The Danger of Intellectual Vanity

Part 2 of 2

See Part 1 here.

The philosophical foundations of scientific overreach are shaky and have been attacked many times over many centuries; notably, for example, by Thomas Kuhn’s exposition of “paradigm shifts.” More recently and more practically, the COVID pandemic provided an opportunity for many who were previously inclined to defer to credentialed experts to become aware that “following the science” was not the simple process they once thought. To take but one of the spectacular miscues committed during that period, scientists, media leaders, and government officials “knew” with such certainty that the virus emerged naturally that they were willing to censor as “misinformation” any suggestion, let alone claim, that it might have originated in a Wuhan lab. Four years later, the AP is now running headlines indicating that the CIA believes that COVID “most likely originated from a lab.” To his credit, the AP reporter exposes the nuances of the situation, noting scientific disagreement, the “low confidence” of the CIA’s conclusion, and the challenges of determining such a matter with certainty. It would have been nice to see this kind of circumspection throughout the public debate touched off in 2020. But the pandemic only made clear what always has been and always will be the case: human beings—especially highly educated officials in roles of authority—are inclined to overestimate their capacity to grasp the truth of any given matter.

There are consequences to such overreach. In the 1950s, doctors routinely advised mothers to stop nursing their babies and feed them formula instead, because it was deemed nutritionally superior to breastmilk. That viewpoint has been almost entirely overturned. In the 1990s, pediatricians and medical organizations began urging mothers to avoid peanuts during pregnancy and to refrain from feeding them to young children, thinking that this was the safest path to preventing harm from peanut allergies. There is still uncertainty and debate around the issue, but there is growing suspicion that such advice contributed to the explosion of peanut allergy incidence in this century—that, in the words of a recent overview, “Experts Created the Peanut Allergy Epidemic.”

Some years ago, the Daily Mail ran an article titled “Back from the Dead: One Third of ‘Extinct’ Animals Turn Up Again.” It revealed that a substantial percentage of species deemed by scientists to be extinct were not actually so. Just because their presence was not or could not be detected by human beings—sometimes, for decades—did not necessarily mean that they had disappeared from the earth. And in fact, they frequently did reappear. In sum, the news of these animals’ demise had been greatly exaggerated.

The pretension to socialist economic planning is an extreme form of intellectual arrogance. As F. A. Hayek pointed out decades ago, such planning is impossible, because the knowledge required cannot be collected by a single person or a group of people. He laid out what became known as “the knowledge problem” as succinctly as possible in his influential essay on “The Uses of Knowledge in Society”:

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.

That is to say, the order (such as it is) of an economy relies on the constant interplay of innumerable actors responding individually to innumerable factors. It is an inherently dynamic process and cannot be comprehended and planned, not so much because a central authority lacks the computing capacity to do so (though that is also true), but because it is simply impossible to “collect” such scattered and unstable data at all.

None of this is intended to put a damper on scientific investigation or knowledge-seeking or to minimize its remarkable achievements. Nor is it an indictment of those who, to the best of their ability, put their expertise at the service of others. Knowledge professionals are rightly consulted on matters concerning their specialties, and they legitimately offer advice based on the knowledge they have acquired. All such exploration and advice-giving, however, ought to be undertaken in a spirit of intellectual humility. Cultivating a properly modest attitude in the course of our learning will naturally influence the way we articulate the findings we make. Instead of saying, “We know that A causes B,” we will more accurately say, “Based on the evidence at hand, we have good reason to believe that A causes B.” Again, there are practical consequences to this approach. The latter formulation is more likely to generate recommendations and guidance rather than mandates and penalties.

The antidote to intellectual pride is not ignorance, apathy, or negligence; it is humility. “Humility,” St. Thomas writes, “restrains the appetite from aiming at great things against right reason.” Humble experts are less likely to look with disdain on those whose opinions differ, and more likely to be receptive to new information and experience, to qualification and correction. If, in our intellectual pursuits, we aim to understand rather than dominate, then we will be more inclined to follow the evidence where it leads and to approach, more often and more nearly, the truth of the matter.

But I could be wrong.