conclusion, and I define analysis as an attack on a proposition, breaking down an argument to examine the efficacy of its defense. I also distinguish between argument, the purpose of which is merely to support a truth-claim, and rhetoric, the purpose of which is to convince another to accept a truth-claim. Rhetoric is a tool which can be successful even if the proposition it advances is wrong, as humans are easily swayed by half-truths told with confidence. Argument, though, is where the real thinking and convincing happens, because it is argument which will determine whether a proposition is true or not. The goal of a research project or scholarly disquisition, therefore, is to build and present an argument, not necessarily to convince others of the correctness of one’s proposition. This is okay because in the scholarly community, at least theoretically, others will be looking for new propositions to contribute to their learning and will, as scholars, be more convinced by argument than by rhetoric. That’s how academia works: everyone advances their own theory, and one walks among them, analyzing each to see which are the most correct. [There is also the consideration of willingness to learn. Rhetoric can certainly be employed to manipulate a crowd, but true learning requires an internal motivation which implies that the student will have come searching for answers, and thus be better served by a strong argument rather than by empty rhetoric.] The task of an intellectual, therefore, in his or her effort to improve the state of knowledge in his or her field, is merely to offer argument and analysis in support of or in criticism of various propositions and theories.

Something that I’d like to discuss here that was not mentioned in my previous journal is the Hayekian idea of the Pretense of Knowledge. “The Pretense of Knowledge” is the name of a speech that Hayek gave when he won the Nobel Prize, which presented and embellished on part of his theory known as the Knowledge Problem. The Knowledge Problem is Hayek’s main argument against socialism. He asserts that central planners would fail utterly at managing the economy because they would be incapable of possessing all of the necessary information. They wouldn’t know what every individual needed or wanted, and they wouldn’t know the best processes for producing all the goods and services, and they wouldn’t know how to innovate at all or adopt new practices developed by others. The market, on the other hand, through market prices, provides an incentive for everyone in the economy to contribute their own individual knowledge to the social nexus of social organization and the prices provide a means of communication for the essentials of this distributed knowledge to be made known to everyone else in the economy. Hayek’s argument, therefore, was essentially that one group of people couldn’t possibly know everything, so we need a market economy to provide a means for all knowledge to be utilized effectively.

[This idea of distributed knowledge employed harmoniously by a free market is best illustrated by the short essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read, where a pencil traces his genealogy as a demonstration that not a single person in the world knows how to make a pencil from scratch.]

But the Pretense of Knowledge, I think, questions even more than this. This speech attacked the intellectuals who thought that they knew enough to fix the problems of the world. “What do we fix?” asks Hayek. “And how?” “And who are you to decide?” He mentions the truth about statistics that escapes almost everyone: statistics tell us nothing about the particular case. All that we know is that this case is a member of a class about which we have some knowledge of the outcomes of the entire class. Furthermore, the only constant in human affairs is the presence of change; therefore, statistics about past human phenomenon really can’t tell us anything certain about the future, even if the statistic in question is 100%. Two recent examples are the Patriots’ Super Bowl win over the Falcons (2017) after going into the third quarter down by 18 points, and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election after some pollsters put his chances of winning at 2%. 

Anyway, Hayek’s main point was to caution his fellow intellectuals about believing that they knew best, not just for themselves but for everyone else. “The curious task of economics,” he said, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” He stressed throughout his life that human beings are not and cannot be omniscient gods, capable of designing a new world out of nothing but their own ideas. Progress emerges, Hayek stressed, out of the cooperation of millions in the division of labor, not through the planning of government bureaucrats, as smart as they may be, because these bureaucrats don’t know everything and there is incredible danger in pretending that they do. 

[In his last book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek even argues that due to the inherent limitations of the human mind, we cannot even be sure that our rational conception of certain systems (like ethics) is correct because the human mind cannot know what it cannot know and cannot see what it has not developed to be able to see (like complex social phenomenon).]

I said in my last journal that people learn by doing, which is a way of saying that people improve through practice, which is a way of saying that people fail before they get better. People learn from failure. Learning is a series of corrections, which implies a series of errors needing correcting. This process is the same for everyone; there is no shame in it. Indeed, the more one fails, the more one knows, and the better they become. In addiction-recovery circles, they say that one must admit that he or she has a problem before they can be helped. In the same way, one must admit that they might not know something in order to learn. One has to want to improve their state of knowledge before they will be able to, and this requires admitting that their current state of knowledge is incomplete or incorrect. This is a struggle for some, especially those who think (and do) know a lot already. It’s a struggle that I encounter with some of my students, who could potentially learn so much and yet are not willing to genuinely admit that they have anything to learn. But there is so much more value in admitting that you’re wrong and growing through correction than there is in clinging stubbornly to a falsehood. That is the true failure.

Without humility, there is no learning. Without learning, there is no progress. It’s okay to not know everything; it means you’re the same as everyone else. And it’s okay to not be the best in everything. You may be right about economics, and wrong about religion. As Hayek demonstrates, we don’t need to know everything. But we should always be aware of the fact that we don’t know everything, and remember the limitations of our knowledge. We should strive to every day stay humble, as increasingly difficult as that will become, because we always have more to learn. We should approach every controversy with questions rather than declarations, and put forward arguments only when we feel that our own truth-claim is better than others or when we have something new to contribute in support of an existing proposition. [I have developed the rare practice of only taking a stance on an issue when I’m able to argue for multiple sides of the debate. If I can’t argue for a position contra to mine, then I don’t understand that position, which disqualifies me from declaring that it is wrong. Therefore, there are many areas of knowledge and issues upon which I often decline to comment because I haven’t thought about them enough to understand all of the sides and thus properly choose one of them.] 

We are, all of us, probably wrong about 90% of the things that we believe. And the areas in which we believe we are most correct (because the truth seems so “clear”) are probably the ones in which we are most likely to be wrong. But, the marvelous thing about being human is that we can always change, and improve our understanding of the world. This learning, however, requires humility. Learning is a natural process, so long as we are willing to participate. We should strive, therefore, to remain humble, no matter how much we come to know, and to always seek improvement of our theories. Let us question ourselves no less rigorously than we question others. This is how we improve ourselves, and enable ourselves to improve the world around us.