The Uses and Abuses of Reductionism
When Has Theory Been Transformative?
Have you ever been allured by a grand theory? Maybe it was Hegel’s argument that history progresses dialectically. Maybe it was Freud’s suggestion that all motivation comes down to the sex drive and the death drive. Maybe it was Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Maybe it was the older claim that God ordered the universe according to a plan, or that strife between gods spills over into human affairs, or that a Messiah has come to save us from the inherent lousiness of the human condition. Maybe it was Descartes’s suggestion, taken up Fichte, that “The I” is the only sure foundation.
As someone who has found myself drawn in, and disillusioned by grand theories, this is my best attempt to argue why we should use them with caution.
As Russ Roberts says on my podcast, a grand theory is like a hammer. It’s great for hammering nails. But not everything is a nail. Grand theories are enticing because they elucidate and narrow, but for this reason we need to distrust them or at least balance them out with a range of competing theories, lest we force reality into our paradigm and suffer from “framework-itis.” Reductionism says, “This is the thing that explains everything.” It’s a form of dogma, because once you have it, you never change your mind. You just cook the data to fit the reduction.
The argument that reductionism is false is less interesting to me than the one that grants it could be true, and asks, so what? Let’s say that a specific reduction is right—does having it in your mind transform you? Let’s say you are aware of confirmation bias—does that awareness somehow lead to less confirmation bias? Perhaps it leads to more confirmation as you think that your knowledge makes you stronger than you are. How many who study the Dunning-Krueger effect in grad school are any wiser for it? This is, in a way, Socrates’s point in the Phaedrus—the appearance of knowledge is no guarantee of knowledge itself. Talking like a wise person doesn’t make you wise. Let’s say you go to therapy for several decades and know all the things that “trigger” you—will you be a different person? Will the self-awareness actually change you? Maybe, in some cases, but I’m not sure the mechanism is “more knowledge > better person.” The strongest critique of reductionism is knowledge of what really is the case is insufficient. An evolutionary biologist who thinks most things we do are motivated by “mate selection” is not better than the rest of us for knowing this. He or she still has to find a mate, and I’m not sure that leading with “I studied evolutionary biology to demonstrate by prowess as a mate” will win affection, but you never know.
Reductionism is too narrow, it’s arrogant, and it’s also besides the point. Explaining how things work, alone, won’t lead to agency or leadership, but sitting on the sidelines. The ancients knew this which is why they emphasized things like rhetoric and politics, and why moderns emphasize things like “EQ” and “reading the room.” One thing many people dislike is being offered a reductive account of themselves. It feels like condescension or control. So even if reductionism were true, it’s a terrible strategy in the social world. Please keep your reductive theories to yourself.
I have a theological argument against reductionism which also won’t persuade you unless you are already sympathetic. Nonetheless, it goes like this: Maimonides and others grasped that to define God is to insult God or assert power over God, thus they insisted that the via negativa was appropriate on grounds that are both ontologically and ethically salient—God is that which you can’t define. Humans are created in the divine image, per Genesis, which means that any reductive account of human nature, be it pessimistic or optimistic, risks becoming a kind of humanoid idolatry—turning “Man” into something knowable and thus undeserving of the label “in God’s image.” When we treat people reductively according to our rules of how humans work, we deprive them of their divinity; we turn them into bots. Not a good look.
Reductionism is not a risk in the real world, but seems to be a propensity of academics and experts, as well as the armchair disgruntled who use it as a way of asserting superiority over the unknowing masses. But the reverse is the case—if you need to reduce, you should be asking why that is your go-to happy place. But please don’t give a reductive answer to it. That would be too predictable, too easy.
How would reductionism explain money?