Knowledge And Decisions

Perhaps the simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way. This applies not only to social phenomena but to natural phenomena as well. Primitive peoples explained the movement of leaves on a tree by some spirit or god who wanted the leaf to move, had the power to make it move, and so it moved. The analogy of this to purposeful and deliberate human activity is obvious. It is only at a much more developed state of reasoning that the movement of leaves is explained by wind currents of a nonpurposeful (but also nonrandom) nature, based on differences in air pressure. The more primitive kind of explanation remains a more spontaneous or “natural” kind of explanation — one that arises first in a wide variety of areas, and is later abandoned only when forcibly displaced by a demonstrable alternative. Some events are in fact the result of purposeful activity toward the goal achieved, but the general presumption that this must be the case can be classified as “the animistic fallacy.”

The animistic fallacy has had many great, historic forms — in religion, in biology, and in economics, for example. Time is a crucial ingredient in the alternative, systemic or evolutionary, explanations of the same phenomena. The religious “argument from design” for the existence of God asserted that the observed nonrandom pairings of environments and creatures, the male and female sexes, the cooperating organs of the body, etc., all proved that a purposeful intelligence had designed the universe to fit together. Even such philosophic skeptics as David Hume and John Stuart Mill found these arguments weighty. After Darwin’s theory of evolution provided an alternative explanation of the same natural phenomena, even religious believers no longer rested their beliefs on the animistic “proof” of the existence of God. Darwin was a landmark, not only in the history of biology, but in the history of intellectual development in general. He showed how — with sufficient time — nonpurposeful activity could lead to nonrandom results: he divorced order from “design.” Yet the animistic fallacy would say that the absence of “planning” must lead to chaos — and the economic and political consequences of that belief are still powerful today.

Animistic explanations require little or no time for the events they postulate to take place — only six days for the creation of the world, in one religious version, and in principle omnipotence could have made it happen in an instant. Evolutionary explanations, on the other hand, necessarily imply sufficient time for initially random events, behavior, or individuals to be sorted out by environmental forces in such a way as to leave a surviving population with nonrandom characteristics adapted to the environment. Initial mutations may happen to range from beneficial to fatal, but surviving mutations tend to represent improved adaptations to the environment. After millions of years of natural selection, what will be observed will be primarily surviving mutations. One may choose to regard the process as a whole as Providential without committing the animistic fallacy of asserting that the observed order could only be a result of deliberate design.

SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS

Social phenomena may also be explained either animistically, from the intentions of the individuals involved, or in terms of the mutually constraining complex of relationships whose results form a pattern not necessarily similar to the intentions of any of the individuals involved. The animistic fallacy is not the exclusive property of either the political left or right. Conservative economists of an animistic bent explain rational behavior in a timeless context, sometimes with the moral conclusion that the wise are rewarded for their foresight and the unwise penalized for their lack of it — that “supernormal brains” explain large profits for example. On the left, social planners eager to save the world from “chaos” engage in another form of the animistic fallacy. Both approaches ignore time, for there is no selective adaptation process to take place. However, the animistic fallacy is rejected decisively by such ideologically disparate figures as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, both of whom analyzed in systemic terms.