Our work, as metamodern philosophers and scientists, is to rewrite the very fabric of what is real, as our participatory perspectives express higher truths, as they mirror more profound insights—and land us in a vast landscape of reflections, gazing deeper into the abyss.
Science is the process of building upon what we know, which ultimately always tears down the previously known. It is a dance of consciousness, always delving into a deeper mystery. We don’t live in a universe where “science” tells us “the truth”. We live in a universe where the truth always lies beyond us as we plunge into its mystery.
This part of the story is relatively straightforward—and yet it is far from. On the one hand, the aim of Empirical Politics is something that is already an accepted norm in pretty much all societies—simply that policies, regulations and practices can and should be based upon the best available information and empirically tested knowledge. For instance, if patients are granted the right to get Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for depression, it is in the interest of most everyone involved that CBT can be shown to work to reduce depression. Nobody would argue with that.
On the other hand—and this is where things get interesting—defining what is “good science” and what level of empirical foundations can reasonably be expected within each field of decision-making, and how such empirical support should be cultivated, is difficult. It is, one could say, a whole science in its own right.
Not Obvious, Not Naive
And that’s exactly why we need Empirical Politics; we require an ongoing, deliberate and explicitly planned process for making society more scientifically driven and empirically tested.
If making society as empirically solid as possible was an easy or obvious thing, we could “just do it” and be done. But since it is such a highly abstract and difficult thing, we need a wide-reaching process through which different paths to validity, reliability, consequentiality and truthfulness are suggested and tested against each other.
We need to perpetually answer and re-answer questions about practices in society. This points us towards more reliable empirical results.
For example, which kind of didactics should be used for which kids in school when they learn to read? Given that we can agree on some basic aims (high information retention, concentration, good reading speed, good awareness of one’s own reading style, etc.)—it’s an empirical question. How should we use policing and social work to reduce crime rates? Empirical question. What level of social welfare optimizes security without being financially untenable? Empirical question. How do we improve the quality of democratic deliberation and the average political engagement of citizens? Empirical question. How do we reduce the level of false information and increase people’s ability to critically evaluate sources of information (as well as one’s own beliefs and presuppositions)? Empirical question.
You get the idea. The core issue of Empirical Politics is how to optimize the process of getting the best possible empirical knowledge and to get all parts of society to commit to using that knowledge. And that, my suspicious friend, is far from a no-brainer.
The societal value of empirical science and knowledge cannot be overstated. Even if we get a deeper form of democracy, people will still need to base their shared decisions upon as sound evidence as possible. The whole point of having a better decision-making process is to come closer to a shared truth; so in the last instance you will still be dependent on evaluations, cost-benefit analyses, facts, second opinions, additional tests and so forth. What does “an opinion” help, or someone’s “feelings” for that matter, if the facts speak against it? Should we treat people with vaccines? Are GMOs dangerous? Are the Jews conspiring against our race? Does imprisonment of convicted criminals help; if so, whom, how and under what circumstances? Whatever feelings or gut reactions we may have towards these issues, it is in our common interest that the most valid and reliable data are produced, presented and rigorously (but not conclusively) interpreted for us.
Precisely because a completely science-driven politics can only ever be a naive fantasy, we must continuously bombard the entirety of politics and bureaucracy with new and critical empirical evidence. “Ideological positions” in the bad sense of the word (holding on to simple, preconceived suppositions about complex issues, where our ideas about empirical truth follow our values rather than the other way around) are often due not only to our cognitive biases, as discussed under Existential Politics, but also simply to lacking empirical data and a rigorous discussion of all relevant information. As empirical knowledge grows, and the demands to cast one’s arguments in verified facts increase, the inner pressure to adopt ready-made template ideologies decreases. It should be pointed out that, at some level, most atrocities have relied upon false assumptions about factual affairs: the Jews weren’t actually conspiring against Germany, and no socialist utopia emerged if you just whacked the kulak farmers hard enough by forcing them to collectivization, and you couldn’t actually reshape human nature at will by brainwashing folks. These were false assumptions about factual matters.
If you look at the great theorists of science, from the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, to Steven Jay Gould’s witty histories, to Thomas Kuhn’s and Karl Popper’s philosophies, to Richard Feynman’s ingenious commentary, to Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now , to all the critical voices from the sociology of knowledge and ethnographic studies of science as a social practice—at the very least all of these agree that science isn’t straightforward, that it must be upheld, maintained, defended and renewed. Achieving a scientific society isn’t easy.
In advanced late modern countries, politics is already to some extent data- and science-driven. When national politicians are asked what they are going to do about this or that complex problem, a common reply is that they are going to pay a bunch of university professors to initiate an investigation into the matter and come up with suggestions. Then the parliamentarians, sooner or later, usually follow through on these suggestions, often in broad consensus from left to right. Likewise, more and more of decision-making is delegated to meritocratically selected but unelected experts, consultants and technocrats. In a way, then, such societies are already slipping into an early form of Empirical Politics—often, however, partly at the expense of democratic legitimacy and transparency. As the systems of governance are tasked with tackling greater complexity and more issues that require technical detail, they tend to slide towards technocracy.
Empirical Politics is the process through which the long and tricky path to a scientifically sound society is discovered and traveled. It should be obvious, after all, that today’s society is still largely unscientific : Massive institutional practices are kept alive without a shred of evidence for them being the best alternative, most people are relatively poor at scientific reasoning and critical thinking, and the politics of the major parties are largely based upon loose “opinions”. Most of life goes unexamined (Socrates turns in his grave) and the unexamined life gets away with it—most fatefully, perhaps, the criminal justice system. Given the very powerful technological forces that are about to be unleashed upon the world, the failure to seriously upgrade the level of scientificness in society is dangerous, bordering on suicidal.
Yet, societies of today are, in a variety of ways, “more scientific” than those of a century ago. Still we should make certain that it is an explicit and prioritized goal to make tomorrow’s society yet more scientific than today’s. Do we know that this kind of schooling is the best in terms of securing long-term human happiness? Do we know that this prison time for this crime is appropriate and leads to the most desirable consequences? The truth is that most of the time we simply don’t know and we’re pretty much guessing as we go along.
Empirical Politics may sound
drier and less exciting than the Politics of Democratization, Gemeinschaft , Existence and Emancipation. But what is any radical transformation of governance worth without a solid relationship to the truth? What is freedom without an intimate connection to the falsifiable search for truth? What is the inner growth of the population, if it cannot be shown to exist? In fact, I could argue that Empirical Politics is the most radical of all that have hitherto been mentioned—the politics, if you will, of truth itself.
What could be a wilder ride than to align society with the verifiable regularities of the cosmos? After all, scientific discovery always surprises us in so many and so earthshattering ways. If madness is civilization’s shadow, our only hope for sanity may lie in increasing our ability to crosscheck and falsify the propositions of one another. It’s not obvious and it’s not naive.
Higher Levels of Truth?
So what does it mean for society to be “more truthful” or “more scientific”? Here’s what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean that there is one category of “serious, academic, scientific, rational, empirical, logical and rigorous” inquiry and another of “weak, emotionally driven, woo-woo, sloppy” category, and that the first should displace the second in the highest degree possible. In the minds of a lot of stupid people, the first category is good, strong and respectable, while the second is despicable and feeble. And “I” am of course, always and forever, on the first side, because I have the guts to stand up straight and sober and see society for what it damn well is! And those others are delusional and cowardly. Yeah! If only everyone were like me, all would be scientific!
What is wrong with that supposition? As we saw in Book One when we discussed the different systems of symbolic code (Modern, Postmodern and Metamodern), the fundamental feature of modern science is intersubjectivity , meaning that science progresses by the act of people verifying or falsifying the findings of one another. Is there an elephant in the room or not; or a rhinoceros, as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein once discussed in a Cambridge office? Do you see it too? By what method can we reasonably find out? How sure can we be? And have we asked the right question to begin with? All of these questions each offer a step at which others can come in and burst our bubbles and perhaps convince the audience that we are wrong—even showing ourselves that we are mistaken.
The level of “scientificness”, then, is not about people thinking more like yourself. How would we know exactly who is that super-scientific and critically minded respectable person that we all believe ourselves to be? I mean, I know that you are, but how do you convince all those other buckos of that obvious fact? They all seem to believe—preposterously and arrogantly—that they are the scientific and empirical ones! But without a God as ultimate umpire, the only claim for universality and truth can come through having the most power. And if it turns out that Stalin has the most power, his truth will reign—and we will all be reading his Dialectical and Historical Materialism, clapping resplendently until our hands swell.
No, the level of scientificness of society can only be measured by the density and complexity of the meshwork of intersubjective verification and falsification . Fundamentally, that’s what it means: the degree to which we—collectively as a society consisting of a network of people referring back and forth to one another—manage to check, double-check and triple-check the information, suppositions, methods, claims and ideas of one another, and the quality, efficiency and systemic optimization of said checks. A peer-reviewed society? Yes, why not—given that the peer-review system itself is criticized and upgraded.
I have already argued that freedom is a collective good, as are the higher reaches of human freedom—well, so is truth. Truth is not due to your intelligence or the honesty of your beautiful soul. It depends on how hard and often and fairly and efficiently and rigorously you are checked for bullshit and mistakes, and how often and well those that check you in turn are checked themselves, and how often the checkers of the checkers are checked—and so on. The finer and more optimized and harmonic this resonance of intersubjective verification and/or falsification is throughout society, the closer society is to the truth.
Is our present society close to the truth? To get an idea, we can take a look at the field of science itself. There are about 50 million published “scientific” studies at the time of writing, with about 2 million being added every year. On average, only 40% of these seem to produce replicable results (and that varies across fields; social psychology is dismally low). And if you look at how many of these research findings are “triangulated” (meaning that you can see the same finding by use of another, independent method, as to avoid any biases due to your way of measuring), you understand that much of science amounts to rather faulty towers. Critical social science and humanities are even worse off. Of all papers published in the humanities, in peer-reviewed journals, only about 20% are ever cited. The rest just pile up. Many are only ever read once or twice; whole careers go on like that. [108]
We seem to have reached a systemic limit in terms of sheer “knowledge production” . As an emerging global society we need to start thinking about how to corroborate and solidify knowledge, how to make it travel across disciplines and social settings so that it lands in the right place, how to invent new applications and combinations of knowledge—how to increase the quality of knowledge in a general sense. Most likely, this would involve lowering the (relative) number of pure researchers and increasing the auxiliary professional functions.
The fact that science and truth are shaky is a serious matter. The greatest terrors and the darkest nights of history are born from jammed information feedback systems, when glaring truths are systematically suppressed and ignored. Communism, fascism, the animal slavery of today—these evils are, fundamentally, direct consequences of unchecked hypotheses, of terrible transfigurations of the processes of truth-seeking, of intersubjectivity violated.
From an informational perspective, the very reason democracy works (somewhat) is the same reason science works in the first place: It allows for ideas and claims to be intersubjectively scrutinized and checked. The developmental direction, in terms of attractors and “relative utopia”, could not be clearer than in this case: The society of the future, metamodern society, must be a society closer to the approachable but always unattainable truth.
Yes, we live in a universe of multiplicity, a universe of perspective. Yes, there is a multiplicity even of truth itself. Yes, actualities and facts are always but thin slices of a greater pie of potentialities that make up reality in the absolute. And yes, our truths are always relative, dependent upon language games, and we can never speak to the word of God, to an ultimate point of reference.
But that doesn’t leave us in darkness. On the contrary, the radical insight that all truths are constructed, relative and multifaceted leads us towards a more profound relatedness to the collective seeking of truth: The ability of a society to manage, evaluate and coordinate the greatest possible number of injunctions into the truth is a measure of how truthful that society is.
Some societies are more empirical than others. Which ones? It’s an empirical question. How do we find out? It’s an analytical question. How do we organize a process of finding out how to be more empirical? It’s a political question.
An Appalling State of Affairs
Just how unscientific are we, really?
Compared to an imagined future vantage point, we can be seen as living in medieval times in which people think irrationally and superstitiously, in which we know too little about most anything. We take all sorts of ad hoc decisions with huge consequences and most of our activities are never seriously scrutinized. The idea is to change that situation, gradually but forcefully. And this process of “truthing” society relies not upon doing what this or that “designated smart person” thi
nks, but by increasing the overall capacity of society for intersubjective verification.
Think about it. Each of us are very limited in scope, time, attention, patience and capability, so in almost everything we “know”, we must rely upon the expertise of others. In any and all matters where such expertise does not exist, is scantily clad, or where enough people dispute it, we’re simply left guessing. And still we manage to believe ourselves while we’re making all these horrendously unqualified guesses!
It is often held that supporters of the populist Right are “fact resistant” when it comes to climate change, while they in turn say that the Left denies obvious facts about links between e.g. criminality and immigration from the Middle East into Europe. What has happened in these cases is that the civil sphere has been fractured: Different segments of the population with different sets of values (and interests) refer to different “authorities and experts” who reinforce certain worldviews and preconceived notions. Let’s face it—you and I do believe in climate change, but it’s not because we can figure it out ourselves, but because we believe in people who are seen as authorities by other people we respect and trust. In the world of the populist Right, another set of people are trusted and cross-referenced, so they can feel safe that they’re right about their worldview. Science outside of the research itself is fundamentally a reference system , and if enough distrust polarizes civil society at large, it will fracture whatever can be seen as “scientific consensus” as well. That’s what’s going on.
But the appalling unscientificness of e.g. Trump voters is just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of us aren’t doing much better. In fact, the differences are marginal if you look at the big picture. Take these (simplified) 2013 forecasts published in Science : If we are to globally make the climate goal of keeping the temperature below a 2°C increase (which is still possibly catastrophic, as we’ll have more carbon in the atmosphere than for millions of years), we need to reduce our carbon emissions by something to the tune of 25 billion tons per year before 2060 (as compared to the “business as usual” scenario). Now imagine this. Reducing with one (!) billion tons would require either doubling the world’s nuclear power output, or expanding our wind power output by 50 times (some two million new mills), or expanding solar power by a factor of 700, or using a sixth of all globally available arable land to grow biofuels to replace fossil fuels… And if we do all four (linearly increasing the output over the period 2013-2060), we are still only done with a small fraction of the overall necessary carbon reduction; four out of the necessary 25 billion tons reduced. And as things stand today, carbon emissions are still growing according to the “business as usual” scenario. [109]
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