Tradition

Tradition

As Fat Tony said, Socrates was put to death because he disrupted something that, in the eyes of the Athenian establishment, was working just fine. Things are too complicated to be expressed in words; by doing so, you kill humans. Or people—as with the green lumber—may be focusing on the right things but we are not good enough to figure it out intellectually.

Death and martyrdom make good marketing, particularly when one faces destiny while unwavering in his opinions. A hero is someone imbued with intellectual confidence and ego, and death is something too small for him. While most of the accounts we hear of Socrates make him heroic, thanks to his death and his resignation to die in a philosophical way, he had some classical critics who believed that Socrates was destroying the foundations of society—the heuristics that are transmitted by the elders and that we may not be mature enough to question.

Cato the Elder, whom we met in Chapter 2, was highly allergic to Socrates. Cato had the bottom-line mind of Fat Tony, but with a much higher civic sense, sense of mission, respect for tradition, and commitment to moral rectitude. He was also allergic to things Greek, as exhibited in his allergy to philosophers and doctors—an allergy which, as we will see in later chapters, had remarkably modern justifications. Cato’s commitment to democracy led him to believe in both freedom and the rules of custom, in combination with fear of tyranny. Plutarch quotes him as saying: “Socrates was a mighty babbler who tried to make himself tyrant of his country in order to destroy its customs and entice its citizens into holding views contrary to law and order.”

So the reader can see how the ancients saw naive rationalism: by impoverishing—rather than enhancing—thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness—half-knowledge—is always dangerous.

Many other people than the ancients have been involved in defending—and inviting us to respect—this different type of knowledge. First, Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and political philosopher, who also countered the French Revolution for disrupting the “collected reasons of the ages.” He believed that large social variations can expose us to unseen effects and thus advocated the notion of small trial-and-error experiments (in effect, convex tinkering) in social systems, coupled with respect for the complex heuristics of tradition. Also Michael Oakeshot, the twentieth-century conservative political philosopher and philosopher of history who believed that traditions provide an aggregation of filtered collective knowledge. Another one in that league would be Joseph de Maistre, who as we saw thought in “second steps.” He was a French-language royalist and counter-Enlightenment thinker who was vocal against the ills of the Revolution and believed in the fundamental depravity of men unless checked by some dictatorship.

Clearly, Wittgenstein would be at the top of the list of modern antifragile thinkers, with his remarkable insight into the inexpressible with words. And of all thinkers he best understands the green lumber issue—he may be the first ever to express a version of it when he doubted the ability of language to express the literal. In addition, the fellow was a saint—he sacrificed his life, his friendships, his fortune, his reputation, everything, for the sake of philosophy.

We may be drawn to think that Friedrich Hayek would be in that antifragile, antirationalist category. He is the twentieth-century philosopher and economist who opposed social planning on the grounds that the pricing system reveals through transactions the knowledge embedded in society, knowledge not accessible to a social planner. But Hayek missed the notion of optionality as a substitute for the social planner. In a way, he believed in intelligence, but as a distributed or collective intelligence—not in optionality as a replacement for intelligence.3

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss showed that nonliterate peoples had their own “science of the concrete,” a holistic way of thinking about their environment in terms of objects and their “secondary,” sensuous qualities which was not necessarily less coherent than many of our scientific approaches and, in many respects, can be as rich as and even richer than ours. Again, green lumber.

Finally, John Gray, the contemporary political philosopher and essayist who stands against human hubris and has been fighting the prevailing ideas that the Enlightenment is a panacea—treating a certain category of thinkers as Enlightenment fundamentalists. Gray showed repeatedly how what we call scientific progress can be just a mirage. When he, myself, and the essayist Bryan Appleyard got together for lunch I was mentally prepared to discuss ideas, and advocate my own. I was pleasantly surprised by what turned out to be the best lunch I ever had in my entire life. There was this smoothness of knowing that the three of us tacitly understood the same point and, instead, went to the second step of discussing applications—something as mundane as replacing our currency holdings with precious metals, as these are not owned by governments. Gray worked in an office next to Hayek and told me that Hayek was quite a dull fellow, lacking playfulness—hence optionality.