Nathan Nielson: Our guest is Gary Saul Morson, professor of arts, humanities, Slavic languages, and literature at Northwestern University. He is a scholar of steady reason judgment, trained in both literary and philosophical disciplines. Today we discuss the book Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us, published by Princeton University Press, co-authored by Dr. Morson and economist Morton Schapiro. We’ll examine the habits of mind that make a democratic society work and the certainties that paralyze social trust. Here we encounter a wise advocacy for practical judgment, open thinking, and generous dialogue. This is not a criticism of institutions, churches, or politics, but rather a deep probe beneath the surface of modern discourse. To earn confidence in our perceptions of people and ideas, let us seek flexibility instead of absolutes. This book is a letter of tough love to a torn society, a guide that teaches hard truths in an imperfect world. Dr. Morson, so wonderful to have you with us today.
Gary Saul Morson: It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Nathan Nielson: In the book, you include a passage from John Milton's Areopagitica that encapsulates your entire project – “For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth – that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.” How does the clash between hope and reality play out in your book?
Gary Saul Morson: Well, the book is a plea, as you said, for open-ended dialogue and really listening to other people. If you think you have the absolute truth, the way of getting it – that’s the first thing Milton says, we're not going to get that – then you don't listen to other people. You have a rigid orthodoxy of fundamentalism, as we call it. And the other virtues that Milton talks about – actually listening to others, freely heard complaints – this disappears because you're either with us or against us. And Milton understood that because he came from a period of English civil war, of wars across the continent between different religions. His wisdom is partly that if we want to avoid civil wars, we will cultivate habits of honest dialogue.
Nathan Nielson: To that point, you cite in the book two conflicting sentiments. The first from Immanuel Kant, which was later summarized by Isaiah Berlin: “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” And the second from Joseph Stalin: We must be “engineers of human souls.” These are two very striking sentiments. What are the stakes for these two opposing views?
Gary Saul Morson: It's very good that you thought of juxtaposing the Stalin statement with the one from Kant, because in fact they are opposites. From the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. People are always going to be strange, unpredictable, anything but perfect. And you have to take that into account in forming a political social order. That's partly why Milton was also talking about the need for open-ended dialogue. If you had perfect people, you wouldn't need it, right? And if you remember the famous passage of James Madison – “If men were angels” we wouldn't have to talk about the shape of the commonwealth, right? But Stalin actually thought that you could design perfect people. That's what he meant to be an engineer of human souls. And the reasoning was that all imperfections come from a bad social order. If you have, and he thought he did have, the theory that will show you where all the imperfections in the social order come from and how to fix them, then pretty rapidly you will have perfect people. And so the Soviets were to be engineers of human souls. The literature reflects this – they kept showing you what a perfect ideal person will be. And of course they were completely unrealistic and the literature became substandard, almost unreadable at times. But it came from the idea that we're not trying to look at reality as we have it, but reality as we plan to make it.
Nathan Nielson: Your book takes a very different tack from that of Stalin, of course, and as a response you and your co-author write: “We hope that this book will be a lesson in the carpentry appropriate for crooked timber.” That's a very clever way of putting it. You're not trying to straighten the timber out completely, but you're trying to work with it. You're trying to work with something that's flawed, obdurate, rigid, difficult, but there's some margin for working with that crooked timber of humanity. I like this approach. So much of the way we relate to people is about managing expectations. Expectations about what we want, what people want from us, what agreement looks like, what coexistence looks like. So I think you set the tone very well for that expectation management.
Gary Saul Morson: And what we can reasonably expect from people unlike ourselves with different experiences from ourselves, and yet with human flaws the way we have them, maybe not the identical flaws, but flaws. We have them too, and we need to approach others with the generosity we would ourselves want someone approaching us.
Nathan Nielson: Yeah, I like that. You make a plain declarative statement in the middle of the book that really jumped out at me: “We do not live in a world of certainty.” What do you mean by that? And are you certain about that?
They think they have eliminated the contingency and doubt of the world. And it's always because they have applied a system which is much too simple, but which also excludes seeing whatever contradiction.
Gary Saul Morson: I'm as certain as I can be from my experience, which is not absolutely certain, but certain enough. Have you ever met people who thought they could predict the stock market and thought they had the system for it? Or people who thought they had the system for perfect gambling? My favorite writer Dostoyevsky thought he did and lost a fortune every time he went to the gambling table. They think they have eliminated the contingency and doubt of the world. And it's always because they have applied a system which is much too simple, but which also excludes seeing whatever contradiction. And so for a while it seems heady because anyone who accepts this system feels like they're the wisest people on earth. All you other people are in doubt. But we, at last, are certain. Marxists certainly had that view. I grew up in the era when everyone thought psychoanalysis was a hard science and explained everything about people. And if you didn't want to get psychoanalyzed, that was simply because you didn't want to face the truth about yourself as psychoanalysis revealed. As somebody I know used to say, anyone who doesn't get analyzed ought to have his head examined. But that's the idea, you simply know it. And just the way Freudians would say, well, if you raise an objection that just shows that we can analyze why you raise an objection – your bad motives, your defense mechanisms. So the objection is already counteracted before it's made. And similarly, the Marxists would say, well, you say that because of your bourgeois upbringing and therefore, you're just showing your self-interest. Either way, there's no way to say, well, if you were right, these would be the facts, but these are not the facts. That's ruled out.
Nathan Nielson: Just to play devil's advocate, I can see a Marxist or maybe a religious fundamentalist or anyone who is completely convinced about their position ask you: Does the kind of perpetual flexibility that you call for make us morally weak and indecisive? Does that make us unprepared to meet the difficulties of the world?
Gary Saul Morson: Well, it might make you hesitate to take action at a moment when it's needed. There's a downside to everything. But it won't stop you from making wiser actions, generally speaking. Because if you don't think, you're going to do something stupid. And flexibility is necessary self -critique in order to figure out, well, gee, could I just possibly have it wrong? Am I misperceiving things? Am I deceiving myself? Is my experience partial? And other people have seen things that I don't because they're experienced. Unless you're flexible, you can't admit any of that. But it's true that on certain occasions it can make you hesitate.
Nathan Nielson: The way I see it, the open mindset that this book fosters doesn't really mean that we can't land on solid principles or trust timeless truths. Rather, the open mindset, encourages a flexibility of judgment and speech that flow with the changing tides and complex variations in how these truths present themselves in the world, how we actually confront them.
Gary Saul Morson: Yeah, that's a good way of thinking. Timeless truths are very distant from specific experience. And it takes a great deal of wisdom to mediate between the two. Okay, this is a timeless truth, but I have to apply it to a situation that's different from any other situation that I've had before. How do I do that? It's not as if there's a series of rigid steps, like in a computer algorithm, that takes you from one to the other. You have the truth up there, but it's far from experience, and now you have to do the right thing, be generous. What means generous in this situation, right? That's not always obvious. It usually isn't. So you can have the timeless truths, but you still need judgment, wisdom, and experience in applying them.
Nathan Nielson: The subtitle of the book mentions the word fundamentalist and you go to great lengths in the opening chapters to flesh out different variations of how that word can be defined. But you do come up with three criteria that I thought were really helpful, because there are so many different types of fundamentalist thinking in the past and in the present. Let me just read those three criteria. Actually, it's me summarizing them from the book. First one is asserting complete certainty about your own views. Number two is assuming that the world is clear, knowable, and simple. Number three is relying on the infallibility of a foundational text or revelation. And I would add a fourth from the book, but it's kind of built into all three of them, and that is – fundamentalist systems preclude falsification. They rule out counter-evidence upfront. Can you say more about how these mindsets display themselves in history and modern life?
There are a lot of things inexplicable and messy about the world.
Gary Saul Morson: Sometimes people use the term fundamentalist just as a term of abuse. And I didn't want to do that. And then they change their meaning depending on the context, labeling whatever they don't like as fundamentalist. The definitions we picked will exclude some things that some people think are fundamentalist, certain kinds of religion. But it will include others because, as you can see from these descriptions, it doesn't have to be religious. And indeed, not all these criteria are equally important. Less important is the infallibility of foundational text. Sometimes that's very important, and sometimes it's less important. But a certain style of thinking is what's really important, and that the world is clear, knowable, and simple, from which it follows that now we have the system that knows it. That's really the key. Think of it this way. There are a lot of things inexplicable and messy about the world. Well, one way to think about the world, which works fairly well in the hard sciences up to a point, is to assume that behind all the contingencies and mess that you see in front of you, there are a few simple laws that you can find. So that the mess is illusory. And the obvious example of that is when astronomers have these amazingly complex ways of understanding the motion of the planets with cycles and epicycles and exceptions and backwards and forward motion and all this sort of thing. It was what we call today a Rube Goldberg machine. And even then it wasn't perfect. Far from perfect. And then Newton showed how you could, by making a few assumptions, put the Earth at the center, and you have four simple laws – three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. And these can be stated very simply, they don't need higher math. Force equals mass times acceleration. Basic elementary algebra will do. And he was able to derive all the complexities from that. Now, that was so impressive an achievement. That's why some people think of him as the greatest scientist who ever lived. For centuries people thought, well, if that's true of the material world, and it was assumed people are nothing but complicated material objects, it should be possible to do the same for individual psychology or society or history or economics and have social scientific laws analogous to Newton's laws. And that was the dream for a couple of centuries. The man who coined the term sociology originally called his discipline social physics by analogy. We've gotten one after another of these systems. And they all prove false, not just Freudianism and Marxism. My time has also had behaviorism recently. We had Jared Diamond's idea that you can reduce all of history to a few simple geographic principles. There's one system after another, and they all work by a similar logic. They all assume that behind the complexity of the world is simplicity, and they can find it. But what if the reverse is true? What if in the social world, and this is what Leo Tolstoy thought, if you trace back, let's say, 100 phenomena, you don't wind up with four laws. The 100 can trace back to 10,000 and the 10,000 to a million. And it doesn't simplify things. They get more and more complex. If that's the case, anything like Newton's laws for human affairs is absurd. It can't be. The constant failure of Newtonian systems is a pretty good reason for thinking that Tolstoy was right. Also, if a physicist figures out the behavior of an electron, the electron doesn't know it. The electron isn't going to say “oh yeah, well I'll show you, I'm going to move differently.” But a person very well may and often does. People can know the laws that supposedly describe them. Think of it this way. Suppose somebody had a law to predict the behavior of the stock market. As soon as that law became known, everyone would adjust their behavior accordingly, and it would no longer predict it, right? That is itself a good reason to think that we're not going to have Newton's laws, but also the sheer experience of trying and finding out that the world is irreducibly complex, the human world.
Nathan Nielson: I think we're dealing with two separate spheres. One is the rigor of hard science, and the other is the indeterminacy of human affairs. And as you show in the book, untold misery happens when people who want the credibility of either their political program or something like that, maybe their religion, assume the rigor of hard science until misery comes about from trying to inject social, ethical, political, considerations into that hard science. Marxism might be the best example of that. You mention in the book what you call a “spectrum of certainty” within the process of scientific discovery that allows for some level of falsification, some improvement of the theory. But I guess the difficulty comes when the science is deemed so rigidly and immovably certain and complete. And when it's applied to human endeavors real misery occurs.
Gary Saul Morson: I was going to be a physicist before I became a humanist. If you really understand how science works, you immediately know you're dealing with a pseudoscience when everything is held to be equally certain. And if you don't believe it, you're questioning science. If that were the case, science couldn't possibly progress because there are always some new things which we have good reason to think, but it’s fully feasible they’ll be overturned and many of them are. Some new things hold up under quite a number of tests, but still it's a spectrum. So greater and greater certainty. Nothing is absolute. Even Newton's laws turned out to be a simplification. They lasted a few centuries. That's pretty good, but many theories don't. The problem we had that made many people distrustful of real science, when they should have just been distrustful of scientists or pseudoscientists who make claims they shouldn't, is during the COVID pandemic. Everything was claimed to be equally certain, when in fact, some things really were certain, as certainness can be in science. And some things were sheer guesswork. And if people had said, listen, we don't know, but this is a good guess, and here is why we think so, then when it turned out to be wrong, people wouldn't say we can't trust these scientists anymore. When the scientists betray science by claiming more certainty than they have, and then the journalists of course pick it up, then reasonable people will be suspicious the next time because they're claiming more than they can know. They're not seeing a spectrum of certainty. Well we have to get people to do the right behavior, so we're going to exaggerate. But if you do that you're ignoring the fact that in the future there's a value to having people trust you, and you have betrayed their trust. And we're in that situation. Something similar happened with climate change. A lot of the predictions turned out to be wrong. Does that mean there's no climate change? No. Does it mean that there's no greenhouse effect? Certainly not. But it means that you're making claims that you shouldn't have made with a degree of certainty that you don't have. And therefore, people don't know what to believe. Reasonable people. Whereas if you said: “Well, this is our prediction based on a computer model (of course computer models aren't perfect), and it may or may not turn out to be correct. If it doesn't, we'll adjust it.” People would accept that. But when you claim you're anti-science if you don't believe me, and then it turns out to be wrong, people are going to be legitimately suspicious of the future.
Nathan Nielson: You could add to that litany the way early Marxist thought claimed absolute scientific certitude about the direction of history, or something like eugenics, a science applied to trying to “clean up” the genetic bank of human life …
Gary Saul Morson: Yes, you don't need to know the science in question to recognize pseudoscience, necessarily. For example, if people attribute to the science what is a policy recommendation, then they're dealing with pseudoscience. Science could tell you, look, if we do this, this is a likely result. But if we do that, that's a likely result. Which one you pick, however, depends on how you evaluate the pluses and minuses of each. Yes, maybe it'll cause more disease if we do this, but children will be able to go to school, and that is a value itself. How do you do the trade-off? That's not a scientific question. That's a social policy question. So when politicians say we're just following the science, they're lying, or they don't understand what science is.
Nathan Nielson: It comes down to how one approaches and defines science. In the book you describe pseudoscience as a body of unquestionable dogma. Whereas real science is a series of falsifiable propositions continually tested. I like the way you phrase that. And that's where we return to the idea of certainty. Science should always leave room for possibilities of falsification or improvement at least. So how can we improve our cultivation of self-questioning skills?
Gary Saul Morson: That's a really good question. If we're talking about universities now, where students come in thinking there's a dogma that everybody believes or you're an evil person. In my experience faculty are more likely to think that way than students, who are much more suspicious of that. But some of them think that. And the faculty encourage it. What you can do instead is from day one that they arrive, freshman orientation, you explain to them the techniques of listening, of saying: “Okay, why would a reasonable person disagree with me? What is that? Where are they coming from? And what can I learn from engaging with someone who thinks differently?” And then engage in a real search for truth. If a university is about the search for truth, then that's the first skill you would teach. And they don't. But we could teach that. We could make it a part of freshman orientation. We could require a course in it. For that matter, I would, at this point, ask faculty to start. They have these online courses you can take. We now have them in diversity and inclusion. We can do them in this as well, right? How to have a civil conversation. And then you would change the atmosphere. And people would understand. It would be their first reaction, not to hate and condemn someone who disagrees, but to think, well, I don't agree, but maybe I can learn something. Even understand my own position better. John Stuart Mill famously wrote, “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Because it hasn't been tested. You have to modify it with the best objections of other people. And gradually, both of you in a real conversation, if it's a real dialogue, all parties will wind up with a knowledge and truth they didn't have when they started.
Nathan Nielson: One of the difficult aspects of dialogue is that when you open yourself up to it, you must allow the possibility that your own sacred cows may be a phantasm of sorts, or that your own bedrock assumptions may not be quite correct. It reminds me of Chaim Potok’s novels about religious characters who observe piety or religious observance in other characters, and it really makes them de-center their own spiritual experience and allow possibilities for other genuine certainties.
Gary Saul Morson: Some people find that difficult because if there's uncertainty out there, they feel insecure. And so they leap to something that promises them all the answers. And they willingly close their eyes to counter it. What's ironic about what happens now is that those very people, the ones who claim to be speaking for science – “you disagree with me, you're anti-science” – we’ve all heard that, right? But a real search for truth, scientific and other, begins with an appreciation of the wonder of the world, how much you don't know, how much you need to learn from other people and from experience, and also how much you need to question how you are self-deceiving, letting your own biases dictate what you see. Those are all difficult habits. They can sometimes even be unpleasant, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant. But if you really are interested either in the truth or in helping other people who need the truth, then that's what you'll do.
Nathan Nielson: We'll address the literary approach to this challenge in part two. Yes, folks, there will be a part two of this conversation. But can you tell us what the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin said about the idea of surprise in dialogue and the possibilities of what he calls “event potential” when multiple consciousnesses interact?
What makes a person a person and not a material object is the person's capacity for surprise, to render untrue any external theory about that person.
Gary Saul Morson: Yes, Mikhail Bakhtin was originally known as Russia's greatest literary critic and theorist, writing about Dostoevsky and other writers too. And gradually it became clear, and he said this himself, that he was really a philosopher using Russian literature and other literatures as examples of what he was saying. And his key idea was that to understand the world you need a dialogic approach. I describe it as – it’s not just one person asks and the other person gives the truth. It's this constant process with an unforeseeable development that never ends. That's unforeseeableness, or as he called it, unfinalizability, meaning incompletability. That's what not only defines the world we live in, especially the social world, but each person. You see, what makes a person a person and not a material object is the person's capacity for surprise, to render untrue any external theory about that person. And another way of putting it is – ethics begins when you acknowledge the surprisingness of another person, that they are not a material object, that you don't know everything about them, that they can surprise you. If you don't allow that, you're treating the person as an object. Humanness begins with surprisingness. And event potential, the word he uses, literally is eventness, the eventness of an event. Look, imagine you could conceive of an event as the automatic result of prior experiences and mechanical laws. It would be an event, but it wouldn't have any eventness to it. It's when all those things don't uniquely specify a single outcome, that there's potential for difference. And that's certainly true of human beings. Then the world has eventness. That's what he means.
Nathan Nielson: And you can't really get that result unless you enter dialogue with the expectation of exiting your group loyalties, your group affiliation, and the idea of pleasing your own group, saying the things that would defend the interests of your group. If you're in that mindset, that doesn't make room for that surprise eventness that you speak of. Our duty is to listen, to reflect, and to question even those in our own camp.
Gary Saul Morson: Well especially those in your own camp because you naturally find the faults of people you disagree with, right? In the other camp, right? I'm waiting to see, let's say, the New York Times, to pick one example, have an article that says – “you know, we don't like President Trump, but some of the things we've said about him turned out to be wrong. And in the interest of truth, we ought to admit that.” Have you ever seen such a thing? But if they cared about the truth, they'd be the first to do that. The fact that you don't see that means that you can't trust anything else because they don't care about the truth. And even when they say things that are true, you have no reason to believe them. And that's true. I'm picking the Times here when I could have picked people who disagree with the Times too.
Nathan Nielson: What happens to societies when people aren't allowed to critique orthodoxies? Or even relationships?
Gary Saul Morson: Well, you get what the Soviet Union was, you fall into what one Russian writer called a 70-year ice age. Everything is frozen. Nobody believes anything. They live in two worlds – the things they're supposed to think and what their experience teaches them. When some policy leads to bad results, instead of critiques leading to correction, people persecute those who made the critique and prove that they're right by doing it more with more results ever accelerating. And then when people object, you send them off to labor camps. That's what happens when you don't allow for real dialogue. And of course, there are degrees. There are some societies that allow dialogue in some areas and not in others. Russia today is an example. You don't criticize the war in Ukraine. You don't criticize Putin's key policies. You don't criticize the Russian Orthodox Church and various other things. But outside of those sensitive areas, you can say whatever you like. In fact, as one of my Russian friends pointed out, Russian academics actually have more freedom than Americans today because I have to watch every word I say, they only have to watch the words that Putin cares about.
Nathan Nielson: One thing you point out in the book is that this type of fundamentalist thinking causes people, or systems mainly, to double down on their own mistakes. So when some error or mistake happens that obviously disconfirms the theory, they in turn view it as confirmation of the theory. And so they see only confirming evidence in what happens in the world. They think, well, we've got to try harder and harder and harder, to double down. And you mentioned that Stalin did this when he declared the “intensification of the class struggle” after the revolution.
Gary Saul Morson: Which was truly contradicting to all the dogma. But how do you explain, if, let's say, crime and poverty are the result of capitalism and now you've eliminated capitalism for 10 or 12 years and crime and poverty are increasing. Well, you have to find a way of dealing with that. So you adjust the ideology to show that's exactly what was predicted by the ideology. Retrospectively, you make predictions. Economists, by the way, do the same thing. They can always account for the last recession.
Nathan Nielson: You could even see similar examples in wartime decisions, perhaps the Vietnam War, to double down on a failed policy – “we had to destroy the village to save the village,” something like that. One moment in your book was very interesting to me. It depicts the different sides of dialogue, and that is Martin Luther against Erasmus in the 1500s. And Martin Luther says something that's very interesting: “What is more miserable than uncertainty?” That sounds like the Grand Inquisitor.
Gary Saul Morson: There's a book which is easily available, at least it used to be, called The Erasmus Luther Dialogues. The ostensible part of the exchange, they were talking about certain dogmas like free will. If everything we do has been known in advance, our salvation has been determined before we were born, why should we be good? But gradually, what became clear is that what they were really arguing about was how certain you can be. And Erasmus was a natural skeptic. He had edited biblical texts. He knew the languages. And he found out that a lot of what people thought they said were textual errors that had crept in. He knew there were lots of reasons to be skeptical. And that's exactly what Luther thought you don’t do. God does not say “well maybe”, and neither should a holy person. I sometimes thought, having studied the Soviet Union, it really struck me that it was a debate in the 20th century between Marxists and liberals. Skeptical liberals like Erasmus versus Luther – sounds just like the Marxists, they’re absolutely certain. So the debate is really interesting. And by the way, they both write very well. So you really get both those viewpoints very well expressed. And it's really short. They only exchanged a few letters, but they're very telling.
Nathan Nielson: One statement that really jumped out at me from Erasmus was: “I'm ready to learn from anyone who advances something more accurate and reliable.” Now that's a very different approach, very key element, I think, to any dialogue.
Gary Saul Morson: Yeah, and he was a wonderful writer in so many ways. I mean, the spirit of the Renaissance, he seems to have invited it more than just about anybody.
Nathan Nielson: At about that point in the book you give three more criteria, but this time for real dialogue. What real dialogue is characterized by. 1) The statements that are being spoken are recognized as provisional and can be revised in light of new evidence and critique. 2) The exchange is a vehicle for arriving at truth, not just a way of convincing or winning points about a truth you think you already know. 3) The conversation is conducted in a spirit of concord.
I have friends who confide in me mildly unorthodox thoughts because they need to tell somebody, and they know I won't hate them for it, whether I agree with them or not.
Gary Saul Morson: I wish we could teach incoming freshmen to the university and then get the faculty to abide by it too. I have friends who confide in me mildly unorthodox thoughts because they need to tell somebody, and they know I won't hate them for it, whether I agree with them or not. But the fact that they can't just talk about them, test them, my argument, says a world about what the university is like. That wasn't even true 20 years ago.
Nathan Nielson: One thing that you write in the book that really stood out for me as well, and I think this is almost like a mantra that we could all take upon ourselves for life. “Sympathy for and interest in those who differ is the key to fullness and the way out of fundamentalist thinking.” If we just approached not only dialogue, but just life in general, sympathy for people, interest in them, and what kinds of possibilities may be lurking in their souls, what kinds of similarities we might share with them is the key to fullness. That's deep.
Gary Saul Morson: You can look at life as – “I've started out with these beliefs and I'm going to fight for them, come hell or high water.” Or you can say, “life is a journey and I'm going to try to get wiser and learn more and correct my mistakes, because I know that I've been wrong in the past, so I'm probably wrong about things now. I just don't know why.” Those are the two different ways of looking at things. And as I tell my students, if you pick the first way and just copy what everybody else thinks, because you're sure it has to be right, they tell you it's right. When you get to be my age, you will never find out what you do think because you've always just been putting on a uniform of somebody else's. And then you'll wonder, it's like you hadn't lived. Some other copy of you, some zombie of you, had lived in your place. I mean, at least that's how it feels to me.
Nathan Nielson: I think the problem that happens when rigid thinking patterns start to develop is that the person wants to see the world perfectly in a utopian way. And as you write in the book, utopia is in literature, philosophy, and politics. They never see societies or individuals as complex, stubborn, difficult, selfish, fearful, or unable to cooperate on solutions. They only see human beings, as you said, interchangeably. And economists are the same way: Human beings are roughly interchangeable. They're all pretty much the same. If the conditions can be made correct, all human beings will act according to reason. But time and time again, history disproves that.
Gary Saul Morson: My co-author, who is an economist, and describes in the book how when he started out, he was a development economist going to the third world trying to modernize societies. And he would bring the solutions that economics, which are impersonable, the laws of economics, would say were universal. And they would cause disaster. One example he gave was when he was in Egypt. The crucial thing is to get the prices right. So, what you've got to do is get rid of the subsidy on bread, which is mispriced. And, of course, the moment they did that there were riots in the streets and the government was overthrown. I mean, you can't get rid of it. People are going to starve. You can't just do that, right? You might do that in England, but when they got rid of rationing in about 1916, something like that. But you're not going to do that in Egypt and it may be yet different in Sri Lanka. The cultures matter. I was just amazed when the Soviet Union fell and all these economists came to Russia to produce a market economy according to a timeless law. You don't know anything about Russia. You really, really think that all you have to do is privatize property and people are going to start behaving like they do in Chicago. Or in London. They're not going to think that way. Well, we'll create incentives and thereby encourage competition and more productivity. And so people have to get more productive because there'll be competition. In Russia, that's not what you do. What you do is you hire a hitman, you go out and you kill your competition. You're not going to kill him. That's still what they do. You don't think that way. It's different. Levels of corruption are much higher in Russia. I mean, they take it for granted. There are these groups that rate the corruption of societies in the world. Russia is not the most corrupt, though it’s near the bottom. Ukraine is about the same level as Russia, from the same Soviet experience. I seem to recall the least corrupt society in the world, the most honest was Denmark, which makes sense. But then what you can assume people will do is very different. So, when you modernize you have to take that into account.
Nathan Nielson: Let me share a parable that you wrote about in the book. It's by former Soviet economist Aron Katsenelinboigen, also your former colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. He said that if the natural world were constant, predictable, simple, two-dimensional, and flat, then human beings would have evolved wheels instead of legs.
Gary Saul Morson: He has all these wonderful parables. One of them was this. He asked me, if you were going to San Francisco, you would get in a car, which has wheels. You wouldn't walk. Wheels are much more efficient. Why then are there no quadrupeds with wheels? Why couldn't evolution of it’s own accord [adapt that way]? It can't be because it's too complex. It's a lot simpler than the liver and evolution designed the liver, right? So why? Well, you have to start thinking. You see, on a paved highway, which is where people laboriously fill in all the potholes all the time, and things are completely predictable, wheels work very well. But that's a very specialized environment. Imagine you have this wheeled antelope escaping a cheetah, and all of a sudden there's a tree in its way. If there's contingency in the world, unpredictability, you don't want specialization. You want flexibility. Legs are much more flexible, even though they're much worse in a very specialized environment. So, the fact that we have legs rather than wheels is proof that the world is governed by unpredictability and contingency. It’s the same reason that central planning doesn't work in an economy, because there are all these contingencies. And a factory has to make a decision and it can't just wait to get an answer from Moscow, which will take two years. It has to be able to decide on the moment, you can't plan for that. And so what he liked to say was, if the world were simple and there weren't contingencies, antelopes would have wheels and socialism would work.
Nathan Nielson: That's a brilliant parable. It really can apply to lots of things.
Gary Saul Morson: I would sit in this guy's office and he would say one brilliant thing after another.
No one can foresee everything. We are fallible and make mistakes. Knowledge is always limited. Decisions need constant adjustment in light of contingencies.
Nathan Nielson: Our time is running short, but let me just read what I take to be the overall lesson of the book. It comes from page 175: “No one can foresee everything. We are fallible and make mistakes. Knowledge is always limited. Decisions need constant adjustment in light of contingencies.” It's very simply stated, but very profound. And I think if we followed that, not only in dialogue, but in our own disciplines and walks of life, we could make much more room for the spirit of concord that you talk about.
Gary Saul Morson: Which we so desperately need right now. I have a colleague here who has been writing about the way people are at each other's throats. And he said, it's not really polarization because the positions have not gotten that further apart. It's that nobody credits the other side with decent intentions. And even with the position not further apart, that makes the hate we see right now. It's really that way of looking at disagreement, even small disagreement, that we see now. My friend, by the way, has expertise in relationships and marriage. And he decided to figure out why America is in the state that it's in by applying what he knew about bad marriages. And he's got these wonderful results.
Nathan Nielson: Yes, very relatable to relationships. Well, Dr. Morson, it's been a pleasure to speak with you again.
Gary Saul Morson: As always, and I look forward to the next one.
[This interview transcript has been edited for clarity]
A Discourse Democracy Deserves: Conversing with Gary Saul Morson