In The Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Georges B.J. Dreyfus describes Tibetan monasteries as homes for “scholasticism,” using a word originally coined to describe a form of Catholic thought and practice that was most influential in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries–later to be mocked and repudiated by both Protestants and Catholic Humanists. As Dreyfus notes, this word has also been used to describe specific traditions in Islam, and more recently in Hinduism and Buddhism. In his book, he explores strong parallels in Judaism.

It could be that scholasticism is an option within any heavily organized and sustained tradition of thought, whether we classify it as a religion or as something else.

One core component is a belief in argument–not just discussion and disagreement, but contentious, often competitive pro/con debate. Debates in Tibetan monasteries are high-pressure, competitive affairs conducted before active audiences. The same was true in medieval universities, where students paid the lecturers individually and enjoyed competitive showdowns. King and Arling write that Abelard’s “quick wit, sharp tongue, perfect memory and boundless arrogance made him unbeatable in debate—he was said by supporter and detractor alike never to have lost an argument.” Dreyfus recalls the Jewish practice of havruta, learning in pairs, and emphasizes that these pairs debate each other.

In scholastic traditions, debate is not seen as a temporary necessity while we sort out important topics once and for all. Instead, it is a form of religious practice, comparable to meditation or ritual and something like an end in itself.

Martin Luther hated it for just that reason. Luther was a formidable debater, but he was trying to defeat heresy. He would have been deeply disappointed to learn that people are still debating theology centuries later. In contrast, I think that Tibetan monks work to keep the debate going. They see it as a good way of life.

Debating what is actually said in the most revered texts of any tradition is risky. While arguing about such texts, it is hard to avoid arguing with them. Therefore, an interesting pattern in scholasticism is a tendency to argue about the previous commentators. According to Dreyfus, “Tibetans emphasize less the inspirational words of the founder (the sutras) and more the study of their content as summarized by the great Indian treatises.” In theory, “the authority of the Indian commentaries is extremely important; practically, they are used in Tibetan education relatively rarely by teachers and students.” Instead, Tibetan monks memorize and debate Tibetan commentaries on the Indian summaries of the sutras that are attributed to the Buddha. My sense is that Catholic commentaries on Aristotle, Jewish Talmudic study, and Islamic jurisprudence have a similar flavor.

Again, this style drove Luther crazy. The truth was in the original Word of God (sola scriptura) not in pedantic commentaries. Erasmus opposed scholasticism for a different but compatible reason. For him, the ancient texts–including but not limited to the Bible–made better literature than the ponderous tomes of the scholastics. The classics had style and form. However, if you want to keep on debating forever, then it makes sense to focus on the commentaries and let them accumulate, layer upon layer.

Another common feature is a focus on law–not necessarily in the literal sense of state-enforced rules and punishments, but at least the question of what counts as the right action in all kinds of circumstances; call it casuistry, jurisprudence, or applied ethics. I’m guessing this is a fruitful focus because we can invent new ethical questions endlessly. Besides, if the real purpose of the debate is self-improvement, then good behavior makes an ideal topic.

Social stratification often emerges in these traditions, to the point where the scholastic authorities can be quasi-hereditary. Yet the traditions offer stories about talented teachers who came up from nowhere. That is the point of the opening story of the Platform Sutra, when an illiterate monk grasps the point that the educated ones have missed and becomes a great authority. (This is my example, not Dreyfus’, and it might not be germane.) Jean Gerson, who became the most senior scholar in Paris, was born as one of twelve children of pious peasants. Of course, meritocratic anecdotes serve as great justifications for hierarchical systems.

I share this generic definition of scholasticism without a value-judgment. I am not sure how much I admire these traditions or resonate to them. Presumably, they are best assessed as parts of much larger social orders that offer other options as well. In any case, it seems valuable to recognize a form of life that recurs so widely.

See also: Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does focusing philosophy on how to live broaden or narrow it?; Hannah Arendt and philosophy as a way of life; avoiding the labels of East and West; Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized; is everyone religious?; etc.

Apparently, at public meetings about social studies curricula, some people are saying: “Just teach facts.” Insofar as this call is coming from people incensed about Critical Race Theory in our k-12 schools, the irony is hard to ignore. CRT is very rarely, if ever, taught, and some of the ideas being attributed to it are factual. Yet I think there is also something else going on. Across many issues and in many political subcultures, it’s common to demand facts instead of opinions, as if the facts are all on our side and the other side is the opinionated one. I have encountered liberals who make versions of this argument, whether about COVID-19 or about history and politics.

In their 2002 book Stealth Democracy, John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that about 70% of Americans are drawn to the idea that gives their book its title. These people basically see disagreement as a sign of corruption. It should not be necessary to disagree about matters of political or moral importance. People who express contrasting opinions must have bad motives or be sadly misguided. Since disagreement is rife, it would be “better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts.”

In a great 2010 paper, Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, Ryan Kennedy, David Lazer, and Anand Sokhey showed that fewer people probably held the stealth democracy position than Hibbing and Theiss-Morse had found, and Americans were more tolerant of disagreement. However, Neblo and colleagues didn’t find zero support for stealth democracy, and I think it pops up fairly often.

It may reflect frustration about opinions that one strongly dislikes: Why can’t those misguided people just acknowledge the facts? But it may also reflect a deeper problem.

In an era when science (as popularly defined) has enormous prestige and purports to distinguish facts sharply from values, people don’t know what to make of value-laden disagreements. Justin McBrayer found this sign hanging in his son’s second-grade classroom:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

McBrayer attributes this distinction to the Common Core. I think the text of the Common Core is actually a bit subtler, and the sign reflects a widespread view. In any case, the distinction is untenable.

First of all, we must select which facts to investigate. We could teach George Washington’s achievements or slavery in colonial America–or neither, or both–but the facts themselves can’t tell us which of those things to study.

Second, the information we possess always reflects other people’s interests and concerns. American historians, for example, study marginalized and oppressed people more than they did a half century ago. This shift reflects ethical principles. Historians do not, and cannot, pursue all facts indiscriminately. You might dispute their emphasis, but then you’re arguing for different values, not rejecting their facts.

Third, it is very hard to identify a fact that is free of value-judgments or a value-judgment that does not encompass empirical beliefs about the way the world works.

Fourth, many of the most important facts about history are the opinions people held. Lincoln’s response to secession was his opinion, but attributing a position to him is either correct or incorrect. You cannot teach history without teaching–and spending a lot of your time teaching–opinions.

Perhaps most importantly, not all values are just opinions that people happen to hold. Valuing chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream is subjective, in this sense. Believing that genocide is evil is not. It isn’t a fact “that can be tested or proven,” but it also isn’t just something I happen to feel. It is something we are all obliged to feel.

Education inevitably involves choices about what to teach and how to talk about and interpret information. It inevitably conveys values and causes students to make judgments–whether as intended or in reaction to what the school wants them to think. Education is better when it helps students to develop political and intellectual virtues. But adults disagree about virtues, and our disagreements reflect our freedom, our diversity, and our nature as finite, embodied, fallible creatures. Therefore, disagreement about what and how to teach is inevitable, permanent, and a sign that free people care about the future. “Just teach the facts” is a call to stop this debate, when what we need is more and better.

See also: first year college students and moral relativism;  science, democracy, and civic life; is science republican (with a little r)?; some thoughts on natural law; is all truth scientific truth?; etc.

The Economist/YouGov has released a survey of 1,500 U.S. Adult Citizens (fielded from
June 13 – 15, 2021) that asks some questions about Critical Race Theory (CRT). This is their summary.

This issue is deeply partisan and breaks in Republicans’ favor. Eighty-five percent of Republicans are very unfavorable to CRT, whereas 58% of Democrats are very favorable. But the public as a whole breaks against CRT, 58%-38%, due to Independents’ opposition (71% are very unfavorable) and Democrats’ somewhat mixed support.

Party ID appears more significant than demographics. For instance, a slight majority of Blacks (52%) are very favorable to CRT, but 16% are very unfavorable: a less positive balance than we see among Democrats. Women, college graduates, and young people are a bit more favorable than others, but those differences are small. (With access only to the printed report, I can’t run a regression to see how these variables may interact.)

Fifty-four percent of Americans say they have a very good idea what CRT is. The remainder are split between not being sure whether they know and being sure that they do not know what it is: 23% each. Thirty-five percent have heard nothing at all about CRT, 38% a little, and 26% a lot.

I think most of the people who say they know what CRT is are giving themselves too much credit. It names a rather specific academic movement that few of us understand. I would not claim that I have reliable knowledge of CRT (when knowledge = justified true belief) even though I study this general topic. But 54% of Americans are confident that they know what it is.

Although almost half of people are not sure what CRT is, 96% of respondents state a favorable or unfavorable view of it, and a total of 78% hold either a very favorable or a very unfavorable view. In other words, many people have opinions–even strong ones–about CRT even though they do not believe they know what it is and have heard nothing at all about it.

A mainstream position in political science these days is that Americans lack well-justified and autonomous opinions about most political issues. Achen and Bartels argue that even politically conscious citizens usually display “just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think” (Achen and Bartels 2017, p. 12).

I dissent from this general view and have spent the past week on a methodological paper that aims to show that individuals hold more complex and individualized structures of opinions than one can glean from standard survey research. Yet the nature of public opinion depends on the issue, and especially on whether political professionals are exploiting it.

CRT is a great example of an issue on which public opinion reflects partisan heuristics and cues from leaders rather than careful thought. It’s bound to stay near the top of the national agenda, not only because it serves as a proxy for deeper issues related to race, but also because of the partisan politics. Republicans aren’t going to drop an issue that polls so well for them, but Democratic leaders–even if they wanted to–can’t strongly oppose CRT while 58% of their voters strongly favor it.

The original article that coined the idea of “wicked problems” has been cited nearly 19,000 times. In their 1973 piece,* Rittel and Webber explained why we lacked fully satisfactory social policies and criticized two popular approaches: expert-designed solutions and maximum individual choice.

Rittel and Webber did not offer an alternative to those two flawed approaches, but many people since then (including me) have argued that wicked problem necessitate inclusive processes. Because social problems have the features Rittel and Webber name, everyone must play a role in defining and addressing problems–continuously and together. Our focus shifts to designing good processes.

In this post, I want to raise a dilemma: inclusive processes must include many people who hold strong and plausible reasons to reject the social theory that leads to the idea of wicked problems in the first place. It is hard to envision a process that is hospitable to people who reject the social theory that justifies it.

But first, what social theory are we talking about? Rittel and Webber offer 10 criteria to define wicked problems. I have summarized their list (with some reorganization) here. For the moment, let’s focus on these specific issues:

“Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad” (p. 162). Yet people disagree about what is good. Furthermore, “Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem” (p. 165). Thus we can endlessly disagree about the center or “locus” of the problem. This is one reason that “There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem” (p. 161). There is no way to develop an exhaustive list of all the possible solutions (p. 164). And “Every wicked problem is essentially unique” (164)

The underlying model in Rittel and Webber is a network of causes and effects. Each problem affects others. There is no root cause. For instance, the issues of racism, poverty, guns, militarization, violent crime, lack of public safety, disinvestment, segregation, substance-abuse, mental illness, educational deficits, etc. are all tangled up. We can intervene at many different points, and each intervention has limitations and challenges. Also, facts cannot be separated from normative judgments, and judgments are permanently contested. For instance, to say that “crime is up this year” is to imply a whole set of judgments about how people should be able to act, who gets to decide, and what should matter to the community.

The challenges that Rittel and Webber identify do not (by themselves) entail democratic processes. These challenges might instead imply pessimism: maybe there simply are no solutions. Or these challenges might suggest some kind of modus vivendi: people who disagree about problems should leave each other alone. Or perhaps we need more sophisticated technical methods in order to identify satisfactory solutions.

I happen to endorse Rittel’s and Webber’s social theory. I would add a commitment to collaborative self-governance as a quasi-intrinsic good. Communities should create the social world through their deliberate action. If that is right, then Rittel and Webber provide helpful arguments against expert-led, top-down approaches and make space for democratic processes. However, democratic processes require additional justification. They certainly do not always succeed–no matter how you define success. And if you don’t agree that collective self-government has intrinsic value, you may understandably look for alternatives.

Further, many people have reasons to doubt the underlying social theory. If the root problem is capitalism–which is really bad and not just disliked by some–and if the solution is workers’ control of the means of production, then all this talk of “wicked problems” is just a ham-handed justification of the status quo. The same is true if individual negative liberty is the highest good, the problem is state coercion, and the solution is a free market. Or if the problem is white supremacy and the solution is liberation from that.

These three views are incompatible with mine and (to an extent) with each other. Obviously, I could be wrong, and one or more of these alternatives could be correct. Since I am unsure, and since I respect my fellow human beings, I favor a democratic process to debate our differences and decide together. Yet the kinds of processes I would build or endorse reflect my social theory. They are ameliorative rather than revolutionary. They envision people constantly focusing on a few tangible, immediate problems at a time, taking concrete steps to ameliorate those problems, and reflecting on the effects as they ripple out. The processes I envision are truly inclusive, which means that at some stage, the police, the capitalists, and the state bureaucrats should be part of the discussion, not defined as the problem.

The question is why people who disagree with those premises should want to participate. That dilemma is not merely theoretical; large numbers of people actually do disagree. Perhaps it is wiser not to use the theory of wicked problems to justify inclusive processes.

Horst Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4.2, 1973, 155-169. See also: wicked problems, and excuses; Complexities of Civic Life; and what must we believe?