the dangers of sophistication
(Note: I’m tired and this is much less well-written than I’d like. I hope it still makes sense.)
1.
The first part of this post is not very interesting in itself, but will provide a setup for the second part. (Now there’s a surefire way to get the reader’s attention!)
In many social environments it is expected that people state their views or tastes in a way that clarifies that their are not “naively held” – that the person is aware of the spectrum of existing opinion, the history of the subject matter, the characteristic flaws of their “approach” (and how they may or may not avoid them), etc.
There’s a particularly extreme version of this culture in certain kinds of academic writing – I’ve seen academic papers or books in which the first 10 or 20 or even 50 pages are devoted to acknowledging that “the subject is complex,” that the author does not believe their generalizations hold in literally every case, that their claims are distinct from other similar claims that are seen as naive or outdated, etc. Is this a useful practice? Well, I’m not sure, but it’s possible to imagine it being useless – that is, it’s possible to imagine that once enough people did this sort of thing, everyone had to do it, because not disclaiming naive views meant implicitly endorsing them. (”If you didn’t mean the terrible straw man version of your point, why didn’t you say so? Everyone else does!”)
There’s a similar thing going on in a lot of statements of artistic taste. Robert Christgau and his descendants in popular music criticism always insist on context and distance – the usual stance, even in a positive review, is something like “this record has this aesthetic, responding to these influences, and all of this is flawed and limited and not fully cognizant of certain things, but if I forget my own vastness I can get into it for a little while, I guess.“ And of course, there’s “you can enjoy problematic media, but acknowledge that it’s problematic,” which does ethically what the rock critic stance does aesthetically. In both cases, the message is that you’ve gotta show your enjoyment isn’t naive, that you aren’t uncritically immersed in the things you like, that you can stand back and see their limits.
Is it worthwhile to talk this way? Again: maybe. But it can have perverse consequences.
2.
Life is very complicated. On virtually any topic, it is hard to know which actions or ideas are correct, and the same action or idea may have a variety of possible justifications.
In particular, intellectual or moral progress can “flip around” so that, after (so to speak) ascending from Level 1 to Level 2, one returns to believing what one used to believe “naively” back at Level 0. Without displays of sophistication, someone at Level 2 looks identical to someone at Level 0. This is one justification for displays of sophistication: they clarify to people on Level 1 that you know what they know, and more, where otherwise they might infer that you know less.
But is this actually a credible signal? If someone says something that seems very wrong-headed, and then squirts a bunch of sophistication-display ink at you, does this really mean that they’re a Level 2 holy fool? Or are they just someone who’s noticed that you can get away with saying silly things if you tack on a sophistication display?
The problem is: it’s very hard to know who’s actually doing or thinking the right stuff. Life is complicated! And so it’s tempting to use displays of sophistication as a proxy for correctness. Because life is complicated and Level 2 can look like Level 0, you can’t tell whether someone is right by just looking at their position and seeing if it looks prima facie silly. Perhaps they have some deep reason for it! But trying to actually look at their reasoning, and check it for validity, is hard. Checking to see if they display sophistication, on the other hand, is easy. Rather than looking at the real content of a person’s ideas or their behavior, one can check whether they “look like they know what they’re talking about.” If they do, any absurdity can be forgiven; after all, Level 2 can look like Level 0 (or even Level -1).
Why is this dangerous? Because it disincentives improving oneself. If you are in a climate where you are judged on your sophistication displays, you will try to have the most and best sophistication displays. Which means that if you have identified a flaw in your thinking or behavior, it may be in your interest not to correct it. If you continually fix problems when you identify them, you are always on the “frontier of naivete,” as it were – of the possible ways you could behave, you have chosen the one you can be the most naive about, the one you have identified the fewest problems with (because if you had identified problems, you would have fixed them). If you let some problems stick around, it may be easier to look sophisticated. You’re not arrogant. You’re aware of the problems with what you do. You know your fave is problematic. Make yourself better, and all of your remaining problems will be ones you aren’t aware of yet – how embarrassing!
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, except that I think naivete has to be destigmatized somewhat, in some way – whatever that means. It can sometimes be good to “naively,” “arrogantly” hold to your current convictions and principles – this means that you are not holding back on fixing problems. It’s good to know your flaws, but once “knowing your flaws” becomes a value in itself, we start to cling to our flaws, because if we gave them up, we’d no longer have them around to know. That’s silly! If you can solve a problem, solve it. Don’t worry that you’ll run out of problems to acknowledge. Move forward; stay on the frontier.