Ecclesiastes, Skepticism, Conservatism, and Warren Buffett
Wherefore I perceived that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his works; for that is his portion; for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him? (Ecclesiastes 3:22)
Skepticism is an equal opportunity offender. It can be used to challenge the authority of those in power, the reigning norms of one’s time, and the solidity of one’s tradition. But skepticism also goes the other way. I consider myself a conservative skeptic; my skepticism that we can know very much leads me to focus on the small areas where we might have a chance of being less wrong and more impactful. The further we get out of our small area of expertise the more subject we are to error.
Since we can’t be sure of what we know, since we can’t be sure of the impact and significance of our actions, since all things are subject to flux and hidden consequences, why should we think we can know better or do better than others? Are we so confidant we can consistently beat the market, triumph over consensus, make the world radically different? Tradition swoops into the void opened up by skepticism not because it claims to be right, but because it can be presumed to be less foolhardy than trying to invent the wheel myself.
Moderns and postmoderns pride themselves on skepticism, and yet many are quite certain that they know better than the ancients, that their atheism is truly skeptical in contrast to naive religious belief. They wield skepticism to challenge authority they view as irrational or corrupt, but fail to direct the skepticism at themselves.
My claim here is modest. It is not to argue in favor of tradition over change in the abstract, but to point out that skepticism as a philosophical worldview and temperamental disposition cannot be used to justify the rejection of tradition. Rather, skepticism can favor philosophical conservatism, the view that we should presume conventional wisdom correct unless we can prove otherwise, with a strong margin of safety.
If you want to challenge tradition you need to overcome skepticism. You need to believe that you know better than hundreds and thousands of years of received understanding. Scientific progress is one area where this seems to be the case. We used to think the earth is flat, now we don’t. We used to be geocentric, now we are heliocentric. Proving that scientific progress validates moral progress, however, is a harder case. Does the fact that Aristotle was wrong about gravity mean he was wrong about friendship? The problem with modern overconfidence is the rubric of relative comparison; does being smarter than another make you any more right? Does being more clever than someone else make you holistically wiser? No. This is one argument in Ecclesiastes. The sage excels the fool, yet both are fools, just different in degree. To quote Hegel, the human condition is the night in which “all cows [sage and fool] are black.” Both sage and fool suffer the same fate. Zoomed out, they are indistinguishable.
A core theme in Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters is the importance of avoiding fatal errors. Avoiding the permanent loss of capital is far more important than anything else. Buffett makes a few investments a year, sometimes none. Buffett retains a large cash position on the Berkshire balance sheet, an inherently conservative attitude. One test that Buffett asks us to apply when investing: could you forget about the investment for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and be happy knowing you’ll come back to it? Applied spiritually, we could expand the question: what deeds will we not regret having done at the end of our lives? What beliefs and values can we feel relatively secure about?
Now you might say that Buffett’s restraint is conservative, but his investments require confidence. There is no contradiction here. Being conservative about most things frees us up to take a few real bets. This is another under-appreciated aspect of tradition; by offering us a playbook it reduces the number of decisions we need to make. It allows us to focus on making decisions that move the needle.
It is often thought that existentialism and traditionalism are opponents. The one is associated with hippies and boomers, the other with baroque institutions. But existentialism and traditionalism are compatible in three ways: 1) an existentialist chooses to accept the yoke of tradition 2) an existentialist lives inside tradition so as to make it unique and 3) an existentialist locates opportunities for action where tradition fails to be directive.
Ecclesiastes says we can’t know much and that what we do know won’t help us much. Buffett says only invest in what you know well. But Ecclesiastes also says that we should focus on what is in our sphere of power; following the divine commandments, living a life in awe of God, taking modest pleasure in trying to live decently, accepting that the consequences of our deeds are not in our control. Moreover, there is no such thing as outperformance, since all is vanity. Live humbly. Ironically, this will yield the best return on invested breath.
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I especially like “there is no such thing as outperformance” since, per John Maynard Keynes, “in the long run we are all dead”. That combination seems like an apt endorsement of the thought that existentialism is not necessarily opposed to traditionalism.