The futility of public opinionation
Some people feel a compulsion to be on stage, to preen and perform in the public eye. Others develop what strikes me as a closely related drive: to have opinions and to express them publicly.
The average contemporary opinionator a.k.a. public intellectual wouldn’t frame his vocation this way, of course. If you were to suggest to him that he is a compulsive, fame-seeking performer who, at best, benefits his fellow man by providing light entertainment, he would react scornfully. A public intellectual sees his work as a semi-altruistic kulturdoktor service aimed at diagnosing and prescribing treatment for all variety of social maladies.
Moreover, to be clear, all healthy humans express opinions with the aim of influencing—for their and/or others’ benefit—the course of events, at least within their families or other social microenvironments. The public opinionator would say that his aim is essentially the same, though his audience is larger and his opinions are more polished and thoughtful.
That said, we might ask: How’s it going? How is our society—or really the society-of-societies we call the “West”—faring under the guidance of its thoughtful and polished public opinionators?
Surely it is hard to make a persuasive case that things are going well. There are measures of societal health that seem relatively objective—measures such as mental disorder and suicide incidence, total fertility, social trust, satisfaction with the present and optimism about the future. By these metrics and many others, the West appears to be in the middle to late stages of an apoptotic process of civilizational dissolution.
It might seem strange to worry, amid this Fall-of-Rome-scale disaster, about the role of newspaper columnists, influential bloggers and other public commentators. But if they are really as important as they think they are—if they are not merely subprime entertainers, of the same broad ilk as OnlyFans strippers and subway buskers—then we should wonder at their lack of efficacy, which, by the way, contrasts starkly with the effectiveness of other professions, e.g., chemists, computer scientists, physicians and aerospace engineers.
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I think at least part of the answer to this mystery lies in the basic difference between the systems that concern opinionators and the systems that concern more successful professionals. The systems that concern opinionators are very large nonlinear systems consisting of (among other things) millions or billions of humans, each of whom is, in his or her own right, an unfathomably complex, quadrillion-synapse system. In contrast, the systems that concern chemists, engineers, doctors and biologists are, though “technical,” much more tidy and comprehensible. If we really thought that opinionators were up to the task of modeling, designing, critiquing and modifying human societies, as engineers and other technical professionals usually are for the objects of their own skill-sets, then we would train them much more rigorously and hand them much more power. Or perhaps we would give that power to the formal professions (“sociology” and “political science”) that are supposed to study, model and optimize societies and their governing structures in rigorous, scientific ways.
But of course we take neither the self-appointed opinionator nor the professional social scientist very seriously—indeed, the latter’s domain is of interest now chiefly as a striking cautionary example of institutional capture by women and consequent wokeification.
As for the typical “successful” public opinionator, he draws a much larger audience, compared to purely academic thinkers, but has only the vaguest (if any) long-run policy and cultural impact. Typically he is someone who started out with an undergraduate degree in something like English Literature or History, then got some journalism experience, then managed to get enough opinion pieces published in the right places, and was personable enough to editors and fellow writers, that he was accepted into the club so to speak. His takes are often popular. They strike chords and draw clicks. They seem cutting edge—without, of course, straying beyond the Overton bounds or otherwise alienating the subscribers of the journals that publish his stuff. Sometimes those takes are borrowed from lesser-known writers, and sometimes they reveal all too clearly the opinionator’s youth and inexperience. But he seems right much of the time, and perhaps more importantly, provides his readers with opinions light enough to carry, like an interesting bottle of wine, to dinner parties. He may end up doing very well for himself, fame-and money- and status-wise. Alas, though, he must share the attentional bandwidth of the public with a vast number of sharp-elbowed rivals, including fellow opinionators, politicians and political activists, actors, social-media influencers, and various others whose ability to infect the collective mind with their opinions is roughly proportional to their celebrity. Thus, his pronouncements on the whole are functionally lost amid an overwhelming cacophony, and his long-run impact on the course of human events is either infinitesimal or indeterminate.
More to the point, if we consider what public intellectuals’ output in recent decades amounts to, we must acknowledge that it has either contributed to the West’s present predicament or signally failed to prevent it.
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So public opinionation, at least as a genuine culture-improving service, appears in recent history to have been an exercise in futility—at best—even if it has been useful to some of its practitioners for private, selfish, money/fame purposes. And the main reason for this futility or even net harmfulness is that humans collectively are unable to understand, to an adequate degree, how a high civilization works, let alone direct and maintain that civilization sustainably. If even a small proportion of the human population were able to perform, with evident competence, this function of civilizational leadership and maintenance, things would be very different. But at present there is no profession that meets that definition and is taken seriously enough to be granted the necessary powers. And, of course, if there were such a profession, there would be little or no need for public opinionators in that space.
Is this lack of a true “social engineer” class really all that bad? Until recently, the problem of the direction of societies was handled by something like a professional class, namely aristocrats and other social elites. In the West, these elites presided over societies of at least modest civilization, which ultimately bequeathed to us unprecedented physical comfort and safety, elongated average lifespan, low infant and child mortality, widespread literacy and cornucopias of market goods. This progress has continued to some extent even in the present, post-elite era of democracy and media cacophony.
The problem is that the areas of unambiguous progress in Western life—in engineering and medicine, for example—can be credited to competent professional classes. By contrast, the critical areas relating to social management and governance lack competent professional classes, and seem to have little near-term prospect of developing them, or even of reaching agreement on what competence in these areas would mean.
Even math-heavy economics, which poses as a settled, scientific, Nobel-worthy discipline, stumbles again and again, because, like the “softer” social sciences, it faces the so-far-insurmountable complexity and mutability of human society. The conduct of economics debates in op-eds and blogs, often by non-economist public opinionators, is above all a sign that economics remains an immature field of study and practice.
In other words, public opinionators are markers of areas where humans remain collectively incompetent.
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Western civilization in its essentials owes its development chiefly to automatic processes of biological and cultural evolution, and much less so to the rational designs of elites. These evolutionary processes occurred largely beneath individual awareness, and were never adequately understood and codified. In principle, conservative governance—conservative in the small-c sense of conserving cultural traits and traditions—could have maintained that civilization and its benefits even as its elites and common folk remained ignorant of how it all worked. In reality, Western societies became less and less conservative, and more and more overconfident and hubristic, over the past half-millennium at least. By the mid 20th century those societies were thoroughly infected by cultural ideas—enthusiastically promoted by prominent public opinionators—that were bound to destroy their enviable way of life.
The worst of these ideas has been the notion that human civilization itself is just an abstraction, an “app” that can be downloaded to any group of humans via a written constitution or code of laws. A particularly powerful driver of this notion’s public acceptance has been the insistence that the contrary idea—that modern civilization is an emergent property of specific human populations with requisite genetic and cultural features honed over millennia—is not just incorrect but evil and punishable. (The spread of post-nationalism, multiculturalism, contractual nationalism—whatever you want to call it—has thus been critically enabled by the threat of harm to those who resist it, much as Christianity was spread in late antiquity.)
I could continue with examples of bad ideas that have infected modern societies, but most of the big ones I’ve already covered in prior essays over the years. In any case, it seems to me that in this grim situation, the only truly helpful public opinions would be those that make people more aware and accepting of their shortcomings, and thus more humble and cautious, especially about sociopolitical matters.
A humbler, more cautious West seems very unlikely, of course. Grandiosity and hubris appear to have been powerfully adaptive traits for Westerners during the critical period in which they achieved global dominance. Western peoples, most obviously in the United States, still tend to see that evangelistic overconfidence as good—“a feature, not a bug”—and self-doubt as bad. That attitude also underlies the Western reverence for “democracy” with its implication that the common people are the ultimate repository of wisdom. To tell those people, especially Americans, that their accumulating problems are the consequences of their own stupidity—“it’s the stupid, stupid,” one might say—is to tell them precisely what they don’t want to hear and will always reject.
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