How Much Does Transmissibility Matter?
Should Philosophy Be Subjected to Engineering Criteria?
Rabbi David Wolpe writes in a new book review of an anthology of Jewish thought:
While literalism is intellectually untenable and liberalism is numerically imperiled, many Jews find that what they believe cannot be transmitted, and what can be effectively transmitted they cannot believe.
His point is that if you’re designing a religious or intellectual system or tradition, believability is not the only constraint. Transmissibility is also a constraint. And often these constraints clash.
Being right is not enough, if you don’t stick around long enough to be vindicated—a point Keynes makes when he says, “in the long term we are all dead.”
Thus, Wolpe’s review amounts to saying something like, “These ideas are compelling, but not necessarily fit, in the evolutionary sense.”
Nassim Taleb, following the example of Montaigne, defends religious practices and ideas, not on the grounds that they are correct, but on the grounds that they are “Lindy,” i.e., time tested and thus likely to endure. Taken to its extreme, this pragmatist school of thought would make philosophy the servant of “whatever works.”
If you believe that history is a voting machine in the short run, but a weighing machine in the long run, then it won’t bother you that the best ideas are often unpopular or difficult to transmit.
Alternatively, if you’re an elitist who thinks truth is for the few, the inability to scale is a feature, not a bug. But even esoteric thinkers need a community in which they can practice esotericism. Maimonides may have been a great mind, but he belonged to a people that provided a sociological reality upon which he could build and in which he could be a critic.
In architecture, designers aim for beauty, but must ensure that their structures stand, that they are livable. This has often been the engineer’s critique of the philosopher— “nice blueprint, but totally impractical.”
To what extent should the livability and/or transmissibility of an idea be an argument for or against it?
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