I don't know if there's any support for this, but an idea that I've been pondering is that arguments based on ideas that are actually good might have an evolutionary advantage over "rhetorically compelling" arguments because they're less fragile. For example a good slogan can be first-order persuasive, but if people need to use that slogan to make their case then they can sound like parrots relative to people who can express good ideas in their own words and go into more depth in conversation. If the arguments need to propagate through people then some of the individual advantages of "good arguers" (charisma, social status, etc.) might be attenuated.
What is a good idea? From an evolutionary perspective it might be adaptive, but this notion does not jive with ideas like Marxist-Leninism that ruled Russia fir 70 years or what I call shareholder primacy capitalism which has ruled the US for thirty years now.
One can use a normative standard, but people differ on norms, often due to different cultural backgrounds.
Regarding people actively resisting good arguers on principle, there are at least some situations where this is just obviously true: general cultural attitudes towards people like politicians and salesmen. In both cases you have a profession that selects for skilled persuaders who turn that skill toward naked self-interest (for the salesman, your purchase; for the politician, your donation or vote). And if I say "She sounds too much like a politician," or "He was clearly trying to sell me something," I suspect you have a general idea what I mean by that.
Yes very good point. Although in this case their good arguing abilities are confounded with the fact that they are obviously motivated to push a specific conclusion. A good question is whether we should be more sceptical of arguments from good arguers even in cases where they are not, e.g, politicians or salesmen.
Well, first and foremost, context - what’s being discussed, and whether it’s a “rational” thing or a “values thing - matters hugely here.
Take Hanson and his wife. If the question is “where should we go to dinner tonight”, or even “should we move to NYC or not”, then she is quite rational(!) to say that “the better argument should not determine the answer”. But if the question is “how should we invest our money for retirement” then hell yeah the better argument will more often deliver a better answer and be a far better way to go.
But that is an example where the trust/bona fides/intentions of the arguer are (presumably) unassailable. In the more general case, said trust/credibility needs to be earned, and so unless the other party believe that it has been earned, they will of necessity be more skeptical of arguments from the better arguer. And it is nigh on impossible for any independent observer to know what the correct answer (or even a “better” answer) is re the intentions of said better arguer.
Very good. The problem with rational argument is not rationality per se but lies in the word argument. The purpose of rational argument is to persuade you not to teach you.
It occurs to me that one question to ask when considering whether or not to defer to tradition, custom or norm (and this relates to your point about power) is who (or what) is othered or externalized by this status quo (ex. a group or class of people, non-human animals, elements of the environment) and can that exclusion still be justified.
Thanks Jason. And yes good point - that's an important nuance when it comes to thinking about tradition/custom (and one that conservative intellectuals tend to overlook, I think).
By the way, your post reminded me of John Ralston Saul’s ‘On Equilibrium’. I haven’t read it in twenty years so I’m not sure what I would think about it now but its overall theme of reason ideally being in balance with other qualities of civilization is still appealing.
Thanks Dan, really enjoying your blog. Fine writing.
Similar to Andy G, I wasn't convinced by the claim that two opposing arguments cannot both be correct. It made me think of more Eastern philosophy that allows contradictory forces. Making a stark truth claim might be plausible for physical states, but not for the correctness of the death penalty because the argument persuasiveness either relies on many push-and-pull psychological factors, none of which can be directly measured, or even if we assumed some kind of Benthamian cost-benefit analysis, it's still not possible to assign fixed values to different outcomes like preventing future violence and satisfying current suffering (formally: multicriteria decision making).
Thanks Cameron - and yes, good point. I agree there is a sense in which two opposing arguments can both in some sense be correct in some contexts. I should have written: it is possibly to construct persuasive rational arguments in favour of manifestly false claims and bad decisions - a claim which seems much less objectionable.
Thanks also Dan. I agree with that claim. As an aside, my 9th grade social studies teacher asked us to take a position on the death penalty and assigned us to write a persuasive argument for the opposing side. It was very educational.
Philosophy is chock full of ingredients needed to finish this recipe (solve the serious problem you are noting).
> it's still not possible to assign fixed values to different outcomes like preventing future violence and satisfying current suffering (formally: multicriteria decision making).
Something built on top of modal logic could do this.
This is great coverage and analysis of the themes and various takes I've seen kicking around in these circles when it comes to rationality and argument. But there's one glaring omission I feel compelled to mention, if only to get it on the map. You make a fleeting reference to sentiment before immediately moving to Burke on tradition and custom. But otherwise, I see absolutely no discussion of emotion and affect (and maybe for some, emotion regulation) in terms of their role for rational argument and belief. This includes the unique epistemic value of emotions in and of themselves, development of "emotional virtues," and the blurry boundary between reason and feeling (which thinkers from Spinoza to Vygotsky to Damasio have written about extensively). However prominently signaling and status games and other marketplace rationalizations feature in the give-and-take of information, belief and commitment, alongside this comes the embodied phenomenology of values, risk, ego, affiliation, etc. Persuasion often goes hand-in-hand with inspiration, or moral feelings like guilt or shame; epistemic vigilance goes hand-in-hand with pride. What do the personal stakes of all these rationalizations and transactions *feel* like - and how do feelings shape and participate in the dynamics of the marketplace of belief and rationalization?
I can imagine how this might seem like a separate topic that opens a whole other can of worms, and perhaps not primarily your responsibility to cover. But if we want to understand the full dimensions of how things like rationality, belief formation, persuasion/argument and knowledge function in the *real* world, socially and adaptively - at some point we will need to grapple with that affective realm of emotion and feelings. Just two recent examples off the top of my head of work attempting to resituate rationality within that affective space (including implications for social justice discussions):
Laura Silva on epistemic justification from emotion and its sui generis epistemic status:
Thanks Chris - great comment and completely agree. Affect, emotion, feelings - these things play central roles in psychology, belief, public discourse, and so on. It's not at all my area of expertise but I hope to learn and think more about this topic. I know Silva and Cherry's work and I agree it is valuable.
It's also important to know the limits of one's expertise, or own level of interest in one particular dimension. So even having you acknowledge emotion as part of the picture and bookmark that for future treatment goes a really long way. Obviously you can't do it all at once, and it's not all on you!
It's just interesting to me the way many of these discussions (not just yours), tend to take emotions for granted and fold this into other processes like incentives or social norms without giving it proper justice in its own right. I think this reflects the traditional tendency to treat reasoning/thinking and emotion/affect as separate realms, when really they are aspects of the same thing. But beyond that, integrating this emotional piece explicitly might better capture the ways in which many of these rationalization markets are, simultaneously at another level, ways of dealing with and negotiating various forms of perceived *injustices* from all corners and people's evolving responses to that.
Yeah it's a difficult question. Roughly: a rational argument is one that provides evidence and considerations that genuinely lend support to a specific conclusion. But I agree that's too vague and it would be nice to have a more precise characterisation.
Love everything about this kind of enquiry. The piece kind of reinforces my suspicions about 'rationality' as opposed to 'wisdom' and even 'intuition'.
An interesting thought popped up in the example of the rational argument for the death penalty. This is around the limits of rationality in an incomplete information environment. In this case it may well be the case (as I reluctantly suspect, these days) that we may not have Free Will. There's a piece of information that really affects supposedly rational cases for harsh punishments, as opposed to merely protecting society via incarceration. Thanks for a thoughtful piece.
"Intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it."
"A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions. (To paraphrase Steve Weinberg, "For a smart person to do something truly stupid, they need a theory.")"
In essence, the observation that people don't generally take their ideas as seriously as their stated beliefs would imply is correct. But, generally, this is actually a good thing! Many ideas, especially political, religious, or social grand narratives about the world, lead to absurd or extreme conclusions when taken to their coherent logical extreme. Societies that purport to share these beliefs but do not, in fact, behave as you would expect them to given this act usually employ social stop signs and cultural gatekeepers who use flowery language to tell the masses to essentially chill out and use common sense when things start getting out of hand.
Problems start when a smart person starts thinking critically and rationally about these matters and realizes the arguments made by his/her culture for why the extreme actions shouldn't be taken are actually all bad. And, indeed, in many cases they are bad; after all, they weren't built up as part of a coherent logical system, but are rather branches of a social immune system meant to prevent (less-critically thinking) ordinary people from going crazy. Sadly, that's not enough to prevent a smart person from going crazy, as he or she can see through your BS and understand how your counterarguments are inconsistent with the premises of the religion/political theory/broad belief you both purport to share. To stop them from going nuts, you need to challenge the premises themselves, but that is much harder and trickier, as the essences of these beliefs are generally tightly tied to personal identity and are much more prone to self-delusion.
Great comment, Rationalism (as opposed to rationalism) as practiced on /r/SlateStarCodex is (substantially at least) a fantastic example of this sort of not-actually-rational rationality.
Tangential broadbrush comment. The 19th c. West saw a sharp bifurcation amongst its borgeoisie.
* A 'productive' path... focused on industry and commerce... highly inventive in this way but happy to leave the inherited societal traditions and mores to look after themselves.
* An 'idealistic' self consciously 'clever' path (the nascent intelligentsia) also highly 'inventive' in its focus on remaking and 'improving' on those inherited traditions. Manufacturing 'progress' in other words.
Perhaps the most persuasive force in human affairs is pain.
In the right hands reason can be manipulated to go in almost any direction our bias prefers. One can learn this from being a good arguer. Pain serves sort of as a cop on the beat drawing a line as to how much reasoning trouble we're allowed to get in to.
I learned this in part when I was educating myself about nuclear weapons. My first Substack has a big nuke section with all kinds of information and argument etc, the usual activist stuff. I let that project go when I realized that no amount of information and argument is capable of puncturing nuclear weapons denial. Pain is the only thing capable of a job that big.
Just which thesis of Henrich's and Burke's are you rejecting? In Henrich's manioc example, where the reasons why a cooking process detoxifies manioc are opaque to the practitioners, and could only have been developed (by them) through a process of cultural evolution that involved each generation following, on faith, the procedures of their predecessors, the problem isn't that the people aren't good at producing and evaluating rational arguments. The problem is that they lack the chemical knowledge they would need as premises. If you're right that conservatives are too pessimistic about the power of rational argument to improve beliefs, how would the culture (/cooking practices) Henrich describes be better if people were more moved by rational argument? You also say many customs function to promote the interests of extractive elites, surely true, but the question is how often that is the case, vs how often it's like the manioc case—where the custom actually serves to prevent everyone from poisoning their family. Burke would probably agree that some customs benefit the undeserving—he favored various reforms after all—but say that a society which rejected all deference to custom in favor of reason would be one where everyone was worse off.
- My views on Henrich's views are complex and I will write about this topic at some point. Basically, on cultural evolution, I am much more influenced by the school associated with Dan Sperber than by the school of dual inheritance theory that Henrich draws from. On the specific manioc example, I'm a bit sceptical of Henrich's interpretation: see, e.g., http://cognitionandculture.net/blogs/hugo-mercier/a-matter-of-taste/. However, I do think his general point about causal opacity and the importance of deferring to custom in some contexts is right, as I acknowledge in the piece. It's just that on average I am more optimistic about individual reasoning and rational argument.
- Agree with your observation re. conservatism. I think conservatives under-estimate the degree to which customs evolve to benefit extractive elites, especially post-agricultural revolution. I agree conservatives can acknowledge this to some degree - as you say, it's a matter of degree - but I think their view of cultural practices is too optimistic, and the manioc case is not representative.
You write above “(Opposing positions cannot both be correct).”
Sorry, I just don’t think that THIS is correct.
Most obviously, as I’m pretty sure Sowell covers in his Conflict of Visions book (been a long time now since I read it), if different people have different values, opposing positions can indeed both be “correct”.
But more generally, you appear to be violating the most valuable thing I learned in my Sociology 101 class:
NOT black <> white
I.e. there are shades of gray. I.e. there can be multiple answers to many questions.
If you were talking only about incontrovertible facts, then that would be a different story. But all your examples were about opinions and values. “A Conflict of Visions” aside, even two people who have largely similar values can come to different conclusions about certain things, and the death penalty is a perfect example of this.
Perhaps you meant something very narrow and specific when you wrote “(Opposing positions cannot both be correct)”, but if so it surely was not apparent.
None of which is a definitive argument for or against whether people should be persuaded by rational argumentation - and indeed I couldn’t figure out at all where you stand after reading this piece, in fact you sounded like you were ChatGPT here - but that’s another story altogether…
Apologies. I did *not* mean to suggest I thought any of it was written by ChatGPT. I meant only that unlike other pieces of yours I’ve read where I could tell where you stand, this one felt a bit like balance for the sake of balance, which is clearly what ChatGPT’s default is.
Forgive me for the 2nd year philosophy student comment, but...
Is there a kind of 'turtles all the way down' problem with being completely against reason and rationality? It strikes me that Burke, Sowell, and Henrich simply *have to* appeal to a good reason, not to appeal to reason. "Traditions, norms, and customs have evolved over time to produce outcomes well adapted to their environment" is essentially an empirical claim that can be evaluated on many of the usual metrics, even if imperfectly. This doesn't mean it is an incorrect claim, but given that it relies on reason, it seems the anti-reason argument can only go so far.
There may be a point about levels of argumentation that I'm not quite grasping this early in the morning...
I don't know if there's any support for this, but an idea that I've been pondering is that arguments based on ideas that are actually good might have an evolutionary advantage over "rhetorically compelling" arguments because they're less fragile. For example a good slogan can be first-order persuasive, but if people need to use that slogan to make their case then they can sound like parrots relative to people who can express good ideas in their own words and go into more depth in conversation. If the arguments need to propagate through people then some of the individual advantages of "good arguers" (charisma, social status, etc.) might be attenuated.
Great point - that seems plausible to me.
Scott Alexander (from the AstralCodexTen substack) made this argument rather explicitly on his old blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
Great piece - thanks for sharing.
What is a good idea? From an evolutionary perspective it might be adaptive, but this notion does not jive with ideas like Marxist-Leninism that ruled Russia fir 70 years or what I call shareholder primacy capitalism which has ruled the US for thirty years now.
One can use a normative standard, but people differ on norms, often due to different cultural backgrounds.
This sounds like you're describing how things should (or *could*) be, rather than how they are.
I think you're right, but I do not anticipate humanity or "The Experts" will ever get to that level without being *forced*.
Regarding people actively resisting good arguers on principle, there are at least some situations where this is just obviously true: general cultural attitudes towards people like politicians and salesmen. In both cases you have a profession that selects for skilled persuaders who turn that skill toward naked self-interest (for the salesman, your purchase; for the politician, your donation or vote). And if I say "She sounds too much like a politician," or "He was clearly trying to sell me something," I suspect you have a general idea what I mean by that.
Yes very good point. Although in this case their good arguing abilities are confounded with the fact that they are obviously motivated to push a specific conclusion. A good question is whether we should be more sceptical of arguments from good arguers even in cases where they are not, e.g, politicians or salesmen.
Well, first and foremost, context - what’s being discussed, and whether it’s a “rational” thing or a “values thing - matters hugely here.
Take Hanson and his wife. If the question is “where should we go to dinner tonight”, or even “should we move to NYC or not”, then she is quite rational(!) to say that “the better argument should not determine the answer”. But if the question is “how should we invest our money for retirement” then hell yeah the better argument will more often deliver a better answer and be a far better way to go.
But that is an example where the trust/bona fides/intentions of the arguer are (presumably) unassailable. In the more general case, said trust/credibility needs to be earned, and so unless the other party believe that it has been earned, they will of necessity be more skeptical of arguments from the better arguer. And it is nigh on impossible for any independent observer to know what the correct answer (or even a “better” answer) is re the intentions of said better arguer.
Very good point, exposing these people for what they are is not very difficult luckily.
Very good. The problem with rational argument is not rationality per se but lies in the word argument. The purpose of rational argument is to persuade you not to teach you.
Stunningly clear exposition, Dan. Thank you.
It occurs to me that one question to ask when considering whether or not to defer to tradition, custom or norm (and this relates to your point about power) is who (or what) is othered or externalized by this status quo (ex. a group or class of people, non-human animals, elements of the environment) and can that exclusion still be justified.
Thanks Jason. And yes good point - that's an important nuance when it comes to thinking about tradition/custom (and one that conservative intellectuals tend to overlook, I think).
By the way, your post reminded me of John Ralston Saul’s ‘On Equilibrium’. I haven’t read it in twenty years so I’m not sure what I would think about it now but its overall theme of reason ideally being in balance with other qualities of civilization is still appealing.
Thanks Dan, really enjoying your blog. Fine writing.
Similar to Andy G, I wasn't convinced by the claim that two opposing arguments cannot both be correct. It made me think of more Eastern philosophy that allows contradictory forces. Making a stark truth claim might be plausible for physical states, but not for the correctness of the death penalty because the argument persuasiveness either relies on many push-and-pull psychological factors, none of which can be directly measured, or even if we assumed some kind of Benthamian cost-benefit analysis, it's still not possible to assign fixed values to different outcomes like preventing future violence and satisfying current suffering (formally: multicriteria decision making).
Thanks Cameron - and yes, good point. I agree there is a sense in which two opposing arguments can both in some sense be correct in some contexts. I should have written: it is possibly to construct persuasive rational arguments in favour of manifestly false claims and bad decisions - a claim which seems much less objectionable.
Thanks also Dan. I agree with that claim. As an aside, my 9th grade social studies teacher asked us to take a position on the death penalty and assigned us to write a persuasive argument for the opposing side. It was very educational.
Yes I agree - that kind of exercise is very valuable.
Philosophy is chock full of ingredients needed to finish this recipe (solve the serious problem you are noting).
> it's still not possible to assign fixed values to different outcomes like preventing future violence and satisfying current suffering (formally: multicriteria decision making).
Something built on top of modal logic could do this.
This is great coverage and analysis of the themes and various takes I've seen kicking around in these circles when it comes to rationality and argument. But there's one glaring omission I feel compelled to mention, if only to get it on the map. You make a fleeting reference to sentiment before immediately moving to Burke on tradition and custom. But otherwise, I see absolutely no discussion of emotion and affect (and maybe for some, emotion regulation) in terms of their role for rational argument and belief. This includes the unique epistemic value of emotions in and of themselves, development of "emotional virtues," and the blurry boundary between reason and feeling (which thinkers from Spinoza to Vygotsky to Damasio have written about extensively). However prominently signaling and status games and other marketplace rationalizations feature in the give-and-take of information, belief and commitment, alongside this comes the embodied phenomenology of values, risk, ego, affiliation, etc. Persuasion often goes hand-in-hand with inspiration, or moral feelings like guilt or shame; epistemic vigilance goes hand-in-hand with pride. What do the personal stakes of all these rationalizations and transactions *feel* like - and how do feelings shape and participate in the dynamics of the marketplace of belief and rationalization?
I can imagine how this might seem like a separate topic that opens a whole other can of worms, and perhaps not primarily your responsibility to cover. But if we want to understand the full dimensions of how things like rationality, belief formation, persuasion/argument and knowledge function in the *real* world, socially and adaptively - at some point we will need to grapple with that affective realm of emotion and feelings. Just two recent examples off the top of my head of work attempting to resituate rationality within that affective space (including implications for social justice discussions):
Laura Silva on epistemic justification from emotion and its sui generis epistemic status:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2126152
https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/5/104
Myisha Cherry on the epistemic value of "Lordean" rage as an intelligent source of action:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-case-for-rage-9780197557341
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/q-and-a/a-philosophers-defense-of-anger
Thanks Chris - great comment and completely agree. Affect, emotion, feelings - these things play central roles in psychology, belief, public discourse, and so on. It's not at all my area of expertise but I hope to learn and think more about this topic. I know Silva and Cherry's work and I agree it is valuable.
It's also important to know the limits of one's expertise, or own level of interest in one particular dimension. So even having you acknowledge emotion as part of the picture and bookmark that for future treatment goes a really long way. Obviously you can't do it all at once, and it's not all on you!
It's just interesting to me the way many of these discussions (not just yours), tend to take emotions for granted and fold this into other processes like incentives or social norms without giving it proper justice in its own right. I think this reflects the traditional tendency to treat reasoning/thinking and emotion/affect as separate realms, when really they are aspects of the same thing. But beyond that, integrating this emotional piece explicitly might better capture the ways in which many of these rationalization markets are, simultaneously at another level, ways of dealing with and negotiating various forms of perceived *injustices* from all corners and people's evolving responses to that.
What a great comment, 11/10.
Im kinda confused by what rational means here
Yeah it's a difficult question. Roughly: a rational argument is one that provides evidence and considerations that genuinely lend support to a specific conclusion. But I agree that's too vague and it would be nice to have a more precise characterisation.
The word rational seems to mean in some ways “desirable ways of thinking and seeing the world”
Which would also explain why some leftists are very skeptical of the word rational
Love everything about this kind of enquiry. The piece kind of reinforces my suspicions about 'rationality' as opposed to 'wisdom' and even 'intuition'.
An interesting thought popped up in the example of the rational argument for the death penalty. This is around the limits of rationality in an incomplete information environment. In this case it may well be the case (as I reluctantly suspect, these days) that we may not have Free Will. There's a piece of information that really affects supposedly rational cases for harsh punishments, as opposed to merely protecting society via incarceration. Thanks for a thoughtful piece.
Thanks Mike - and yes, that's an interesting case.
Related writing that readers of this might find interesting: "Reason as memetic immune disorder" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder). Relevant excerpts:
"Intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it."
"A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions. (To paraphrase Steve Weinberg, "For a smart person to do something truly stupid, they need a theory.")"
In essence, the observation that people don't generally take their ideas as seriously as their stated beliefs would imply is correct. But, generally, this is actually a good thing! Many ideas, especially political, religious, or social grand narratives about the world, lead to absurd or extreme conclusions when taken to their coherent logical extreme. Societies that purport to share these beliefs but do not, in fact, behave as you would expect them to given this act usually employ social stop signs and cultural gatekeepers who use flowery language to tell the masses to essentially chill out and use common sense when things start getting out of hand.
Problems start when a smart person starts thinking critically and rationally about these matters and realizes the arguments made by his/her culture for why the extreme actions shouldn't be taken are actually all bad. And, indeed, in many cases they are bad; after all, they weren't built up as part of a coherent logical system, but are rather branches of a social immune system meant to prevent (less-critically thinking) ordinary people from going crazy. Sadly, that's not enough to prevent a smart person from going crazy, as he or she can see through your BS and understand how your counterarguments are inconsistent with the premises of the religion/political theory/broad belief you both purport to share. To stop them from going nuts, you need to challenge the premises themselves, but that is much harder and trickier, as the essences of these beliefs are generally tightly tied to personal identity and are much more prone to self-delusion.
Great comment, Rationalism (as opposed to rationalism) as practiced on /r/SlateStarCodex is (substantially at least) a fantastic example of this sort of not-actually-rational rationality.
Tangential broadbrush comment. The 19th c. West saw a sharp bifurcation amongst its borgeoisie.
* A 'productive' path... focused on industry and commerce... highly inventive in this way but happy to leave the inherited societal traditions and mores to look after themselves.
* An 'idealistic' self consciously 'clever' path (the nascent intelligentsia) also highly 'inventive' in its focus on remaking and 'improving' on those inherited traditions. Manufacturing 'progress' in other words.
With hindsight, this excessive bifurcation has been Liberalism's undoing. I explore this theme in this post https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress?utm_medium=reader2
Perhaps the most persuasive force in human affairs is pain.
In the right hands reason can be manipulated to go in almost any direction our bias prefers. One can learn this from being a good arguer. Pain serves sort of as a cop on the beat drawing a line as to how much reasoning trouble we're allowed to get in to.
I learned this in part when I was educating myself about nuclear weapons. My first Substack has a big nuke section with all kinds of information and argument etc, the usual activist stuff. I let that project go when I realized that no amount of information and argument is capable of puncturing nuclear weapons denial. Pain is the only thing capable of a job that big.
Just which thesis of Henrich's and Burke's are you rejecting? In Henrich's manioc example, where the reasons why a cooking process detoxifies manioc are opaque to the practitioners, and could only have been developed (by them) through a process of cultural evolution that involved each generation following, on faith, the procedures of their predecessors, the problem isn't that the people aren't good at producing and evaluating rational arguments. The problem is that they lack the chemical knowledge they would need as premises. If you're right that conservatives are too pessimistic about the power of rational argument to improve beliefs, how would the culture (/cooking practices) Henrich describes be better if people were more moved by rational argument? You also say many customs function to promote the interests of extractive elites, surely true, but the question is how often that is the case, vs how often it's like the manioc case—where the custom actually serves to prevent everyone from poisoning their family. Burke would probably agree that some customs benefit the undeserving—he favored various reforms after all—but say that a society which rejected all deference to custom in favor of reason would be one where everyone was worse off.
Thanks for this, Brad.
A few quick responses:
- My views on Henrich's views are complex and I will write about this topic at some point. Basically, on cultural evolution, I am much more influenced by the school associated with Dan Sperber than by the school of dual inheritance theory that Henrich draws from. On the specific manioc example, I'm a bit sceptical of Henrich's interpretation: see, e.g., http://cognitionandculture.net/blogs/hugo-mercier/a-matter-of-taste/. However, I do think his general point about causal opacity and the importance of deferring to custom in some contexts is right, as I acknowledge in the piece. It's just that on average I am more optimistic about individual reasoning and rational argument.
- Agree with your observation re. conservatism. I think conservatives under-estimate the degree to which customs evolve to benefit extractive elites, especially post-agricultural revolution. I agree conservatives can acknowledge this to some degree - as you say, it's a matter of degree - but I think their view of cultural practices is too optimistic, and the manioc case is not representative.
You write above “(Opposing positions cannot both be correct).”
Sorry, I just don’t think that THIS is correct.
Most obviously, as I’m pretty sure Sowell covers in his Conflict of Visions book (been a long time now since I read it), if different people have different values, opposing positions can indeed both be “correct”.
But more generally, you appear to be violating the most valuable thing I learned in my Sociology 101 class:
NOT black <> white
I.e. there are shades of gray. I.e. there can be multiple answers to many questions.
If you were talking only about incontrovertible facts, then that would be a different story. But all your examples were about opinions and values. “A Conflict of Visions” aside, even two people who have largely similar values can come to different conclusions about certain things, and the death penalty is a perfect example of this.
Perhaps you meant something very narrow and specific when you wrote “(Opposing positions cannot both be correct)”, but if so it surely was not apparent.
None of which is a definitive argument for or against whether people should be persuaded by rational argumentation - and indeed I couldn’t figure out at all where you stand after reading this piece, in fact you sounded like you were ChatGPT here - but that’s another story altogether…
1. I agree with the point that opposing conclusions can in many contexts both be correct and should have been clearer about that.
2. I work hard on these. If you think I sound like ChatGPT you're welcome to read other blogs.
Apologies. I did *not* mean to suggest I thought any of it was written by ChatGPT. I meant only that unlike other pieces of yours I’ve read where I could tell where you stand, this one felt a bit like balance for the sake of balance, which is clearly what ChatGPT’s default is.
Forgive me for the 2nd year philosophy student comment, but...
Is there a kind of 'turtles all the way down' problem with being completely against reason and rationality? It strikes me that Burke, Sowell, and Henrich simply *have to* appeal to a good reason, not to appeal to reason. "Traditions, norms, and customs have evolved over time to produce outcomes well adapted to their environment" is essentially an empirical claim that can be evaluated on many of the usual metrics, even if imperfectly. This doesn't mean it is an incorrect claim, but given that it relies on reason, it seems the anti-reason argument can only go so far.
There may be a point about levels of argumentation that I'm not quite grasping this early in the morning...
Anyway, thanks for the great post!