Bobby Jindal and Alex Castellanos write,
We don’t make the big decisions in our lives with a calculator: whom we love, whom we marry, the children we bring into the world, the groups to which we are loyal, the causes for which we fight and die. We make those commitments not only with our heads, but also with our hearts.
People live not just with rational beliefs but also with irrational commitments. When Bohr says to interpret the Uncertainty Principle as implying that the location of an electron is probabilistic, he is stating a rational belief. When Einstein replies “God does not play dice!” he is stating an irrational commitment.
Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up makes a case for respecting, or at least not dismissing, irrational commitments. As an example, he uses the belief in free will. But the Enlightenment, which raised the status of Reason and lowered the status of dogma, has apparently given us a better way to approach issues in science, business, and politics. The philosophical project of many epistemologists in the British empiricist tradition seems to involve making an irrational commitment to get rid of irrational commitments.
Is it more useful to think of what Jindal and Castellanos are describing as irrational or as subjective? Do we understand someone’s choice of who to marry better if we think the decision is irrational (he doesn’t make enough money for the lifestyle she is accustomed to, they have different religions) or if the decision is subjective (he satisfies her subjective needs)?
I would vote Carl Sagan and Deirdre McCloskey as folks who try to get us to make an “irrational commitment to get rid of irrational commitments.” Both appeal to the heart by trying to inspire awe at great things: Sagan the majesty of the natural world and the power of science to illuminate it, McCloskey the magnitude of the Great Enrichment and its transformative qualitative impact on human lives.
The receptive audiences for their messages may be limited, but I will take their worldviews over those attached to older irrational commitments any day.
I’d never thought of them that way before. Interesting.
McCloskey was a nutcase that mutilated himself and got disowned by his family.
I don’t know much about Sagan but Wiki says he was married three times.
Ayn Rand famously was a basket case in her personal life. I was friends one pair of kids who grew up in an objectivist house growing up. They were predictably divorced and the kids were messed up. The girl couldn’t form healthy relationships and the boy later got sex reassignment surgery.
One of the first things cults do is try to cut you off from family.
Its notable that so many “big idea people” that stress universalism have terrible personal lives and have a really hard time doing something as simple as getting and staying married while raising children.
True, but lots of unreflective people have trouble with that too. Staying married and raising kids is simple in the same sense that walking from Boston to LA is – there’s not much complicated about it, but it’s not easy.
“The great question in life is the sorrow we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics cannot justify a man who has broken the heart that loved him.”
– Benjamin Constant, from Adolphe
The great and respected classical liberal political scientist Constant, surely as notable a specimen of Reason as one would hope to find, still felt the need to write a classic tragic novel illustrating perfectly Thomas Hardy’s maxim that “only love can lend loyalty.” And what is love if not an irrational attachment. Dierdre McCloseky wrote extensively on the virtues yet reason alone will not instill what was once known as ” character. ” She lauds societies that foster respect for certain virtues citing works of Art as key indicators, yet the logic of Art is more often than not irrational. I suspect Constant keenly felt the limitations of Reason and needed Art to come to grips with the reality of his emotionally messy personal life. For a good treatment of the irreducible reality of the irrational, Constant’s fiction Adolphe is not the worst place to look.
Leeson’s “WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird” is just one example of many efforts in economics to show the “subtly rational” basic behind many behaviors and attitudes that might seem ‘irrational’ on their surface.
“Rational Irrationality” (and ‘overconfidence’ in some contexts) is also a well-studied phenomenon when comparing tactics and strategy in the game theory analyzing situations with many iterations of interaction.
Often times it pays to ‘over-react’ to even small trespasses and transgressions because every reaction communicates information and these are also probes for commitment to resist future aggression and thus otherwise you set a precedent for small concessions and you will soon get salami-sliced into oblivion.
The situation of loyalty presents a similar context. You cannot coordinate with people if you expect them to make short-term utilitarian calculations and defect every time the benefits exceed the costs. So human instincts evolved to allow more long-term and strategic underlying subconscious calculations to manifest as impulses and emotions to permit better group cooperation.
There is the additional complication that we are often not honest with each other or even ourselves about our true motives, in Hansonian / Elephant in the Brain fashion. So, behavior which is in truth perfectly rational (whether tactically or strategically), cannot be recognized as such, because they won’t be consciously connected to the true motivations as the rational way to maximize one’s genuine interests.
If Einstein had “commitments” (rational or not) about God and dice, he kept changing them. See, for example, the quotations below.
Einstein, Letter to Neils Bohr (1926): “God does not play dice!”
Einstein, Letter to Paul Epstein (n.d., but before November 1945): “God tirelessly plays dice under laws which he has himself prescribed.”:
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6210431/
Einstein, Letter to Joseph Dispentiere (March 24, 1954):”I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”:
https://books.google.com/books?id=T5R7JsRRtoIC&pg=PA43#v=onepage&q&f=false
It’s the same with economics. I thought economic models — from simplest to most complicated — were there to help us make neutral claims about the world even if we disagreed on values.
But some like Glaeser or the libertarian types think neoclassical theory points to liberty in choice, in immigration, in trade as better values.
I say au contraire. All it does is show that in certain situations there are costs to be borne with policies that encourage free exchange. It does not tell me when free exchange becomes inferior because of considerations such as national defense, patriotic solidarity, or defense of cultural values. But so many economists I know just think the models allow us to sidestep the issue. They are as stupid as MDs who think only THEY can assess the tradeoffs from different medical treatments.
Is belief in free will irrational? No. Free will is plausible (coheres with many beliefs that can be verified empirically). Free will is also directly verifiable, by introspection, when we make bootstrap; and by observation, when others rise to the challenge of hard choices. Similarly, belief in weakness of will is not irrational. Apart from some philosophers, people deny free will altogether only when excuses or coercion are convenient.
Commitments are to virtues; for example, personal responsibility, humility, charity, gratitude, courage, sincerity, truth-seeking.