Crisis of Infinite Confidence
(Note: I wrote this post two years ago, in the summer of 2021, and then hemmed and hawed about whether I wanted to try to commit myself to more active blogging. Now in the summer of 2023, as I look at what’s happening in the world of social media, I feel like I should re-stake my claim to a corner of the Web. So I re-read this and discovered that it’s still a pretty accurate framing of my general outlook. I feel like we may be inching in a positive direction, but in a very two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way. But that’s a topic for future posts.)
I am quite sure I am not alone in being rather exhausted in this summer of 2021. I am, relatively speaking, very lucky. I know a few people who had COVID, but they recovered. My wife and I both kept our jobs and my daughter was able to come home and attend her college classes virtually. But even acknowledging that good fortune, I have felt worn out, and struggled to make as much progress as I wanted on any number of projects. After spending entirely too long staring into space and thinking about what I would write if I could get myself to write something, I think I have zeroed in on a major factor.
I am trying to work through a major crisis of confidence. The big picture ideas that motivated me through my 20s and 30s feel battered and frayed, and I don’t trust the compass that’s supposed to guide me as much as I used to. I don’t know whether I can repair the foundation, or build a new one, or just let myself sink into a “whatever-gets-me-through-the-day” cynicism. (That last option is the one I’m really trying to avoid, but that depends on making one of the first two work.)
I should probably recap those big picture ideas for the sake of anyone who hasn’t read all the pages of this long-dormant blog. I spent my 20s earning a PhD in philosophy, studying the democratic theory embedded in the philosophical school of pragmatism. What I eventually came up with in my dissertation is the idea that a real thriving democracy would be a community of citizens, working together to identify problems and figure out how to solve them based on a process of trial and error. This community would be able to learn from its mistakes and incorporate the different perspectives of its members, and while it would never be perfect, it could make progress through a better understanding of how the world worked.
I figured one way that I could contribute to moving the US closer to becoming this kind of thriving democracy would be to teach high school students, to help them actively engage with the world. So after the dissertation was done, I went back to school to get certified, and I’ve been teaching high school for the last 12 years. And that part has been absolutely as rewarding as I hoped it would be. I absolutely love working with high school students and seeing what they create. The problem has been in my ability to imagine the world that I’m helping them prepare for, and to do so from a perspective of hope and optimism that we can build a better future.
The first crack in my foundation actually happened while I was building it, during grad school. I took a political science seminar about how possible it is to identify what the people want and, if you can identify it, get the government to do it. It was a great seminar, and it’s where I read the book Stealth Democracy. The central thesis of the book is that most people do not want to spend a lot of time or effort on the work of politics. At most, they want to hire people to do that work, and for those people to go do their jobs, leave them alone, and not rip them off. So there’s a pretty substantial gap between my engaged democratic community and where we are today. I knew that, and I told myself that this was the sort of change that would take time to make happen.
Then I had to wrestle with my faith in empiricism. Now, I had never believed in anything like the infallibility of scientists, but I had a certain amount of faith in the knowledge-building structures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Then the replication crisis in social science hit. Studies whose results had been widely shared and accepted were re-examined – and found to be unreliable. This hit hard because a functioning system of creating and testing knowledge is essential to making any kind of community decision-making process based on empiricism work, and suddenly that system seemed far less reliable. I had shared some of the studies and theories that have since been questioned with my students – things like the marshmallow test and the theory of finite willpower, or the idea that the Stanford Prison Experiment shows how systems can foster abuse. It was one thing to write in my dissertation that we have to be prepared to accept new evidence that our beliefs aren’t as justified as we thought, but it is still a bit of a punch in the gut to realize that not only may I have been wrong in the past, I probably helped spread those wrong ideas. On the one hand, welcome to being human. We all get knocked down, what matters is getting up again. (This is where my daughter cues up the montage from Captain Marvel.) On the other hand, getting knocked down still hurts like the dickens.
The scientific community is working on the replication crisis, though. There’s a real opportunity to make the system more robust. (We also need to work through the crisis in academia but I’m poking at enough rattlesnakes in this post as it is.) So even though the wind was in my face, I felt like I was getting somewhere. And then 2020 happened.
I don’t even know where to begin. Remember what I said about “a community of citizens, working together to identify problems and figure out how to solve them based on a process of trial and error?” Did the world look anything like that in 2020? The scientific and medical community got caught flat-footed on COVID. I still remember telling my students in February 2020 that experts were saying masks probably weren’t important. And while many scientists rallied and got their act together relatively quickly, I think a lot of people around the country and around the world were slow to catch up. I don’t know how much of the problem was the experts being unable to convince the public and how much was the public not wanting to be convinced. But even when it’s a matter of life and death, reaching an empirical consensus and then acting on it is a lot harder than I expected.
I don’t think these problems are insurmountable, but they’re hard. I feel like I’m seeing experts warn about so many dangers – the pandemic; political instability and democratic backsliding; economic inequality; climate change; the list goes on. It feels like we’re just smart enough to see the edge of the cliff coming up but not smart enough to hit the brakes. I don’t want to resign myself to driving over the edge. So I’m looking for the reasons to hope. Looking for the signs that we can, in fact, learn from our mistakes. And there are some signs, don’t get me wrong. The vaccines alone suggest that we may be as good at getting ourselves of trouble as we are at getting into trouble in the first place. But I really hope we don’t stop there. It would be great to get this midlife crisis of confidence out of the way by the end of the summer. (Note from 2023: Well, I didn’t say which summer, so hope springs eternal . . .)
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.