The Moral and Intellectual Value of Western Civilization

Towards a discourse civilizing process

Conspicuous Cognition writes, at the end of a post on “People embrace beliefs that signal their traits and loyalties,”

What we need is a 21st-century civilizing process aimed not at people’s behaviours but at the appalling, self-serving, and groupish ways in which they frequently think and reason.

During a election year, it should not be difficult to think of examples in which people embrace beliefs that signal their traits and loyalties.

The post starts with the epigraph,

“The bulk of available evidence suggests that people in all societies tend to be relatively rational when it comes to the beliefs and practices that directly involve their subsistence… The more remote these beliefs and practices are from subsistence activities, the more likely they are to involve nonrational characteristics.” - Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies

When people are trying to get a job done, they are not as egregiously irrational as when they are expressing tribal loyalties.

That said, I believe that rational discourse is possible - that is the essence of the Socratic tradition. We engage in dialogue together with the mutual expectation of adhering to norms of logical consistency and coherence. Each of us acknowledges when we have contradicted ourselves or when we have brought in a completely unrelated rationale to justify a belief that otherwise doesn’t seem plausible. This rational discourse is the engine of western civilization. Whitehead said that all of western philosophy may be seen as a series of footnotes to Plato. I would add that all of western civilization is a series of extensions of Socratic dialogue.

Propositions:

1. With 2500 years’ hindsight, the most distinctive aspect of Socratic dialogue, implicit in much of the Platonic corpus and to some extent in other Greek texts (e.g. Antigone), is the Socratic expectation that we should engage in a dialectic in which we all work towards consistency and coherence of our beliefs regardless of the possibly corrosive effects of such a process on existing standards of epistemological and social authority.

2. The most distinctive net positive contribution of western civilization is the Socratic norm of mutual rationality as described above:

A. When combined with the empiricism of Bacon and Galileo, the rational development of science is the result.

B. When combined with the assumption that every human being is equally deserving of dignity or possesses a soul of equal worth (an assumption foundational to Christianity), a rational commitment to universal human rights (e.g. the notion that slavery is immoral, or that human dignity should not be contingent on gender) is the result.

C. When directed towards an analysis of human institutions, an evolving understanding of political governance designed to protect the rights of the governed is a result (the U.S. Constitution being one such attempt, however flawed, ongoing innovations in voting design is another).

D. When the logical consistency driving Socratic inquiry is formalized in Aristotelian logic or the axiomatic mathematics of Euclid, and the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries are acknowledged 2000 years later, the foundations were laid for the formalization of logic that led to all of modern computing.

E. This is not to claim in any sense that science, human rights, humane political governance or logic are in any sense distinctively or necessarily Western or that Western versions of these institutions are in any sense distinctively superior to those that have evolved in cultures around the world for millennia. The only claim is that a common set of dialectic norms (which may have arisen sporadically elsewhere) has served as an engine of progress in a distinctive manner within Western civilization. This engine of progress has produced stunning outcomes over the centuries which have (mostly) benefited most of humanity.

In conclusion, Socratic norms of consistency and coherence regardless of their impact on authority have played a distinctive role in the development of Western institutions and thought that has been, on balance, remarkably positive.

Corollaries:

1. As we reduce the ethnocentrism of existing curricula we should nonetheless preserve the core standards of Socratic rationality.

2. One of the most enduringly valuable characteristics of university life should be a communal norm of Socratic rationality in and out of the classroom.

More casually, “How can you believe x if you believe y?” should always be a socially acceptable question when we are discussing ideas, at least when not asked with aggressive intent. This is by no means the case universally in the world at large.

This optimistic role for rationality does not contradict the well-established notion first articulated by Hume that reason is a slave to the passions nor Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson’s more recent notion that we are not aware of the real reasons for most of our actions. Indeed, it is precisely because each of individually is prone to self-justifying rationales and behaviors that it is critical to support norms of dialogue that lead to “truth-seeking” in the Popperian and Mertonian senses (which I see as complementary, one emphasizing falsification, i.e. non-contradiction, and the other the norms themselves).

Insofar as we adhere to norms of dialogue in which we mutually adhere to the obligation to be consistent and coherent, we are more likely to discover beliefs that are inconsistent with each other and with reality or beliefs that can only be supported by ad hoc rationalizations. Thus we should respect such norms both be giving status to those who are exemplary with respect to adhering to those norms and penalize those who violate those norms. (Entrepreneur Steve Everist is creating Integrally.one in an attempt to create a social media incentive system that rewards online status in this manner; stay tuned).

In our classroom dialogues at The Socratic Experience we work to develop such norms in the course of interpreting complex texts. One of the reasons to work with difficult texts is to reward consistent and coherent interpretations. Insofar as students enjoy simply arguing over, say, political beliefs or contemporary controversies, they lack the evidentiary base to make rational arguments. Insofar as we are focused strictly on the prose in front of us, we have most of the relevant evidence to construct an interpretation (sometimes additional historical context and/or verbal nuance is required, but not always).

But above all, we seek to cultivate an environment in which it is a respected act to ask, “If you believe x, how can you believe y?” Once we are no longer allowed to engage with each other in this truth-seeking process, then the most fundamental dynamic of human improvement has been halted. Our natural biological propensity to base beliefs on tribal conformity and/or the beliefs of authorities takes over. The bridge to truth and progress is thereby destroyed. Despite being more advanced civilizations than Europe in 1300, both China and the Islamic world suppressed intellectual exploration on behalf of dogmas, and both fell behind as Europe advanced to the foreground. Insofar as contemporary universities are suppressing intellectual exploration on behalf of dogmas, they are in danger of halting progress (this is why the University of Austin is such an important project).

In my next post, I’ll focus on how to develop the civilizing process for 21st century discourse beyond textual interpretation into decision making, empirical modeling, and forecasting and predictions built from a foundation of progress studies.