. . . in relation to the unknown

My dad once said to me that philosophy is "highly destructive of certainty." Thus prompted, I want to enumerate some (possibly novel) observations about certainty which come from outside philosophy's academic silo. In doing so, I affirm the above remark as a serviceable mandate for philosophy proper, on top of whatever more parochial application it may find day-to-day; but I suggest, also, that the "destructive" bent is not philosophy's alone, and that, in fact, this oft-hidden "philosophical" potential of so many other intellectual and cultural practices is precisely what redeems them beyond their parochial circumstances of origin. In fact we may be "doing philosophy" while we're doing something else, whether we realize it or not; but this can be the case only if certain peculiar conditions are met therein.

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Christopher Lasch's chapter "The Soul of Man under Secularism," which is the final chapter of his The Revolt of the Elites, contains the following passage:

In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, not as a challenge to complacency and pride. Its ethical teachings are misconstrued as a body of simple commandments leaving no room for ambiguity or doubt. Recall Jung's description of medieval Christians as "children of God [who] knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves." . . .

What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people in the past were unacquainted with existential despair. The famous collection of songs written by medieval students preparing for the priesthood Carmina Burana would be enough in itself to dispel this notion; . . .

Or consider the varieties of religious experience analyzed by William James in his book of that name, . . . Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion.

(pp. 242-243)

For Lasch here, "religion" may be "a challenge to complacency and pride." Is it also destructive of certainty? He says only that certainty is not something that religion necessarily provides. Above all, he sees suggestions to the contrary as a kind of motivated slander issuing from the apostles of "secularism"; in other words, from his book's eponymous "elites." That is more so what is at issue in the above passage.

I happen to think he has a fair point here, despite being a deeply "secular" person myself. Still, it is curious to return to his previous book, The True and Only Heaven, and find the following:

The scientific worldview, [William James] argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. . . . Science . . . had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. . . . Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. . . . It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life.

(p. 289)

Now, if what today's mandarin technocrats "long" for is "to live in a risk-free world," perhaps they are not doing a very good job; perhaps they have become irreverrent of "verification" in precisely such matters as verification ought apply to most rigorously; perhaps they have found the sheer scale and scope of their scientific problems unamenable to control, and so simply given up on "verification" wherever insistence upon it threatens to slow their advance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for one, has powerfully argued this about forecasting and forecasters; and this, anyway, is what so often appears to have happened most any time a new technology is released into the world without its behavior being fully predictable or its effects fully foreseeable. (And how could they be?)

This latter book of Lasch's is subtitled "Progress and its Critics"; but the legitimate critique of scientific progress seems to me to issue from within science's own walls: the whole problem is an irreverence for "verification," not an over-reverrence for it.

But of course science cannot really be about "certainty" either, because true certainty doesn't exist. How often have all of us non-scientists (and non-doctors and non-economists) been scolded to that effect in recent decades? And, how selective and unidirectional this scolding has been!

The reality is that some houses of worship are full of bullheaded hypocrites, just as some institutions of higher learning give safe harbor to sloppy methodologists and bad-faith polemcists. As my undergraduate Music History prof, David Grayson, aptly put it, "It is the destiny of great music to be played badly."

It would be overstating the case to say that "science" or "religion" (or "philosophy" or "music") are necessarily "destructive of certainty," but all can have this effect, depending on how they are practiced. It is the element of practice, as conspicuously absent from Lasch's remarks as from those of his retrospective adversaries, which is ultimately determinative of such outcomes as he is concerned to examine. The Jamesian notion of "quality of belief" can never get us quite all the way to practice. That quality and that belief have to be realized somehow, realized in earthly deed and not just in thought or word. I think that "conduct of life" is not quite the same thing as what I mean to denote here by "realized."

The historical baggage of (and inherent tensions between) religion and science, so-called, make it nearly impossible to parse the issue of practice without adopting a certain degree of methodological philistinism. Again, a high "quality of belief" is of no help here; it more easily blinds us to some otherwise obvious conclusions if we do not take pains to circumvent it. But if we can manage at least this much, then we need not abandon any particular beliefs of our own in order to see, more broadly, that "quality of belief," when it is "realized" in "practice," can (and probably will) lead to the destruction of myriad easy certainties that had taken root prior to the "conversion"; we can see, in other words, that "philosophy" in its certainty-destroying capacity can be practiced through almost any cultural medium, but that not just any quality of belief or of practice will get us all the way there; in yet other words, a high quality of belief realized in exemplary practice can transfigure a seemingly benign earthly pursuit into a fully "philosophical" one; and of course, a low quality of belief or merely perfunctory practical activity makes this exalted outcome impossible, even when the "music" being "played" this way is widely conceded to be "great."

By "methodological philistinism" I mean merely to suggest a way of getting past the obvious fact, inconvenient for both sides of any fraught cultural conflict, that the belief and practice of most exponents, most of the time, is very low. The fallacy of incomplete evidence is always available to those wishing to show that their adversaries have sought mere "intellectual and emotional security" rather than the "challenge to complacency and pride" that comes from commitment and struggle. It would be notable if an author of Lasch's persuasion could show in more detail that this or that commitment to this or that lifeway really did coax a higher "quality" out of its exponents. Failing that, I have only my own haphazard experiences and anecdotes to fall back on, whereby all signs point unequivocally to Jung's purported caricature of Christians being, actually, quite a servicable portrait of every form of ostensible commitment I have run across face-to-face. It is very rare for anything else to be the case. I am suggesting, though, that there are certain commonalities among the committed exceptions, even though they may belong to incommensurable cultural forms, even to the most infamously incommensurable forms, "science" and "religion."

The aim here is not to deny the incommensurability but merely to notice what is wrong with Lasch's remarks, in spite of all that is right with them. James-as-rendered-by-Lasch has badly mistaken the scientific "respect for facts" for heedless worship of them. But to really "respect" facts is something else entirely. This is neither the exclusive burden nor the exclusive privilege of science. Respect per se is precisely the precondition for adeptness at any cultural practice.

Of course in a culturally pluralistic environment one had better be quite careful about paying such respect, about daring even to speak of such minimum "facts" as are necessary to establish preliminarily. How to handle this? There have been entire libraries filled with that kind of advice, and with chronicles of its refinement through practical application. There is nothing "childish" about this literature! Quite the opposite.

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The thing about rationalism that leads the same word to denote a properly philosophical school or lineage, a Silicon Valley subculture, and a potentially deal-breaking trait on dating apps, is precisely that it is destructive of certainty. It may be possible for certain entrepreneurial types to outwit others by reasoning their way to near-certainties which remain opaque to normie-brained competitors, but I'm not sure that this practical application, with its positivistic orientation and narrow scope, serves as a good proxy for everything that a good-faith social actor is confronted with in today's world-at-large. Lack of certainty is one thing, surfeit of illusion is quite another. Human beings are illusion-generating machines. Illusion is constantly being created anew, faster and in greater quantities than any proper "science" or "philosophy" can address it. Only the most pressing or salient matters can be addressed, or (eventually) address themselves; the rest of it skates.

Lasch's chapter of course begins in his dissent from those "1960s revolutionary" slogans which were "much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx"; in dissent from "the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, . . . leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art" (p. 234); from Wilde's notion that Christ was himself the "most supreme of individualists" (p. 232); and so on.

Lasch holds that "this kind of message" merely "confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd." "In place of self-denial and self-control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familiar, or religious obligations." (p. 233) "The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual's growth from childhood to maturity . . . made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition." (p. 237)

Wilde's particular rhetoric may well be worthy of the criticism, and so too may be most of the "artists" who have attempted to make good on it, but it seems, also, that this same criticism cannot apply equally or in the same form to any-and-all ways of being an "artist." Already in the suggestion that life-as-art might be "unconstrained" by any "obligations," something is very wrong. (Recall once again Dr. Grayson's quip.) Much great art of the past seems, at least in hindsight, to have been hatched under severe "constraints," a point which "cultural conservatives" and antimodernist critics never miss an opportunity to reiterate. If Lasch did intend to cast his lot with this tendency, he has buried that intent beneath myriad contrary innuendos.

The Danish radical artist Asger Jorn made a distinction between "art" and "critique" which is very relevant here. Jorn called art "primary action in relation to the unknown," whereas "critique" is "a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists." Of course another way of saying that something "already exists" is to say that its existence is certain. All certainty is precious! The mere "existence" of an artwork is unlikely to be an outright illusion, Warhol and Duchamp notwithstanding; but artworks bring along with them into existence all manner of illusions about the intent, meaning, and value of the work. Intent, meaning, and value are most of what matter about art to most people, but they are often inscrutable, even if the mere existence of the work and certain observations about its formal properties are beyond question. Hence disputes over intent, meaning and value account for most of what goes under the heading, Philosophy of Art.

I think it is because of this inscrutability and not in spite it that these aspects, far more so than the mere artifacts or formal properties themselves, are the customary bases of critique, even long after academic art criticism has contrived an identity for itself as "objective." A mere homage or counterfactual to the form-and-content of an existing artwork is hardly a critique at all unless it bleeds into questions of intent, meaning, or value. That is precisely what is "secondary" about a "secondary reaction," and what is "primary" about "primary action": the bases of critique are epistemically very tenuous, but they are taken as given "facts" about the artwork and about the artist. Conversely, the object of "primary action" is "the unknown," the un-certain; art as primary action pleads uncertainty about the intent, meaning, and value of its antecedents, even as it also is, as all contemporary art must be, a "reaction" to some already-existing forms and artifacts.

What would it mean for someone to underdraw the boundaries of their own certainty based on an illusion? It's not clear that this has any ramifications for Jorn's formulation. If an artist is truly uncertain in the moment of creation, and if that uncertainty is truly their object, then there is the possibility of "primary action." (Of course if a critic interviews them about their state of mind, or tries to read the resulting work for psychological tells, expect the illusions to come at you fast.)

What would it mean to overdraw the boundaries of one's certainty? This is more familiar, and it does, plainly, come to bear on "critique."

What is wrong with Lasch's chapter, then, is that he has merely presented the reverse caricature of the one he is writing against. He has committed the same fallacy of incomplete evidence. The fallacy is the same because certain contours of the problem are the same in religion, science, philosophy, and art: it is easy enough for outsiders to form a certain uncharitable view based on the lowest common denominator of practitioners; at this, the adepts are bound to cry foul, but there is little they can do to compel a higher quality of belief in their cohort.

It's a bit of a stretch (but only a bit) to rephrase Lasch in Jorn's terms: Wilde claimed to be extolling life lived as a work of art, but what he (or at least his postmodern pseudo-followers) ended up extolling, instead, was life lived as a critique of all the lives which had come before, a critique of the "common herd" toward which they now felt a "sense of superiority."

In yet other words,

disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modern pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets.

(pp 241-242)

Now, what is so wrong with a little bit of well-justified "disillusionment?" One problem, at least, with this "modern" form, besides its pridefulness, is that it is too knowing; it can only amount to "critique," to "secondary" rather than "primary" action. What does the knee-jerk Pollyanna rejoinder to "disillusionment" come down to but the suggestion that perhaps the pessimist does not fully know the good side of everything at issue? I tend to be pessimistic, that is, to think precisely the opposite; but I also tend to think that we do not actually manage to dig up very much of everything that is down there, good or bad, no matter how hard we try; hence the irreducible "unknown," what Donald Rumsfeld infamously called "known unknowns," in relation to which we "act" . . . if in fact that is how we understand ourselves to be acting . . . not even if but especially if we are "artists."

Conventionally the reversion to critique is parsed as a postmodern inevitability, the curse of life after-the-fact: too much has been done, too much is known too well; not enough is uncertain. But again, this can refer only to the mere existence of artifacts and formal properties. That is all that we really know about. We do not really know much about intent, meaning, or value. Most of what we know is that those things do not remain stable over time. We know that we ourselves may feel or react differently each time we confront the same inanimate physical stimulus, but we do not know exactly why. Instrumental musicians come to know this especially intimately through our peculiar kind of "practice." Yet when we encounter people who themselves do not have that kind of intimacy with the artworks or with the instruments, we constantly find them driven to desperately deny any uncertainty about intent, meaning, and value, because it is precisely (and perhaps paradoxically) these epiphenomena of artworks that people care most about. Here of all places is where audiences demand certainty, precisely where it is least forthcoming. Understandably, people are not too keen to simply abandon their most cherished intuitions to the undertow of passing time and the ever-accelerating churn of cultural relativity. But it is precisely this denial which imprisons us in critique. It is nothing about how much we really know, nothing about the instability of popular taste or about the arbitrariness of signification. Rather, it is our desire to know all, and to think that we already do. It is the old "childish desire" again. And so Lasch, though he overcorrects, also provides an indispenable piece of advice for artists and audiences, even for those of us who will never believe in God. Of course we cannot (must not) simply forget what we know; but given what precious little certainty is available to us, there really is no shortage of "unknown" arenas for "artists" to "act" in "relation" to. In fact there is an abundance of "unknowns," the more so the more exemplary our "practice" can be made. What is not abundant? The courage and intellect required to face up to it all; the same in art as in religion, philosophy, and science.

As usual, Ernest Becker has a passage which ties all of these disparate ideas together beautifully:

In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away, . . .   If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? . . .   We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.

. . . there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending. I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers.   . . . the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it.   . . .   There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.

(The Birth and Death of Meaning, pp. 120-121)

Scientific materialism, in other words, furnishes an ever lengthier and more detailed chain of proximate causes without ever quite landing on an ultimate cause. There is no danger here of going wanting either for "facts" or for "uncertainty," or for "existential despair" if that's more your bag. It's all in the mix. Blanket ascriptions of "childishness," then, just like blanket ascriptions of adept enlightenment or religious profundity, cannot really be made, at least not to entire academic fields or cultural institutions. These ascriptions can be made only to individuals. There is no social theory of art that can modulate the epistemics of that question. The "great music" of science can be played "badly" or it can be played well; a hobbyist group can give a jagged but rousing rendition, or a celebrity professional group can give a soullessly "perfect" one. Choose your own adventure.

William James cannot serve as proxy for the sum total of modern religious practice, because there have not been very many William Jameses (perhaps there has been exactly one) in the "modern" era. There was, however, at least one, just as there have been a few model rationalists, and indeed also a few (only a few) modern artists who have insisted, always, on acting in relation to the unknown, in Jorn's sense; or perhaps what these artists have done is merely understood, as good rationalists also do, when this is actually what they are doing, and when it actually is not.

COVID Confessional—On Maintaining Just the Right Amount of Skepticism

Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.

I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.

Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.

There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.

Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.

I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others¹. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.

For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.

There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.

One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.

1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.

I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)