Who’s Crazy?
The value component of psychiatry is strong even in diagnoses of delusional thinking. We're all delusional in some ways (unreasonably optimistic or pessimistic, suspicious or trusting, fearful or crazy brave etc.). And many of us believe things that are completely outlandish (e.g., that the world is run by a secret cadre of Jews, that the world is four thousand years old, that lizard-like aliens disguised as humans now hold key political and economic positions, that we are all under constant surveillance by someone who knows everything we think and do, etc.). Some of these delusions are multimedia. A college acquaintance of mine, who graduated with honors in history, told me he took after dinner walks with Jesus every night (for those of you who are curious, Jesus appeared to him in a body that was about six feet tall and had blonde hair and blue eyes—I asked). But no one is locked up and drugged for taking nightly walks with Jesus or noticing incompletely transformed lizard skin on the neck of a banker. Again, these decisions have nothing to do with brain chemistry. Some delusions are not dangerous enough, and/or fall into the protected categories of religious and political beliefs and/or are simply too widely shared to be written off as crazy. Some religious beliefs are exempt even if they make one a serious danger to oneself or others. Whatever we think about suicide bombers and self-flagellators, we don't label them mentally ill. This is because, for better or worse, we are vigilant about protecting religious freedom (though, of course, there are limits). This is obviously a value choice.
Eyewitness Testimony
When a witness to a crime points to the person at the defense table and says "That's her, I'm completely sure of it" everyone takes take notice. But psychologists have been suspicious of eyewitness accounts since the early 1900s. Writing in 1908, Hugo Munsterberg argued that the study of perception "may help clear up the chaos and the confusion which prevail in the observations of witnesses."1 And, as we saw in Chapter 1, research on perception and memory in general provides reasons to doubt many perceptual reports. In the 1970s, moreover, a number of psychologists initiated programs specifically designed to study eyewitness errors. From 1974 to 1999, psychologists published well over two thousand papers on eyewitness issues in psychology.2
Some of these papers describe experiments in which psychologists stage crimes and then interview witnesses to them. In one such experiment, researchers staged an assault on a professor on the campus of California State University at Hayward to which there were 141 witnesses. The reports of these witnesses differed significantly as to the perpetrator's weight, appearance and dress and other aspects of the "crime" (witness accuracy averaged 25% of the maximum possible score). In similar experiment involving a staged purse snatching, only seven of fifty-two witnesses were able to identify the perpetrator from two video-taped lineups. Ten witnesses made no identification. Thirty-five witnesses identified the wrong man.3 Psychologists have also conducted numerous studies that explain why eyewitnesses may go wrong. In addition to obvious factors like bad lighting and expectancy, there is a lot of research on the ways that stress, arousal, focus on weapons, and difficulties making cross-race identification may affect both perception and memory.
Despite these reports, in the U.S., at least, little if anything has been done to change the rules of evidence themselves. All forms of eyewitness testimony are still admissible. This is partly mitigated in some cases by allowing defense attorneys to bring in expert witnesses to testify about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in cases that rely on eyewitness testimony alone.4 But these expert witnesses are also excluded from testifying under a variety of other conditions.5 In those cases, the court relies on the ordinary forms of cross-examination by defense attorneys to undermine eyewitnesses (and, in some cases, some general instructions by the judge). So although eyewitness testimony may be very important in these cases, the criminal justice system has done little if anything to respond to research on its limitations.
Accounting Fraud
...In 2002, an especially bad year for scandals, the list of American companies caught up in major accounting fraud included the following: AOL, Adelphia, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CMS Energy, Computer Associates, Duke Energy, Dynegy, El Paso Corporation, Enron, Freddie Mac, Global Crossing, Halliburton, Harken Energy, HealthSouth, Homestore.com, ImClone Systems, Kmart, Lucent Technologies, Merck & Co., Merrill Lynch, Mirant, Nicor Energy, LLC, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Radiant Energy, Tyco International, Waste Management Inc. and World Com.33
Most of the so-called independent auditing in the United States (and worldwide) is now conducted by four major accounting firms—Deloitte and Touche, Ernst and Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. These firms audit more than 78% of publicly traded U.S.companies (and more than 99% of public company sales). In 2002 there were five firms. Author Andersen, the Enron auditor, folded as a result of that scandal. When most Americans think of accounting fraud, they think of Arthur Andersen and Enron. But the firms involved in these scandals were not all clients of Arthur Andersen. In fact, every one of the major accounting firms—firms that continue to audit more than 78% of publicly traded companies--has been implicated in multiple scandals in recent years...
These are major scandals involving hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars in fraud, fines and/or losses to investors. To take just the first six firms on the 2002 list in alphabetical order:
Adelphia, went bankrupt after it was discovered that it had $2.3 billion in off-balance-sheet (i.e., concealed) debt;
AOL Time Warner misrepresented hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenues to inflate the market value of AOL (they settled their case by paying $510 million in fines);
Bristol Myers Squibb illegally claimed $1.5 billion of revenue from sales to wholesalers an agreed to pay $150 million in fines and perform numerous remedial tasks;
CMS Energy overstated its revenue by $4.4 billion from 2000-2001 by reporting trades that, according to the SEC, "lack economic substance";
Computer Associates was charged with prematurely recognizing $2.2 billion in 2000-2001 and $1.1 billion in earlier quarters (in 2004 it reached a deal with the SEC to pay $225 million to shareholders victimized by its criminal conduct).
Duke Energy was charged with falsifying trades that added $1 billion to revenues over three years...35
The point of all this detail—really, just the very tip of the iceberg—is to emphasize just how seriously inadequate so-called independent auditing has turned out to be. Time after time these independent auditors have falsely assured us that the numbers—the data—are reliable when they were not. The results have been bankruptcies, lost pensions, lost jobs, lost tax revenues and huge losses to investors. From 1995-2005, more than 2500 class action law suits were filed in response to these frauds. 37
Post-Modernism
The term 'Post Modernism' has been tossed around with abandon during the last fifty years. Not surprisingly, it means different things to different people. I am interested here in the common threads that address the questions of this chapter. The resulting picture may not be true of everyone who has ever called herself a Post-Modernist.
Used in a purely descriptive way, "Post-Modernism" is an adjective characterizing styles of architecture, art, poetry, fashion, academic work, journalism, even social relations. Used in this way it suggests a mix of disparate elements, surprising juxtapositions, and an absence of more traditional forms of order and sense (for example, collages that include classical and industrial themes and novels without linear story lines or coherent characters) . But 'Post-Modernism' is also the name of an intellectual movement that is skeptical of traditional forms of sense and order and that applauds, or at least accepts, the emergence of Post-Modern cultural forms.
Every version of the Post-Modernist intellectual movement defines itself explicitly in opposition to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a powerful eighteenth century (or, some say, seventeenth and eighteenth century) intellectual, political and social movement that includes some of the most important thinkers in our tradition. As Post-Modernists understand it, the Enlightenment was an unmitigated celebration of the powers of reason. On this view, Enlightenment thinkers believed that we can achieve a complete understanding of the natural and human world through the proper exercise of reason and/or the proper mix of reason and observation. Armed with this understanding, we can perfect our institutions, and subjugate and exploit nature to our own purposes. What holds us back, on this account, are ignorance, superstition, religion, blind acceptance of authority, self-centeredness and other forms of bias. Once freed of these burdens, once guided by reason and observation alone, we can arrive at objective, accurate and complete pictures of ourselves and our world and use them to create a kind of paradise on earth.
Before describing the Post-Modernist critique of this account, I should warn the reader that this Post-Modernist portrait of the Enlightenment is ridiculously simplistic. For example, it makes a complete hash of two of the most important Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume and Immanual Kant. In philosophical circles, Hume is not regarded as an apostle of reason. In fact, he is best known for his skepticism about both reason and observation. In opposition to the rationalists, he denies that we can understand the basic principles of the universe just by thinking about them. In opposition to the standard run of empiricists, he doesn't believe it's reasonable to generalize from observation either. For example, he thinks we have no good reason to believe that correlations that held between events in the past will continue to hold in the future (his famous problem of induction). Without that, he emphasizes, we have no good reason to believe that turning the door knob opens the door, drinking water will quench our thirst, putting our hand in a fire will burn us, etc. In fact, according to Hume, our belief that correlations that held in the past will hold in the future is simply a matter of "animal faith." We have no choice but to run our lives in accordance with habits that have no rational basis. Furthermore, in relation to ethics Hume famously argues that "reason is a slave of the passions". Yet Hume is among the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant is often portrayed as a poster boy of the Enlightenment. But Kant's most important philosophical project explicitly attacked the pretensions of reason in defense of faith. According to Kant, we have no hope of ever understanding the world as it is in itself. The purpose of his most famous book—The Critique of Pure Reason—is to establish this claim. Although he very much admires science (in its place), he believes that science can not settle the big questions and he tries to protect the religious ideas of God, freedom and immortality against the incursions of both science and philosophy. Of course, some aspects Humean and Kantian thought better fit the Post-Modernist picture of the Enlightenment than these descriptions of their core views and central projects. The point is that, in their rush to contrast themselves to the Enlightenment, Post-Modernists ignore the complexity of the Enlightenment. They also fail to recognize that it contains the seeds of their own ideas. In his philosophical capacity, no one was more deeply skeptical about our capacity to understand the world than Hume.
But this is just an historical point. We still need to address the Post-modernist critique of what they think the Enlightenment represents. The most important theme of this critique is that we are all 'situated' beings. We are members of a particular culture at a particular period of history. We get our intellectual tools—our concepts and theories—from our time and place. We depend on these tools to reason about the world. And it is arrogant to believe that these tools are better than all the possible alternatives, or that they somehow enable us to "cut nature at the joints." In addition to time and place, we are also limited by the peculiarities of our own circumstances—for example, our religion, race, class, gender, family of origin, schooling, and other such contingencies. Finally, although everyone is situated in this way, our culturally authoritative pictures of the world are the pictures of the privileged and the powerful.
Understood as an account of the obstacles to knowledge—the problems we face as thinkers—there is a lot of truth to this picture. But most Post-Modernist thinkers use it to support more extreme conclusions. As suggested, the literature of Post-Modernisms is a litany epistemic pessimism. We read that our situatedness is inescapable, objectivity is a pipe dream, truth is relative, it is impossible to hold our representations up to the world to see how well they capture it, the very idea of representing the world is obsolete, the idea of truth itself is obsolete, that all we have are the stories we tell ourselves and none of them has any more epistemic claim to our allegiance than any other, and that, in the end, its all about loyalty and expediency. Perhaps not every Post-Modernist would assent to all of this, but there is no denying that the waters of skepticism everywhere run high and that nothing remains anchored in their wake. Science is washed away along with history, philosophy and theology.
Naturally understood, these claims challenge the project of this book. If no narrative has any more claim to truth than any other, it's pointless even to try to guard against error. But not to worry. Considering the popularity of Post-Modern skepticism, it is an amazingly feeble philosophical position. The most obvious problem is that it hoists itself by its own petards by using sociological, historical, psychological, and philosophical arguments to show that no sociological, historical, psychological, and philosophical arguments or conclusions are trustworthy. If that's so, why should we trust the arguments and conclusions of the post-modernists? Radical Post-Modern skepticism undermines itself in the same way any argument that concludes one can't trust arguments undermines itself.
When philosophers point this out to Post-Modern evangelicals, they get two responses. Some Post-Modernist simply shrug them off as salvos in a turf war between what they take to be a narrow group of philosophers (so-called analytical philosophers) and the rest of the humanities and social sciences. That is, they take this criticism as expressing the complaint that they are practicing philosophy without a license. The truth is that most of them are practicing philosophy without a clue (that is, in almost complete ignorance of relevant episodes of the history of philosophy and of much of the relevant contemporary philosophical literature). The second response is, 'Well, yes, I see the force of the criticism, but we have people working on that.' Yeah, well, good luck.
Still, Post-Modernists are right to say that we are situated beings. It is an important observation and one that too many philosophers ignore (thinking that once they have made the obvious objection they can get on with business as usual). But how can anyone with any understanding of history, sociology, anthropology or psychology deny that our situatedness creates obstacles and hazards on the road to knowledge? How can they simply ignore all the variations in basic beliefs between cultures, ethnic groups, social classes, genders, personality types, etc.? The real problem is to identify exactly what these obstacles and hazards are, and to think about the degree to which and the methods by which we can transcend them. But neither the Post-Modernists nor their philosophical critics are interested in rolling up their sleeves and getting down to cases. Both seem happier with their ritual dance of dramatic proclamations and balloon puncturing.
We can start thinking about the real problem by recognizing that some forms of reasoning are not situated, but rather just plain human. Every human group that trades does arithmetic. Every human group that builds thinks geometrically. Every human group that eats generalizes from examples. Every human group that regulates behavior identifies particulars as instances of rules. As human groups become larger and more prosperous, they expand and develop these thinking skills. Every known civilization has a number system, a calendar, sophisticated engineering and building skills, a legal system and other technologies that demand planning and coordination. These are accessible to any intelligent person. People of any class, race and gender today can learn to do advanced mathematics and science, to read history, to program computers, and so forth. And its not as if Bantu, Maori, Japanese or Bedouin people have some special logic—some special, unique methods of reasoning—that prevent them from learning these things. We can all learn them because we have human brains and these brains are remarkably reliable in some areas. They provide us with pictures of the world on the basis of which we build airplanes, computers, hydro-electric dams, and countless other complex things. The fact that we can built things that work doesn't logically imply that our theories are true but that's certainly the best explanation. If we were wrong about air foils, it would be an astounding bit of luck that airplanes fly.
As this suggests, Post-Modernist writers respond that there are countless ways to divide the world into types of things, countless possible systems of concepts and categories. And the fact that our technologies work doesn't imply that our way of doing it is the best possible way, that it cuts nature at the joints, or that it gives us the Best and Final Word on Things as They Are In Themselves. Its not exactly clear what this even means. Philosophers have struggled with that since Kant. But we don't need to worry about that in this chapter. Our concern here is with plain, old, ordinary garden variety truth and reliability. Contrary to the way some Post-Modernists write, we don't need to categorize the world the way God would to have that.
Here's a simple example. Instead of dividing animals into genuses and species we could divide them in a much cruder way, say, according to their height (small, medium and large, with fish measured from tail to head). That is hardly a candidate for cutting nature at the joints. For one thing, there is a lot we wouldn't discover about animals if we were limited to this taxonomy. But even given this taxonomy, we can use reliable (or unreliable) methods to make accurate (or inaccurate) statements about animals. We could say whether there are more small animals than big animals, how the three kinds of animals are distributed in the planet, which group has the lowest average lifespan, what proportion of each group are carnivorous, and so on. Again, we don't need a language that cuts nature at the joints to say things that are reliable and true about these matters.
The upshot of this discussion and the discussion of scientism is that the simple popular answers to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter fail. Its now time to further investigate some of the complexities.
The Values of the Economists
...Economists and governments measure the health of an economy in terms of its Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product. These are regarded as at least rough measures of total utility or preference satisfaction. This means that, all other things being equal, the higher the rates of production and consumption in an economy, the healthier an economy is. Whether one agrees with this or not, it is clearly a value judgment. It rejects the idea that small is beautiful (that the simpler, low consumption life is better than the more harried high consumption life). It is indifferent to the types of goods that are produced and consumed (bombs are equal to food and each Hummers is worth a thousand bicycles). It does not take the distribution of consumption patterns into account (two economies may be equally healthy even if one has a huge gap between the rich and the poor and the other does not). And it ignores externalities (e.g., polluted air and water and toxic waste dumps). One could argue that all of this should be taken into consideration when we judge the health of an economy. Of course, that is also a value judgment. But that's the point. In the last analysis any account of what makes us better off economically that is intended to guide policy necessarily rests on assumptions about what makes life worth living.