Good books have reach. You know them because they stick around in your mind for weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. I reckon The Beginning of Infinity (2011) may just be such a book. I recommend it. Meanwhile, here are a few more highlights1.
All Evils Are Caused by Insufficient Knowledge
Why would anyone want to change a bad leader? At first glance, this might sound rather absurd: why would anyone not want that? Yet the question does conceal a certain assumption: hope. We hope that the next leader will be better - or, at any rate, less bad. However - why? Change is both risky and expensive, forecasts are often unreliable and the leadership selection process far from guaranteed to deliver the best outcome. Surely, better the devil you know?
This is an open question. People can, and often do, argue in favour of keeping bad leaders (if less often in their own countries). For Thomas Hobbes, to take a classic example, merely stifling opposition and crippling the economy were not reasons enough to depose an absolute ruler ("humane affairs cannot be without some inconvenience", he wrote). Constant change can be chaotic. And life in a power vacuum - "nasty, brutish and short". No sober advocate of change would seriously dispute that. Indeed, Karl Popper pointed out that democracy is not about electing the best possible leaders, but about changing leadership without bloodshed. There is no guarantee of improvement, only the promise of change. For Mr Deutsch, how a society settles the question of bad leadership is a special case of how it settles the question of progress in general. Both questions turn on a certain attitude: optimism.
For Mr Deutsch, optimism follows from the reality of living in a "computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation friendly" universe. If the only requirements for knowledge creation are conjectures and criticism, then the only requirements are human intelligence, mass, energy and evidence (for the purpose of testability). These are all things we have, so "problems are soluble". In other words, "if something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing [preventing] it from being technologically possible is not knowing how".
Whether or not you agree with Mr Deutsch that optimism is self-evident, it is certainly worth considering his notion that there can be no progress (and no democracy) without it. Change is not an unalloyed good. We may try to improve things and fail. Misunderstandings are ubiquitous and neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate can guard against them. Knowledge is fallible. Bad leaders emerge, mistakes happen and it takes optimism to push through when they do. Optimism is the hope that future choices will be better than present ones. Optimism is the willingness to accept the gamble of change. It is "a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success". It is a stance towards the future: the belief (perhaps the hope) that "all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge". At their core, progress and democracy are both expressions of optimism. Perhaps a better leader can be found, perhaps new ideas will prove better than existing ones, and perhaps problems are, in principle, soluble.
Progress / knowledge creation = creative conjectures + rational criticism. Democracy is a special case of progress, in politics. Both are expressions of optimism: they express the hope that change is likely to prove beneficial.
So whether a society is open or closed rests largely on how it settles the question of its optimism. "A pessimistic civilisation considers it immoral to behave in ways that have not been tried and tested many times before, because it is blind to the possibility that the benefits of doing so might offset the risks", writes with declared partisanship Mr Deutsch. An optimistic one, on the other hand, will be "open to suggestion, tolerant of dissent, and critical of both dissent and received opinion". Closed societies are static: they follow tradition. Open societies are dynamic: they embrace change. Closed societies discourage creativity and criticism, open societies encourage them2.
Moreover, both tendencies are self-perpetuating. Open societies expect change to bring about improvement. Consequently, they encourage creativity and criticism, which does (eventually) bring about improvement, and this confirms their original assumption. Closed societies, on the other hand, fear that change leads to decline. Consequently, they discourage creativity and ban criticism, which in turn makes the emergence of bad ideas more likely, and this confirms their original assumption. Bad ideas are more likely to emerge in closed societies because without a tradition of critical thinking, they are left vulnerable to false and harmful conjectures. Besides, "almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic". So in a closed society, change is more likely to lead to decline because "in the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage".
Progress relies on creativity and criticism. Creativity is important, but criticism is more important still, for it is our best mechanism for detecting and eliminating errors. In the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage.
Side note on "I told you so". I rather enjoyed Mr Deutsch's deconstruction of why the answer "I told you so" is bad. It is bad because it could be used to "explain" anything (see point about good explanation needing to be precise, in part one). It is bad because it answers the form of the question rather than its substance: it focuses on who asked it, rather than what was asked. It is bad because it reinterprets a request for true explanation as a request for justification. It is bad because it confuses epistemological authority (which does not exist3) with human authority, meaning power. And, finally, it is quite dangerous because it implies that through such power, it stands outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism. So yeah - fuck you, Mr Adult.
Side note on emotional triggers. A short comment on his observations around the mechanisms static societies (or static subcultures within societies) employ in order to suppress change. They are the usual mechanisms employed to prevent deviation from the norm: triggers of uneasiness, embarrassment and shame, together with positive triggers (such as pride and endorsement) which can be used to reward conformity. Moreover, there is the mechanism of socialising children to derive their sense of selves from enacting that society's memes. From then on, such people "not only enact those memes, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them". Psychology has shown that a strong sense of self (identity) is correlated with feelings of high self-esteem, purposefulness, connection and love; so bundling a person's identity with the need to conform to certain norms can be pretty effective. I sometimes wonder - is doing so infringing on a child's right to freedom or is it a requisite part of creating a new person? A bite for thought.
Side note on communication. Finally, I enjoyed his argument that communication is an act of creativity. It goes like this. Memes cannot be downloaded from one mind to another like software or inherited like genes. Memes spread by being enacted. Person A enacts a meme, Person B observes Person A's behaviour and tries to guess what the meme might be from this observation. It's a process of reverse engineering. Person B is building an entirely new instance of the meme in their own mind. How? You've guessed it: conjecture and criticism. Person B makes an intelligent guess with regards to the meme in Person A's head (using evidence, logic, experience, creativity), then subjects this to criticism and testing before tentatively adopting it. We call this conversation. "The puzzle of how one can possibly translate [a meme from one mind to another] is therefore the same puzzle as where scientific theories come from". Creativity, argues Mr Deutsch, must have evolved as a solution to the problem of perpetuating culture, by making meme-copying as accurate as possible. The trouble with generic solutions, however, is that they can be repurposed :)
Only progress is sustainable
What if you disagree that optimism is self-evidently the better choice and that it follows from the laws of physics? Is there another argument in favour of adopting it? Yes, says Mr Deutsch.
The answer is subsumed by the rather amusing anecdote of the prisoner who escapes a death sentence, by promising to make the king's favourite horse talk within a year (as a child I heard this story starring Nasreddin Hodja, a famous character in Middle Eastern folklore). Fellow prisoners are appalled on hearing of Nasreddin's bold proposal: what if he failed?! Well, says Nasreddin, a lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the hose might talk! If Nasreddin "is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning". However, the story's moral is not just that "progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities". The moral is also that the alternative to progress is not stasis, but death.
If we are inclined to believing 1) that problems are not soluble (and that to think otherwise is sheer hubris) and 2) that stasis is sustainable, we are inclined to do so because of bad philosophy. In particular, Mr Deutsch embarks on an arduous debunking of two popular ideas: the Principle of Mediocrity (physics laws are majestically indifferent to humans affairs, there is nothing special about our species) and the Spaceship Earth metaphor (this planet is highly adapted to sustaining human life, humans are but its stewards, they should never aspire to more than keeping it as it currently is). Nonsense, says Mr Deutsch. Humans are special, they are "universal constructors" of knowledge. And their habitat is only hospitable inasmuch as they possess the knowledge of how to make it so. On a time scale long enough, "Mother Earth" is guaranteed to kill us.
In reality there is no sustainable lifestyle, only progress is sustainable. Antibiotics have saved many lives, but may soon become obsolete. Industrialisation lifted millions out of famine and poverty, but the resulting climate change means new discoveries will soon be needed. Sooner or later, an asteroid will lay waste to the whole planet. All triumphs of progress are temporary. Rather than hankering after an irretrievable past that was never sustainable in the first place and rather than aspiring to reproduce, endlessly, our current lifestyles, with their misconceptions and mistakes - better to look to the future and "embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next". Survival requires progress.
Moral imperative: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors
In conclusion, if progress requires optimism and survival requires progress, then this moral imperative naturally follows: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors. In others words, do not suppress criticism. Doing so is a "rare and deadly sort of error: it prevents itself from being undone".
Enlightened people accept that all knowledge is fallible. Indeed, the mechanism of conjecture-criticism relies precisely on allowing ourselves to be wrong. Not just sometimes and not just incidentally, but always and inherently. This should be fine. Progress, as Mr Popper put it, is precisely about allowing our theories "to die in our place". It is the mature pledge to criticising our ideas without staking our lives on them. And it is about discriminating between ideas, not between people. Such a process is self-correcting. We may temporarily be deceived by bad explanations. But in the long run, what other path is there to Truth?
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Notes:
1 The better to grasp/remember/index a worldview (Weltanschauung, to use the fancy term), I look out for these two features: call them Pursuit and Attitude. Between them they cover the two questions all Weltanschauungen must address: What sort of employment gives Life meaning? and What sort of outlook makes Life bearable? The first is about what to do, the second is about how to feel. Here are some examples. In the worldview of Herman Hesse, the Pursuit is wisdom, the Attitude is reverence. Marcel Proust proposes art and curiosity, Tolstoy - love and piety, Alain de Botton - reflection and ambivalence, Kurt Vonnegut - creativity and forbearance. Certainly, worldviews that have taken great minds lifetimes to create should not in earnest be folded neatly into pairs of words, but I find Pursuit/Attitude nevertheless a useful mnemonic. In David Deutsch, I reckon the Pursuit is progress. The attitude is optimism. (Note: George Orwell in Why I Write, "but before [the writer] beings to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape")
2 Of course, no society is either always closed or always open (Mr Deutsch's didactic examples are Sparta and Athens); instead, all societies nurture both impulses: open and closed, liberal and conservative, relativist and absolutist. Most of us possess both tendencies. It is clear which of the two Mr Deutsch prefers. However, just for the sake of championing the middle ground, I would like here to mention Jonathan Haidt's TED talk, in which he argues that thriving societies honour both liberal and conservative values.
3 Karl Popper in Knowledge without Authority (1960): "I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of knowledge by the entirely different question: how can we hope to detect and eliminate errors?"
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Notes:
1 The better to grasp/remember/index a worldview (Weltanschauung, to use the fancy term), I look out for these two features: call them Pursuit and Attitude. Between them they cover the two questions all Weltanschauungen must address: What sort of employment gives Life meaning? and What sort of outlook makes Life bearable? The first is about what to do, the second is about how to feel. Here are some examples. In the worldview of Herman Hesse, the Pursuit is wisdom, the Attitude is reverence. Marcel Proust proposes art and curiosity, Tolstoy - love and piety, Alain de Botton - reflection and ambivalence, Kurt Vonnegut - creativity and forbearance. Certainly, worldviews that have taken great minds lifetimes to create should not in earnest be folded neatly into pairs of words, but I find Pursuit/Attitude nevertheless a useful mnemonic. In David Deutsch, I reckon the Pursuit is progress. The attitude is optimism. (Note: George Orwell in Why I Write, "but before [the writer] beings to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape")
2 Of course, no society is either always closed or always open (Mr Deutsch's didactic examples are Sparta and Athens); instead, all societies nurture both impulses: open and closed, liberal and conservative, relativist and absolutist. Most of us possess both tendencies. It is clear which of the two Mr Deutsch prefers. However, just for the sake of championing the middle ground, I would like here to mention Jonathan Haidt's TED talk, in which he argues that thriving societies honour both liberal and conservative values.
3 Karl Popper in Knowledge without Authority (1960): "I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of knowledge by the entirely different question: how can we hope to detect and eliminate errors?"
