Sunday, September 18, 2011

The way of the world

Computer problems at home (now partly fixed) have meant I was unable to waste spend nearly as much time online as I normally would. And that means I missed my email and the good blogs I like to read, but it also means I spent less time aimlessly surfing and reading trivia. One morning I actually read bits of a real magazine over breakfast, including a short article by Marshall Poe in The Atlantic about how someone with an idea might go about turning that idea into a best-selling book:
I could get a book deal with a big New York trade publisher.
This is what I had to do. First, I needed to have a platform. A platform is something you stand on. It makes you taller than you are. In trade publishing, a platform is the same, but it’s a prestigious brand. I had two: from a trade editor’s point of view, I had been a “professor” at the big university and a “writer” at the big magazine. Second, I needed a big idea. A big idea is an enthusiastically stated thesis, usually taking the form of “This changes everything and will make you rich, happy, and beautiful.” A big idea must be counterintuitive: the this that changes everything must be something everyone thinks is trivial, but in fact matters a great deal. In my case, the this had to be Wikipedia, so my big idea was “Wikipedia changes everything.” I had done no research to substantiate such a claim. Third, I needed a catchphrase title like The Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point, or The Long Tail. The title had to be the kind of thing that becomes a cliché.
I was going to describe this as revealing, but it pretty much just confirms what I already thought. Poe concludes:
I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong. Years of academic research taught me two things. First, reality is as complicated as it is, not as complicated as we want it to be. Some phenomena have an irreducible complexity that will defeat any big-idea effort at simplification. Detailed research has, not surprisingly, cast doubt on the reality of wise crowds, tipping points, and long tails. Second, most of the easy big questions about the way the world works have been answered. The questions that remain are really hard. Big ideas, then, can only reinvent the wheel or make magical claims.
My first reaction was to feel contempt for the people who sell these big ideas, but maybe the people who buy them are more of a problem. These, after all, are in some sense the intellectuals of our society. Not the leading intellectuals, mostly, of course, but the people who buy books and take an interest in ideas. If what goes over best with them is ideas that are almost guaranteed to be false then there is a problem with our intellectual life, with our culture. (This problem, of course, might be no worse now than ever before.) Perhaps that goes without saying, but it makes me wonder about the value of democracy. Perhaps that kind of questioning is also just obviously called for, or already too late. But then what?

One thing that might help would be a reduction in the power of individuals like Rupert Murdoch to wield so much influence over how people think. But it's not hard to imagine the media being dominated by multiple people who all think along the same lines as Murdoch. There aren't that many people rich enough to be media moguls who are politically neutral or who think the rich have too much power. Strengthening disinterested news sources, e.g. PBS and NPR, might help, but I don't know how likely this is to happen, and it will never be a solution in itself.

Two other things that occur to me I associate with Martha Nussbaum, no doubt partly because I'm currently reading her Creating Capabilities. The first would be to guarantee the provision of certain basic capabilities or rights, so that these would be protected no matter what crazy people got elected. This would limit the damage that could be done by rule of the stupid by the stupid.

The other is Nussbaum's idea (which, of course, she shares with others) of educating people for citizenship by teaching them things like philosophy and thus developing their critical thinking skills (among much else, no doubt). This seems idealistic in both the good and the bad sense. It's worthy and admirably optimistic, but it also seems unlikely to work. Partly because some very powerful people would surely not want it to work. If an educated electorate started electing people other than those who are currently paid for by the power elite then this elite would do something, surely, to stop them.

I feel as though, in thinking all this (or thinking there is a need for the capabilities part of it, at least), I'm being elitist and anti-democratic, neither of which sounds or feels good. So it would be nice to see some alternative. But I'm not sure I do right now.


13 comments:

  1. i think it would help to know what people do with those ideas that are bound to be wrong. one hears, for example, people throw around the phrase 'tipping point', but it's not clear to me what it does beyond help some kind of unclear thinking to persist. (compare to strong-sounding distantly-philosophical theses that float around in politics about individual liberty and 'size of government', which seem to do real work in forcing the dynamics of certain conversations to follow certain constraints, to only be pursued up to a certain point, etc.)

    i've always been fascinated by socrates' response to meno in the 'meno' and his dismissal of misology in the 'phaedo'. i've never seen what exactly the justification is for the courage or bravery that he extolls, to keep pursuing the truth, and that seems important because he identifies the emboldening effect of his arguments in each case as their most important feature, and it's one which (as not really attached to the arguments) needn't be compromised by the faults in the arguments.

    i mention that because it seems like an important component of the overall inquisitive attitude that helps to leaven the negativity and disappointment that come from actual critical engagement (at that level where the questions are hard rather than easy, and so success or progress is rare and hard-won). neither of which seems to be very attractive to a lot of people who want 'ideas'.

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  2. The end of your computer problems was well worth the wait: the length and complexity of the trains of thought that this post triggered rival anything triggered by earlier posts. First, on Poe.

    My own experience as a non-fiction writer is that the requirement of novelty value can be met perfectly well while sticking to what is true. (Indeed, the very fact that somebody satisfies it for a change by sticking to what is true is something that may itself have novelty value of its own.) The selection of true things that you know just has to be wide enough, and your familiarity with the expectations of your readers good enough, to enable you to select a sufficient number of true things that are sufficiently interesting cumulatively for your readers.

    I have the uncomfortable feeling that Poe just hasn't cast his net widely enough. If the prevalence of the requirement of novelty value in contemporary culture is invoked as an explanatory hypothesis for the triviality of public discourse, as it seemingly is by both Poe and by you, this is apt to strike me as largely a form of special pleading. Of course there are limits to what any book or any contribution to public discourse can achieve. But whatever experience I personally have points in the opposite direction, if anything.

    I can't speak for New York publishers, but my books have not only got published by one of the most prestigious Helsinki trade publishers but also turned a profit for it - although I fully share Poe's extremely low opinion of what he calls "big ideas" and the books themselves explicitly poke fun at big-ideas thinking at every opportunity. I don't believe in big ideas at all, and yet I have what Poe terms a platform. Why? Because what I say is simply sufficiently little-known for it to be interesting in its own right although it is demonstrably true, and rather banal and trivial to anyone already familiar with it.

    The people you characterise as being "in some sense the intellectuals of our society" have repeatedly reported being taken by surprise by my books, although I myself view the books as being largely a "synopsis of trivialities" (Wittgenstein's characterisation of philosophy in a 1930 lecture). But what is trivial to me has not been trivial to my readers. Many times, readers have asked me in amazement how I can know this fascinating, fascinating stuff about which they had no idea until they read my book. All I can really do is to point to the 35 pages of endnotes and say that if they had spent the same amount of time reading the source materials to which I refer, instead of doing whatever it was that they did while I read it, then they too would have known it.

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  3. Second, on Nussbaum. I haven't read her book, but if the impression I have received is correct, it seems that she's looking in the wrong direction.

    Among the stuff from political science and social psychology that I read for my own book, one of the really strong (and shockingly neglected) findings to stand out is that people's seeming apathy at the lack of optimal political outcomes is caused much less by the lack of critical thinking skills than by false beliefs about straightforward empirical facts. For every person who doesn't work towards desirable outcome X because they have philosophical obstacles, there are scores who don't work towards it because they mistakenly think it has already been reached.

    The study reported here is a representative one. When people in the United States are shown a pie chart showing income distribution in the United States (the least equal among rich Western countries) and another pie chart showing income distribution in Sweden (the most equal among rich Western countries), and given the impression that these are two hypothetical cases, over 90 per cent say they would prefer to live in the society depicted in the Swedish chart. They just have the thoroughly mistaken belief that their own country already resembles Sweden more than it resembles itself. If they had been asked which income distribution they prefer, their own or Sweden's, without being informed first on what the distributions actually are, they would have "preferred" their own and "rejected" Sweden's.

    And most opinion polls, for instance, ask questions of this latter type exclusively. Mere willingness to express an opinion when asked is taken to suffice as a qualification for expressing the opinion, although it may rest on the most bizarre misconceptions of the most uncontroversial and non-value-laden empirical facts. Polls measure what people think they support as opposed to what they support.

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  4. Around the world, there have been many empirical experiments in so-called deliberative democracy: take a small, more or less randomly selected sample - say 50, 100 or 200 people -, take a currently controversial political issue, and experimentally raise the sample's knowledge of this issue to expert level by giving them a crash course of a day or two. Time and again, the result is a swing of tens of percentage points in the sample's opinion on the issue.

    In Britain, for instance, an experiment was done at the time of the 1997 general election in which a small sample of voters was simply familiarised with the three main parties' major policy positions and nothing more. The Liberal Democrats gained around twenty percentage points of support (at the roughly equal expense of both the other two parties), and very nearly outpolled Labour - in the very same election which, in the uninformed real world, won more seats for Labour than any election before or since and left the Lib Dems a distant third.

    As I said, I haven't read Nussbaum's book, so maybe she also discusses this kind of empirical stuff. Maybe your parenthesis "(among much else, no doubt)" covers it. But if she doesn't discuss it, then she would seem - in an ironic twist of self-referentiality - to be ignorant herself about what it would take to reach the social outcomes she would like to see.

    I haven't managed to get back to the Winch business yet. (I did re-read The Idea of a Social Science, and have been intending for several weeks now to write a new comment on it here.) But this is one of the cases which together make me think that Winch's demarcation between philosophy and social science just simply won't do.

    This is a comment by me on a philosophical post in a philosophical blog that discusses a philosophical book by philosopher Nussbaum. And yet my comment mentions practically no philosophers or philosophical arguments. Instead, it discusses quantitative empirical findings of the various social sciences, political science and social psychology before anything else. And it suggests that Nussbaum risks failure as a philosopher if she does not take into account these findings, which have nothing at all to do with philosophy and everything to do with social science. How is this possible if never the twain shall meet?

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  5. Thanks, j. (I'll have to reply to Tommi separately).

    Yes, "See, see, we know nothing!" (as I think Wittgenstein put one possible conclusion from the Socratic dialogues) is not very popular. It's odd that Socrates should think arguments might have an emboldening effect regardless of whether they are good arguments. Surely they would at least need to seem good to embolden anyone? But I don't think I understand him on this.

    As for what people do with the bad ideas, I suppose they mostly just chatter about them. But if that's a substitute for thinking then that's a shame. And I'm sure such chatter can influence political decisions (although no examples are springing to mind).

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  6. Tommi: thanks, as ever.

    If the prevalence of the requirement of novelty value in contemporary culture is invoked as an explanatory hypothesis for the triviality of public discourse, as it seemingly is by both Poe and by you, this is apt to strike me as largely a form of special pleading. Of course there are limits to what any book or any contribution to public discourse can achieve. But whatever experience I personally have points in the opposite direction, if anything.

    I guess I was bowing to Poe's experience, but here I bow to yours which reminds me that, of course, there are good non-fiction works that get published and make a profit. I didn't mean to imply that public discourse is trivial because publishers demand novelty but, rather, that the public demand for novelty is a symptom of triviality (at least when taken to an extreme). Especially, perhaps, when the demand is not for new facts but for new ideas.

    More to follow.

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  7. Tommi: I'm sure Nussbaum is all for teaching people relevant facts as well as critical thinking skills (although I don't remember exactly what she recommends, nor even whether I have read that book.) I think more is needed than just facts, though. The LibDems, as I recall, were regarded as right by many people who were nevertheless unwilling to vote for them in a real election because they thought that only Labour and the Tories had any chance of winning. So some sort of idealism or optimism might be needed too. Something to get people out of the picture that there are just two major parties, i.e. parties worth taking seriously.

    Similarly, there are pictures of the USA as a place where class doesn't matter, where wealth comes (always and only) from hard work, where everything is better than it is everywhere else, and so on, that (maybe) few people believe in consciously but that are not far below the surface of many people's thinking. I suspect that many Americans would be reluctant to admit even to themselves that Sweden was somehow better than the US. It's one thing to be shown it during an experiment (and maybe temporarily accept it). It's another to take this fact seriously and act on it later. I don't mean that all Americans are stupid or blind to reality. But a surprisingly large number of them are surprisingly reluctant to consider the possibility that there might be much to learn from other countries. People who are open to such thoughts seem overwhelmingly to be politically liberal, and "liberal" is a dirty word for some. There are open-minded, thoughtful, intelligent conservatives too, but they are not highly visible.

    So there are pictures or myths that need to be overcome, but attempts to debunk them sound like political propaganda of an unwelcome sort. In Britain they will sound like pro-LibDem (or Green) propaganda. In the US they might simply sound like anti-Americanism. And they will be portrayed that way by their opponents.

    As for Winch, I'm sure he would not count this as a philosophical discussion. How far philosophy can be distinguished from politics, though, is an interesting question.

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  8. Yes, "See, see, we know nothing!" (as I think Wittgenstein put one possible conclusion from the Socratic dialogues) is not very popular. It's odd that Socrates should think arguments might have an emboldening effect regardless of whether they are good arguments.

    You were probably thinking of this: "Socrates, who always reduces the Sophist to silence - does he reduce him to silence rightfully? - It's true, the Sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can neither be a case of 'You see! You don't know it!' - nor, triumphantly, 'So none of us knows anything!'" (Culture and Value, 1998 edn., p. 64)

    I actually quote this in the introduction to my last book - to warn against the "triumphant 'So none of us knows anything!'" that Wittgenstein attributes to Socrates (correctly in my view). In the rare schools of political philosophy that have paid attention to the empirical findings of deep ignorance in voters and citizens, their significance has often been blown completely out of proportion, significant and neglected though they are - to the extent that they're offered as a kind of automatic secret key to everything in need of any explanation about society and politics.

    I was reminded of the Wittgenstein passage while doing the research for my book, as a posteriori findings of factual ignorance seemed to have very much the same unwarranted emboldening effect on contemporary political philosophers that a priori arguments purporting to show ignorance had on Socrates. In fact the resemblance was uncanny at times.

    (And the objection too is the same in both cases: "None of us knows anything!" is a sexy-sounding claim, but not one that can be lived out. In my introduction, I go on to illustrate this by reference to On Certainty: in actual everyday life, it is the presence of at least a certain degree of certainty that is the sign of a healthy and functioning mind, not the lack of certainty, and especially not a jumped-up and conceited lack of the Socratic kind.)

    As for Winch, I'm sure he would not count this as a philosophical discussion.

    Well, if discussions of Nussbaum's book are not philosophical discussions, then it must mean that her book is not a philosophical book. Which simply sounds like a terribly odd thing to say, to me. But this is not at all my main objection to Winch. I'll have to write some more on him, and I'll try to do so while the iron's hot.

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  9. I suspect that many Americans would be reluctant to admit even to themselves that Sweden was somehow better than the US. It's one thing to be shown it during an experiment (and maybe temporarily accept it). It's another to take this fact seriously and act on it later. [...] So there are pictures or myths that need to be overcome, but attempts to debunk them sound like political propaganda of an unwelcome sort.

    There have of course been empirical studies of this phenomenon too, and attempts to come up with something that would circumvent it somehow. There is one political science paper with a turn of phrase so fabulous that I ended up quoting it word for word in both of my books:

    "The empirical investigations reported below [...] show that, in general, citizens tend to resist facts. They can be induced to use correct information, even in the context of a single-shot survey, but it takes an extraordinarily obtrusive presentation of that information." (p. 792)

    The challenge is to find a way to succeed in this "extraordinarily obtrusive presentation" without nevertheless violating the social rules of comity. One important way to do this could well be to apply one of Wittgenstein's most neglected methodological remarks (if not the most neglected) - one to which I personally find myself returning again and again:

    "Philosophy often solves a problem merely by saying: 'Here is no more difficulty than there.' That is, just by conjuring up a problem, where there was none before. It says: 'Isn't it just as remarkable that ...,' and leaves it at that." (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, §1000)

    Thus, one could ask people in the US: How is it possible for you to express a preference for a society answering to the description of Sweden if preferring a society other than the American one is somehow supposed to be un-American? If this is the case, then don't you inadvertently wind up accusing yourself of anti-Americanism? If not, then doesn't the example of you yourself already demonstrate that it's not at all difficult to square one's admiration for foreign societies with a lack of anti-Americanism?

    Another strategy would be to address not the people, but the politicians. Imagine a TV interview with (say) George W. Bush in which he was asked to comment briefly on the recent finding that nearly 90 % of his own voters would prefer Sweden's level of economic inequality to that of the United States.

    I imagine that someone like Michael Moore has used this strategy to the extent that it has been possible for him. But he's a classic big-ideas person, and his being a big-ideas person is such an integral part of him that it has made it impossible for me to be really thrilled about anything he's done.

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  10. I'm sure Nussbaum is all for teaching people relevant facts as well as critical thinking skills (although I don't remember exactly what she recommends, nor even whether I have read that book.) I think more is needed than just facts, though.

    Yes. But somehow I still find myself extremely troubled by Nussbaum's book - today even more than yesterday - and by the enthusiastic reception it appears to have had so far. Much of this has to do with the subtitle of the book: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. I think it's perfectly possible that democracy simply doesn't need the humanities all that much in the end.

    By this I mean that there isn't necessarily anything philosophically or argumentatively interesting about the most egregious wrongs suffered in the world. The British political philosopher Adam Swift recently spoke about how he was approached by a would-be graduate student who wanted to work on sex trafficking, but who had to be dissuaded from doing so. Not because sex trafficking isn't awful, but because there's simply very little that can be said about it from any kind of moral philosophical or theoretical viewpoint that would be interesting enough to be worth sketching out and discussing. It certainly isn't as if defenders of sex trafficking have won the argument or have some kind of upper hand in contemporary public discourse, so that their views are more respectable socially or more natural-seeming than rival views. If anything, the exact opposite is the case, to the extent that it feels weird to speak of "defenders of sex trafficking" at all. And yet sex trafficking happens on a vast scale every day and is not about to go away any time soon.

    Among other things, this bears on what you wrote above about Murdoch. What if Swift's diagnosis holds for all kinds of undesirable and disheartening social outcomes? Nothing is more common than rueful complaints about how the advocates of a certain type of social policy, economic policy or foreign policy (which the complainant considers repellent) have the upper hand in respectable public discourse. But what if the fact that these policies have respectable and prestigious advocates has as little to do with the fact of their widespread adoption than the non-existent fact that sex trafficking has respectable and prestigious advocates can have to do with the fact of the existence of sex trafficking?

    Should that be the case, it would seem that no amount of midnight oil burning by the humanities, "educating people for citizenship by teaching them things like philosophy", and so on, can be of much help.

    (Or have I missed something?)

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  11. The Culture and Value quote is relevant, yes, but I was actually thinking of the passage on p. 50 of
    Bouwsma's book
    on Wittgenstein. Since the Nussbaum book in question is a work of advocacy I can certainly imagine some people not counting it as philosophy. Wittgenstein, for instance, and quite possibly Winch. I'm less sure whether they would be right, but there you are.

    Another strategy would be to address not the people, but the politicians. Imagine a TV interview with (say) George W. Bush in which he was asked to comment briefly on the recent finding that nearly 90 % of his own voters would prefer Sweden's level of economic inequality to that of the United States.

    That would be interesting to see. I just don't know what would happen. I might start watching interviews with politicians again, but beyond that it's hard for me to say. And I realize that my main exposure to conservative thinking in the US involves students and the worst of the right-wing media (the kind that is gleefully quoted by its opponents), so I might have a badly skewed view of how crude popular conservative thinking in this country is. (My biased hunch, though, is that they would switch off at the very mention of Sweden.)

    (Or have I missed something?)

    Possibly not. Maybe what people need is more history and sociology, so that they know facts more than myths. Some education in media bias might be good, too, and some philosophy. But I don't know what the cure is for propaganda, or for not wanting to know the truth, or for mythological thinking.

    It's also possible that the trouble is not nearly as bad as I tend to think it is. Or that it's nature is different. Fox News used to get 10% or less of the viewers for news in the US, which suggests it doesn't reflect the views of that many people. And Jon Cogburn has recently argued (on his blog and at New APPs) that gerrymandering is the reason why so many Republicans keep getting elected. So actual people might not be the problem, and their education might not be the solution.

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  12. I had completely forgotten about the Bouwsma book, and especially his discussions with W. about Socrates. It's a wonderful little book, but I must have last read it when I was writing my master's thesis late last millennium. I just ordered it from Amazon. Thanks for the reminder. As for your last remark on Winch, it touches directly on what is my main objection to him, which I have already advertised as forthcoming a couple of times. Stay tuned.

    And I realize that my main exposure to conservative thinking in the US involves students and the worst of the right-wing media (the kind that is gleefully quoted by its opponents), so I might have a badly skewed view of how crude popular conservative thinking in this country is.

    Crude popular conservative thinking is incredibly popular, and not only in the US, but its popularity is also incredibly shallow. In an important sense, the political thinking of most "conservatives" isn't nearly articulate enough to even deserve characterisation with such terms as "conservative" - completely regardless of whether "conservative" is regarded as a honorific term, a purely descriptive term or a term of oppobrium. But this of course is a thing that's hard to say out loud without coming across as a propagandist.

    The way I managed it in my book - somewhat - was to emphasise at every opportunity that the same goes basically for any political outlook, the ones I support personally just as well as the ones I deplore personally. Indeed, my own political writing (and the punditry to which it has given rise) has largely been a reaction to my depression at how often the things I support myself are seemingly supported by most of their other supporters for completely wrongheaded and irrelevant "reasons". (Compare our recent discussion of human rights and your mention of "the rights of the philosophers" - that is indeed exactly what I meant by the parallel I drew with Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion.)

    (My biased hunch, though, is that they would switch off at the very mention of Sweden.)

    Well, there are other things to mention - and ways to turn others' mentions of other things against themselves. For instance, I have been much bemused by the claims of some of the "conservative" opponents of Obama's health care reform, seemingly to the effect that the mere existence of universal health care in a country is somehow enough to make the country "socialist" or even "communist". Because this would immediately make a nonsense out of the generally accepted narrative of the end of the Cold War, for instance. After all, both West Germany and East Germany had universal health care, so if we take the anti-Obama view seriously, then it would seem that German reunification was merely a matter of one socialist country annexing another. The received view of course is that it was a triumph of capitalism over socialism if anything - and the opponents of Obama would not hesitate to portray it as such if asked specifically for their views on this matter.

    This is the sort of thing I have in mind when thinking about that remark of W.'s about "conjuring up a problem where there was none before".

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  13. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on Winch.

    Yes, popular thinking (liberal or conservative really--and I know there are other options, but they are by far the main ones in the US) is barely thinking at all. And most of us are guilty of this much of the time. We can't constantly examine every belief. But there is a popular kind of conservative view that actually glorifies mediocrity, ignorance, and thoughtlessness. I suspect that you would be good at conjuring up problems for such people. But there needs to be a dialogue for such conjuring to take place.

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