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The Calculator & The Bible
Ross Douthat wrote a powerful piece last week that used the upcoming SSM ruling as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion about the history of social predictions and SoCons’ strong (if imperfect) record on the matter. I commend the whole piece to everyone, but this passage on the left’s increasing prejudice towards quantitative analysis — to the exclusion of all other modes of thought — stood out:
[T]he modern liberal mind is trained to ask for spreadsheet-ready projections and clearly defined harms, and the links that social conservatives think exist aren’t amenable to that kind of precise measurement or definition. How do you run a regression analysis on a culture’s marital iconography? How do you trace the downstream influence of a change in that iconography on future generations’ values and ideas and choices? How do you measure highly-diffuse potential harms from some cultural shift, let alone compare them to the concrete benefits being delivered by the proposed alteration? How do you quantify, assess and predict the influence of a public philosophy of marriage — whatever that even means — on manners and morals and behavior?
Of course, there is nothing in traditionalist thinking that precludes serious data dives; indeed, a traditionalist should hold that his positions will very much be validated by statistics, provided the right questions are posed and investigated dispassionately. Nor, for that matter, should a data-focused researcher be allergic to tradition, which — through the forces of trial, error, and selection — should be expected to form a great many gems that need only a little sunlight to shine. Indeed, Hayek went so far as to say in The Fatal Conceit that “all the benefits of civilization, and indeed our very existence, rest… on our continuing willingness to shoulder the burden of tradition.”
The fact is that thinking through a problem and working (or muddling) through one involve different faculties. Both are applicable to almost any imaginable circumstance, though the particulars of how — and in what proportion to each other — vary immensely with circumstance. Everyone knows that traditionalism can save us from some follies while leading us to others, but the same applies to empiricist modes of thinking as well.
Tradition and research work best when each is used to check and reexamine the others’ findings. If quantitative social research yields predictions that contradict well-established and successful traditions, that’s more than sufficient cause to go back and make sure the researchers made the correct assumptions and didn’t miss anything (Douthat makes a strong case for doing so with regard to many questions regarding sexual mores and marriage). On the other hand, the simple fact of something being tradition doesn’t automatically put it beyond empirical questioning (Douthat similarly points out that a great many of Robert Bork’s more dire predictions about these same subjects did not materialize).
Balance and judgement — as always — are very much in need.
Published in Culture, Law
I meant, for the politician, not Rick Rescorla. I fully agree professionals are exactly that.
Midge, you and I improvise in very different ways. If by “super-algorithmic” you mean that improvisation is going to result in some common loops -scales, repeats of leitmotif within the piece, thirds and fifths, repeats at different octaves, and elaborations on the existing harmonies -then we agree on the meaning, but I wouldn’t call that super-algorithmic. Every jam session may start with the same parts, but they never sound the same or end in the same place.
I’m not sure I actually like the analogy, but no one would claim that an engineer, upon finding out that the ground he is working on is softer than expected would just follow the plan as written, nor would they scrap the plan entirely and build something new. And to solve the specific problem they’ll pull solutions that worked in other plans -but that hardly makes them planned in this case.
While I am in general agreement with Rachel, it’s worth noting that this has been true for literal centuries at a stretch in the past. The entire era of “seen and not heard” from the 1700s-1900s saw parents ignore their children except for limited contacts at the beginning and end of the day. Entire schools of urban architecture were designed so that parents never needed to see their children -leaving them instead with maids, or maybe their mother (yes, this was the urban middle class of the era, but we’re talking about the urban middle class of our era, too). Mary Poppins, I discovered when learning about urbanization, is astonishingly accurate in this regard, and Mr. Banks’ transformation at the end of the movie is thoroughly modern, not Victorian or Edwardian.
I agree that there is a difference, but I don’t think it was in the celebrating and scorning. Rather, children of the era were expected to be children who would eventually become adults -and thus needed supervision to make sure they didn’t kill themselves, but otherwise were expected to be children until they became adults (of course, poor children would need to go to work early). Then they entered the adult world as equals-ish. Modern children are oft vanity projects of their parents.
How can you not call that super-algorithmic? Those “common loops”, adherence to common chord progressions, and so on, are algorithms.
I used to hold improvisation contests in the chapel basement with a superstar computer-scientist who confessed two things:
What he did have was a very orderly mind, and a good memory for all the “tricks of the trade” as described in music-theory textbooks.
He regarded my innate musical intuition as “mysterious” and “other”. I regarded his total lack of intuition, but proficient implementation of what he had been explicitly taught, as likewise “mysterious” and “other”.
Our results, though, were of equal quality.
I’m rusty now, because I have stopped compulsively practicing improv, which for me was absolutely necessary to maintain that purely intuitive understanding. But having learned some music theory myself, I now realize that he and I were never that different.
Have you ever read about Emmy? The first cyborg composer. Killed by her creator, alas.
What do you call the sheet music, then? Super-duper algorithmic? Those loops are the inputs, the ingredients, of improvisation. Their assembly is the improv.
Even Douthat gives the conservative/traditionalist position too little credit. Consider this graph of crime and incarceration rates:
What happened is obvious. Crime rates went through the roof, as traditionalists predicted. Then traditionalist/conservatives took over sufficiently to impose much more draconian penalties — remember “three strikes and you’re out”? That brought crime rates under control — though still at more than double 1960s levels — at a cost of millions of Americans stuck behind bars.
Yes, the folks behind bars are mostly young male criminals, who deserve to be there. But their lives would have gone very differently if the warnings of the traditionalists had not been ignored.
The obvious lesson that we should learn is that we should be very skeptical, and act slowly, on major social changes. So why do so many conservative opinion leaders support SSM?
No, just written-out algorithms.
Writing algorithms is one way to record them. Practicing them till you’ve learned them by heart is another way to record them.
(Also, some styles of sheet music have the expectation of improvisation built in. Figured bass, tablature, cadenza notations that just tell the artist to put in a cadenza, but don’t say what it should be…)
Well, I don’t concur, but I can’t think of a more basic point of departure from which we could logically settle the matter -nothing that you are saying here strikes me as demonstrating that improvisation is algorithmic in a meaningful way. Not even the cadenza point, which seems to me a striking departure from an algorithm, thus evidence cadenza it is not algorithmic.
What’s the source on that graph? Is it in absolute or per capita terms?
Um… how good are you at cadenzas?
Or, have you ever overhead one musician criticizing another’s choice of ornamentation/improvisation for not being period enough? Did you wonder to yourself, “How can improvisation have a period – it’s improvisation!” Or was it obvious that there are differing sets of improvisatory rules that, when internalized, yield different styles of improvisation?
I would like to hear more about how the American founders had an interpretation of human nature that was controversial and unproven.
The idea that a republic of the size of the United States could endure and survive was extremely controversial at the time. It’s called the American Revolution for a reason.
Yeah, it’s always worth recalling, this had never been tried before;–& the Founders had every intention of expanding.
But the theory of gov’t which Madison calls the deepest reflection on human nature did not strictly require a great republic. & parts of it were tested in Britain following the Glorious Revolution. By the time of the Founding, a new step in constitutional politics was being taken in Britain–Burke’s defense of partisan gov’t. Americans were comparatively backward, but incredibly daring. I’m not sure there ever was any regime more theoretical.
Argument 1:
Premise: Dadly virtues exist and benefit children.
Premise: Motherly virtues exist and benefit children.
Premise: SSM erodes further the connection of marriage to the goal of keeping mother, father, and their offspring together.
Conclusion: We can expect SSM to contribute to some harm to children.
Argument 2:
Premise: The premises of Argument 1 provide some support for their conclusion.
Premise: The premises of Argument 1 can be rationally endorsed.
Premise: Some people endorse Argument 1.
Conclusion: People who give a reason against SSM which is not an expression of animus exist.
I noted above the idea of anecdotal evidence.
My experience in life and here at Ricochet would press for another conclusion. It is not difficult to find married couples with zero children. Some of them have responded to my comments here in previous conversations.
Finding married couples with one or two children is easily done. These people have grasped the idea of the nuclear family and run with it. It is easier to avoid a clash with those who would limit the family size than it is to have that third, or fourth, or fifth, or sixth child.
One man I know, the father of a daughter, told me that he was not at all sure that he had enough love left over for another child. His wife, who did not like her daughter until the girl reached the age of 10, the age at which the young girl became interesting, wasn’t looking for more children anyway, so there they are.
I have six. Love expands, and each of my children is different although there were common needs, especially among the boys.
Yep, that’s me. Just like when the next hurricane comes I will not be gracious enough to the tell the global warming nuts that they were right all along. Because the hurricane would have come anyway.
Will you be gracious enough to apologize to the child brought into the world by third party reproduction who longs to know and be raised by his parents?
It is an excellent piece. I read it last week and I think it was partially why I put out that “Libertarianism is silly on cultural issues” post. For which I was roundly attacked. On social issues, pure Libertarianism – not what appears to be a conservatarian position – is hardly different than Liberalism on social issues. I’ll be roundly attacked again, but I stand by it. Libertarianism does not value tradition to the extent that it must be preserved through institutions of which the government has to be involved in, either through legislation or direct support.
I don’t think that answered the question of the interpretation of human nature. I think the answer there would be that it was controversial that a country can self govern given a flawed view of human nature. I would argue that it could only be self-governed because it relied on certain traditions that had been proven to work.
I feel sad for children who suffer. But children can and do long for a lot of things. Another child might long to have died a natural death in infancy, instead of being kept artificially alive at great cost to his parents and ultimately, even, to himself.
What do we say to that child? Only remaining alive by artificial means is not so very different from having come into existence by artificial means.
Doubtless the parents raising the artificially-conceived child will tell him the same thing that the parents who keep their child artificially alive do: “You are here because we loved you and wanted you and sacrificed for you. You should not be ashamed of your life.” But as long as the child prizes “nature” over “artifice”, that cannot be enough, can it?
Do you know why I hate the typical conservative arguments from nature? Because a big part of me is habituated to believing them, and to the extent that I do believe them, I cannot justify my own existence: I should have died in infancy.
Sure, Merina. First, you can apologize to the child for saying that the child never should have been born, and for treating the child as some sort of unnatural abomination; and then I’ll tell the child how badly I feel that he or she is being raised by loving adoptive parents instead of by the sperm donor who masturbated into a cup and never gave the child another thought after that. Of course, after you’ve said your part of it, the child will be crying too hard to listen to my part.
I’ve never heard a satisfactory response as to why surrogacy et. al. is all that different from my own life experience – I’m adopted. I’ve never “longed to know or be raised” by my biological parents. I don’t see any reason why biological parents are any more likely to be good parents than adoptive ones.
If traditions are so weak that they have to be sustained through government support and involvement – in other words, force – then they’re not really all that good at being “traditions” are they?
I think the contrast between Adam’s lack of longing, even though he knows he is adopted, and my bad habit of feeling guilty simply for continuing to be, even though I was conceived and birthed naturally (though that’s where the “natural” ends) is instructive:
Quite obviously, Adam is a better-adjusted person than I am, at least in this respect.
That I am prone to regret over my very existence likely has less to do with the manner in which I have been kept alive, and more to do with the temperament I inherited (from the parents who both spawned and raised me). The manner in which I have been kept alive merely gives the weaknesses in my temperament a pretext for asserting themselves.
And ultimately, molding and reforming my native temperament is my own responsibility. A SoCon in Full Judgment Mode would quite rightly tell me to Quit Whining and Suck It Up. Most SoCons are kinder than this, obviously. But the fact remains that, if they judged me this harshly, I would honestly believe they had a point.
The same SoCons, though, would find my temperamental weakness entirely justified if I had been artificially conceived rather than artificially kept alive? That makes no sense to me.
They are consistently being undermined, and yes traditions have usually established means to a good society that run counter to selfish desires. It takes wisdom to know the benefits of tradition, and the average Joe – especially a younger than fifty year old Joe – doesn’t usually have that wisdom. Is it a surprise that the 60s baby boom in their bulging youth demographics have destroyed tradition? No, that’s not a surprise at all.
Man, you’re really shaking my faith in conservative principles. You’re saying that the human impulse toward hedonism is SO STRONG that the only thing capable of checking it is the state? You mean civic societies, churches, parental instruction, communities…all the “mediating institutions” that conservatives bang on so much about…are all useless in the face of raw human desire? Well you’ve done it. You’ve convinced me. I’m now a progressive. All must bow before the state and submit their consciences to the rule of the enlightened elites who will explain to us exactlyl how we must all live. Wait…that was what you were arguing for, right?
Not necessarily hedonism but certainly self interest. And it didn’t happen over night. I’m looking at the last fifty years, and it’s been a slow destruction of western civilization. You’re mixing up Libertarian principles with Conservative principles. Edmund Burke articulated conservative principles with this:
Absolute liberty was never a conservative principle and I would argue not a principle of the American Founding Fathers.
I’m not arguing for absolute liberty. But if a people aren’t going to govern themselves (ie. come together for common purpose and toward a common goal) then they won’t respond well to being compelled to come together toward a purpose and goal they don’t share.
Man, you’ve got so little faith in the ability of people to come up with good ideas and stick to them. You’d almost wonder how that notorious tyrant and imperialist Jesus of Nazareth ever got his teachings to spread across most of the world.
This is why I find the Appeal to Nature so underwhelming.
I want to marry this comment and conceive and third party artificial baby with it.