David Egan Philosophy

This month’s essay began as a grumpy response to an article that one of the subscribers to this newsletter shared with me. She graciously suggested I expand upon it for the newsletter. This is why I like you guys so much.

The article in question appeared in Nautilus, an excellent popular science magazine that I generally enjoy reading. It features an interview with the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, who studies political ideology. She’s also the author of a book on the subject, The Ideological Brain, which I confess I haven’t read, so take everything I say here with that grain of salt.

I have no reason to think that Zmigrod is anything other than an excellent neuroscientist. I’ve studied just enough anatomy and physiology to know that neuroscience is really hard so hats off to anyone who’s doing advanced work in the area. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s tricky stuff.

But the interview betrays a prejudice that I find all too frequently in the empirical sciences. The history of philosophy, on this view, is a history of better or worse guesses about the world that await scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. It’s only when we reach scientific maturity that we confirm the truths that philosophers can only guess at.

Zmigrod is aware that political ideology has been a subject of serious study long before brain MRI technology has been available. The article begins with a passage from her book in which she imagines Karl Marx challenging the novelty of her research. Is she really discovering anything that political theorists like Marx haven’t already worked out in detail?

In response, Zmigrod strikes an irenic tone. Her work isn’t meant to supplant the work of theorists like Marx but to complement it. In particular, neuroscience can study unconscious processes that are invisible to the social sciences. On this telling, neuroscientists, social scientists, and political theorists can work cooperatively, each contributing something distinctive to a rich tapestry.

But her words tell a different story. Her imagined Marx claims, “I wrote about the ideological phantoms in the human brain long before these strange neuroimaging technologies were invented.” He adds, smugly, “It is no surprise, of course, but I’m glad to discover these phantoms are real.”

It’s that last sentence that sent up the first red flag for me. This fictional Marx grants that he and Zmigrod are both studying the same phenomenon. He didn’t have her imaging technologies but, Zmigrod implies, he would have used them if he had. Even while raising an objection, Zmigrod’s Marx pays her the compliment of telling her that the things he only theorized about are things that she’s discovered are “real.”

In the interview, Zmigrod pays a similar backhanded compliment to the political theorist Hannah Arendt. She praises her “astute intuitions” and calls her “hugely prophetic,” while adding that “she didn’t have neuroscience or psychology at the time” (a bit of an overstatement—Arendt was working in the mid-twentieth century).

On Zmigrod’s telling, Marx and Arendt were able to offer theories or intuitions about the phenomena she studies but, unfortunately for them, they didn’t have access to the scientific tools that could get beyond intuition to proof. On this picture, philosophy and political theory are just science without the data.

When Zmigrod says she studies political ideology, what does she mean? In the interview, she talks a lot about the political spectrum from left to right, while also mentioning nationalism and religion. Social psychologists have various tools for measuring these things, usually involving surveys. Study subjects are asked a range of questions about their social and political beliefs, which allow the people conducting the study to plot them on a one- or two-dimensional grid, either straightforwardly left-to-right or sometimes distinguishing economic and social positions (for example, a libertarian and a democratic socialist are both socially liberal but disagree about economic policy). One measure of conservatism is known as “system justification” or “economic system justification,” which measures a person’s alignment with current social or economic realities.

These sorts of studies generate precise and wieldy data but they operate under two major constraints. The first is the coarse-grained nature of the data. If you want your data to be legible, you need to plot it on fairly simple axes like left-versus-right. You’re also computing averages from large numbers of survey participants. That means the people conducting the survey have to decide in advance what the parameters are and then slot people into those parameters. This approach doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance. It also means accepting whatever prevailing terms are available in the political discourse (e.g. “left,” “right,” “conservative,” “liberal”) rather than imagining alternatives—which is one of the things political theorists do.

The second constraint is that this research studies people in a laboratory setting. Measuring someone’s heart rate when they watch a video about a hot-button political issue might reveal something about how that person thinks and acts outside a lab. But it might not, and it certainly won’t capture more than a very controlled aspect of a person’s full political existence.

I won’t go so far as to say that there’s nothing we can learn from this kind of experimental work. But there are a lot of questions it can’t answer. Marx and Arendt are mostly interested in these other questions. They contend with big theoretical questions about the overall shape of history and human society and with normative questions about how we should comport ourselves individually and collectively to build a better world. Their work can inform the sort of work Zmigrod does in the lab. And some of those lab results can illuminate some of the theorizing. But political theory isn’t just a pre-empirical version of the work that neuroscience can now handle more rigorously.

Scientific research is great at providing precise answers to precise and testable questions. But these successes can lead to the hubristic sense that there are really only two kinds of questions: the kinds that are precise and testable and the kinds that aren’t precise and testable yet. If only we can set the right parameters, some researchers seem to think, then the fuzzy questions of the humanities will yield lab-confirmed answers.

The result of this thinking isn’t philosophy plus data so much as a rejection of any philosophy that isn’t reducible to data. The zoologist Donald Griffin captures the danger in a sequence of four steps. “The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily isn’t very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

When I read Zmigrod talk about confirming Marx’s “discoveries” or praise Arendt’s “intuitions,” I read her as somewhere around steps three or four of Griffin’s schema. She seems uncurious about the aspects of these theorists’ work that don’t conform to her own research methods.

I’m picking on Zmigrod but her thinking is common. A few years ago, a book by Robert Wright called Why Buddhism Is True topped bestseller lists. Wright draws on neuroscience and empirical psychology to “show” that the Buddha was on to something despite the primitive state of neuroscience in India two and a half thousand years ago. Wright advocates a secular Buddhism where the bits that are “true” are the ones that align with current brain science and the rest is cast aside. As it happens, the Buddha himself codified his teaching into four so-called noble truths. None of them is an empirical hypothesis.

Zmigrod’s and Wright’s approaches speak to a more widespread tendency to regard the scientific method as the only legitimate model for generating knowledge and understanding. I think this tendency marginalizes the vast bulk of human inquiry—not just in the humanities but in less precisely quantifiable work in the social and natural sciences like political theory or ecology. It’s a way of thinking that’s pinched and arid. It shows a reluctance to trust our ability to respond thoughtfully and precisely to the world and our place in it unless we have numbers to back us up.

A few years ago, I wrote an article about why the “softness” of subjects like philosophy makes them neither less difficult nor less exacting than the “hard” sciences. They lack quantified precision because they meet us in the midst and fullness of our lives, in the messy business of making sense of ourselves and our place in the world. We can’t get enough separation from these questions to study them under the controlled conditions of a lab.

My thanks, once again, to the reader who pointed me to the Zmigrod interview. This is maybe a moment to say I take requests! I have a number of ideas I want to explore in future newsletters. But let me know if there’s something you’d like me to tackle and I’ll see if I can find something to say about it. 

1. The word “metaphor” comes from Ancient Greek and literally means to transfer something or carry it over. This literal meaning has been carried over to modern Greek (see what I did there?). Charmingly, the modern Greek term for a moving truck is a metaforikó fortigó. (source)
2. Boccaccio’s Decameron has a certain notoriety in Japan because the name of the book sounds like Japanese slang for “big penis treatise.” (source)
3. Polar bears face the dual challenge of staying warm and camouflaged in the Arctic. Their skin is actually black, which allows it to absorb solar radiation better. And their fur isn’t actually white but rather transparent and hollow. When massed together, the fur appears white, which gives them good camouflage. The hollow, transparent hairs also trap heat and helps them float while also scattering ultraviolet light between underfur and skin, which keeps them warm. (source with thanks to Graham Sanders)
4. I live in Beyoğlu, which has a population of 216,688, making it the 35^th largest district in Istanbul. If it were a municipality in Canada, it would rank 25^th in the entire country. (Istanbul data and Canada data)
5. The ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is estimated to be about 1:10,000,000. (source)
6. The average British person will spend four months of their lives making small talk about the weather. (source with thanks to Anila Babla)
7. Nigeria (population 240,000,000) generates less electricity than Wyoming (population 600,000). (source)
8. Maybe not super surprising, but Brazil is home to more mixed-race people than any other country. (source)