Most people aren’t responding to this, to the sheer quantitative immensity of the task and its rising stakes. They don’t care, they don’t understand, they don’t inform themselves because they’re not incentivized to; they don’t politically support serious decisive action and they don’t adjust their lifestyles. Many people I talk to really don’t worry about it. Travel by flight is booming globally, as is meat consumption. None of the political parties, including the Greens, are advancing anywhere near the necessary measures. The media talk about trivialities such as making “conscious choices” and not throwing away good food. This amounts to just another splash of piss in the Mississippi.
That, my suspicious friend, is catastrophically unscientific behavior—and it’s not a few hillbillies on the red hills of Georgia. It’s the establishment; most people you will meet. It is an indication, if anything, that we live in an unscientific society—leading lives far, far removed from empirical science. It is, frankly, an appalling state of affairs.
And yet, science itself doesn’t point us towards appealing to human rationality as the best means for transitioning to sustainability. Within disciplines such as environmental psychology and behavioral economics, it is becoming abundantly clear that emotional and personal development evolves our values, habits and goals in terms of sustainability. Consequently, science itself seems to point us beyond “rationality”, and towards a meta-rationality that includes our emotions, relations and narratives. A scientific society would not only change our minds, but also our hearts. [110]
Breathe it in. We are far, far, far away from a truly scientific society. We are medieval.
The Ten-Fold Path to Enlightenment (2.0)
So much for the Enlightenment and its modern project. In short, we must “truth” society. It must be properly truthed. It needs a good and thorough truthing. I give you… the ten-fold path to enlightenment! Enlightenment 2.0, that is.
As with so many other things this is not a binary matter, a matter of either-or, but a developmental matter, a matter of society advancing to higher stages of empiricism and critical self-scrutiny. The radicality of this process lies not so much in the general idea that polices should be “evidence-based”, but in the thrust to make it an ongoing political project to make society more scientific in a wide and pervasive sense.
Here and there, proto versions of Empirical Politics are cropping up. In 2018, the French president Emmanuel Macron announced that his country will combat “fake news”. This, of course, begs the question about who knows the truth, and who gets to say what’s fake, and how fake it has to be? His taken path is much too linear, much too naive and bound to produce self-contradictions and censorship, perhaps in the hands of less liberal powers. Clearly, he does not see that truthing society is a long-term non-linear process. You can’t just “press the truth button”. Like I said, Empirical Politics is not obvious, not even to the prodigies of progressive European politics. And in cases like Macron’s, it does get naive.
What, then, are the major areas of Empirical Politics? What exactly would our Ministry of Empirical Politics —or maybe just the Ministry of Science or something similar (Orwell’s 1984 had a “Ministry of Truth”)—be up to? I’d like to mention ten categories of things to do. We won’t discuss them in detail because expanding them is itself part of the political process, and because there’s ten of them. The ten-fold path.
Numero uno : The Ministry of Empirical Politics would evaluate, survey, rate and publicize the degree of evidence-based practice in all areas of public sector work and civil service. This would include everything from education to healthcare to social work to policing and forensic practices to environmental protection to all of the other forms of politics that we have mentioned thus far. What can be shown to function in a replicable manner, and what cannot? How can big data be accumulated and analyzed in each of these cases? In which areas are we driving in the dark? Together with people on all levels of society, the ministry should also be charged with making plans for how to improve the empirical rigidity of what is going on. Step by step, all public activities should become more knowledge-driven and well-informed—meaning they should be intersubjectively scrutinized, again and again.
Number two: Empirical Politics would aim to improve the quality, relevance and reliability of science, throughout all branches. It is an uncontroversial fact that universities and other institutions generally function far from optimally. Society as a whole has a lot of science out there, and this entity, viewed as a massive entirety of enough frontiers to explode any human brain, can of course be more or less efficient, well-coordinated and in line with human needs and goals. It’s not just a question of how much funding science gets; it’s a question of what level of quality science—this most crucial of society’s projects—has. There is a lot of low-quality research that is just too sloppily made, made for show, never reproduced or double-checked, and simply never read by anyone. And there is so much stuff which needs to be done but never is, “because we don’t have the resources”. Science and research of course require a good amount of autonomy to function: Naturally, we want evidence-based policy, not policy-based evidence! But even that is a question of Empirical Politics: If we want a society informed by the best possible knowledge, how do we make certain that such knowledge is produced autonomously and reliably?
Number three: a cultivation and development of the critical meta-discussion about science and its role in society. Basically, if we are to have a society where things are always evaluated against the benchmarks set by scientific inquiry, we should better make certain that science as a whole and our “politics of science” are properly critiqued from as many and systematic angles as possible. This is where activities such as the philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge (and of science, and of philosophy), applied cognitive science and the discipline that is sometimes called “social epistemology” (pioneered by Steven Fuller) are granted plenty of resources and a central role in society. This concerns such things as seeing which trends and norms are dominating within the sciences—and why—and how this spills over into society at large; or how politics and economic interests may be undermining the autonomy and validity of science; or how certain sciences unduly get more resources and attention than others; or how certain research programs may be built on shaky premises in the first place; or how certain ethical codes are not being observed… You get the picture. There’s really no limit to how deep you can go on this one. Under the umbrella of all projects we think of as “sciences” (and humanities) there is just so much crazy and unfair and irrational tunnel vision stuff going on that we must make certain there is a proper critical discussion about science-in-society. Science is not a straightforward affair, something “obvious” that you can “just do” and then “get knowledge”. It never was and never will be. New questions always arise: what is worth knowing, why, and how highly should it be prioritized, and by what processes should we decide, and how should the research be organized… Tough questions.
Bruno Latour, the philosopher and anthropologist who wrote Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts in 1979 (with Steve Woolgar) pioneered the practice of studying the everyday life of scientists and their research tools and environments; today Latour’s tradition is called “Actor-Network Theory”: scientists whose specialty is to study scientists. People like to joke—sometimes scornfully—that then there are scientists who write about scientists who study scientists, and scientists who write about scientists-scientists-scientists, and so on. But yes, that’s pretty much the direction society must take: a peer-reviewed society. It’s no joke. Society must be scientific, and science itself, viewed soberly as a part of society, must also be under constant critical siege from a rich multiplicity of intersecting perspectives. Science isn’t too sacred to b
e scrutinized: It becomes sacred through scrutiny. An intelligent Empirical Politics would fund and cultivate such a process of the sociology of knowledge throughout society.
Number four: We should increase the number of networked contacts and exchanges between the scientific fields—there’s that magic word interdisciplinarity (or crossdisciplinarity)—as well as between the sciences and the industries, both private companies, social entrepreneurs, the public sector and other agents. You may recognize this line of thinking in economic geography, where people study things like innovation clusters, triple-helix models (the synergy of university, business and city administration) and incubators for high-tech industries. The point is that if an economy specializes within some branches of science in the global knowledge economy, say solar power or nanotech, it should also try to create pathways to putting this knowledge into the right contexts and uses. Science is one thing, science-in-society is another; it’s the rich ecosystem that feeds upon the juices of discovery and in turn creates fertile soil for further research. Not only should science be improved upon and optimized, so should science-in-society. These knowledge ecosystems should be improved upon, and that requires smart Empirical Politics.
Number five: increasing the average ability for critical thinking and logical reasoning in the general population. There are, naturally, many ways of doing this. One way is standardized tests in schools that include techniques of “fooling” the minds of students, so that they must be confronted with how they bought into an illusion, an apparent surface phenomenon or a case of downright trickery. Creative projects that cultivate the public’s logical and critical thinking could be funded, e.g. by means of prize contests and so forth. Coaches in logic and critical thinking could be educated and be employed as teachers or advisors within many fields. If more people identify as critically minded and “logical”, this will make such norms more pervasive—and hence quackery and false inferences will be more difficult to get away with within all fields of society. Not only should more people be more apt at busting bullshit arguments—this being a skill we generally lack to a truly deplorable degree—but more of us should cultivate a deeper search for truth. This includes increased inner self-awareness; that we are trained, for instance, to catch our own minds making false implicit inferences (“this person is bad at playing the violin, so he’s probably a shallow person” and all other sorts of things we make false assumptions about).
It has been shown that it is not enough to inform people of our own biases; we must be actively trained to catch ourselves before such biases curtail our reasoning. Our fundamental relatedness to reality as a mystery is one of the forms of inner personal depth that we discussed in Book One; and by finding ways to awaken this spark within more of us, we can bring into being a more profoundly truthful society.
Let’s speed up.
Number six: the founding of crosschecking media institutes. When President Macron wants to combat disinformation and fake news, he is not entirely off mark. But the way to increase the reliability of the media and the general discourse long-term is through cross-referenced reviews of the quality of reporting and journalism. Media outlets, journalists and writers should be checked for factuality, reasoning and presentation and be given rates and rankings. Low quality journalism should not receive public support. Again: a peer-reviewed society. How to do this in a depoliticized, fair and “objective” manner is a question of Empirical Politics. May the best suggestions win.
Number seven : the support of a co-developmental political culture. We don’t want the sneakiest and most loudmouthed to rule us and gain power; we want the best possible common truths and solutions to emerge through the rich processes of competition, understanding and deliberation. So we need our political culture and debate to take on more civil and respectful forms. There is a tendency in all of us to admire the dashing, the confident, the winners of exchanges of clever retorts. But in an advanced and complex society, such competitions are little more than a signal interference in the information-processing that makes up society’s self-organization. We need to find ways to develop beyond it, to develop political culture itself; from snide remarks and sly competition, to earnest co-development. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m saying do it or die trying.
Number eight: We could support the development of popular culture in an empirically correct direction. Whereas the arts must always remain free, it should be noted that blockbuster movies and popular outlets play a crucial role in forming people’s background understanding of reality. If physics and history are presented with glaring faults in movies and books, this certainly affects the overall level of realism that can be expected from the public. Efforts could be made to support the proliferation of more factually correct stories. If people are soaked in preposterous movies 24/7, should we be so shocked that many don’t react when leading politicians deny climate change?
Nine: the development of the precision and reliability of everyday language. Since so much of our lived and shared reality is mediated through language, many of our political problems, conflicts and misunderstandings stem from linguistic imprecisions and the vagueness of words. It could be a long-term project to make language more coherent, exhaustive and precise. It’s one of those things that’s almost impossible to measure, but the impact of which must undeniably be vast.
Ten . Phew. This one links back to Existential Politics: support of the “ontological security” of the population. Ontological security is a term coined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens, and usually refers to “the sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual’s experience”. The point here is, as noted earlier, that our commitment to truth and our ability to challenge our own opinions and conceptions depend upon how safe we all fundamentally feel in the universe. By strengthening this sense of security, we serve truth-in-society at its most essential level.
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Ten things, my suspicious friend. Feel free to add more, or to exchange this list for a better one. But the issue remains: We need to find ways to be better at sticking to empirically sound assessments of reality.
Ice-cream does not make machinery work better, not even computers, I am not Napoleon, vaccines don’t cause autism, climate change is not a hoax. If we’re wrong about these things and if we make the wrong predictions, we pay an enormous price. It’s that fundamental. All things tend to work poorly without good predictive models of reality. And yet we are always at some distance from knowing any number of very relevant, life-changing truths.
But you’re getting the drift, aren’t you? The point is that if you do these ten things in a smart and organized manner, and you coordinate all of them with each other, and you love them long-time, you will wake up one morning to a more truthful society. And I hope I’ve shown you that this isn’t an “obvious” thing that “we’re already doing”. It isn’t and we’re not.
We really need to kill off all the excuses our lazy minds can come up with for not being scientific and committed to truth. I am not proposing scientism or crude reductionism; I’m talking about finding the best possible explanations and solutions and using them in all parts of society. There isn’t a place in the world, not even within the arts, psychedelic trips or spirituality, where the truth has no relevance.
In metamodern society, “truth is God” (Gandhi said it). The point is not to obsess about “hard, rational empiricism!” with those strict eyebrows of a narrow-minded modernist, or to reduce the richness of life and existence to hard, crunchy data and chew it like a jawbreaker until the end of days. To the conventional modernist mind, truth is binary: To them, there is “the real world” and then there’s the cheap copout fluff of weaker and dumber spirits. This stance is sometimes called “scientism”, sometimes “naive realism”.
That’s not what metamodern Empirical Politics is about. The point is to gradually increase society’s
capacity for information processing and event prediction by developing our collective capacity for intersubjective crosschecking . This must happen at all levels of society.
Although we must all bow before the dazzling elegance of science, it doesn’t offer us a safe “ground of reality”, just a strange space that tunnels in all directions. Yet, in this magnificent and frightening hall of mirrors we must still latch on to the best models of reality, and we must still respect the authority of science, but only if it can be questioned by yet more universal authorities of science creation.
Empirical Politics is the cultivation of our shared commitment to an honest exploration of the mysteries of reality. Imagine waking up in a world truly committed to science on a new and higher level.
And what a wonderful world that would be.
Chapter 17:
POLITICS OF THEORY
Nordic Ideology Page 40