Atheists trying to justify themselves often find themselves asked to replace religion. “If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?” “How did the Universe begin?” “How do you explain the existence of eyes?” “How do you find meaning in life?” And the poor atheist, after one question too many, is forced to say “I don’t know.” After all, he’s not a philosopher, cosmologist, psychologist, and evolutionary biologist rolled into one. And even they don’t have all the answers.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what? There’s still something that doesn’t make sense about what you learned in Sunday school. There’s still something wrong with your religion. The fact that I don’t know everything won’t make the problem go away.”
What I want to emphasize here, even though it may be elementary, is that it can be valuable and accurate to say something’s wrong even when you don’t have a full solution or a replacement.
Consider political radicals. Marxists, libertarians, anarchists, greens, John Birchers. Radicals are diverse in their political theories, but they have one critical commonality: they think something’s wrong with the status quo. And that means, in practice, that different kinds of radicals sometimes sound similar, because they’re the ones who criticize the current practices of the current government and society. And it’s in criticizing that radicals make the strongest arguments, I think. They’re sketchy and vague in designing their utopias, but they have moral and evidentiary force when they say that something’s wrong with the criminal justice system, something’s wrong with the economy, something’s wrong with the legislative process.
Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.
Most people, confronted with a problem they can’t solve, say “We just have to live with it,” and very rapidly gloss into “It’s not really a problem.” Aging is often painful and debilitating and ends in death. Almost everyone has decided it’s not really a problem – simply because it has no known solution. But we also used to think that senile dementia and toothlessness were “just part of getting old.” I would venture that the tendency, over time, to find life’s cruelties less tolerable and to want to cure more of them, is the most positive feature of civilization. To do that, we need people who strenuously object to what everyone else approaches with resignation.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
But it is the critic who counts. Just because I can’t solve P=NP doesn’t mean I can’t say the latest attempt at a proof is flawed. Just because I don’t have a comprehensive system of ethics doesn’t mean there’s not something wrong with the Bible’s. Just because I don’t have a plan for a perfect government doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong with the present one. Just because I can’t make people live longer and healthier lives doesn’t mean that aging isn’t a problem. Just because nobody knows how to end poverty doesn’t mean poverty is okay. We are further from finding solutions if we dismiss the very existence of the problems.
This is why I’m basically sympathetic to speculations about existential risk, and also to various kinds of research associated with aging and mortality. It’s calling attention to unsolved problems. There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems. In mathematics, we value a good conjecture or open problem, even if the proof doesn’t come along for decades. This would be a good norm to adopt more broadly – value the critic, value the one who observes a flaw, notices a hard problem, or protests an outrage, even if he doesn’t come with a solution. Fight the urge to accept a bad solution just because it ties up the loose ends.
Voted up for extremely clear writing on an important topic, but I vehemently disagree with part of your thesis.
Agreed.
I disagree on both points.
First, it is not the critic who counts. A critic with no solutions and no realistic hope of inspiring any counts for nothing; a volunteer who builds one house with Habitat for Humanity is better than a state legislator who delivers a thousand eloquent speeches in favor of increased housing funding but ultimately fails to secure passage for any of her bills.
One could point to a handful of reformers who have successfully focused attention on an issue with good results; e.g., Rachel Carson criticized America's environmental practices and asked people to pay more attention to the environment. For Carson, though, the criticism came with its own realistic solution--during the prosperous 1960s, at a time when rivers were literally aflame with floating toxic waste, it was plausible to think that people would spend more resources on environmental protection if only the topic were skillfully brought to their attention.
Today, there is little interest in poverty in the US, and not simply because of ignorance; many people are more or less aware of the conditions in which the other half lives, and yet they don't care. Claiming (correctly) that poverty is very, very bad, without some novel or concrete solution, is highly unlikely to rouse the rich and the middle classes from their apathy. Such a claim is merely pleasant speech; one who makes it has no claim on the kind of glory that Teddy Roosevelt was praising.
Second, if there really are no solutions to a problem, not even partial ones, then, in my opinion, it really is OK to take no action to solve the problem. I would, e.g., like to talk to my dead grandmother; I have a few questions to ask her. Unfortunately, her body has been in the dirt for 10 years, and her living relatives do not remember her clearly enough for me to construct some sort of holographic emulation. Therefore, this is an impossible problem, and I do not want to talk to her badly enough to tackle an impossible problem the way Eliezer describes in the sequences.
May I feel badly? May I feel outraged? Sure, if I like. Or, if I like, I can try to cultivate a sort of detachment from the problem; I can try to let go. In this sense, it is "OK" that my grandmother is dead beyond recall. I experience her deadness as harmful; I would not wish the death of a grandmother on others, and yet, I do not see the wisdom in stirring myself up and urging myself to be especially upset. Where would the energy I get from being upset go? There is nothing to be done. My time and energy are better spent on problems that can actually be solved.
I debate policy issues with friends a fair bit for fun, in part because it helps me think about where I might want to work, donate money, or volunteer. If the economy can be fixed but not the criminal justice system, I want to know that. I don't really care how 'wrong' each system is in the abstract, because most things are 'wrong' to one degree or another; our world is much less than perfect. What matters is whether a system is worse than a system that could actually be implemented, or, more precisely, worse than a system that people within my circle of influence could significantly help to implement.
I'm trying to figure out whether you're unimpressed with the legislator for (a) making useless speeches, or (b) making speeches that might have been useful but didn't succeed on this particular occasion.