Rats and trads

Recently I spent some time at a liberal arts college, doing close reading out loud with a group of the profs. It was lovely; stimulating, collegial, civilised. A little pocket of air outside history. But I was aware of being an interloper, of feeling inimical to them. Why?

After all, I’m an obsessive reader – and they do little else. I’m uninterested in most kinds of worldly success – and, e.g., none of the six professors present had ever heard of YCombinator. We both love learning and teaching and talking about ideas; admire and promote mathematics; take aesthetics seriously; get really into philosophical questions; think that virtue is extremely real and extremely important and at least a little transmissible; and have serious misgivings about AI, academia, goodharting, specialisation, and other mechanisations of the as-if soul. From the outside we seem like the same kind of intellectual fundamentalist organising our lives around thinking.

Is it that they’re religious? No; I have religious friends who instead share my disposition. Is it that they’re conservatives? No; they’re sometimes not (one’s a sort of Marxian), and anyway at this point I am unthreatened by Burkean selection and Hayekian humility. Is it that they’re hostile to science? They’re not; they all know C20th physics in passing and view it an essential and noble part of the human mind. These ones simply aren’t like Snow’s philistines. Is it that they hide in the past? No; they’re much occupied by understanding and critiquing the present with tools from the past. Is it that they’re deontologists? I don’t know that they are; they could easily believe that the transmission of wisdom and the leading-out of new minds is the greatest matter of consequence. Is it that they think that the modern world is worse than the old one? In some ways; better in others.

Or is it that they’re holists? That they don’t quantify much? That they view philosophy as the best thing for humans to do? That they are idealists? That they hold onto the manifest image and folk psychology? Getting warmer, but these are mere philosophical disagreements and there’s something deeper behind these symptoms.

Eventually I worked it out. The short version is that I am Greek (“rationalist”), but they are Roman (“traditionalist”) - French, where they are English - Huxley where they are Arnold. They default to respecting the past; I default to disrespecting it. They love the context of discovery most; I love the context of justification. I think the human condition has changed enormously, that qualitative history is just not very explanatory, that philosophy is nice but relatively impotent, and that the conceptual tools developed in the last hundred years (stats, formal logic, linear algebra, and above all computation) are superior to nearly all those of the entire past; they aren’t convinced. To get at the world they analyse texts and ideas; impatiently, I want to analyse the world directly. I am obsessed with originality and novelty; they are deeply suspicious of them. I have a problem with authority; they have a problem with its absence.

For them the point is the process (truth-seeking, character-formation, cultural transmission); but the point is the result (truth, character, culture). Their fundamentalism is in going back to the beginning. Mine is in zeal for correctness.

At the extremes, scholarship (the study of past research) and research (the study of the world) come apart. (You don’t have to pick between them, but some people do.)

pre-emption

The title of this post has little to do with the vulgar popular forms, slavish internet-addicted rationalism and idiotic internet-addicted "trads". I mean instead the thing which Lesswrong is an instance of, and the unusual modern science-inclusive subset of the liberal arts ideology.

Traditionalism

or, indirect rationalism

At the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study… I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which is mine only and which I was born for; I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, forget every trouble, do not dread poverty, am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

— Machiavelli

A college education [ideally] concerns realities. It is supposed to make people uncomfortable — not to offend them pointlessly or with evil intent or effect, but to make them uncomfortable with, say, the Bill Cosby level of moral and social discourse. It’s the uneducated who live in the ivory tower, a comfortable place with a good TV in which nothing important is discussed honestly, candidly, or thoroughly.

— Deirdre McCloskey

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire

— Gustav Mahler

The still-potent thing behind the names and manifestations: Classical Education, The Classics, the liberal arts, the Great Books, the Great Conversation. Foundational texts. Western Thought (Western in this case, but everywhere has their own trads).

Steelman

The object of our inquiry is not here. We need help. The truth is hard and hidden; we are not strong enough to solve it alone; one hope is to approach it indirectly, with the distillate of the distillate of the best things that any of us have ever said.

Statistically, most of the greats are not currently alive.

We study things because people have studied them a lot before - no, sorry, that’s unfair: “we study things because the process which preserved them was partially filtering for quality and timelessness.”

Sure, time does winnow and does select for timelessness. They let Burkean selection pick out our texts, because it is actually good at it; they let Burkean meta-selection pick out their approach to texts / the world. They trust in Burkean selection, and distrust other selection mechanisms. (But it is so slow!) The delay, the foot-dragging, the antipathy to trends means they dodge many bullets. Freud and his ghouls didn’t break in. Marx and his abusers are right out. Foucault is neither here nor there.

Rote learning, imitation, and humility are underrated first steps in education. This process has in fact produced a lot of very original thinkers. It would be silly to totally ignore great people if you wanted to become great.

The ancients are quite interesting. Getting your head out of the post-Christian Enlightenment postmodern is useful to be able to do, e.g. so you can see it more clearly by comparison. Some apparently new things are just rehashing ancient things, sometimes missing the point or flattening it.

Understanding people very different from you is hard and key, and theory of mind generalises. Solitary learning is harder, so just talk to each other.

Historiography is better than nothing.

You don’t have to agree with what you read, read deeply, or even with what you devote your life to.

But

Obviously the traditionalist curriculum includes rationalists sufficiently-old: Bacon, Leibniz, Franklin, Hume and so on. The best of my kind will show up in their curricula in a hundred years or two; but the converse is not true. (Well ok, but maybe that’s because rats are closed-minded.)

They conduct a modest study of some of the least modest people of all time. Hegel thought his was the final philosophy. Leibniz went further, thinking that he could automate and solve all arguments in any field.

It’s cool to read al-Khwarizmi, but when we do we’re doing something quite different than he was doing. He was exploring, and we’re retreading. You are not learning how to do science when you read 400 year old texts, because science is always in the present tense (even when it mines old texts for neglected and decorrelated ideas).

I buy that to really understand Christianity, you need to understand Judaism and Platonism. But I have the great fortune of not much needing to understand Christianity. We gave it enough of our time already.

Tradition is logically not the only source of wisdom, since there had to be a first person doing something new for a tradition to get going. (Well ok, but maybe you have to be completely exceptional to initiate and add real substance, so it’s not practically relevant for most of us.)

But what about the new greats? They will let others identify them.

As you can see, I struggle with this.

Rationalism

the thing with me is that i am smart and i’m smelf, i’m self smarted, basically, by myself, basically from nature and smoking drugs and doing different things i’ve self… like self-learned myself. and that’s the whole difference i guess is that i don’t need the books or the schooling type things. i just get everything on my own and because of that i’m alive right now, because people say books and college are for-to make you smarter, but they can also be for-to make you dead, which is what could have happened to me. my brain doesn’t use enough oxygen because i don’t have the whole thing filled with different stuff… and if it was full… it’s only part full, and that’s why i’m alive right now.

— Ricky LaFleur

a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress… until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.

— Carl Becker

Follow not the paths of the ancients; seek what they sought.

— Baizhang Huaihai

No: the object is here, right here. There is an answer, and we can find it ourselves. I am impatient with texts because I wish to reach past them to reality.

Correctness matters to me too much, and even the best of the ancients are unable to be correct, and the text seminar is too cooperative and “yes, and” to focus on correctness as much as I need.

I’m not very interested in history for its own sake (hence how I can possibly say “the object is right here”). I don’t esteem things just because they are large or famous or influential. I think Burkean selection was serving all kinds of goals I don’t have (like the justification of who happens to be holding power).

I address myself to playing this bad game instead of renouncing the world.

It is plausible to me that something more than 8% of the best philosophy ever done is happening now, and I want it represented.

I am very struck by the Bitter Lesson, the overturning of a few (scientific) fields in just 10 years: the relevant point is that human priors and concepts ended up being mostly inferior to those learned directly from data. (“Every time I fire a linguist…”) Whether this transfers to the humanities is far from obvious but you might at least worry. But the lesson bears on human rationalists who aren’t using machines as well.

Finally my morals drive me out into the world. I teach, and while I think that’s a morally significant act it is mostly instead part of my own flourishing. But my life would feel like a failure if it was all I did.

Nearly everyone struggles with rationalists. They ignore so much, and change their minds, and don’t play along.

psychologism

One thing people do when trying to argue deep orientations to the world is to psychologise a position: to explain why it is held rather than why it is true or false. This is very dangerous to do to others, but important to do to oneself:

My rationalist method is quite surely an adaptive preference on top of my impatience, contrarianism, and cynicism.2 I hate the cyclical and the eternal. A natural accusation, which actually came up in the seminar I mentioned in the intro, is that rationalism is an incapacity: intolerance of mess or aporia or unanalysables - when "in fact" things are messy and unknown and hard to get an attack on.

The answer is simple: rationalist arrogance sometimes makes some headway against mess, where traditionalism leaves behind exactly the same amount of mess after it passes.

Trade offer

Without rationalists they wouldn’t have half of their curriculum. And without rationalists and a far far larger number of pragmatists there would be no economic surplus to spend on the lovely cloisters and their scholars. But so what? They know this! It is actually not an objection, since no one’s saying everyone should live like this full-time. [Though this argument does strike against an orthodox Kantian traditionalist, since their behaviour isn’t universalisable.]

One should not tear down fences without knowing why they are there - but at this point we have a 250 year tradition of tearing down fences and coming out well on net. Don’t tear down my fence made of tearing down fences!

There are so, so many ways to think badly - and the canon is full of them. But the errors are usefully decorrelated.

Without traditionalists I wouldn’t have any icons to clasm. (And without a far far larger number of pragmatists there would be no economic surplus to spend on the lovely laboratories and workshops.)

There are so, so many ways to think badly, and classical education does let you avoid a subset of them.

We have many enemies in common.

There is something valuable and inexhaustible here, and if we survive then their activity will help keep life interesting when the horrible but exciting economic and political problems are taken from us.

One of my favourite poems, ‘Under Which Lyre’, contrasts Apollo (top-down control, Marxism-Taylorism, self-congratulory practicality) with Hermes (artistry, freedom, mess). Certainly within rationalism I side with Hermes over Apollo, and Apollo gets carried away all the time, and people don’t even see Hermes as an option.

The rationalist way of compromising is to ask what the split is. I’ve given lots of reasons to do some trad (quite besides enjoyment). But having more than like 20% focus on trad matters would worry me.

Sebastian, an actual classicist, replies to me here.

Just as you can’t really understand England without leaving it, I understand rationalism better after looking at it from the outside. Help me to never disparage (this specific tradition of) traditionalism again: they are obviously complements to my quixotic aims.

Added to the great conjunction of what-ifs that always encircles me is the warming thought that I could spend my life peacefully-passionately in this cloister, keeping things warm. Or, I won’t but I could have. Or, I won’t but I can visit.

Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him, any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt… For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his… We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom… He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own.

Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later. It is no more ‘according to Plato’ than ‘according to me’, since he and I understand and see it the same way. The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Just so with pieces he borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own - to wit, his judgment.

— Montaigne