The West, Institutions, and Applied Optimism

There’s a difference between right and wrong, better and worse, progress and stasis, truth and falsehood. Everyone says that these dichotomies are obvious, but few take them seriously.

There’s a difference between right and wrong, better and worse, progress and stasis, truth and falsehood. Everyone says that these dichotomies are obvious, but few take them seriously.

For instance, if some ideas are more moral than others, it follows that some cultures are more moral than others. Similarly, some societies really do make progress, while others flounder. Some ideas really do contain more truth than others. Some choices really are better than others. Unfortunately, these facts are denied, avoided, ridiculed, and suppressed across the West. Never mind how this came to be—it is a civilizational problem, not only for the West, but for all of humanity.

Denying the truth of Western superiority means never investigating why the West makes so much more progress than the rest of humanity. It means failing to discover the institutions, principles, and values that underlie the progress that the West has made. It means taking for granted the necessary ingredients for how a society can transform from a worse one to a better one. It means putting those very ingredients at risk in the West, and it means placing them farther out of reach for the non-West than they need to be.

Accepting the truth of Western superiority, on the other hand, leaves one wondering: Why? Why is the West the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen? What are the attributes that distinguish the West from the rest? Once we identify those, we have a much deeper understanding of which elements of the West to preserve, which to change, and which to abolish. And this understanding not only helps us improve our own society—with the recipe for progress in hand, we can, if we so choose, spread them to every other society on the planet. Everybody wins.

To identify the West’s magical attributes, one must first appreciate the facts that errors are inevitable, and that mankind was born into ignorance and poverty. Only in light of these facts does it make sense that progress of any kind demands an explanation. (As it happens, so many of those who either take the West for granted or deny its superiority literally do not know these facts.)

If errors are inevitable, then any particular error cannot be what distinguishes all other civilizations from the West. The distinguishing factor cannot be, for example, that the West’s suite of scientific theories at a given moment is more advanced than that of the non-Western world. Nor can the distinguishing factor be that the West has more secure property rights than the non-Western world at a given moment.

On the contrary, if a stagnant society happened to have a deeper scientific worldview and more secure property rights than the West at any given moment, then we should expect the West to catch up to, and eventually outpace, the stagnant society. Because errors are inevitable, the stagnant society’s scientific theories and system of property rights will have flaws, gaps, and inconsistencies that have yet to be accounted for. But if the society lacks—or has lost—the ingredients necessary to make progress at that point in time, then all of those shortcomings will be frozen in place. The West, on the other hand, is capable of resolving errors in its scientific theories and system of property rights, allowing it to improve upon both until they have far outstripped those of the stagnant society.

The distinguishing characteristic of the West, then, is that it corrects errors far better than any historical or contemporary culture. More generally, societies are characterized by the degree to which their various institutions are capable or incapable of correcting errors.

The means of error correction, whether within a single mind, the society’s culture, a private organization, or a political institution, are necessarily capable of resolving a wide class of errors (potentially all possible errors, though not always). That is, the means of error correction catalyze processes that can resolve, improve, or ameliorate a lot more than just a single erroneous idea, action, movement, or position.

This is why judging a given society by its errors at a given moment in time is less fundamental, less important than judging that society by its means of correcting errors at that point in time. (This has enormous ramifications for the field of history.)

Each of the West’s means of error correction themselves have different attributes, as each evolved to solve a particular problem (or collection of problems). The institution of science has peer review, an openness to novel hypotheses, and a university system that (at its best) facilitates both. The institution of political democracy fosters the removal of leaders and policies in favor of an alternative that (some) citizens think will better solve the problems of the day. The institution of cultural norms like freedom of expression, freedom of lifestyle, and freedom of life trajectory facilitate individuals making their own mistakes, learning from them, and changing their minds and choices accordingly. The institution of the market facilitates the allocation and reallocation of scarce resources, as entrepreneurs and consumers alike continuously sell and buy, respectively.

Of course, if errors are inevitable, then we should not expect any of these institutions to be perfect. On the contrary, it is the West and only the West that is currently capable of improving all of them.

All of these error correcting institutions have evolved over centuries, some over millennia. And all of them exist primarily as shared ideas across people’s minds—if enough people thought that they did not, in fact, correct errors and thus gave up on them, the institutions would disappear in time. On the contrary, if people can explain how and why they really are capable of resolving errors, then they will want to retain (and improve upon) them.

In other words, societies that are optimistic that errors can be corrected will want to employ and improve upon their means of correcting errors. Societies that are pessimistic about the prospects of correcting their errors will allow their means of correcting errors to languish and eventually go extinct.

But choosing between optimism and pessimism is not a matter of taste, mood, or disposition. As David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity, optimism is a physical fact—all errors are, in principle, correctable. It is just a matter of creating the right knowledge of how to do so.

The West is less optimistic today than it has been in the past. This is itself an error that Conjecture Institute exists to correct. Progress in every domain depends on it.

Everything that Conjecture Institute does is a kind of applied optimism—we recognize that the world’s deepest ideas are little known and yet, on the other hand, would correct many of humanity’s errors if they became more widespread and were themselves applied to areas like physics, parenting, epistemology, economics, aesthetics, and artificial general intelligence.