Dear Humberto and Colleagues:
Well, sure, it sounds like a good thing. It's surely an
improvement over endless, and meaningless, existence theorems, or
endless, and meaningless, t statistics. It gets back to the spirit of
the Blessed Adam Smith, or even the Honored Alfred Marshall, in looking
into the ordinary business of life with all the tools of inquiry that
one can think of instead of a tiny selection of tools developed by Paul
Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow.
But notice the narrowing Science-worship in the piece. This
is typical of the Times, and of the times. Let me give you an example
from the admirable (if misled) Douglass North. North believes that one
can achieve "an understanding of . . . how individuals make choices
under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity" by the study of what he
calls "brain science." As a scientific program this seem doubtful, at
any rate for the next couple of hundred years. He is looking into
popular summaries of recent research in biology for understanding the
way in which the mind acquires ideas, ideologies, and prejudices in an
economy. It's not a promising place to look, at any rate compared with
the 4000-year exploration of the way in which the mind acquires ideas,
ideologies, and prejudices that we call literature and its descendents
in philosophy, theology, and criticism. We can probably learn more
about such matters from The Epic of Gilgamesh or Paradise Lost, from
Confucius or St. Paul or Hume, not to speak of the explosion of
literature and the humanities since the 19th century, than from what we
are likely to learn from brain scans and psychological experiments for a
long time to come.
North has gone from doubting Max U in economics to adopting another form
of Max U in biological psychology. I suppose the
hold of allegedly "scientific" methods on men of his generation
overwhelms his common sense. "Science" to North is science as
demarcated c. 1950 among the less sophisticated thinkers (which lets out
Wittgenstein, for example, or Willard Quine, or Michael
Polanyi, or a young Thomas Kuhn; it includes Daul Samuelson, Kenneth
Arrow, and Milton Friedman). A scientistic reductionism seems to figure
in how he himself acquired his ideas, ideologies, and prejudices about
people and history. "Clearly [brain sciences] underlie
institutional change and therefore are a necessary prerequisite to being
able to develop a theory about institutional change." So too
the chemistry of proteins and the laws of quantum mechanics, not to
speak of the physics of formation of heavy elements in supernovae,
"underlie" institutional change as well. They too are a necessary
prerequisite to a theory of institutional change. Forget about the best
that has been thought and written.
In 2005 North writes, "I have gone much more deeply into cognitive
science and attempted to understand the way in which
the mind and brain work and how that relates to the way in which people
make choices and the belief systems that they have."
The word "choice" is important. As an economist he thinks of "choice"
as the snappy calculations that Max U is supposed to make, and
so he went in search of similarly snappy models of mind in biology. But
the belief systems of people do not for the most part come
from the snapping close of a mathematical proof, such as that the square
root of 2 is irrational, or an imagined decisive experiment
in dropping balls of different weight. Literature and its offshoots
reveal, and explore, and are part of, and praise or damn,
deliberation under prudence and temperance (as in Nichomachean Ethics,
Bk. III; Sense and Sensibility), impulsiveness (Madame Bovary),
faithfulness (Antigone), perfidy (The Peloponnesian War, Bk. V, 85-113),
justice (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals), injustice
(Max Haavelar; Uncle Tom's Cabin), physical courage (Nj?ls Saga),
cowardice (Lord Jim), moral courage (Augustine's Confessions,
Huckleberry Finn), love (Anna Karerina; The Tale of Genji), hate
(Othello), hope (Julian of Norwich). And on and on and on.
Preferring an amateur's grasp of recent "science" to the educated
imagination 2000 B.C.E. -the present was not a very good
plan of research.
Regards,
Deirdre McCloskey
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