Impeller
My beliefs about the world aren't more accurate than yours, or anyone else’s, just because I happen to be committed my beliefs.
The truth or falseness of my beliefs is instead a question of how consistent they are with reality.
The continuing mission of discovering the true nature of reality, as it exists in our universe, is a process we call science.
Those conclusions all seem obvious until I apply the principles to my own worldview.
I’m Wrong
I was reminded of those axioms the other day as I reflected on the varying degrees of ignorance and confusion that have characterized much of my history as a human being.
When I was a high schooler, for example, most of my beliefs about the world were wildly inaccurate. Comically so, in retrospect. My beliefs were somewhat more reasonable once I got through college. And they were better yet after law school.
Still, after all that education, and after 27 years of hard-earned life experience, many of my beliefs about the world, and my existence relative to it, were a undisciplined morass of:
Learned dogma.
Unverified conventional wisdom.
Myriad cognitive biases.
That’s not even the worst of it. Not only were my beliefs about the world, and myself, often dead wrong, I was unjustifiably confident that they were right. A terrifying combination.
I’ve often excused my ignorance during that second decade of my life as a predictable product of youth, inexperience, and my relatively privileged suburban background. To be sure, those factors drove my social and ethical confusion during those turbulent years.
But a more fundamental force was also at work. I know that because today, at age 38, and even though I’m aware of human cognitive biases and take them seriously, I continue to discover aspects of my worldview that are corrupted by unreason.
Why, despite my best efforts, do I keep unearthing nuggets of unreason buried in my belief system?
Because I’m a human being. And we human beings are primed to believe our own bullshit.
The Bullshit of History
Before we get into the implications of our bullshit - yours and mine - I’d like for us to put our bullshit inquiry into perspective. I love perspective. And the best source of perspective is history. In this case, evolutionary history.
#HomoSapienStatusMatters
We (homo sapiens) are a social, and brainy, species of primate that evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands. (Evolutionary scientists often call the environment in which homo sapiens evolved, the ancestral environment.) In the ancestral environment, one's status in the band's social hierarchy predicted how many offspring one would produce. And as ever, reproduction (i.e., ensuring one's genes make it to the next generation) was the name of the game.
Humanity evolved, therefore, to climb the various, and overlapping, social hierarchies that articulate our lives. We leverage our relationships with others to assuage this innate drive to increase our status. We do it directly and indirectly via both dominance and ingenuity. (Broadly speaking, this is what we call: politics.)
Of course, we can’t credibly reduce humanity to a mere hodgepodge of super star networkers and ruthless opportunists. I’m not suggesting that we try.
I’m saying that to successfully exist as a human being (certainly if one plans to reproduce) is to exist successfully alongside other humans - either by dominating them or by peacefully coexisting with them. This is fundamental to human nature and it's the result of ancient evolutionary pressures.
Happily, in 2020, a person need not sit atop a social hierarchy in order to successfully reproduce. Still, our drive to enhance our social status relative to others is as strong today as it was in the ancestral environment.
We’re all Damn Liars
A central feature of humans' drive for status is a powerful capacity for deception. Somewhat ironically, this human tendency toward dishonesty is directly related to our capacity for cooperation. True, humans lie with the goal of cheating others outright (like a conman). More commonly, though, we humans use deceit as tool to convince others to cooperate with us.
When we’re looking for a job, for example, we don’t embellish our resumes so that we can rip off employers outright. We embellish so we’ll appear a bit more qualified than we really are and employers will hire us (cooperative, social behavior).
Likewise, men don’t say they’re 5’11 on dating websites, even though they’re really 5’9, because they plan to rob their potential mates. They do it to convince potential mates to like them (cooperative/mating behavior).
Now then, if the regularity and ease with which we lie to each other surprises you, then the extensive and elaborate lies we tell ourselves ought to be downright astonishing.
Many evolutionary scientists maintain that the reason we humans so readily deceive ourselves is related to our innately social nature and our coincidental drives to climb social ladders. What better way to convince others of our virtue than to genuinely believe that we’re virtuous, right? The most successful liars believe their own lies.
In any case, our appetite for self-deception primarily manifests in our inner narrative. You don’t know what I mean by “inner narrative?” OK. Consider the following scenario:
* Alarm goes off at 07:30 on Monday *
Me: “jesus, Christophe, what the hell were you thinking? Of course watching that last episode of Star Trek kept you up too late. Argh! Why do you do this to yourself?! Well tonight I’m going to bed early, for sure.”
* Alarm goes off at 07:30 on Tuesday *
Me: “DAMN! How the hell did you let this happen again?!’
This scenario is contrived (anyone who knows me knows that I’m never up at 07:30). But we’ve all had these kinds of conversations, haven’t we? Who the hell are we talking to?
These are our inner narratives - the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. They appear critical to the subjective experience of being a self in the human sense.
The problem is that our inner narratives are frequently inconsistent with reality. Not because there’s anything wrong with us. It’s that in any given scenario (including the most mundane, day-to-day scenarios) we have incomplete information. And while our minds do a remarkable job of supplying the missing information (via reasonable guesses, assumptions, etc.), that information is often inaccurate and it’s almost always self-serving.
Why Should We Care?
Before we explore the “why” let’s get clear about the “what.” So far, we’ve determined that:
We humans each use combinations of (genuine or feigned) altruism, and outright dominance, to enhance our status relative to one another.
Meanwhile, we deploy various brands of deception to convince other people, and ourselves, that we’re virtuous and that our intentions are altruistic.
We should expect, therefore, that:
Most human beings spend much of their time deceiving themselves, and others, without realizing they’re doing so;
Since literally everyone is deceitful, and since we’re all part of “literally everyone,” we’re as susceptible to self-deception as anyone else; and therefore
Our beliefs about the world are often inaccurate.
These subtle deceptions manifest in many ways. It’s well documented, for example, that in the workplace, we tend to overestimate our competence relative to our coworkers.
Let’s say that my boss, Jane Do, summons me and my co-worker, Dane Jo, into her office to review the results of a project we’ve been working on. Dane and I contributed more-or-less equally to the project and we’re equally accountable to Jane for the outcome. Let’s further suppose that, despite our anxiety about the review, Jane is very impressed with our work. She heaps praise upon us. And Dane and I are beaming as the meeting adjourns.
Once the backslapping and guffaws abate, Dane and I retire to our respective offices. Back in my office, I pause to bask in the glow of the praise Jane lavished upon me. I’m confident that I earned that praise with my intelligence, attention to detail, and general aptitude.
And Dane?
Well, Dane is a nice enough guy and he’s certainly a reliable co-worker.
I like Dane.
But he’s also riding my coattails. Sure, Jane praised both Dane and me for our work on the project. But whatever praise Dane might’ve received from Jane was unearned, and incidental, good luck.
I’m sure you can see now the problem I’m highlighting in this example.
We (you and I) are likely to attribute our successes to our skill and ingenuity even as we attribute our rivals’ successes to luck and slyness. Similarly, we attribute our failures to bad luck even as we attribute our rivalry’s failures to their ineptitude. (This tendency derives from the cognitive bias is known in psychology as the self-serving bias.)
But the human capacity for self-deception isn’t limited in manifestation to petty workplace rivalries. It also influences our deeply-held beliefs. After all, if human cognitive biases can trick us into unfounded trivial beliefs, we shouldn’t be too surprised that those biases can also trick us into unfounded meaningful beliefs. Right?
The takeaway is that, at bottom, our beliefs about the world, even if sincerely held, are often wrong.
Once we grapple with that uncomfortable reality it’s easier, logically and ethically, to empathize with our fellow sentient beings. If my closely-held beliefs are fallible and subject to criticism, just like anyone else’s, it’s a lot easier to concede that I’m fundamentally the same as my fellows.
Still, deconstructing my own inner-narrative (i.e., the story I tell myself, about myself) can be really disconcerting. The experience is akin to that of a kid who just found out there’s no Santa Clause. Like that 9-year-old child (I’m actually not sure at what age kids stop believing in Santa Clause), I often struggle to accept that my particular belief about the world isn’t based in fact. That can be really destabilizing.
But there’s hope.
A Proposed Solution
Fortunately, there exists out there an evidence-based, relatively bias-free, approach to making sense of our lives. We can discover that approach if we courageously commit ourselves both to:
Trusting good ideas like: rationality and science.
Rejecting bad ideas like: faith, superstition, conventional wisdom, and dogma.
I propose that we leverage good ideas, those based in rationalism, to fashion a coherent proto-philosophy for living in 2020. My working name for this idea is: Moderate Rationalism (MR).
MR is an Expression of Secular Humanism
The attentive reader might cry out at this juncture, “but wait, Christophe, aren’t you just describing Secular Humanism?” You, my attentive friend, have a point. A reason-based epistemology is at MR’s core, whether you want to call it Rationalism, Rational Humanism, or Secular Humanism.
How is MR different?
The answer is that it isn’t. MR is not a philosophy in competition with Secular Humanism. Rather, MR aspires to be the Secular Humanist’s practical guide for addressing real world conundrums. MR approaches that challenge in a way that’s more granular than the broad prescriptions advanced in the various humanist manifestos.
To make an analogy, if Secular Humanism were statutory law, MR would be the implementing regulations.
MR is Moderate
The proto-philosophy is Moderate in that it expressly rejects unexamined and ideological dogma. Of any kind. Defining, “ideological,” sufficiently for MR purposes could probably occupy me for a whole other essay (note to self). We can be sure, however, that MR wholly rejects Right wing or Left wing authoritarianism. MR is, moreover, uninterested in ideologies that are anchored in deontology rather than in measurable outcomes. So under even the vaguest definition of "ideological,” MR rejects right wing:
Anti-science agendas.
Anti-secular agendas.
Intolerance of minority interests and positions.
Fetishization of capitalism and markets.
The philosophy also rejects left wing postmodernism, left wing moral relativism, and the left wing blank slate philosophy under which:
Humans are infinitely malleable; and
There’s no human nature apart from social constructions.
(Let’s be clear about one thing before we move on: I’m not saying, even implicitly, that modern right wing ideologies are morally or ethically equivalent to modern left wing ideologies. They aren’t. For example, and it’s a shame that I have to make this point so explicitly: AntiFascists (Antifa) are morally superior, in principle, than Neo Nazi fascists. And the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Ferguson were morally superior to the Unite the Right demonstrators in Charlottesville. There aren’t “very fine people” on “both sides” of racism and fascism.)
MR is Rational
This proto-philosophy is (among other things) an ethical and moral perspective grounded wholly, and unapologetically, in evidence-based conclusions about our world. In that sense, it’s empirical and rational.
(Note that I’m using terms like “philosophy” and “rationalism” here in an informal sense. I don’t hold a degree in philosophy and I don’t claim to be a philosophy expert otherwise. I don’t seek, in establishing MR, to engage career philosophers on the merits of their craft or on the merits of particular philosophies or philosophers. To embark on a journey like that would be, for me, an exercise in futility.
The MR idea is influenced, heavily, by the titans of philosophical thought as well as by the the forward-most thinkers in several other disciplines. But I’m not here to win over tenured professors. Rather, I want to drag all the brilliant content out from the porticos of academia. I want to talk about what that content can tell us about living life gainfully, ethically, and rationally, in 2020.)
Conclusion
I arrived at the Moderate Rationalism concept almost accidentally. I think of it as a sort of proto-philosophy. It’s rooted in the humanistic ideas I've explored as I’ve tried to make sense of the world, and myself, since trumpism. (For a full discussion on how trumpism has impacted my perspective, see my post titled, Generator.)
Still, trumpism isn’t why I’m committed to finding answers to life's big questions. The project of discovering what constitutes a good life, and trying (often in vain) to live according to those principles, has been a central feature of my life for many years - out of necessity.
As a younger man, I faced some painful challenges that forced me to make dramatic changes to my life. Part of those reforms involved committing myself, explicitly, to self examination. And more importantly committing myself to self-improvement. (I’ll talk more about those pivotal years in my life in future posts.)
I’m not claiming, of course, that I’m in any way superior to all people out there who are working to improve themselves or their lives. I’m saying instead that I happen to be among the relative few who’ve confronted death’s door and who’ve discovered that their physical and psychological well being is connected directly to a commitment to self examination. (Again, I’ll talk about that in upcoming posts.)
Having said that, the emergence of trumpism in 2015 certainly forced me to face myself in an unprecedented way. I had to come to terms with a version of America that I’d thought had passed into history well before my birth. It’s been a quest for solace. And in prosecuting that quest, I’ve:
Read a lot of books.
Interviewed a lot of people.
Spent a lot of time meditating, reflecting, and writing.
I’ve concluded that the best counter offensive a relative nobody like myself can muster to the anti-enlightenment assaults of our age (besides vote, etc.) is to:
Live according to a philosophy based, explicitly, on rationality.
Talk to anyone who will listen about living according to a philosophy based, explicitly, on rationality.
One of this blog’s goals is to build out, ever more precisely, the tenets of the proposed Moderate Rationalism philosophy. Or to disprove its viability - if that’s where the evidence leads.
I’ll accomplish this by applying principles of rationality to my own life. Like a mad scientist who insists on injecting herself with her own dangerous concoction. I hope that JWF will be, among other things, the space in which we discuss the results of those experiments. We’ll find out if humankind can (or should) live a life of disciplined rationality. In the process, we’ll perhaps gain perspective on ourselves and our lives. And we’ll get closer to understanding why we humans do what we do.
Look, I get that I’m not doing anything revolutionary here. Many other people (people far smarter than me) have made similar arguments (in blogs far better than mine). I’m neither a trained evolutionary scientist nor a trained philosopher.
But I also don’t care about any of that.
I’m committed to discovering and communicating - impelling - what evolutionary science and rationality can tell us about how best to run our planet and our individual lives. I, for one, am sick of living in a civilization where dogma and unreason reign so supreme that actual adults elected far, far-right politicians in the U.S. and the U.K. and across the industrialized world. No civilization that’s confronting 2020’s reality, on reasonable terms, could conceivably commit such a colossal misstep.
Just Word Fallacy and Moderate Rationalism are, in short, the refuge for those of us who know humanity can do better.
I hope you'll join me.
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Postscript
The image associated with this post is a jet engine. A jet engines function by (among other things) using an impeller to intake and compress air to produce thrust.
