THE CONSEQUENCES OF DENYING COHERENT BELIEFS.

I've been fighting it out on this line since before there was a Cold Spring Shops.  "Yeah, when you deny coherent beliefs of any kind, you get incoherence."  That cannot turn out well.  "If you're going to deny coherent beliefs, everybody else has to be in on the con."  That post also noted, "Arguments from authority only work when people respect your authority."

But people in authority have been undermining their authority for a long time, while dressing up in the skin suits that Erudition and Expertise have become.  Thus does Arthur Brooks, writing in The (Not Detroit) Free Press, conclude, "Millions of Americans aren’t just misinformed. They’re searching for coherence in a world that no longer provides it."  His essay is notionally about people becoming conspiracy theorists.

Many outlandish-seeming scandals have turned out to be absolutely factual, such as the squalid Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee that lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s. Present-day cases have also occurred, such as the official discrediting of the lab-leak origin of the coronavirus pandemic—later shown to be the most plausible explanation of Covid-19’s emergence—as nothing more than an anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.

So it often goes as a high-trust society unravels.

Read on, and note that his suggestion is for the institutions that squandered their authority by going along with foolish things work to recover first a modicum of confidence in their work, and then earn their authority back.

At the public level, it is to reestablish broader confidence in our institutions that previously provided a wide sense of coherence; namely, the news media, academia, and religious organizations. As a columnist, scholar, and churchgoer myself, I am deeply embedded in all three—and I’d have to acknowledge a tendency among members in all of my institutions to feel aggrieved, to shift blame onto malevolent influencers, bad political actors, even the distrustful people themselves. I realize it is much more productive to look inward at how these institutions have too often become politicized and faddish, and thus lost the public’s trust. By facing the problem fair and square, we can see it as an opportunity to improve.

That might be more easily said than done, as the goal of institutional survival pre-empts the goal of institutional purpose, which in the academy is sifting and winnowing to find the truth (or at least to get closer to it) and which is in reporting offering readers or viewers a fighting chance at weighing the evidence and drawing their own conclusions.  Mark "Words about Thoughts" Atwood offered a candidate Friday short take that captured the conflict.  "The personality the institution cannot process is the person who corrects errors because they are errors."  We get a little Gödelian here, as to a naive view, clarifying facts ought not be viewed as an attack on the academy's, or reporting, or a government agency's mission.  Dear reader, make the case in faculty senate that your university is admitting unprepared students and calling it access.  Make the case in the morning reporters' meeting that your copyeditors are spinning stories to benefit favored politicians.  Make the case during budgeting that the money is going to poverty researchers, not to poor people.

By all means, read the essay in full.  I highlight his concluding paragraphs, which spell out how organizations working to isolate the error-correctors leads to a loss of institutional credibility.

The interesting question is not why institutions attack error-correctors. That’s straightforward: institutions optimize for stability, error-correction threatens stability, immune systems attack threats. The interesting question is what happens to a society that systematically drives out the people who correct errors.

The answer is: the errors accumulate.

Not dramatically. Not catastrophically (at first). Quietly. One uncorrected number in a policy document. One unchallenged assumption in a strategic plan. One unquestioned metric in a performance review. Each individual error is small. Each individual immune response is locally rational (why fight about this number when the political cost of the fight exceeds the cost of the error?). The accumulation is invisible because each error is invisible and the people who would have made it visible have been excluded.

Over time, the institution’s model of reality drifts from reality. The drift is undetectable from inside because the people who would have detected it have been driven out or have learned to stay quiet. The metrics look fine because the metrics are the ones the institution chose to measure, and the institution chose to measure things it was succeeding at. The reports are positive because the people writing the reports know what happens to people who write negative reports. The strategy is on track because the strategy is evaluated against the goals the strategy was designed to achieve, and the goals were designed to be achievable.

Sergiu "Heterodox STEM" Klainerman, who might be with Northwestern, sketches how the Institutional Immune System cleaned up the error-correctors in order to protect the New Dispensation.

Enlightenment ideals, centered around faith in reason and science, inherent individual rights and skepticism towards tradition and religion, have ultimately devolved into the present belief system based on hard-core materialism and its ideological derivatives: Marxism, neo-Marxism, deconstructionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalistism that shape the belief system of our intellectual elites. As in Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique” what started as a romantic dream about the ability of humans to improve their condition through reason has transmogrified into a witches’ sabbath of kooky beliefs, sold to the public in the name of “Social Justice.”

It's a long essay that will reward careful study, although it touches on points not immediately germane to the argument I offer today.  He concludes with the hope that the academy can be redeemed, "hopefully in less time that it took the Left to achieve its present dominance of the cultural space."  Well, Iran has been a festering sore for nearly a half a century and Communism still won't go away ...

There's a new book, The Poisoning of the American Mind, that appears to be offering similar arguments, both about the operation of the institutional immune system and its consequences, driving people to their intellectual silos and putting confidence in conspiracy theories.

The academy, or journalism, or the administrative state, can go down the rabbit hole of radical skepticism and make life miserable for the error-corrector with integrity, that is, until, as Victor Hanson argues, Reality steps up to bat.

[T]here sometimes occurs a sixth stage, which we might call the “Emperor Has No Clothes” wake-up call, that occasionally stops the lemmings in their mad dash over the cliff.

Gradually, the public wonders why it pays twice as much for electricity as it did a mere few years earlier. Supposedly doomed polar bears appear to be thriving in the Arctic. John Kerry is routinely spotted on a carbon-spewing private jet to get to climate change conferences abroad. California’s “permanent” drought strangely ignores near-record wet years and snowfall. Too little rain proves global warming; too much is proof of “climate chaos.”

Thus, the people who correct error for its own sake might yet prevail.