Shall the epistemically meek inherit the earth?

On courage, shouting, and meekness

We admire epistemic heroes, as José Medina calls them: people such as G.E.M. Anscombe who went against the grain when she protested Harry Truman's rubber-stamped honorary doctorate at Oxford. In her pamphlet Mr Truman's Degree, she argued that mass murderers (Truman ordered the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) should not receive such an honor. As the lone protester, it was to no avail, but the pamphlet is still read, a testament to clear-eyed and uncompromised ethical thinking.

Epistemic courage is rare. It's not just grabbing a megaphone and standing on a platform. It is difficult because you're saying things that make people uncomfortable, that they are often not ready or willing to hear. It's risky: you can put your reputation, livelihood, relationships with friends and family, on the line.

We often forget how difficult it is. For instance, I still remember when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up the pope's photo on TV in 1992, saying “Fight the real enemy.”

I was stunned. Many fellow Catholics around me were infuriated. At the time, I didn't know what to think or why she would do a thing like this. Sinéad was “totally cancelled.” Yes, cancellation was a thing.

When it happened, I lived in a sleepy Belgian village and was fourteen years old, a student at a Catholic school and very much a part of Catholic life. Yet even in that sheltered environment I had heard rumors about the abuse scandals that she obliquely referred to. When a local scandal involving disabled children in a boarding school run by friars burst open just a few years later, I kept on thinking back of Sinéad O’Connor. In the subsequent years, more and more abuse scandals unfolded.

When she recently died, I could not escape the impression that we were papering things over. There's a comfortable narrative: those we later realize were on the right side of history, well they were right all along. We all knew it at the time. We were at their side. But to deny the cancellation, or to pretend that only some hardliners did it, is to betray our epistemic heroes' struggles and to make light of the torn decisions they made to stand up for their beliefs.

A lot of grandstanding and shouting is now mistaken for epistemic courage. It isn't courage though, because in a shouting match, we do not risk our reputation or our connections.

The information ecology is very difficult. A diverse landscape of different venues has been swallowed up by a few giants: four main trade book publishers, a few large magazines and newspapers, while local news and small magazines are dying. Social media giants monopolize our attention. Youtube's unforgiving algorithm punishes you if you do not put things out like clockwork. Twitter/X rewards outrageous content over thoughtful discussion.

In this ecology, the loudest voices (not necessarily the most courageous ones) win out. There is endless competition for a scarce and finite resource: time. Realistically, how many Substack letters can I read? Maybe if I read one by an SF author, I will be interested to read another, but there is a limit in my day to how much time it can take up. So, the competition for public space is largely zero-sum.

In that space, only a few (former or present) academics can ever hope to rise to prominence. Recent(ish) examples include Richard Dawkins, Sabine Hossenfelder, Jordan Peterson, and Steven Pinker. For each, I've watched their ascent and evolution with interest. You can see how they tend to fall into similar traps.

First, a tendency for general punditry, talking about things farther and farther outside of their expertise. It's always interesting to hear an evolutionary biologist's views on religion or a physicist's take on philosophy of science, but at some point it becomes epistemic trespassing.

This punditry is combined with a disregard of the knowledge of people in the fields you are wading into, to the point that Dawkins in some discussion was proud to proclaim he had no idea what “epistemic” meant, or Hossenfelder had no problem admitting she had only read the title of a critique on her recent video on capitalism and yet felt she could dismiss it.

The third feature is an inability to deal with critique, even when offered in good faith. When you have a large platform, there are a lot of trolls and it is difficult to sift out who is in good faith or just trying to bait you. But eventually, because of reputational concerns, the temptation becomes big to resist any kind of critique. Thus I found myself blocked by Steven Pinker (some people have speculated he has some outreach person do this on his behalf) when I voiced a very mild critique/engagement with his work.

I can see the dynamics of why this happens, and no-one is immune from it. So it is altogether better if one does not rise to fame like this. The dynamics are not because of some inherent shared intellectual vice, but because of the pressures and demands of public life. They focus uncompromisingly on egos and how they appear. Soon, while trying to keep your position in the zero-sum game, you pay disproportionate attention not to the ideas you're engaging with, but how it all makes you look.

This, according to Laura Callahan, does amount to intellectual vice. According to her no-distraction account of intellectual humility (IH),

Intellectual Humility is freedom, in one's thinking, from prideful distraction by one's intellectual ego. The person with IH enjoys a certain relative ability to think clearly or focus; her intellectual energies are not often diverted by thoughts about her own status or intellectual abilities, and her thinking does not suffer distortion from the need to validate her own beliefs, as such. I call this the no-distraction account of IH. (Callahan 2023)

In this sense of intellectual humility, the epistemically courageous are also often intellectually humble. Keenly aware that their ideas will not be popular, and that they might suffer reputational damage, they will nevertheless fight for them, because they believe them to be true. Their intellectual humility expresses itself as integrity and a certain selflessness which we find attractive.

But what about the epistemically meek? I first encountered this term in a paper by Katherine Dormandy. In that paper, she argues that religious communities should pay attention to their heretics and their dissenters.

We may call marginalized people who are timid or who lack robust alternative versions of the belief system “epistemically meek.” Such a person may need help of encouragement in expressing and diagnosing his disquiet with the authoritative version of the belief system, or in articulating any fledgling alternative that he may have. Religious authorities and central community members should want to offer such help if they can—on epistemic grounds, but also on moral ones, since taking their marginalized seriously as epistemic agents can be an important step toward healing and re-integration (Dormandy 2018, 386).

Now, while Dormandy talks about this helping our epistemically meek peers a bit to articulate their ideas, and give them a platform in a religious context, I think this captures something valuable about other contexts too. The epistemically humble and meek have important things to tell us and important perspectives for debates we are in.

But, in the unforgiving zero-sum information ecology there's less and less space for them. In a place where we struggle to be heard, do we take the opportunity to platform and to draw out the epistemically meek?

I do not have much of a religious life these days, but sometimes I think back of the Church of England Evensong I used to attend in Christ Church, and particularly these lines from the sung Magnificat I loved so much:

He hath put down the mighty from their seat:

and hath exalted the humble and meek.