The Pursuit of Ignorance

 At a certain point in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, the titular historian and Boston scion describes his attempts as a young scholar to publish an article on the subject of monetary retrenchment. In the wake of the Civil War, the U.S. government had issued a large supply of paper currency that it allowed to exceed the extent of its gold reserves. This was the country's first experiment with fiat currency, and it was highly controversial at the time—particularly among New England conservatives—because (in Adams's telling), it was seen as an affront to the idea that money has to be backstopped—ultimately—by "intrinsic value." 

Adams—as a good son of New England (albeit one whose family always had a conflicted relationship with the forces that he shorthands as "State Street," which seems to stand in—for him—for capitalism and the financial class)—initially set out to prove that the U.S. needed to follow the path of Great Britain, and pull back its money supply in peacetime until it matched the country's gold reserves. Yet, as he set about his studies, he in fact found the opposite was the case. Britain's experience in retrenching its currency, he found, had been widely regarded as a mistake. They ought to have simply let their paper money alone. 

Something similar happened, as Adams tells it, when he set out to write a piece defending Charles Lyell's new theories of geology. He was ready to proselytize for the school even before he was fully acquainted with its doctrines. He therefore found he needed to teach himself Lyell before writing up its main doctrines for others. As he did so, however, he encountered a difficulty. He couldn't see how Lyell's theories were any more of an inevitable inference from the data than anyone else's. All seemed speculative at best. And so, he found himself losing his new faith in the very process of trying to proclaim it to others. 

With the trust of any new convert, he assumed at first that the deficiency was in himself, and not the doctrine. He assumed that Charles Lyell himself must know the answers to these riddles, and he just needed to turn to him for illumination. But none came. He continued plodding in the dark, unsure why the fossil record or evidence from the glacial period proved uniformitarianism any more than it did its alternatives. Ultimately, as with the gold standard piece, he wrote up more or less what he initially intended to publish—but he realized he had lost confidence in his own conclusions even before they reached the press. 

Any of us who have pursued enlightenment on any topic have had versions of the same experience. We generally pursue knowledge of something because we want to prove a conclusion we have already accepted on faith. I came to college telling myself that I was entering the belly of the beast of neoclassical economics because I was going to use these tools to dismantle the same edifice. I was going to become a great economist so that, like Andre Gunder Frank, I would become a more effective weapon in service of the Marxian or democratic socialist doctrines that existed to tear down neoclassical economics itself. 

It was years before I actually took an economics course. But on the first day I did, I learned enough to convince me henceforward that price controls were actually a bad solution to inflation. So that was one tenet of the socialist faith, at least, that I had to jettison. 

Of course, the faith had prepared me for moments like this. I had been warned that I would be tested. The economists would take me up to the mountaintop and show the kingdoms of men laid out at my feet. And I would have to be strong. I would have to resist. I would have to say: "I know what you are about. You are all bourgeois economists! You are teaching bourgeois ideology! Your class interest has distorted your reasoning and led you to these foreordained conclusions. So—of course you would oppose price controls. I ought to have expected it of you all along! I will not be duped by your blandishments!"

But then, on the first day of Microeconomics, an alternative possibility presented itself. Of course, it could be universal class-brainwashing that had led all the bourgeois economists to oppose price controls. Or... it could be that they all oppose price controls because these policies are actually bad economics. 

I came to law school with a similar intent. I was here to learn another technical field in order to once again make myself a more effective weapon in the hands of The Struggle or The Movement. I would study the lore of the "law and economics" school and the textualists and the originalists and the what-have-yous, the more effectively to demolish their reasoning and defend the holy prerogatives of the administrative state. 

But you take enough courses, and at a certain point, you are forced to concede certain uncomfortable truths. You have to admit, well, okay, maybe Scalia was not all wrong in this opinion. Or: maybe I can't read the Endangered Species Act to reach this outcome, even if I'd like to. Or: maybe the farmers who want to plow their land do have a cognizable interest here that does not make them wholly unsympathetic. And so forth. 

In short, the more you learn, the less you know about anything. Henry Adams describes the process of his education, for this reason, as the "pursuit of ignorance." Time and again, one approaches a new body of knowledge with the conviction that it will make one more useful to the Church, or the Movement, or the Struggle, or the Cause of one's choosing. But the knowledge has the exact opposite effect. It quickly renders one wholly useless. All the learning I've ever done has only made me less useful than I was before, not more. Such seems to have been Henry Adams's experience as well. 

Of course, there are ways to accommodate these various heresies—up to a point. One can say: Okay, maybe I've been forced to rethink this one point about the Endangered Species Act that I would have taken for granted as a good liberal before. But I'm still a good liberal about everything else. But then... one does encounter the disconcerting realization, at a certain point, that all the things one has actually looked into closely are precisely the areas in which one has become more heterodox. All the other areas, which one has not yet examined in any depth, are still ones where your faith is untroubled. But... maybe that's just because those are the ones you haven't looked into yet. 

"Okay, okay, so maybe price controls are a bad idea," one says, "but all the rest of the socialist dogma is correct." But... price controls was the only topic you had covered in that class, before you dropped Microeconomics the next week. So... who knows what other tenets of the creed might have been troubled too, if one had stayed in the class longer? 

One notices with all the policy contrarians out there, the Yglesians of the worlds, that all the areas in which their views are still presumptively orthodox, are precisely the areas in which they have the least interest and expertise. "Oh, of course, I'm still a good liberal when it comes to legalizing drugs," or fill-in-the-blank. But whatever issue they cite there is also sure to be the issue in which they done the least reading. The areas they know the most about will inevitably be the ones in which they are the most heterodox. So—what does that tell us? 

It tells us that, as a character in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh memorably puts it: "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer." Such a person, the character notes, is useless to any Struggle or Church or Movement or Cause. They must be condemned, at last—like Henry Adams—to accept their own uselessness. They must accept that they are to be observers of life, rather than its protagonists. They must accept that all their education was but a pursuit of more ignorance. 

But woe unto the one who, having lost one Faith, becomes a willing tool for another. Woe unto the one who, having found only more complexity in place of truth, throws up their hands and says "What is truth? I might as well serve any paymaster, since none is more right than another." Woe unto the one who becomes a bought servant of evil just because they were disillusioned with their prior simplistic notion of good. Here again, Eugene O'Neill's character offers the right warning: "If I don't believe in the Movement, I don't believe in anything else either, especially not the State. I've refused to be a useful member of society." 

This, surely, is the right answer. If one has found that one's education has made one useless for the Cause—if one can no longer be a tool in the hands of righteousness—one must at least have the decency to make oneself just as useless for the hands of unrighteousness. Having discovered that one doubts the perfect wisdom of the administrative state in some respects, one cannot on that account hire oneself out as a mercenary for the timber companies. If one cannot be a help to the struggle for justice, one can at least be just as much of a hindrance to the cause of greed. One can at least be just as much dead weight for them as one is for the Movement. 

This is the only honor that can be gleaned from a lifelong pursuit of ignorance. One can lie down at full-length as a roadblock to the march of history. One can prove as much an obstacle to one army's path as one is to another. If one refuses to be a useful member of the Movement, one can also refuse to be a useful member of the established Society it is contending with. One can be, as O'Neill's character puts it: "a philosophical bum and proud of it."