Dear Mat,
Apologies for lateness. The fund I operate to give cash-transfers to dentists and mechanics has taken up a lot of my time lately.
Man, I feel like there’s an increasing amount to try and respond to in each letter. (Incidentally, Dennett calls it a Good Trick when evolution stumbles across a solution to a problem that really does work, often because it chance upon a deeper truth. Good term for what you were describing.)
I’ll pick one point. You note that we love to produce explanations and stack them up on one another. Indeed Deutsch suggests that it’s the only thing we really enjoy, on our quest as universal explainers. But something he doesn’t mention, which I assume is entailed in his ideas about jumps to universality, is that not only do birds lack this ability to go beyond exploiting knowledge to actually experiencing or understanding it, but so do many humans. Only a human brain — at this stage — has the necessary conditions to jump to universality, but seemingly most humans for most of history have not enjoyed explanation for its own sake or the accumulation of new knowledge.
Jumping across to politics, this is where I get somewhat annoyed with the Jonathan Haidts of the world and their advocacy of centrism. In fact, I think despite his best efforts he is an apologist for relativism. Whereas Deutsch (although he’s a one-eyed zionist, a bit of a child of the ’70s and not very interested in ideas outside his domains) is pretty honestly putting the case that there is no justification for some styles of thought. What I’m getting at is that clearly a person who has met the threshold we currently have as the vanguard of knowledge, who is up to date with modern ideas and has access to the good explanations of science, the error-correcting nature of a democratic system, the open possibilities inherent in an environment that fosters conjecture (free speech) — such a person’s style of though contains the thought of someone who hasn’t met this threshold.
A conservative, status quo justifying, tradition-upholding person does not want to see the continual expansion of knowledge and is uninterested in or afraid of the unfettered conjectures of ideas. A progressive (in the most basic sense of the word) has a style of thought that contains the explanations of conservatives (which were generally those of yesteryear) and has moved on to new ones, built upon those of the past.
Ironically the only thing that can transform someone into a lover of explanations and new knowledge is a dose of new knowledge and some good explanations. But the conditions which allow this are predicated on a certain threshold of free speech, error-correcting politics and investigation into how people learn: themselves pieces of rare, hard-won knowledge. I fear that the attempts by Haidt et al. to temper the left-wing bias in academia, to stymie the excesses of the regressive left is actually contributing to the same preservation of old/bad explanations as some strains of identity politics and cultural relativism.
This sounds like simply another argument for good old classical liberalism (the house always wins) but even classical liberalism is a bit old now. At least it contained error-correcting mechanisms within it and leads to a plurality of possible thoughts and positions, with the possibility of updating itself. By my count that makes it the first “universal” political philosophy. I think any view now that doesn’t build on that as a baseline is basically stone age. If you haven’t even gotten to liberalism yet I don’t see why we should take it seriously. (That rules out traditional conservatives, the alt-right, Haidt-style centrists, censorship-lefties and most people on the American political landscape before the race even starts.)
Liberalism contains the mechanisms necessary to smack down bad explanations that would seek to undermine it from the left, the right, or the centre.
Progressively progressive,
Jamie.