We have met the enemy
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, Ged is a talented young mage whose conjuring mistake releases a powerful demon into his world, Earthsea. Ged is then compelled to dedicate himself to defending himself and Earthsea by attempting to cast the demon back where he came from.
We too, loosed the demon of global heating on our world. And our redemptive quest resembles Ged’s in other ways.
Ged pursues the demon to the ends of Earthsea. But Ged eventually discovers that to conquer the demon, all along what he really needed to do was to look inside himself, and overcome his own weaknesses.
Source: L.L. Prindle Design, 2005.
In my last post I suggested we need to attack the menace of global heating along three levels, the physical, social and personal-internal. I list these in decreasing order of current public saliency. Most people today think of our global heating problem as one of material, physical issues, like how to limit carbon emissions. A few, among them the U.S. National Intelligence Council 1, project that our main problems will be social, in the form of refugee crises, wars, dictatorships, and other social dysfunctions brought about by climactic pressures.
My own view is that most influential problems we face in our current predicament are internal to us as individuals: We don’t engage with the realities of the climate crisis because key systems we use to produce knowledge about reality are themselves in crisis.
Personal knowledge
We’re all convinced we thoroughly know certain things. But neurobiology and psychology reveal our personal knowledge claims to be giants with feet of clay. As individuals, neither our brains, our eyes, our memory or even our basic pattern recognition faculty produce reliable “maps” of the world. “Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes”: Our senses can pick up a minute portion of the oceans of signals immersing us. But those few that do enter, we then filter to fit our preconceptions. What does not confirm our prejudices we generally discard. Our memories are utterly flawed; they are constructed entirely by our brains. In general: “We construct a narrative, which has emotions and themes attached to it, and we alter details in order to be in line with our thematic narrative.”2 Optical illusions are good examples of how our brains distort what they take in to fit prior expectations. Most asserted “personal knowledge” really amounts to mental constructs that are highly partial and biased.
Source: NewOpticalIllusions.com
Systems of shared knowledge
To ascend from such beliefs to something more deserving of the name of “knowledge” is the accomplishment of certain groups, which have been able to develop what we now call mathematics, the sciences, the arts and the humanities. To which one may add religions. Each of these has built conceptual structures on the basis of certain assumptions, and through the application of certain techniques. But all, too, have limitations associated with their assumptions, and their techniques.
For example, epidemiologists develop models to describe how diseases transmit over time. The more they know about the disease agent, say the Covid-19 virus, the more accurate and reliable their models. But if the virus mutates, their models suddenly become less reliable. In short, the result of epidemiologists’ work is descriptive models of a changing reality. The models will never be perfectly reliable, because one can never know if the virus has mutated again. And the models do not prescribe any particular response to what they describe. A model may predict a million human deaths from disease; that consequence may be of import to humans, but it is to grossly misunderstand epidemiology to think that it can be of import to a model!
Epidemiology by itself cannot prescribe a response to its descriptive models. Its “what is” cannot by itself prescribe a “what ought to be”.3 For that, humans can and must draw on other resources, which may include moral or religious intuitions, and also the results of intellectual disciplines like ethics, history, and political economy. And yet, during the ongoing Covid pandemic, governments all over the world have claimed that “the science” (of epidemiology) prescribed a particular response. 4 This shockingly false claim betrays profound ignorance about the nature and limits of scientific activity, among governors and governed alike. How could sophisticated political leaders make such preposterous claims? Because most of them did not know or care how primitive was their own conception of science, and they assumed a similar misconception among their citizens. In their minds, “science” is a semi-magical process, whose fruits are to be enjoyed, and whose blessings are to be invoked, but which only the specialized mages called “scientists” need to try to understand.
Source: WallpaperUp.com
A failure of education
We inhabit a complex, highly interdependent world which rests on imperfect knowledge systems very few comprehend. Science is simply the most disturbing example of this, because science plays such a central economic and social role in modern life. Our educational systems invest heavily to teach children science over many years. But after eleven years of schooling, and several bouts of learning the “scientific method”, most students emerge with a dangerously primitive ideas about it. Not just that “science prescribes”, but that the goal of science is certainty, and that scientific theories can be proven true.5 These misconceptions raise unrealistic public expectations which backfire, breeding distrust of scientists and of science.
We similarly misunderstand the nature and limits of other disciplines, like math, history and the human sciences. Much of the problem can be traced to our failure to teach the history of these disciplines. Without showing how our current understanding replaced previous ones, and why, we deprive students of a sense of why we arrived at today’s definition of what constitutes knowledge in any given field, despite the key shortcomings that still accompany it, and the often major qualifications we must attach to its claims. “To understand anything, study its origins and its development”, wrote Aristotle. All knowledge is a work-in-progress. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know, we know incompletely at best.” 6
Our cardinal vice
One would expect that the radical fragility of all human knowledge should logically manifest socially in a general modesty about what we know, and disinclination to impose our ignorance on others. Too often, just the opposite is true. In 1999, Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger tested experimental subjects on a variety of competences, and found that those who performed in the bottom quartile rated their skills far above average. For example, those in the 12th percentile self-rated their expertise to be, on average, in the 62nd percentile.7
The researchers attributed the trend to a problem of metacognition—the ability to analyze one’s own thoughts or performance. “Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” they wrote. Psychology Today explains:8
Confidence is so highly prized that many people would rather pretend to be smart or skilled than risk looking inadequate and losing face. Even smart people can be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect because having intelligence isn’t the same thing as learning and developing a specific skill. Many individuals mistakenly believe that their experience and skills in one particular area are transferable to another.
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been found in domains ranging from logical reasoning to emotional intelligence, financial knowledge, and firearm safety. And the effect isn't spotted only among incompetent individuals; most people have weak points where the bias can take hold. It also applies to people with a seemingly solid knowledge base: Individuals rating as high as the 80th percentile for a skill have still been found to overestimate their ability to some degree.
In short, we systematically lie to ourselves about how much we know, to feel better about ourselves! We take a personal intellectual weakness, lack of competence in a given area, and compound it through the moral failing of inflating our egos by pretending to a knowledge and confidence we have not earned.
None of this is new, of course. It describes what the medieval Christian moral tradition called the chief of the “Seven Deadly Sins”, pride. Pride is “irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior, or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others, and excessive admiration of the personal image or self (especially...refusing to acknowledge one's own limits, faults, or wrongs as a human being).”9 To this day, Louis XIV of France serves as an embodiment of this noxious mental habit. By his death, it had bankrupted his government and compromised France’s leadership of Europe.10 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.11
Source: “Louis XIV of France” By Hyacinthe Rigaud. 1701. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
A different path
"We have met the enemy and they are ours", reported Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry to his superior officer after the Battle of Lake Erie against a British squadron in 1813. For the first Earth Day in 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly adapted the slogan to the fight to preserve the environment; the little possum, Pogo, reflects: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 12 I agree with Pogo’s diagnosis. In my view, the main obstacles to our rising to the existential challenge posed by the climate crisis is us: our unacknowledged personal intellectual and psychological weaknesses.
There is another path humans today can take, following the lead of Confucius: “Shall I tell you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to recognize that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it. That is knowledge.”13 Confucius points us to intellectual humility.
Another name for it is moderation—and realism. But how to develop these virtues in ourselves and others? How do we counteract the powerful influences of our emotions, which have developed over hundreds of thousands of years to reinforce patterns of thought that served our ancestors adequately in their lives as isolated hunter-gatherers, but which equip us so poorly to meet the 21st century challenges of climate crisis? How do we come to understand the successful knowledge systems that certain groups (like scientists, mathematicians, and others) have developed, which now offer us powerful tools to protect us in our life-or-death emergency? Is there a way to educate ourselves and others (particularly our children) to assess the strengths, weaknesses, advantages and limitations of the knowledge systems available to us?
One priority should be to expand our system of education to teach people what they need to know about the history and philosophy of knowledge. For almost the past twenty years, I have had the good fortune of teaching a course within a global curriculum that tries, and generally succeeds, to do just that. It’s called the “Theory of Knowledge” program of the International Baccalaureate. 14 I do not offer this as a panacea, rather, as an example of the kind of effort that can be made to fill this yawning gap in most children’s education. I know it can be done, and that most students find it personally transformative. I intend to write more about this, in later posts.
I see many other promising initiatives of like inspiration. There are books like Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio). There are numerous science and philosophy podcasts and newsletters. The task is immense; we should apply every tool that works.
To vanquish the global heating menace, it’s tempting to look around us, for monsters to destroy. But like Ged in Earthsea, I do not think we will prevail without first looking within, to liberate ourselves from the ignorance and pride crippling our efforts.
Source: “We Have Met the Enemy…” By Walt Kelly. 1980 reprint of 1970 poster. Toni Mendez Collection.
“Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World” A publication of The National Intelligence Council. U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence . March, 2021. NIC 2021-02339.
Our Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills. By Prof. Steven Novella, Professor of Neurobiology at Yale Medical School. The Great Courses Company. Lecture series. 2012.
“Decisions can never be derived from facts (or statements of facts, although they pertain to facts)…It is impossible to derive a sentence stating a norm or a decision from a statement stating a fact; this is only a way of saying that it is impossible to derive decisions from facts.” The Open Society and Its Enemies. By Karl Popper. Routledge. 1945.
For example, see: “There's no such thing as just 'following the science' – coronavirus advice is political: As we’re seeing in this pandemic, politicians tend to favour the evidence that supports their argument”. By Jana Bacevic. The Guardian. April 28, 2020.
Instead, science describes but by itself it cannot prescribe, scientists pursue not certainty but the theory that best accounts for the evidence, and scientific theories are best considered provisionally true, or useful, rather than simply true.
Two Lives. By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press. 2007.
“Dunning-Kruger Effect”. Wikipedia. Consulted on October 3, 2021.
“Dunning-Kruger Effect”. Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff. Psychology Today.com. Consulted on October 3, 2021.
“The Seven Deadly Sins” Wikipedia. Consulted on October 3, 2021.
“Louis XIV: Reputation.” Wikipedia. Consulted on October 3, 2021.
“The more things change, the more they remain the same. “ Alphonse Karr (1808-1890). The title of two collections of articles. Les Guêpes. January, 1849.
“We have met the enemy”. By Walt Kelly. Poster. April 22, 1970.
The Analects. Attributed to Confucius. (Approx. 551-479 BCE)
“Theory of Knowledge” International Baccalaureate. Webpage. Consulted on October 3, 2021.