The Wisdom of the ghosts
The Wisdom-of-the-Ghosts argument is an ancient argument for conservatism that goes as follows. All of our ancestors affirmed X. Who are we to go against their good judgment? Who are we to second-guess them? Why think our judgment is better?
This is one of the oldest political arguments. Examples of it occur in the work of Edmund Burke, and pretty much every famous conservative at some point. It is a venerable form of argument but by no means a dead one. To pick one out of a practical infinity of cases, Dave Rubin recently appealed to this argument in a conversation with conservative Dennis Prager to explain why he has had his kids circumcised- generations of his ancestors for thousands of years have had their kids circumcised, who is he to say he knows better?
Presentations on the subject often wax poetic about the volume of accumulated knowledge the past represents, the dangers of ignoring that accumulated knowledge, how everyone thinks their circumstances are unique, but truly there is nothing new under the sun, the rivers of blood that seemingly innocuous things can be damming up and so on and so forth.
I call it the Wisdom-of-the-ghosts argument because it seems to me to be very similar to the wisdom of the crowd’s theory. The wisdom of the crowd’s theory is the largely true supposition average judgment of many people is more likely to be correct than the judgment of one person or a smaller group of people.
However, the comparative wisdom of the crowd depends on the assumption that you do not have access to a large trove of information they do not. True, It’s hard to beat the judgment of the stock market, the ultimate example of aggregated knowledge and the wisdom of the crowds, but if you have insider information- knowledge that no one else has access to you have a very good chance of beating it. Here’s where the analogy between the wisdom of the crowds, and the wisdom of the ghosts breaks down: by actually being in these times, we have the equivalent of insider information in comparing our judgment to the aggregated judgment of our ancestors.
A list of all the implicit assumptions I dislike in the wisdom-of-the-ghosts argument
I’m not a fan of the argument. In some cases, I think it is, at best, a weak consideration. In others, as in Dave Rubin’s argument about circumcision, I think it is risible. It seems to me that the wisdom of the ghosts argument implicitly makes the following assumptions, but these assumptions often (usually?) aren’t met:
People, in the past, in general, were aiming for the same things as you. [They weren’t, many of their terminal values appear to have been quite different, especially the values of their ruling aristocratic warriors. See ideas like “natural slavery”.]
That the people who happened to be making the decisions were executing that general will [and not, say, entrenching the domination of people like them throughout time].
That those in the past were making a decision equivalent to the one you face, and that they had the same information. [They weren’t. Granted, every generation has thought it was unique, but only a clod would fail to see that our technology is a game changer and our social norms and structure vary greatly also, which has cascading effects for which decisions are prudent. Better statistics and science mean that even if they were making the same decision as us, we have more information about the choice we face than they did.]
That people in the past, or at least some of them, had the same perceived options as you, and wouldn’t have taken one of the alternate options available to you if it had been present as a feasible choice. [The set of politically and technologically feasible options is vastly different now than it was even 100, let alone 1000, years ago.]
When the argument is made, there is often an attempt to appeal to the sheer number of people who made the same choice. However, that implicitly assumes the decisions taken by each generation were based on independent, fair-minded evaluations and not just “the tidal pressure” of history [see especially how this breaks down in the Rubin-Praeger interview case- as if each father made the decision through careful and solemn reflection, rather than something like intergenerational habit].
Another thing I dislike about the wisdom of the ghosts argument is how inconsistently it is applied in practice. The welfare state, for example, is quite established at this point. People determined that in modern conditions we need a welfare state and that judgment was repeated through several generations. Even before the modern welfare state, much of the time churches cared for certain welfare needs through compulsory tithes- effectively a welfare state. But now many conservatives want to abolish it and replace it with private charity! Nonetheless, no one ever applies the wisdom of the ghosts argument to show that we shouldn’t dismantle the welfare state- or maybe a few moderate conservatives do, but I haven’t heard it much.
Worse, no one ever grapples with the fact that wisdom-of-the-ghosts arguments can be self-defeating when mobilized against change. The founding fathers thought, for example, that the constitution would and should be frequently amended. What to do when, as is often the case, the judgment of the past is that we should not adhere too closely to the judgment of the past?
I do think that the wisdom of the ghosts argument has its uses. The closer the list of assumptions I gave comes to being met, the more likely it is that the argument from the wisdom of the past has merit in a particular case.
The wisdom-of-the-ghosts argument probably worked pretty well for many hunter-gatherer groups, where a lot of what was being decided wasn’t questions of social allocation, desert, justice, etc. but technical questions about staying alive, and where traditions encoded information about rare but potent dangers (e.g. “when the sea falls massively, run and seek high ground- an enormous wave is coming”). The wisdom of the past matters less though in questions about values, especially where those values vary between generations, between classes, between castes and so on. Hunter-gatherers also encountered such questions, of course, and in some cases, their traditions led to very poor choices by our lights (e.g., slavery).
The TV argument
There’s a related argument, often conflated with it the wisdom-of-the-ghosts argument, that goes as follows:
A) Society is a complex system B) Most rearrangements of a complex interacting system will not work C) We cannot know if a given arrangement will work in advance D) By the preceding, if we make significant changes to society, it will probably fall apart.
This argument has been put forward by many, but the presentation I know of it is from an Australian philosopher and arch-conservative called David Stove- who gave it with the memorable metaphor of a television set. Most ways you can fiddle around with the bits inside a TV- attaching, detaching, rearranging- will simply make it stop working. So I’ll call it the TV argument.
I have little to say about the TV argument except we had better hope it’s not true! Why? We live in a society that is built, thanks to capitalism, on a process of continual social transformation. Hence if the argument is true, either our society will eventually collapse due to changes pushed on it by the capitalist process, or if we get rid of capitalism instead to forestall this, then the end of capitalism, and the massive flow on consequences of that, will probably be the major change that breaks the TV set. Either way, we’re doomed. It’s like we have a TV that constantly rearranges itself randomly.
I have a troubling sense that something like the TV argument may turn out to be true, that fiddling with social configurations endlessly risks disaster. However, given the ceaseless churn of our world, using the TV argument as David Stove would- as an excuse to cut out reforms intended to promote equality, liberty, and fairness while ignoring the turmoil of capitalism- seems like silly special pleading. If anything, blocking off changes in one area may even hasten disaster by preventing compensating changes that could help rebalance the system on a more sustainable basis, as capitalism and technological change throw society back and forth.