Episode 89: Tradition as a Source of Knowledge: Popper vs. Chesterton
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Transcript
[00:00:06] Blue: Hello out there. This week we discuss the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, perhaps the most famous defense of the Christian Judition. We contrast this with Carl Popper’s talk towards a rational theory of tradition from his collection of essays, conjectures and refutations. Though Bruce and I have quite different religious beliefs, I think we agree a lot as we contrast these thinkers and how they view tradition as a source of knowledge. I hope you enjoy this. Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. How you doing, Bruce? Doing good. How’s it going, Peter? Wonderful. This week we will discuss, I’m really excited for this episode. Gotta say, one of my ideas, it just kind of really seemed to come together really nicely. We’re gonna talk about a man named G.K. Chesterton. Many people probably know him from the concept of Chesterton’s fence.
[00:01:09] Red: Which I think I’ve referenced a bunch of times on this podcast.
[00:01:13] Blue: We’ve talked about it on the podcast, though in retrospect, I dare say that neither of us really knew that much about him. No. But we’ve tried to change that, I think. Let’s see. I guess that that was originally what made me want to read him. Tradition has been something that’s on my mind. It’s been something I’m interested in. Concept of Chesterton’s fence. This idea that you shouldn’t tear down, seek to tear down a tradition unless you know why it’s there in the first place is something that kind of resonated with me when I first heard about that. I thought, you know what? I should actually try to read some G.K. Chesterton.
[00:01:56] Red: You’re saying it resonated with you, but you’ve challenged it, too. You’ve said, how would you actually apply that in real life? I’ve just seen you see this on Facebook. You’ve asked me about it, and that’s actually a tough question. It is. It’s nice to say, but how do you actually apply this to real life? That’s a really difficult question to answer.
[00:02:13] Blue: Yeah. The short answer is I’m not sure.
[00:02:18] Red: Maybe we’ll get there through this conversation.
[00:02:21] Blue: Yeah, so I realized that his most popular book was a basically a defense of Christianity and religion as well as tradition. I’m not religious, obviously you are, but there’s actually some questions I have maybe for you that you can help clear up some of his perspective on religion or me thinking about, you know, he was really into the paradox of Christianity and some other some other things. It kind of was like, huh. But anyway, so I read the book Orthodoxy, and I mean, it hit me like a lightning bolt. I’m not going to say I’m religious now or anything, but for one thing, it was hilarious.
[00:03:07] Red: Are we going to name this episode, Peter finds God?
[00:03:12] Blue: Is there’s that that would be a pretty dramatic conclusion to the episode, I suppose, my conversion. But yeah, it was, you know, part of the spirit of critical rationalism to me always be looking for the best arguments against what we believe. And I don’t know, maybe that’s why I came to critical rationalism is I just love the feeling of like seeing an argument that you disagree with. But it just it’s such a good argument. And, you know, I guess I think that’s how we change. That’s how we grow. And I found that I feel I felt like when I read this book, that I had discovered the best arguments against rationalism I have ever seen in my life. I mean, the guy is, I just can’t believe it was written in 1908, the way he talks about materialism and determinism and free will, utopianism, solipsism, pragmatism, progressivism, objectivity. He’s just he it feels so modern and accessible.
[00:04:21] Red: He has a very dramatic attack on induction, although he never uses the word induction. Okay, he does. He goes after induction quite strongly.
[00:04:31] Blue: I can see that. Yeah, I mean, it felt very like I almost expected him to start railing against the simulation hypothesis or something. I mean, he really, it really felt very modern to me. And it was I mean, the book and like I said, just funny as heck, I mean, it was easy. He is an amazing writer as well. It’s just one of those books that just reaches out from history. And yeah, it was really enjoyed it. I thought we could contrast this to Karl Popper’s essay on tradition from conjectures and refutations, which is I think a, I wouldn’t say completely at odds with Chesterton. I saw as I think you did a lot of parallels and how they looked at tradition. Obviously, Karl Popper was much more was a rationalist and much more invested in the scientific tradition and defending that, whereas Chesterton seemed to at times link rationalism with madness, I would say. I there’s there, I’m not going to say they’re in in alignment either. But there were some interesting areas of agreement. I’ll say that. I think overall, I’m going to try to make the case through this conversation that Chesterton actually is a rationalist, at least by Karl Popper’s definition, maybe not his own, obviously, but he, I mean, he’s making a case. He’s he’s he’s making a reasonable argument in some ways. And you know, if that’s not a rationalist, then I don’t know what is.
[00:06:16] Red: Can I read the first couple sentences from the book, the opening? Because I just thought they were so good. OK. The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. So the whole book came out of somebody asking some question that challenged him to answer a question. So he decided to go write a write a book. And so that’s the reason why I’m writing this book.
[00:06:45] Blue: Yeah. And the book is so quotable. I just like it’s one of these books where once you start highlighting your favorite quotes, like the whole page will just end up in just one big highlight. I have the same same reaction when I read Thomas Sol and just like every every line just seems so pithy and smart. And then you look at the next line and you’re like, oh, that’s just as good. And then so I mean, this was I I collected about 30 quotes here. I thought we could structure the podcast that way and look at some of these quotes and then talk about how proper might respond to them. I didn’t even get all the quotes that I liked. And it sounds like you brought some too. So but I thought that we couldn’t can go that direction and see see where the conversation takes us. At first I collected all the quotes I liked. And then I spent a little time trying to kind of, well, I should organize these somehow. It’s kind of interesting how that that fell into place, the organization of these quotes, most of them, well, let’s see, there was about four major categories that at least it’s not like I spent hours doing this or anything. But there was about four major categories that the the quotes seem to fall into. There was of course, well religion and Christianity. That was that was a major one. A lot of the real zingers, though, were in what I what I call the materialism, skepticism, rationalism and madness category, where he he goes after the the materialists.
[00:08:21] Blue: And then there was the what I call the joy mysticism and fairy tales section, where he he seems to really be invested in defending not just religion, I would say, but the but what I would consider mysticism and fairy tales, I suppose he never straight up says he believes in ghosts or elves or anything, but he certainly seems to be sympathetic to at least the idea that there are a lot of metaphorical truth in these these things. And you can definitely see why he was such an influence on C.S. Lewis and and Tolkien. I think he was basically just the generation before them. And they had both I think it was at C.S. Lewis, who converted to Christianity because of Chesterton. Have you heard that?
[00:09:13] Red: Oh, I don’t remember. I’ve read a lot of C.S. Lewis’s books. I’m I the problem is, is that back when I read C.S. Lewis’s books, I didn’t know who Chesterton was.
[00:09:22] Blue: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:09:23] Red: like I probably read it. And then I wouldn’t the name wouldn’t didn’t register in my mind. So I didn’t make the connection.
[00:09:31] Blue: Yeah. I think even though Chesterton was a Catholic and C.S. Lewis was a Anglican, I believe.
[00:09:39] Red: Yeah.
[00:09:39] Blue: But there was still some some overlap there and Tolkien of I think was I think Tolkien was a Catholic then, right? So
[00:09:48] Red: Tolkien is a Catholic, yes. And that was actually a bit of a a bur between their friendship was that one that one was Anglican one was Catholic.
[00:09:58] Blue: So
[00:09:59] Red: that put some stresses on their friendship sometimes, even though they had a lot in common because of that also
[00:10:05] Blue: I in addition to the religion, materialism, skepticism, and fairy tales, there there is the his ideas about democracy and liberalism, progress and optimism. I think there were a lot of parallels between that and David Deutsch and Karl Popper interesting parallels and areas of divergence as well. But he seemed to have a somewhat similar view of humanity and in humans as David Deutsch, or at least, you know, through my Deutsche and lens, I saw a lot of parallels at the very least. He seemed to very, very much was invested in the idea that Christianity, that liberalism is a sort of an extension of Christianity. Yeah, rather than something that’s opposed to it, which even I as an atheist doesn’t argument that I am quite interested in, actually, and I think it’s very foolish to completely discount the assertion that that being there might have been a reason why the Enlightenment happened in primarily in the in the West, in Christian countries. And so he seems very quite interested in that idea. He seemed there like I said, there were some things about his take on religion that I find kind of confusing. I don’t really know what he means when he talks about the paradox of Christianity. So that’s maybe that’s something we can come to in this conversation. I’m sorry, you go, Bruce.
[00:11:45] Red: Well, I was just going to say that. So you pointed out there’s a whole bunch of parallels between the the rationalist, Popperian, critical rationalist, Deutsche and worldview. But one of the main differences was that is that he is defending mysticism, which Karl Popper presumably never would, right?
[00:12:06] Blue: Mm hmm.
[00:12:07] Red: Here’s the thing that’s interesting, though, even in that, they’re not the opposites you would first think. And there’s actually some really interesting parallels between them in this area. So one of them is that despite the fact that Chesterton spends the entire book attacking, quote, rationalists, he calls himself a rationalist at different parts of the book. I noticed that too. OK, so here’s here’s a great quote. He says, people ask him, why can why cannot you simply take what is good and Christianity, what you define as valuable, what you can comprehend and leave all the rest, all the absolute dogmas that are in their nature incomprehensible? This is the real question. This is the last question. And it is a pleasure to try to answer it. The first answer is simply to say I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions. And then a little bit later, he says, I can deal better with a man’s exercise of free will if I believe he has got it. And I thought that that was interesting that he is admitting he’s a rationalist. Now, by comparison, the statement that comes from Hopper at the beginning of his essay, he says, I am a rationalist of sorts. I am not quite certain whether or not my rationalism will be acceptable to you. So whereas Chesterton attacks rationalists the entire time, but then says I am one. Hopper is talking to a group of rationalists and basically has to say, I’m not sure if you’d consider me a rationalist or not. And I want to point out that the reason why is because there’s not actually a contradiction here.
[00:13:53] Red: The term rationalist at the time had come to mean something somewhat more specific and really didn’t include Chesterton or Popper. And so both of them found themselves at odds with what you would normally think of as a rationalist. And in some ways for the same reasons, because the rationalists were wrong on all sorts of things. And both Popper and Chesterton could see that. So I just wanted to call that parallel out, because I actually think that’s an important parallel, that both of them kind of think of themselves as rationalists, but of a different breed of the rationalists of their day.
[00:14:29] Blue: Well, yeah, let’s let’s start with it. How about we start with the most famous quote, at least as far as I know, on democracy. And then we’ll go from there. Okay. I he says, I have never been able to understand where people get the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting a consensus of common human voices, rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant or oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around. All Democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth. Tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. I hope you can see how funny that is, that the arrogant oligarchy of those who happen to be walking about.
[00:15:35] Unknown: I
[00:15:35] Blue: mean,
[00:15:35] Red: that’s that’s hilarious. It’s just golden.
[00:15:37] Blue: But what do you think, Bruce, is is tradition that the democracy extended through time? Is there some validity to this idea?
[00:15:47] Red: So boy, how do I even answer that question? Let me say that I don’t know how far you should argue with someone who’s being poetic. Fair enough. And so, I mean, obviously, there are some, if I take him too literally, there are some problems with what he’s saying. One of the most obvious ones is that he really is kind of impinging upon the who should rule fallacy, right? And yet he never comes out and he actually gets there. And he’s making a point that’s kind of valid. And keep in mind, false ideas are often partially true. And that’s just kind of the norm, right? He wants to cast tradition as democracy that includes dead people. OK, I don’t know that that’s the best way. I mean, that’s maybe not a completely terrible way of putting it. I mean, like it certainly captures my interest and I can see where he’s coming from. But it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s the best way to go about it. For one thing, I don’t really think most traditions are conscious, right? Actually, Popper talks about this in his thing. Let me see if I can actually find the quote here. Here it is on page 168 of Conjectures and Refutations. He says, it is only very rarely that people consciously wish to create a tradition. And even in these cases, they are not likely to succeed. So to try to liken our traditions to the vote of dead people, maybe misses that nobody ever created these traditions to begin with because memes exist as replicators, completely separate in some sense. I mean, obviously, they get implemented through human minds. So I don’t mean completely separate from human minds, but nobody creates memes like intentionally.
[00:17:43] Red: The memes exist because the memes exist. They are they they are their own replicator that survives based on, you know, the rules of Darwinian natural selection, you know, or if you prefer Popper’s epistemology, completely distinct from anyone consciously coming up with them and forming them and things like that. So it does seem like to me like maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to try to liken tradition to democracy in that way. Now, having said that, that’s maybe not a bad thing, though. I mean, like the fact is, is the reason why we should respect tradition is not because it’s. Some wise person in the past said it like that’s not really the reason why traditions are so valuable.
[00:18:34] Blue: Yeah,
[00:18:34] Red: it’s because they’ve survived and they to do that, they had to bear knowledge. And we could argue here what type of knowledge it may actually be negative knowledge. It may be to the detriment of the individual. But there has to be some sort of knowledge for any meme to survive. And so that means that it deserves a certain amount of respect when we’re trying to approach it, that we don’t just dismiss it by, as he put put it, an oligarchy of those walking around. It’s the same as presentism, this idea that just because we hold these opinions today, therefore, that that’s right. And the people in the past are wrong. Like I don’t buy that. Like there’s all sorts of ideas we have today that are worse than ideas in the past. And that’s very normal, right? So I
[00:19:21] Blue: love that connection to the meme. I didn’t really think about that. I guess that’s the more of the David Deutsch or Richard Dawkins or whatever connection to the history. Is if you think about that tradition is something that’s passed on through through memes, which makes sense to me that these these memes are in some ways operated on democratically by our ancestors. And perhaps that speaks to why we should at the very least have some respect for them or take them seriously, at least.
[00:19:55] Red: Right.
[00:19:57] Blue: The other quote I loved along the similar line.
[00:19:59] Unknown: He says, it is quite easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated more respectfully than a book of history.
[00:20:07] Blue: The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village who are saying the book is generally written by one man in the village who is mad.
[00:20:15] Red: Yeah. That’s hilarious. So can I actually throw a quote in that is maybe gentle to what you were just talking about?
[00:20:28] Blue: Yeah,
[00:20:28] Red: he’s talking about this oligarchy of the living, right? That this pessimism that we we just think we’re right because we’re the ones that happen to be alive. OK, I couldn’t help but relate that to a lot of the problems that the left has with woke ism and the right has with Trump ism today. And probably more people with this podcast could relate more strongly to the the problems of woke ism than to the problems of Trump ism. I don’t know that we have many Trumpist Deutschians out there, to be honest. But like, I know a lot of them have a lot of concerns with. And rightly so, I have a lot of concerns with woke ism. So it might be easier to relate this to woke ism. But let’s be honest, this the criticisms we’re about to say could easily be applied to the right also. But you can see in the left and in how certain aspects of them have become too woke and have tried to shut down conversations. You can kind of see what Chesterton is getting at this idea that, hey, we know better, we know better than our ancestors. We don’t care what everybody in the past said. There is no reason why we should listen to past traditions. And they do kind of want to burn everything to the ground, or at least they say they want to burn everything to the ground, as Hopper will point out, that’s impossible. But they often talk about wanting to burn everything to the ground and start over.
[00:21:53] Blue: Yeah.
[00:21:53] Red: And they want to do it because of virtues that themselves, we haven’t talked about the book Dominion that probably deserves its own podcast. But a lot of the virtues that we accept as modern virtues do have their their roots in Christian tradition. This is one of the things that Chesterton is arguing throughout the book. And then here’s a quote that he had that I just couldn’t help but feel like this is so like it feels like he wrote it, wrote this book very recently. Like it feels very modern, right? Yeah, our modern problems. But here’s the quote, the modern world is not evil. In some ways, the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation, it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are indeed let loose and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are also let loose also. And the virtues wander more wildly and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad. And I think that’s a wonderful description of both kind of the extreme left and the radical left and the radical right today is that they are full of modern, you know, they are ancient virtues gone mad and on both sides to the point where it just doesn’t even make sense anymore and that they are quite damaging. This felt to me like it was spot on, honestly.
[00:23:28] Blue: Yeah, I left his thing about how he says that he believes in liberalism, but not liberals and he believes in progress, but not progressives. Right. Yeah, that was that was pretty good. Let me, well, along those lines. There are so many quotes here. It’s hard to pick. OK, let me just jump in. Let’s why don’t we shift gears to the to his take on the materialism, skepticism, rationality and madness, which I thought were probably most of the real zingers is when he was going after the, you know, Russian or not Russian German German philosophers and that, you know, the materialists of the day. And, you know, this is it was here. Here’s one of the best ones. But the new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty. Therefore, he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in the way when he wants to denounce anything for all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. And the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it as a politician. He will cry out that war is a waste of life. And then as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself, the man of this school goes first to a political meeting where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts.
[00:25:22] Blue: In short, the modern revolutionist being an infinite skeptic is always engaged in undermining his own minds. In his book on politics, he attacks men for trampling on morality. In his book on ethics, he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore, the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt by rebelling against everything. He has lost his right to rebel against anything. I just thought that was just a pitch perfect. Just take on these people who just want to just tear everything down and mold society according to their own utopian ideals or just the schizophrenic nature of that whole enterprise. Or how there was a comedian who did a thing about this. I wish I could remember the exact comedian talking about how you know, in our modern society, to say some to criticize a certain race is about the worst thing you can do. That doesn’t apply to the white race, but any other race or minority group would be. But then to criticize all humans as being terrible is just considered perfectly acceptable and normal. Oh, that’s a good point. Why is that?
[00:26:46] Red: But so, you know what? I had a quote I wrote down where he was criticizing Nietzsche that I thought was really funny. So he does say some positive things about him. He says this incidentally is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as bold and as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a political and suggestive thinker, but he was quite the reverse of strong. And then here’s the quote I like. And this is by the way, very Popperian. OK, so I want to point out just how Popperian this attack is. He, meaning Nietzsche, was not at all bold. He never put his own meaning before him in bald, abstract words, as did Aristotle and Calvin and even Karl Marx, the hard fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question by physical metaphor. Like a cheery minor poet, he said beyond good and evil, because he had not the courage to say more good than good and evil or more evil than good and evil. So if you’ll recall, Popper’s Popper’s epistemology is really about making you formulating your theories to be bold so that they’re easy to see what’s wrong with them and they can be error corrected and then to only error correct by making them even more bold. That’s Popper’s ratchet in a nutshell. Right. And this is exactly what he’s attacking with Nietzsche is that he kind of talks around things. He’s a philosopher. And he doesn’t really come out and just say what he really means. He ends up really not saying much early. That’s I’ve never read Nietzsche, so I can’t say for sure if I would agree with this or not, but this is the attack he’s making.
[00:28:39] Red: And I think that that’s exactly right, is that there is this tenancy and we’ve certainly all seen this where we’ve got these professors that have this word salad of things that they’re saying that make them sound really intellectual, but they’ve got no idea what they’re actually saying. And it sounds really good and it kind of gives you warm fuzzies. But like they’re not really just saying what they mean. Right. And so there’s nothing there to criticize. There’s nothing you can respond to. There’s no way to error correct what they’re saying.
[00:29:11] Blue: They teach children to express themselves like that. It’s just it’s unbelievable to me, but he seemed to see a real connection between materialism and or materialism or skepticism, I guess, might be a better word and madness. Like a lot of his quotes, his ideas seem to make this connection. I feel a little bit unsure about that, I guess. I mean, I guess it would depend on what kind of materialism we’re talking about.
[00:29:44] Red: You know, can we actually stop and try to make an attempt to talk about what is materialism, since I’m pretty sure the answer is that it’s never the same thing to two people.
[00:29:55] Blue: Oh, that’s an excellent point. Yeah. One criticism of the book is that I wouldn’t say he tries to steal man what someone could mean by a materialist. Yeah, exactly. You could call it a quite a strong straw man, as funny as his criticisms are. But I don’t know, what do you think, Bruce?
[00:30:18] Red: So I kind of have an opinion on this, but like I’m so not the philosopher. Yeah. And I just haven’t spent. And I just I’m just not interested enough in philosophy to be from other than Karl Poppers to really look into this and to try to become an expert in it enough to say anything definitive. But it’s my understanding that materialism was originally supposed to be the idea that matter is all that there is. Yeah. And that is a completely false idea. Yeah. And so I mean, obviously today, if you were a materialist today and there are people who would call themselves materialists today, you almost assuredly are including things that aren’t matter in your physical worldview, such as say forces, right? I mean, physics just doesn’t consist of just matter like by any stretch of the imagination. And that’s not even taking into consideration like Deutsche and ideas like computation, you know, or I mean, like there’s all sorts of things that are real that that aren’t matter.
[00:31:21] Blue: I think the whole software hardware distinction really rings true for me. I mean, maybe that’s its own kind of dualism in a way is that, you know.
[00:31:31] Red: Roger Penrose points out it is dualism. He says it’s not Cartesian dualism, but it is dualism. And he tries to attack it on those grounds. He’s right. It’s dualism. He’s wrong to attack it.
[00:31:42] Blue: Hmm. Well, I mean, I just love that. I mean, it’s the Deutsche’s take on the reality of abstractions. It’s just how seriously we should take these these other, you know, it’s sort of it’s a form of reductionism to almost want to reduce everything to, I guess, just subatomic particles or laws of physics or something. But, you know, one of the things I get from Deutsche’s philosophy, I suppose, is that these other levels of abstraction are worth taking very, very seriously. Right. You know, and I mean, that to me goes perfectly in line with what Chesterton is saying about poetry and, and, you know, at least some kinds of mysticism, I suppose. Well, let me let me read the quote here. He says, imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this, that only one great English poet went mad, but he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic, predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine. He was damned by John Calvin. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea. Reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The reason is mental exhaustion. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. The madman is not the man who was lost as reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. Materialists and madmen never have doubts. Mysticism keeps men sane as long as you have the mystery you have health.
[00:33:38] Blue: When you destroy mystery, you create morbidity.
[00:33:44] Red: So I was going to say that that quote was a one one paragraph quote that is almost identical to our episode 56, rationality, religion and the Omega point. OK, which took us three hours to discuss. There’s a great deal of similarity there. And now he said because it’s such a short quote, again, I don’t know how much you should criticize the poet because they don’t mean everything quite literally, right?
[00:34:15] Blue: But
[00:34:16] Red: he’s getting it something that I was bringing out in episode 56. Tolstoy went mad because he was rational. So Chesterton, I mean, at least we have one example of Chesterton being right. I think we could easily find other examples. So there is something to this. Now, I did take the stance that the reason why was because the cosmology of the day was pessimistic and that science’s cosmology has traditionally been very pessimistic. I excluded the Deutsche and cosmology from that and tippers and some others from that critique. And that’s really one of the things that had attracted me to Deutsche’s for strands, was that it was this rational, scientific world view that didn’t throw out what Chesterton is calling mysticism, what he’s referring to, right? And it actually kept a lot of those things that that scientists have historically tried to throw out. I mean, it’s not an accident that the vast majority of of people who consider themselves rationalists and consider themselves scientists and advanced thinkers and things like that. So many of them don’t believe in objective morality, right? Is not even slightly an accident. That’s not it’s not some weird coincidence. It’s because they think their theories say that. Yeah. And they arrive that with what they thought was rational thought. And very much when they say I’m a rationalist, they mean that cosmology. So if you mean, if that’s what you mean by rationality and right now, let’s not worry about whether it’s actually correct or not. That’s almost a separate question. But if that is what you mean by rationality, then yeah, I think it does deserve to be opposed. I’m like, absolutely. Yeah, I think it seems to
[00:36:14] Blue: be. It seems to be real tied into the skepticism to like the, you know, more more negative skepticism where you don’t really. You believe believe anything? Well, he said, well, let me just read one more quote here. What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced. But these are too humble to be convinced. Too modest to believe in the multiplication table.
[00:37:15] Red: But isn’t that like, I mean, like I didn’t even like it’s weird that he’s even saying that when I thought that was that like the attack on math, that math is what you actually do. There’s actually thinkers that have said this that, you know, math is really just something that we need to do away with because it’s it’s a way of oppressing people. And I mean, like you actually find that in the most extreme forms of wokeism today.
[00:37:44] Blue: It’s just a cultural bias or something. Yeah,
[00:37:46] Red: right. I didn’t even know that was a thing back in Chesterton’s day, right? And but apparently it was. There’s people who are actually today and back then, apparently, you know, too humble to accept the multiplication tables. Like, literally, that is happening.
[00:38:04] Blue: Oh, yeah. And then I guess the other side of that would be the whole mathematical universe hypothesis. That’s sort of maybe the other the other extreme where you basically conclude that the universe is is math as as Tagmark calls the level four multiverse, which is sort of I would be. And I’d be curious what Chesterton would think of that. He probably would not be to the fond of that idea. You know, and you know, the idea that mathematics describes the universe so well, including the behavior of subatomic particles that, you know, it’s one way to get get around the whole what do you call that? That the idea that the cosmological constants are so perfect. What’s that idea? I’m thinking of
[00:39:03] Red: anthropomorphic principle. Yes, yeah,
[00:39:05] Blue: that this idea that that, you know, if all of the constants were just a little bit different than reality would just collapse and or be completely inhospitable to to life. And, you know, one way to get around that, I guess, as I understand it is to see the the world is just everything that’s mathematically possible just lays out somewhere in the multiverse or other other universes. You know, I mean, it’s an it’s an interesting idea, I suppose, but it also seems to be the kind of skepticism.
[00:39:42] Red: It’s a bad explanation. It’s a bad explanation. So she explains in beginning affinity why it’s a bad explanation. Right.
[00:39:48] Blue: Yeah.
[00:39:49] Red: And it is he understand that bad explanation doesn’t mean wrong. And that’s like really important to keep this part, because Dwight actually explains this may turn out to be a part of the good explanation once we have it. But in its current form, it is absolutely a bad explanation.
[00:40:06] Blue: Well, should we move on to religion here? Sure. I his his take on. Jeez, it’s it’s great. So the like like we kind of hinted at he seems to see, you know, there’s this idea, this atheistic or secular, I guess you could say idea that the dark ages was the where religion ruled. And then the Enlightenment was sort of a process of coming out of that. But, you know, lately, I I still haven’t read that Holland book you were talking about, but lately I’ve been kind of curious. That’s quite right. I mean, another way to look at it is that in the dark ages life pretty much sucked everywhere. And, you know, maybe maybe the some of the ideas baked into Christianity were the only thing that made life somewhat more tolerable in this in the West and could have influenced the getting out of that that the the Enlightenment that occurred and the getting out of that lot world and living moving into a more of a culture of criticism in Deutsche’s words. He says here’s one short quote. He says, how can we say that the church wishes to bring us back into the dark ages? The church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
[00:41:38] Red: By the way, Hopper, I’m preparing a future podcast. And I noticed that Hopper talks about Copernicus’s theories. We often point to Galileo as the example of the church being Catholic Church in this case, being oppressive and shutting down the culture of criticism and things like that.
[00:42:02] Blue: Yeah,
[00:42:03] Red: but Hopper points out that so Copernicus predates Galileo by a long period of time. I forget how long it is, but it’s a lot. And Copernicus’s theory is Galileo’s theory. Copernicus is the one who had this idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. It wasn’t Galileo that came up with that. And in fact, Hopper points out that that theory that Copernicus came up with was based on the religious beliefs that he had at the time. The mythology that the church had integrated its theology in with the natural philosophers, so Plato and Aristotle. And it actually came out of the Aristotle’s and Plato’s thoughts that the sun must be because it’s so bright and it brightens everything. It should be the highest point and therefore it made more sense under that theory for the Earth to revolve around the sun than for the sun to revolve around the Earth. And that was actually Popper claims, at least, the basis for Copernicus’s theory, more so than any sort of inductive observation that, you know, that he then induced the theory from. Now, I’m not an expert in this, but I just thought that was interesting that just how muddled things are like Galileo supposedly is oppressed because he’s opposing the church. But Copernicus wasn’t oppressed because in his mind this is just what the church taught. And many churchmen agreed with him and it was perfectly normal for them to. And in fact, if you really get down to it, it really wasn’t the church that had a problem with Galileo. It was actually the Aristotleians, which was intermixed with the church. You could hardly tell the difference between them because typically if you were a philosopher, you were a monk or something like that.
[00:43:57] Red: And really, it was because he was starting to say things that they found at odds with Plato’s theories. Which to them was the science of their times that had been intermingled with theology, of course, they were becoming concerned with a lot of his claims. And it was really more things like the claim that the moon isn’t a perfect sphere. I mean, like I can look at the moon without a telescope. I can tell it’s not a perfect sphere. But like because Aristotle’s theories, you were supposed to be a perfect sphere. They had learned to kind of see it as a perfect sphere. And as Galileo was starting to look at it through a telescope and really see, look, that this really is a rough surface, right? That was really the types of things that they were starting to have problems with. It’s super hard to tease apart. And Galileo, by the way, was a zealot. Like he was a religious zealot. And that was one of the reasons why he was so insisting on trying to say what he thought was right and to overthrow some of the Platonic ideas that he felt had corrupted part of the church theology. And it’s really tough to actually tease these things apart in simple religion, science, philosophy, things like that. They just they’re kind of all just one thing if we go back far enough in time. And it’s very hard to know to find examples of the church was oppressing the scientist or something like that. It just didn’t happen that way.
[00:45:25] Blue: Hmm. Yeah, that makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. That’s an interesting way to to turn it around. Speaking of religion, he seems well, one of the things I liked about his take on religion is he seemed to see Christianity is really tied into joy in a way that he says other religions are not. And part so part of his defense seem to be a defense of the concept of of enjoying life, which which I really, really liked. You know, this is the last the very last paragraph of the book. He says, and as I close this chaotic volume, I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came. And I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation, the tremendous figure which fills the gospel’s towers in this respect as in every other above all the thinkers who ever bought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears, never concealed. He never concealed his tears. He showed them plainly on his open face at any daily site, such as the far site of his native city. Yet he concealed something. Solemn, Superman and Imperial Diplomacists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained his anger. He flung furniture down from the front steps of the temple and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet he restrained something. I say it with reverence. There was in this that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that he hid from all men when he went up a mountain to pray. There was something that he covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation.
[00:47:21] Blue: There was something, one thing, that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth. I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth. So, his joy. What do you make of that as a religious person?
[00:47:39] Red: Have you ever read the Gospels?
[00:47:41] Blue: A little bit.
[00:47:44] Red: I actually recommend people read the Gospels.
[00:47:46] Blue: Yeah, I’d like to read more.
[00:47:48] Red: Ain’t a picture of a man, Jesus.
[00:47:52] Blue: That
[00:47:52] Red: is an incredible picture.
[00:47:54] Blue: And it’s very easy to see why the Gospels have been so powerful in the minds of people and why Jesus has become a center of worship for Christianity.
[00:48:07] Red: Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is absolutely an astounding person. And not in the ways that we as moderns would want him to be. And yet somehow he comes, his greatness just comes across.
[00:48:23] Blue: Yeah.
[00:48:24] Red: And I’m not sure I can explain it better than that. It’s almost something you have to experience to understand. So I can relate very strongly as someone who’s read the Gospels many times to what Chesterton is saying there about Jesus and the way he is portrayed in the Gospels.
[00:48:46] Blue: Hmm. Yeah, well, I’ve also I’ve often thought many times that it was not to pick on on Islam per se, but it was probably a good thing that the Jesus was a. You know, I don’t know if you want to say pacifist or hippie or something. But he, you know,
[00:49:07] Red: Sam Harris’s podcast and need to say that recently or something.
[00:49:10] Blue: Oh, did he? Yeah, he
[00:49:12] Red: did. But
[00:49:13] Blue: he, you know, instead of I, yeah, I’m probably echoing Sam Harris here. But, you know, I mean, Muhammad was a it’s just a fact was a war lord who had slaves and killed people and had, you know, why had a wife who was nine years old or something? I mean, these are it was much different kind of a character than
[00:49:35] Unknown: then
[00:49:35] Blue: Jesus and, you know, even even atheists should be open to the idea that there’s some pretty good ideas in there, I think. Yeah, but what do you make about this? OK, the paradoxes, the Am I expressing that right? The Christian pay talks a lot about the one of the things that appeals to him about Christianity is all these paradoxes.
[00:49:54] Red: And yeah,
[00:49:55] Blue: I’m not exactly sure what that was about. OK, maybe you can explain that to me.
[00:50:01] Red: Let me see if I can explain it to you. I didn’t write down any good quotes on that because I didn’t know you were going to ask about it. So I don’t know if I can do as anywhere near as good a job as Cheshire didn’t try to explain. OK, so let me see if I did have a quote that was related to it. Let me see if I can find that quote because I think it’s got some relevance. OK, so here’s the quote that I had in mind. He says one round. So he’s talking about how he came to accept Christianity when, in fact, he was originally a rationalist and an atheist and things like that. And he would say one rationalist. Um, this is in the chapter called the paradoxes of Christianity, by the way. So one rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me. The charges seemed inconsistent. So this is something I’ve experienced many, many, many, many, many times as a religious person. So I know exactly what he’s talking about. OK,
[00:51:01] Blue: yeah,
[00:51:02] Red: when people are
[00:51:03] Blue: attacking a
[00:51:04] Red: religion, and this happens in particular with Christianity, this happens a lot with my own religion, which is Mormonism, which is a kind of Christianity. It’s a specific set of Christianity. It’s like you can’t do anything right. The attacks are so inconsistent that people will attack you because you as in as this exact, he gives like a ton of examples and you almost have to read the book. But oh, it’s it’s it’s religions this way of making you feel like you’re happy because you have an imaginary friend, you know, or something like that. Like there was I remember reading a back and forth between Jonathan Hyatt and people he was arguing with a scientist he was arguing with. And one of the arguments was that, you know, belief in God is just like a belief in imaginary friend. So they’re trying to make fun of you for believing in God because it’s the same as a child believing in an imaginary friend. So they might say that on one hand, right?
[00:52:07] Blue: Yeah.
[00:52:07] Red: And, you know, turn around and say, oh, but, you know, it’s actually this total nightmare and people who believe in Christianity live these terrible lives and they’re not free and they they have to do what the religion says. And it’s then they they have terrible mental health, you know, and like this is actually a testable theory. And I don’t mean to imply like I think being a Christian can cause you terrible mental health. I think there are cases where that’s actually the case. But like don’t test it. And Jonathan Hyatt will point out it just isn’t the case that it shows up that, you know, religious people have terrible mental health.
[00:52:45] Blue: Like
[00:52:46] Red: whatever is going on, it isn’t causing them to be worse than non -religious people with mental health. In fact, they do far better on average. Oh, yeah. Right.
[00:52:55] Blue: I believe that.
[00:52:57] Red: So you have these attacks that are complete opposites of each other. And in Cheserton, when he would receive these and remember, he’s not a Christian when this is going on. He would notice that these attacks were completely inconsistent and that they were in contradiction to each other. OK. Or like the violence, they said Christianity is too violent. And then it’s it’s too. Right. Too peaceful. Right. Right. It didn’t matter what you do, you’re wrong. Yeah. Right. And it’s being treated that way. And so he started to wonder if maybe at first he believed that this was a sign that Christianity was particularly evil. And because he could imagine, you know, some man that, you know, he was at once, you know, one way and then in out of proportion in one way and then out of proportion in some other. And he tried to imagine some super amorphous evil that was wrong in every conceivable way. And he was trying to make sense of that, even though it seemed like it was in contradiction. And then he says this, that I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation for such exceptional corruption. Christianity, theoretically speaking, was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. So on the one hand, they’re trying to denounce believe the Christian beliefs as this horrifying thing and in ways that are in contradiction. And then when he started to think, oh, well, that must mean it’s just particularly corrupt. They would then come up with an argument that would make that impossible to. And he started to wonder, this is Chesterton now. He started to wonder if maybe there was something exactly proportional about it.
[00:54:53] Red: So let’s say everybody else in the world was out of proportion and then you had this one man that was in proportion. Then everybody else would see that man is out of proportion. And he started to wonder if maybe that was what was going on. And again, I don’t want to necessarily defend this point of view. This is definitely all Chesterton here, but I’m just trying to explain what he’s saying in his book. OK.
[00:55:16] Blue: Yeah.
[00:55:17] Red: And so. So that is where he starts to get into this idea of the paradoxes of Christianity and Mormonism has an additional set of paradoxes that exist, that have been written about quite a bit. And I think paradox is the right word here because it’s not truly an outright contradiction. But Christianity is this spiritual religion that believes in a physical resurrection. It’s this religion that is neither truly pacifist. It actually believes in the necessity of fighting in a lot of cases. But it’s not really violent either. And it teaches a form of pacifism almost, but it’s never actually full pacifism. And there’s like a ton of these where all throughout Christianity, you’ve got these ideas of that that maybe at a surface surfacey level seem like contradictions. But if you look at them just a little more deeply, they’re really paradoxes. And what’s really going on, Chesterton is arguing, is that is that Christianity is allowing for and I wish I had written some of the quotes down as he’s got so many good ones that I had never thought of that I were very impressive and I don’t have them at my fingertips. But the idea is, is that human beings exist in a set of paradoxes and that Christianity as a religion was accepting of these paradoxes that we want to be a better self, but also never actually succeed at it. You know, we have ideals that we never that we teach and never fulfill. And then, you know, is that make us all hypocrites? So Jonathan Hyde argues we’re all hypocrites. And from a certain point of view, that’s true.
[00:57:02] Red: But Christianity puts it into a light where it’s no, that’s not what a hypocrite is as long as you’re actually doing your best and you’re trying Christianity has this idea of human beings being all sinful. And at the same time has this idea of the greatness of humanity that they are all in, you know, like C.S. Lewis’s terms potential gods. I see. And so you’ve got this this weird mix where on the one hand, you could read just certain parts of Christianity and you could see it as being typical of trying to tear down humanity. And you could look at just that this idea of the sinfulness of man. You could say, oh, that is exactly what moderns think today about humans being terrible and worse for the planet. And then you just keep reading. And suddenly it’s placing humanity right up there with God. And you’re just going, what is going on? Right? Because it just it just isn’t the pessimistic version of Christianity that you first thought it was, right? In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite of it. And then just as you’re starting to think it’s this this version of of humans that exalts humans way above what, you know, what they really are. It pulls you back down again. Humans are, in fact, sinners, you know, and they are out of alignment with God. And the whole of Christianity is just full of these paradoxes. OK. And they never really come out to be contradictions. They actually, in some sense, acknowledge that both are true at the same time. And this is really what Chesterton was trying to say. And I so wish I had some good quotes.
[00:58:50] Red: If you’ve got some good quotes, please read them, because he’s got so many great ones. Well,
[00:58:55] Blue: I think it’s sinking in now. So man is both significant and insignificant, sinful and capable of good. And like, I think I can see where more where where you’re going with that now. That’s interesting. I that’s the one one thing that I think why I am so, I guess, open to these kinds of religious arguments is not because I necessarily believe them or want to believe them, but I just feel more at this point in my life, just more philosophically aligned with people who are religious than people who are not religious. People who accept that there’s truly something special about humans rather than the people who say, well, we’re just another animal. We’re I mean, we are an animal, of course, but, you know, we’re not just another animal. We’re something different in nature. We’re truly special creatures to read another quote. He says that that rang true for me. A short one. He says, the essence of all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard nature as a mother, you discover she is a stepmother. Oh, and all modern cosmic religions, I mean, that kind of speaks to the whole God God shaped gap thing, too. I mean, if people so often it’s it’s, you know, maybe myself included. When people are not religious, they’re kind of just they want they want to believe in in mean something else. And it could be some kind of modern environmentalist religion or something. And yeah, not very friendly to stepmothers, either, I suppose. But funny, though. Should we should we move on to Popper’s response here? Or is there any other Chesterton quotes that you like? Before
[01:01:06] Red: we do, I would like to actually throw out a couple of quotes from Chesterton.
[01:01:10] Blue: OK,
[01:01:11] Red: I thought went well. They show that he was thinking about the same things Popper was thinking about. Yeah, right. Yeah. So here is him attacking induction, not by name, but we read the actual quote. When I came to ask them being the rationalists, I found they had no real proof of this unavoidable repetition in things, except the fact that these things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. This is page 104 in my version of the book. All the towering materialism, which dominates the modern mind, rests ultimately upon one assumption, a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself, it is probably dead. A piece of clockwork. So you can see that, I mean, like at the time he’s writing this, if you were talking to philosophers of science, they’re going to be telling you that the justification for science is induction, right? And he is rightly taking issue with it here. OK. Now, here’s another one that comes to mind. This is Chesterton aaping fallibilism in my mind. They, these rationalists, so did my mind. My first wild doubts of doubts. My grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Payne and the Free Thinker is unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use. Whatever. Page 152. So you can see kind of the fallibilism, right? That that coming from this world view that he’s interacting with and was originally a part of that was this inductivist, justificationist worldview. You can see why he’s resisting it rightly so, right? So anyhow, I just thought I wanted to throw those out.
[01:03:11] Blue: No, I definitely picked up on that, too. He seems to be at times rightly or wrongly portraying the materialist as an infallibleist, whereas he is seems to be arguing at times for fallibilism, not not so far away from what what Carl Popper might have said.
[01:03:32] Red: Yeah. Now, without a doubt, he he ends up going down a completely different route than Carl Popper does. No, no, ifs, ands or buts about it, even if they were maybe inspired by some of the same concerns.
[01:03:45] Blue: Well, that is true. So, yeah, moving on to Carl Popper’s essay, this is towards a rational theory of tradition. I don’t know if I specified that while at the beginning from conjectures and refutations. He it’s a it’s actually I said essay, but it’s actually a speech. I think he gave that’s that’s written down in the the chapter four of yeah, in the collection of essays. But he he makes the it’s framed as sort of a a response to I don’t know if he’d ever read Chesterton, but he talks about Edmund Burke, who’s the father of conservatism and presumably a I think he came way before Chesterton, but probably made the same kinds of defenses of traditionalism as far as I can tell. And, you know, Popper basically says that these kinds of defenses of traditionalism are worth taking very seriously and and maybe even have a grain of truth in them. But, you know, I think one of the things I really like about the essay is that he seems he under his version of rationalism. I think that something like what Chesterton is doing fits in perfectly with that. So I think by Karl Popper’s definition, Chesterton is a rationalist. I mean, he’s making a case. Like, what are you doing if you’re not making? If you’re I think Stephen Pinker has something about once you start making up reasons against reason, you’ve already conceded that reason has some basic validity. And, you know, I mean, Chesterton, what is he he’s basically engaging in in reason? And that’s what Popper, let me see, he is basically argues that that’s what the that’s what the Greeks started doing at the beginning of philosophy is that what they started discussing things.
[01:05:57] Blue: And that’s the basis of science discussion. It’s much more scientifically valid to to argue than to just trust the science or whatever. But so that’s kind of the tradition I see Chesterton working in is he’s making making a case. Here’s here’s from Popper’s essay. I think that the innovation which the early Greek philosophers introduced was roughly this. They began to discuss these matters instead of accepting the religious tradition uncritically and unalterable, like children who protest if anti alters one word of their favorite fairy tale. Instead of merely handing on a tradition, they challenged it and sometimes even invented a new myth in place of the old one. We have, I think, to admit that the new stories which they put in place of the old were fundamentally myths, just as the old stories were. And then going on a little bit, my thesis is what we call science is differentiated from the older myths, not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second order tradition that of critically discussing the myth before there were was only the first order tradition. A definite story was handed on. But now there was still, of course, a story to be handed on. But when with it went something like a silent accompanying text of a second order character. I hand it on to you, but tell me what you think of it. Think it over. Perhaps you can give us a different story. The second order tradition was the critical or argumentative attitude. It was, I believe, a new thing. And it’s still it is still the fundamentally important thing about the scientific tradition.
[01:07:55] Blue: If we understand that, then we shall have an all together different attitude towards quite a number of problems, science of scientific method. You shall understand that in a certain sense, science is myth making, just as religion is. You will say, but the scientific myths are so different from the religious myths. Certainly they are different, but why are they different? Because if one adopts this critical attitude, then once myths do become different, they change and they change in the direction of giving better and better account of the world of the various things which we can observe. And they also challenge us to observe things which we would never have observed without these theories or myths. So I guess I rest my case there. Chesterton is a rationalist because he’s at least by Karl Popper’s definition, because he’s making an argument.
[01:08:49] Red: So I think that was a great quote. I think that in some sense they’re both Popper and Chesterton are arguing against, quote, rationalists precisely because they think the rationalists are irrational. So let me actually give a quote from Popper on this. He says rationalists are inclined to adopt the attitude. Notice rationalists are inclined to adopt the attitude. I am not interested in tradition. I want to judge everything on its own merits. I want to find out its merits and demerits and I want to do this quite independent of any tradition. I want to judge it with my own brain and not with the brains of other people who lived long ago. Popper then goes on to explain the impossibility of doing that and why that isn’t a rational thing to expect and why you actually need these traditions, in this case, even certain traditions for science to work, right? One of the things that in the quote you just gave, I feel like there is something that I pulled out in some of our past podcasts and I made a big deal about. So I kind of want to flag it just briefly again. There isn’t really a strong distinction. There is really no distinction between early myths and scientific theories. That seems weird to say because of course Popper had this whole boundary condition. It’s a huge part of his epistemology, etc, etc. But here you see him saying otherwise. And I don’t think this is in contradiction. I think it takes a little bit of teasing out to understand what he’s saying. So the way I tried to explain this was that there really isn’t such a thing as a good explanation or a bad explanation per se.
[01:10:36] Red: OK, we may call an explanation a bad explanation. We may even mean something meaningful by that. If I were to call communism a bad explanation, that would be a rough way of saying communism, as it’s currently understood by most communists, it’s it’s not being proposed in a bold way. It’s not being proposed in a way that it actually says something about reality other than, you know, moral implications, of course, and versus rule that if it’s only got moral implications, that it’s a meaning meme, not a scientific theory. But there’s no reason why communism couldn’t be posed in a way that it could be tested. And this is something that Popper brings up a lot throughout his books, that that the Marx version of communism actually made real life empirical predictions. And then they turned out to be false and the theory was refuted. And at that point, people who believed in communism as a dogma kind of fell back and circled the wagons and continued to make their theories vaguer to where it just wasn’t possible to test it against the real world anymore. And the real distinction that takes place between a good explanation and a bad explanation isn’t easy to very versus hard to very per se, but whether the offenders easily vary it or the defenders refused to vary it and let it actually be tested. And then when they do vary it, they come up with an even more empirical theory to replace it. Popper’s ratchet. And when we talk about the demarcation of myths and science, you can’t really separate it based on only the theory itself.
[01:12:16] Red: You have to look at the attitudes of the defenders of the theory to really understand is this theory currently in its current form? What’s keeping it from being actually tested and against reality? And I think what you’ll find in the majority of cases that when we talk about an explanation being a bad explanation, what really makes it a bad explanation isn’t some law in the theory itself, but the choice to keep making it vaguer and vaguer so that it’s just impossible to ever every time you bring up a counter example to it, you vagify the theory further. I made that term up so that instead of making it more explicit, instead of making it more empirical, you make it less empirical. And once you start doing that, the theory therefore becomes entirely impossible to ever error correct or to refute to use the paparian term, which I a little bit disagree with that word. I feel it’s a little misleading. I agree with the word as Popper intended it. I think it’s often misunderstood. And this is really what I think Popper is getting at. And I don’t know if Popper necessarily explains this the best, but I feel like the passage you just read explains it very, very, very, very well that myths really aren’t of a different character per se from science. They do eventually become a different character. That’s what Popper’s saying, but the difference is the attitude of the people who are defending the theory. And as they try to solve the problems using Popper’s ratchet instead of making things vaguer, that the theory must change character. And yes, once that character changes, eventually you end up with something that’s very different than the original myths.
[01:14:03] Red: But you can’t make an easy divide between them. Atomism is a considered a completely valid scientific theory today. It came out of a purely metaphysical set of theories from way back in ancient times. And there is no break at all between the original totally made up, we would say, false metaphysical theories that and the modern scientific version there is a complete stream between them with no break between them. And there is never a point where it suddenly became scientific. And it’s just impossible to tease them apart. This is one of the reasons why I’ve made a big deal about you can’t dismiss a theory just because it has a lack of mechanistic explanation today. The theory vitamin C stop scurvy has no mechanism listed, but it is a completely valid scientific theory. Even though it has no explanation at all being offered other than just straight up vitamin C somehow stop scurvy. But it is a completely valid scientific theory because it can be tested. And that’s really what makes it special. Yes, from there we continue to criticize it and we get way more specific over time till we’re working out oranges stop scurvy is what I meant to say until we work out it’s actually the vitamin C it’s because it addresses the connective tissue and it does these things to it. And we can eventually criticize that theory into something that’s super specific and way more testable and way more true truth like because of that. Okay, sorry, that was my tangent, but that’s my response to what Popper is saying there. And I did want to emphasize that there is not a true distinction between myths and science scientific theories in Popper’s mind.
[01:15:50] Red: It’s really the additional tradition of criticism that eventually discovered this idea of well let’s make, let’s cash everything out in terms of empirical tests that we can all do and then boom, you’ve now unlocked the progress machine, right?
[01:16:09] Blue: Yeah, he seems to make the case in the talk that the science is essentially a tradition, tradition of criticism.
[01:16:18] Red: He does a great job of talking about how hard it is to create a tradition of research saying that you can go and you can, he gives an example of how there was schools outside the West and the struggles that they had back then in Popper’s time to try to establish the scientific tradition
[01:16:37] Blue: because
[01:16:38] Red: they just did not have the necessary cultural traditions necessary for them to make sense of it.
[01:16:43] Blue: Yeah.
[01:16:43] Red: And so they would have these universities and they weren’t very good research universities and that have the person come out and say we need to be a good research university and he says nobody really believes that’s going to change a thing just because somebody said we need to do good research, right? Yeah. It absolutely comes down to you have to actually import the culture and the traditions that allow you to be a good research university and until you have that, you’re just not going to be, right? Yeah. And science works exactly the same way, without the right traditions and we often say a culture of criticism. I think that that is a very vague term and I think that’s one of the criticisms that I’ve often leveled against the crit rats, right? Is that it really does not mean we offer criticisms because that’s always existed, like throughout all throughout history. It’s something way more specific than that, right? And I’m not even sure I can off the top of my head giving a super specific definition of what that means, a culture of criticism because it’s a vague set of traditions that are a little hard to describe exactly, right? A huge part of it is what I keep talking about this idea of we’re going to cash everything out in terms of empirical tests. Obviously, that doesn’t always apply because there are non -empirical theories but the very fact that the culture of criticism in the west tries to make all its theories empirical as much as it can, okay?
[01:18:15] Red: Which is something that is very much at odds with the crit rat culture that I’ve often encountered where they into me they’re going away for making the theories as empirical as possible, right? Yeah. Like this is part of the culture of criticism that has been lost that’s easy to lose that gets lost regularly amongst little subcultures but that the scientific community has never lost and has held on to even if you can’t get a scientist to explain to you exactly what it is they’re doing. Like it’s just a part of their traditions that they cash everything out in terms of empirical content and empirical theories are considered more important and so they have a rush towards empirical content as much as they possibly can, right? And instead of taking the stance, oh, but this theory is metaphysical, therefore it can’t be tested they go out of their way to try to figure out how to make it testable and no, you can’t always figure it out and it’s often a matter of what your technology level is at this time and sometimes they go about in ways that don’t make sense. I mean, there’s a lot of psychological theories out there that have rushed to testability in ridiculously stupid ways but you can see that culture of criticism, the real culture of criticism at work, it’s not just we criticize each other it just isn’t that. It’s something way more specific than that, right? Way deeper.
[01:19:41] Blue: Well, there isn’t Karl Popper of a mind about the definition of a rationalist as someone who is willing to let their ideas do their fighting and dying which I think that speaks to what a culture of criticism is in a way is that it’s the central characteristic is that it’s culturally encouraged that people will change their mind in the face of new evidence and even talking to my own children, at least the way I raise my children and I’m not as extreme as maybe some of the people we interact with but I try to be, I guess and I’ve, you know, even long before I discovered David Deutsch and Karl Popper when I speak to my own my children have always known that they can argue with me and maybe I’ll even change my mind and they’ll find them so persuasive and even that relationship is not like as authoritative as authoritarian as it is in many many cultures which I think is probably a good thing. I think it goes too far but it’s one thing I appreciate about our culture. So I thought maybe we could wrap this up with the way the his essay ends which in some ways maybe contradicts what I was saying before about Chesterton being a rationalist. Maybe you know, maybe Karl Popper would read him and think that he wasn’t a rationalist and he was making engaging in pseudo -arguments and propaganda. Let me just read this the way he closes the essay. He says even more precious perhaps is the tradition that works against the ambivalence connected with the argumentative function of language. The tradition that works against the misuse of language which consists in pseudo -arguments and propaganda.
[01:21:48] Blue: This is the tradition and discipline of clear speaking and clear thinking. It is the critical tradition, the tradition of reason. The modern enemies of reason want to destroy this tradition. They want to do this by destroying and perverting the argumentative and perhaps even the descriptive functions of human language by a romantic reversion to its emotive functions, the expressive. There is too much talk about self -expression and perhaps the signaling of stimulative function. We see this tendency very clearly at work in certain types of modern poetry, prose and philosophy. In a philosophy which does not argue because it has no arguable problems. These enemies of reason are sometimes anti -traditionalists who seek new and impressive means of self -expression or communication and sometimes traditionalists maybe like Chesterton who extoll the wisdom of linguistic tradition. Both assume a theory of language that sees no more than the first or perhaps the second of its functions. In their practice, they support the flight from reason and from the great tradition of intellectual responsibility. So is Chesterton an enemy of reason? I don’t think so, but regardless I would encourage everyone out there to read him as the best argument against materialism and rationalism and for religion that I’ve ever encountered and sounds like you sort of agree. I do.
[01:23:36] Red: I agree. Can I just point out that that quote you just read from Popper just how completely relevant it is to our current modern setting. And again, just to not to pick on wokeness but this idea of the enemies of reason are trying to make everything about self -expression and that they don’t want to have the argumentative function they want to shut down the argumentative function through self -expression. That is certainly one of the things that has been leveled as a criticism against wokeness. I would say it’s by far also a fair criticism of radical right as well. And I think that this is exactly what, you know, Popper when did Popper live? When did he say this? When did he write this book?
[01:24:26] Blue: The essay was 48.
[01:24:28] Red: Oh, wow. Okay, the book is 63 but the talk is 48. Interesting. So we were dealing with the same problems all the way back then. I think it’s stunning how often that’s true that we think we have some sort of modern problem we’re dealing with but actually it’s the same problem that has come up over and over again in the past and you come across someone who lives decades or even centuries in some cases before you and just how modern it sounds.
[01:25:04] Blue: That’s definitely how Chesterton struck me is that he really reached out of history and you realize that yeah, people have been debating these issues and thinking about them for a long time now and just not on podcasts but I’m happy to do it here with you, Bruce. Thank you. Happy to do it with you too. Bye -bye. Bye -bye. Hello again. If you’ve made it this far please consider giving us a nice rating of whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch’s four strands tie everything together so we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BN Nielsen 01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group the mini worlds of David Deutsch where Bruce and I first started connecting. Thank you.
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