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Where Can We Find Knowledge?
During one of Ricochet’s big Same Sex Marriage debates during the run-up to Obergefell, @jamesofengland said this:
I think I’ve been clear that I don’t share Augustine’s confidence in specific bad outcomes […] I tend to think of Burke and Hayek as telling basically the same story, a story that I’ve been boringly obsessive about for decades now (before law, I took theology up to a Master’s degree, spending quite a lot of that time dealing with Derrida and Pseudodionysus, who I also believe to be in the same epistemically humble tradition). […] It’d be good to shift the conversation in that direction, because if the subject isn’t [Same Sex Marriage], but Hayek, I’ll have [another Ricochet gentleman] on my side, along with [a Ricochet lady] and [a third Ricochet gentleman]. I don’t know how much Augustine really backs that side, but I think [another Ricochet lady] has a higher epistemology (a sense that we can know more about the world than Hayek thought), meaning that we could pretty completely reshuffle the teams.
Ever since then, I’ve wanted to start a conversation on the subject. Initially, I wanted to write a long essay explaining and defending my own views, but, frankly, I don’t want to put much time into it. Maybe it’ll be a better conversation anyway if I keep it short! So short it is.
My View
Roughly, my view is that it’s easier to know things about family and the structure of human society than it is to know about economic productivity and the structure of the economy.
In other words, it makes sense to be a Hayekian on macroeconomics, but something else (a Thomist or Augustinian, perhaps) on family and community and friendship. And perhaps a third thing (say, a Calvinist or a Pseudodionysian) on theology, and an as-yet-unnamed thing on something else.
One Reason It Matters
This is one of the reasons I (and, no doubt, others) are SoCons and FiCons but not exactly libertarians: We fear action taken on the inevitable human ignorance of economic matters even as we also fear inaction on social matters where knowledge is possible.
Explanation
I’m not giving a proper argument and haven’t properly thought this through, so I’ll offer just this brief explanation in hopes of starting a conversation from which proper arguments may emerge.
Let’s contrast the production of a human and of a pencil. (Any old widget would do, but let’s stick with the classics!) No individual knows how to make a pencil. But most people know how to make a baby. (And many who don’t . . . find out before the second trimester.)
Now expand this a bit. Pencils are one thing. The healthcare system of a -hundred-million-person country is another. At that level, the knowledge of how to achieve economic productivity moves even deeper into the realm of impossibility for the individual.
What about human relationships? Well, some relationships have an aspect that becomes more complex in the aggregate. (National networks of churches or of chess clubs, for example.) But some things don’t change a bit. For any particular pairing of citizens, how to make a baby is the same, no matter how big the economy gets. For any particular romantic pairing of citizens, things are pretty much the same, again, no matter how big the economy gets. The basics of parenthood aren’t changed by the size of the economy, though though how birthday presents are procured for the kids gets more complex, along with some other details. Friendship is basically the same in a big country, and the same things make it work, things like humility, respect, honesty, and forgiveness. (Internet friendships, if they are friendships at all, might be an exception here.)
I also tend to think individual knowledge in one sphere tends to get easier over time, the other harder. Long ago, the Torah told us “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and Aristotle noted that there is no right way to commit adultery. Even now, I suspect (I admit I haven’t done the homework), careful social science would only confirm that adultery causes a lot of harm. Not to mention fatherlessness and other social ills.
But the process by which a widget is made gets more complex every day. It’s getting harder all the time to know how to efficiently make one and accurately price it.
A Disclaimer or Two
I mentioned above that this has something to do with being a SoCon rather than a libertarian. And so it does. But there are a lot of other details to consider and I’m only addressing one of the fundamental ideas that many SoCon-FiCon types probably have lurking in their brains.
Some SoCon-FiCon types probably don’t have it lurking there at all. And, after you work out what social situations are worthy of governmental interest, you might still be a libertarian!
And after you work out whether things that do merit governmental interest merit at from the states or the feds, and whether they’re Constitutional or not, there’s a lot of room to be be a libertarian of one sort or another — or something similar — if you think that kind of economic knowledge is a delusion for the individual but other kinds of knowledge aren’t.
So, I’m talking about knowledge here: not attacking libertarianism or saying anything about same-sex marriage.
So I’ll stop the opening post now. Hope to hear from you in comments!
Published in Religion & Philosophy
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that this is quite right. I have a much better appreciation of the awfulness that is Unitarian Universalist polyamorous relationships, marriages in which one spouse regularly tells people that he’s in an open marriage and the other spouse insists that they are not, and such because I’ve spent time with people who lived those hells. I feel like I have a slightly better understanding of abusive working class/ benefit scrounging family relationships from friends who find themselves in that sector of society. They appear to be genuinely different, and different from my parents marriage and from mine. I don’t really have any familiarity with the international dynamics of African American families. @iWe ‘s family seems awesome, as has every large Mormon family I’ve come into contact with, but I suspect that they would also be good at avoiding the publicization of problems if they had them.
Diversity presents us with problems in understanding the relationships of others and it is extremely hard to overstate the degree to which America is diverse. I’m sure that there are all kinds of relationships that are significantly different from the ones I have a degree of familiarity with that are distinct for reasons that I couldn’t even guess at.
This can be important for policy reasons. Ben Carson’s medical plan involves people being given money and then having family members help them out when they blow through their funds with either expensive illness or a series of problems. It’s an important and, so far as I can tell, unaddressed problem that some sick people exist who do not have a family that feels particularly charitable toward them. Daryl Perry stood on the Libertarian Debate stage next to Johnson and argued for a charity based approach to care for the elderly on the basis that we all give to charity and none of us would let grandmas starve, apparently unaware that he was within arm’s reach of a guy who does not give to charity. I mention these examples as unusually obvious ones, but quite a lot of social policy comes with assumptions about how families work that may not be true in all settings. To use a more serious example, child protective services often follow laws or internal guidelines with assumptions that do not apply well to particular families.
In circumstances where people are claiming knowledge of contested things, I think that Jamie’s version is more useful. For instance, KC is not claiming to think that he knows that Arsenic will not be helpful. We can discuss epistemology at a number of levels, but it is generally helpful to try to match one’s interlocutor’s level where one can (often one can’t, such as when one’s point is that they’re missing a more fundamental level issue).
Since the conversation has headed that way, I’d like to present once more my favorite piece on the subject, which I suspect I’d recently talked about on the thread quoted. Megan McCardle on Hayekian thought and divorce. In short, those who are socially conservative in the sense that they apply conservative (as in, in the school of Burke) principles to social issues really do seem to me to have a better handle on the knowledge problem than either the sorts of social conservatives who reason from first principles to apply a utopian vision or the sorts of libertarians who reason from first principles to apply a utopian vision.
I should maybe clarify that it is my view that her argument against SSM (which she later recanted) held considerably more power when it was not yet the law of the land. Even if we were to overturn Obergefell and pass laws restoring traditional marriage in 50 states, it’s my sense that we would retain much of the harm done to the country by SSM, and that we would do more harm still if we were to fight over the definitions for decades more. One of the primary harms that SSM appears to bring to me is a destablization of the concept of marriage, an effect that is otherwise correlated with inferior outcomes in other areas (the more one questions an underpinning of society, the less one is likely to feel bound by it, to the general detriment). Even putting the benefits to same sex couples aside, it’s not obvious to me that a fight that achieved minimal levels of success (and I find it hard to imagine a fight achieving major levels of success) would be better than living with an outcome that is somewhat destructive to society. Obviously, there are other fights (government intrusion on religious liberty and such) that are good and necessary for SoCons to engage in, but the fight to prevent or slow SSM on these sorts of grounds seems like one that has mostly passed.
Well put…
Careful. Don’t go postmodern on us.
So are you suggesting that I can actually know something that isn’t even true?
Or are you just saying that we can speak imprecisely with our interlocutors?
(I think you’re saying the latter. I might agree–on rare occasions.)
If I ever do that, it’ll be like Jean-Luc Marion–i.e., Augustinian and Nicene and orthodox and totally awesome.
Great comments! Unfortunately, I don’t understand how they’re supposed to relate to what I was talking about in the opening post.
Again, a lot of good commentary around here! I’m still not sure how this is meant to be an objection to anything I’ve said.
It was meant as an objection, wasn’t it?
Upon a bit more thought, it reads like an objection to some specific strong version of the general idea I’m getting at–which I might not hold if I could sit down with a cup of tea and think through different possible versions of it.
Good stuff. Same one you linked back in the day, if I’m not mistaken–probably 550 comments earlier.
Half a moment. You’re presuming that there is a knowledge problem for social and family issues, right? And that it’s about as big a problem for those issues as it is for knowing how to efficiently produce and accurately price a widget?
Why should I believe it’s that big?
Good comment! I would need a new morning and a nice cup of tea to be able to sit down and think about whatever or how much I agree, and why or why not. But a great comment for sure!
I think that scale affects our knowledge of human relationships that one is not a part of. To put it another way, federalism or localism often makes sense with this stuff.
I’m not sure how to quantify how big a problem it is; the metrics here seem to present some pretty intense issues. Nonetheless, I would say that, yes, human relationships seem more chaotic and hard to understand than pencil manufacturing. I recognize that the details of pencil manufacturing are beyond the ken of man, but I believe that the same thing is true of the details of social networks beyond those that are immediate to us.
Perhaps you’re thinking of all people as being male; I agree that men tend to follow basic rationality. Dem chicks be crazy, though, and that’s half of us! ;-)
Seriously, I tend to think that as one gets away from hard numbers and towards emotions, modeling becomes harder. To use McCardle’s example of divorce, we probably could have projected that making it easier and more common would reduce the stigma, just as we can predict that decreasing the price of something will increase sales of that thing, but there’s essentially nothing that one can go on to model how much the stigma would be reduced by, whereas one can often model widget manufacturing. I’ve spent a moderate amount of time messing with other people’s business models, and they tend to be sufficiently objective that two teams drawing up separate models will often find that they look kind of similar. I’m not sure that that’s the case with social issues. I was having a conversation with @iwe last week in which he was suggesting that matchmakers got things wrong by seeking similar people, when you often want opposites; that’s a social science as mature as anything that exists, and the deepest fundamentals are still in doubt.
You’re very kind. If you do find it persuasive, post-tea, then I apologize for moving you into a category of people with few friends, although I imagine that your charm will help you to overcome barriers put up by any disagreeable views I sell you on.
I guess what I should have said is that when someone else uses words informally, it’s generally best to try to match the definition being used. There are exceptions for when the definition rather than the concept really matters, but I think that I’m with Jamie here that his point would have been less clear if he’d answered in a more formal manner. Which is to say, yes, the latter.
Woo hoo! I can’t do that very often.
(Maybe because I’m too philosophical, or just a particular kind of weird. Or maybe I’ve noticed that when people talk imprecisely it is the concept and not just the definition that is problematic, as when people say a some claim about an alleged objective truth is “true for you but not for me” and really seem, upon interrogation, to believe it–even though it’s impossible.)
Half a moment: When I said “precisely nothing,” I was thinking that there simply was not such a big scale–not that a larger scale wouldn’t make it harder to know.
I think we may have had a couple of misunderstandings, including this one and the one two comments down.
Ok, so when relationships do have a bigger scale (i.e., large extended families), we have a harder time knowing things about them, right?
Sounds good. I expect that’s true. Still, compared to how to efficiently make and accurately price a widget, it’s a lot easier to know about some of those things–empirically, via the experiences of others, as you described.
(I think I figured out the confusion. You said something about how much better you knew them, and your point was that you had to rely on others–i.e., that it’s harder to know by yourself–but I was focused on the part about you knowing.)
Indeed. If we talk about all human relationships, in all their complexity–especially since some of our relationships are themselves economic!
But marriage, romance, parenthood, friendship–do they ever reach a level of higher-level complexity even remotely resembling economic complexity?
I suppose I should clarify what sort of higher-level complexity I mean. Sure, individuals are complex, and their personal reactions more so; there’s a reason therapists exist! Even words said at breakfast are deep and murky waters.
But I’m talking about higher-level complexities.
I.e., we know a few things about these relationships: kids need fathers, kids need mothers, adultery kills marriages, kids shouldn’t be beaten by drunken fathers, etc. Those truths shine through, even if the people involved are awfully complex. And that knowledge doesn’t disappear just because we live in a big society.
Well, to be honest, I probably will be hopelessly busy and distracted again and won’t even look at it in the morning–unless a new comment with a Ricochet alert brings it to my attention.
My Grandfather died in 1964, when my mother was quite young. She turned out okay. Kids don’t need fathers, they benefit from fathers. Likewise, adultery is not uniformly fatal for marriages. Like embezzlement for businesses it’s a lousy thing, but how it turns out in specific is really, really hard to tell. If you talk to the victims of adultery, they are often surprised themselves. The children of abusive fathers sometimes grow up to be awesome people, sometimes awful people, but neither is predictable as a consequence of the beating at the time of the beating.
Even the personal relationships that one pays considerable attention to are highly unpredictable. If you’d told me that I’d marry my wife when we met, I’d have been happy (she was the first woman I fell for as an adult), but she would not have been. Undergrad me was a friend of hers, but not someone for whom she held any romantic feelings. A decade and a bit later, God was kind to me. Lots of people have similar stories about the degree to which their part of the network of society is unpredictable and unfamiliar to them. I, Pencil doesn’t make the same claim of economic matters; if you work in lumber you may not be able to make a pencil, but you’re probably moderately familiar with the lumber market.
In neither case is it impossible to muddle through (I suspect that I see more involvement for the Holy Spirit in both markets and relationships than you, since I see more of an active role for God in the macro than most people, but whatever the reason people generally seem able to find work and/ or relationships that get them through life).
Predictions like “massive embezzlement is definitely bad” or “massive adultery is definitely bad” are easy. “Minor embezzlement” or “a limited degree of excessive intimacy” are also bad, but less so. Knowing what to do about either, balancing the costs and effectiveness of policies that discourage them, seems harder. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the latter category is easier to cope with. As people say in the North of England, “there’s nowt so queer as folk”, and in that category of things that are not as confusing as people they would generally place microeconomics.
If I mistake not, these are lovely remarks tending toward clarification but not presenting any objections relevant to my own view.
So we shouldn’t generalize much and say all adulteries kill marriages or the like. Right on.
And microeconomical knowledge is easier than much knowledge about people and relationships. Fine. But I was talking about macroeconomical knowledge.
What’s wrong with the thesis that knowledge of social and familial ethics is easier than knowledge of how to manage a macroeconomical activity?
An analysis of an economy is tainted by the fact there are more decision-makers than can reasonably be factored. But a relationship, such as a marriage, really only has a small number of decision-makers – two. In an economy, the range of causes for decision might be infinite, but between two people, the number of causes is much smaller – small enough to be knowable.
Besides, it may be true that adultery isn’t always fatal to particular marriages, but those are for individual cases where other factors may overcome the damage. Fidelity can be restored. But it stands to reason that if the institution is based on fidelity, you can’t adopt a social policy that tolerates infidelity and expect the institution to remain intact.
We’re talking on the level of defining institutions, and how we should understand those institutions. It isn’t hopelessly utopian, it’s definitional. Just because some couples overcome aberrations of the definition doesn’t mean that we should change the definition.
I dig that, KC Mulville.
(Not that I might not be able to quibble if it were a new morning with a cup of tea!)
@saintaugustine So, if I am following you, what you are saying is it is easier to know what a family is and what works best in aggregate for a family then it is to know how to produce a pencil or any other widget.
The basics of Human relationships don’t get more complex then the people involved while even the creation of something simple like a pencil is actually enormously complex. Do I have that right?
So the consequence of this it is easier to advocate for a good relationships or perhaps you mean it is simply easier to know what a good relationship or a good family structure than it is to know a good economic system?
If that is the claim I think it is obviously true. Every relationship has trade offs and people manage certain trade offs better than others and every decision is about managing your trade offs in the best way possible. I believe it easy to know that two individual people could make an open marriage work and know that if open marriage was the model that an entire society aspired to that it would be a disaster for that society.
Better yet to say that what we think we know is rarely something that everyone else agrees upon. The real question here is how do you justify imposing (by force of law) what you think you know, on other people who don’t agree with you.
I don’t think Auggie has really offered his answer to that question as yet, so I am reluctant to jump into this argument. All I will say is that human relationships, whether romantic, friendly, or economic, are far too varied and complex to be managed effectively by one-size-fits-all solutions imposed by some central-planning authority.
Even if we can identify some principle that is widely agreed-upon (such as kids are better off being raised by two loving, rational, and non-violent parents), the method of reaching that goal will be the subject of widespread disagreement, and any one-size-fits-all solution will certainly be wrong for some people.
Thanks for the comment! That’s pretty close to what I’m getting at. A couple of notes, however.
Probably, but to be sure I need to confirm what “in aggregate for a family means.” I think you mean something like this: What Auggie is saying is that it is easier to know what a family is and know some reliable generalizations about what works for families than it is to know how to efficiently produce a widget.
Yeah, that’s right.
I wouldn’t say that stuff is easier than knowing a good economic system. That stuff is easier than knowing how to manage an economy efficiently. But you can know a good economic system: the free-market one, where no one tries to manage more than his own small part.
Well put! I’m not sure I agree that it’s better, but I agree that it’s good!
Very carefully, i.e. with very good reasoning and a huge degree of caution when the reasoning is less than very good.
Well, if you mean that there is not even one one-size-fits-all rule that should be imposed on everyone, I withhold agreement. But I do concur that there are at least very few of them.
Aquinas would agree with this, you know. (If I’m not an actual Thomist I’m at least pretty similar.)
(What might be a one-size-fits-all rule that should be imposed on everyone? Maybe something like “Never commit adultery on penalty of being at a disadvantage if your spouse divorces you.”)
Very likely. (Again, I do believe Aquinas would agree, or would agree with a very short list of exceptions.)
It’s way better if most or all of these rules are left to States rather than feds, of course. And more Constitutional!
Thank you, anonymous Editor!
(It did need a picture, too. A light bulb is good. It would have been pretty ugly if I’d added a picture of knowledge.)
But that’s the difference between a relationship and an institution. We’re talking about marriage, not relationships, and we cannot equate the two. Relationships can be infinitely complex, but an institution like marriage has a publicly agreed-upon definition.
Marriage isn’t merely about the two spouses. If you want to live in an infinitely complex relationship, go ahead. But when you get married, you’re asking the rest of society to treat you and your spouse in a defined way – namely, that you are one legal unit, jointly and severally responsible for any children and property. Your relationship may be infinitely complex, but the marriage covenant isn’t. The marriage covenant is public and therefore doesn’t vary from marriage to marriage.
Marriage is not a merely private form of relationship. It’s also a legal and social covenant with the rest of society about how your relationship functions in society.
We should probably emphasize this region of general agreement around here: Even granting a relatively high degree of knowledge of familial and social ethics, and even granting that some of that knowledge supports governmental intervention of one sort or another, . . . most of us would be delighted if the government didn’t help at all but opted instead to stop doing harm!
Right there, Auggie, you come very close to defining my brand of libertarianism. Government force should be used with great caution, and only where very strong reasoning (and empirical evidence) demonstrates that the use of that force will prevent some greater harm. Laws against murder, kidnapping, and theft are justified because it is clear to almost everyone that protecting the rights of life, liberty and property is sufficiently important to justify the loss of the individual’s “freedom” to kill, kidnap and steal.
Where we may disagree is on whether some central planning authority is smart enough and knowledgeable enough to reason its way to a set of rules that are sufficiently “good” as to justify taking away people’s freedom to order their own relationships. From what I know of history, efforts to do this have never worked. Never.
I suppose that another relevant question is, even if there is some theoretical central planning authority that could be trusted to do this, will that authority be the one in power when the government is elected by majority (or plurality) vote. As the current election demonstrates, the people so elected are not always the best and brightest.
KC @ #56,
Your argument was raised endlessly during the SSM debates (which also seemed endless), and I see no reason to relitigate it here. So I will offer only three very brief answers: (1) Nonsense. (2) Not my marriage. No way. Not the marriage of anyone I know either. (3) You could use that argument to justify any government regulation of any activity. Once the government steps in and starts regulating, you can say that it is no longer a private activity, but rather a socially recognized “institution” that serves a public purpose. The “proof” of this is the government regulation. Your reasoning is circular – because the government regulates the activity, the activity is a public “institution” and therefore the government regulation is justified. So your argument is not an argument against some form of marriage, but rather an argument in favor of tyranny, anywhere and everywhere.
That’s absurd. Funny how you immediately assumed that society equals government regulation, and then you launched into arguments against government. You’re chasing the wrong goose.
When two people get married in a church, for instance, are the congregation and pastor acting as government regulators? Of course not. Marriage is a social institution, but not a government regulation. There’s a difference, and the difference matters.
By your argument (that marriage is completely private between you and your spouse), why should anyone else “respect” your marriage? If the neighbor hit on your wife, you’d have no cause to complain, because after all, your definition of marriage only applies to you, not to anyone else. As far as you’re concerned, your marriage doesn’t bind anything or anyone.