Knowledge And Decisions

The trade-off between culturally determined decisions and individually determined decisions involves a prior sorting and labeling of decisions by their degree of importance and uniqueness. Within some range neither cultural norms nor rational calculation will be applied, but fancy and caprice will be allowed to choose — as between blue or green bedspreads or automobile colors, however much rational thought may have gone into the selection of furniture or of an automobile.

Sometimes the choice between cultural and individual decision making is a choice between “feelings” and articulated rationality. Given the imperfections of language and the limitations of specific evidence, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the mere formally logical articulation is in fact more rational, much less empirically correct. When the choice between the two processes is not within one individual but between one individual and another (or between one group and another), it is even less likely that the more articulate position is the more valid position. This is not an argument for mysticism rather than logic. It is simply a recognition that the weight of generalized but unrecorded experience — of the individual or of the culture — may be greater than the weight of other experience which happens to have been written down and spelled out. While specificity and articulation are important, they are not categorically preemptive: every small-sample study cannot overturn the common sense of mankind or the experience of the ages.

Obvious as this may seem, it contradicts the philosophy of rationalism, which accepts only what can “justify” itself to “reason” — with reason being narrowly conceived to mean articulated specifics. If rationalism had remained within the bounds of philosophy, where it originated, it might be merely an intellectual curiosity. It is, however, a powerful component in contemporary attitudes, and affects — or even determines — much political and social policy. At its most extreme, it exalts the most trivial or tendentious “study” by “experts”¹⁸ into policy, forcibly overriding the preferences and convictions of millions of people. While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim — or arrogation — of power to stifle the autonomy of others, on the basis of superior virtuosity with words.

Rationalism is at one end of a spectrum with evolutionism at the other. The evolutionary process sees the determining rationality in a process — unarticulated in whole (animals) or in part (humans) — not in the individuals involved in the process. From this viewpoint, the evolutionary process is no less powerful in its effects for being undiscovered or unplanned. This applies not only to biological evolution but to social processes as well. People have articulated intentions, but history is not a record of those intentions being realized so much as it is a record of entirely different things happening as a net result of innumerable strivings toward mutually incompatible goals. Hegel and Marx called this “the irony of history” and Adam Smith called it “an invisible hand” determining the social result of an individual’s action — “a result which was no part of his intention.”¹⁹ Darwin’s biological generalization of the same principle made the point even more vivid, since his evolutionary theory applied to animals whose intentions (or “instincts”) hardly included the evolution of their species, and even to inanimate life such as trees and grasses with no apparent intentions at all, but which develop elaborate ecological patterns nevertheless. In short, intentions must, at the very least, compete with powerful nonintentional forces.

When culture is conceived of as an evolutionary product — an ecology of human relations — it is by no means clear that any and all well-articulated reasons for changing particular parts of this social ecology must be valid. Even if plausible in the specific case, a policy’s unintended consequences throughout a complex system is a weighty consideration. Articulated rationality can seldom predict very far or very specifically, and much depends on the speed and accuracy of social feedback mechanisms — and on whether the feedback includes incentives to adjust or abandon counterproductive policies.