Humilitism

getting away from the terms "conservative" or "libertarian"

It occurs to me that I have at least two reasons not to call myself a conservative.

• I do not have a ready answer to the question: what do you wish to conserve?

• I have major differences with many of the public intellectuals who call themselves conservatives or who are called conservative

My economic views are libertarian. But I think that too many libertarians under-estimate the fragility of social order. As one example, I am not a fan of drug legalization, which is one of the libertarian movement’s most sacred causes.

I think that the belief that matters most to me is the belief that human society is too complex for anyone to understand well enough to know best how it should function. The more confidence that you have in your political opinions and the greater your commitment to your political tribe and its leaders, the less confidence I have in your wisdom.

When I asked a couple of LLMs for a single term that describes my outlook, the best answers that came back were “fallibilist” or “Hayekian.”

The term “fallibilist” is used by academic philosophers. I think it means something like the notion that anyone can be wrong. But the trouble with borrowing a concept from academic philosophy is that (a) it doesn’t register with laymen and (b) you have to sit back and watch academic philosophers pick you apart for how you (mis)used their terminology.

The term “Hayekian” is too ambiguous. Am I talking about his theory of the business cycle? the road to serfdom? “the uses of knowledge in society?” Sort of the latter, but with a broader view of the implications of complexity.

Thomas Sowell’s expression, “constrained vision,” is quite good. But it does not boil down to a single word. And even at two words, it is not self-explanatory.

So I propose a new term: humilitism. A humilitist is someone who believes that neither he nor anyone else can have a highly accurate understanding of social phenomena.

Humilitism suggests that I will show humility. But it also suggests that I want others to show humility, also. That is perhaps the key.

As a humilitist, I can have strong opinions about issues. For example, I blame Hamas for all of the troubles in Gaza, including the suffering of civilians. I believe that it is Hamas, rather than Israel, that wishes for Gazans to suffer and die.¹ But I admit that one could push back against my view.

As a humilitist, I despair of the left. Even moderate Democrats are far too certain of their moral superiority and technocratic wisdom for my taste.

As a humilitist, my feelings about Donald Trump are mixed. For me, his most attractive feature is his portfolio of enemies. They tend to be institutions and causes for which I have some antipathy. But he is certainly no humilitist.

Humilitism shares with populism a distrust of technocratic elites. But populists think that their instinctive opinions are correct. They are not humilitists.

Humilitism is a tough sell in the contemporary media ecosystem. It’s difficult to break through the clamor with our message. Instead, you get followers by shouting “Crisis!” and leading a crusade to address it. The ability to scapegoat a specific group as the enemy is particularly powerful. But the humilitist instinct is to downgrade alleged crises to problems. I’m sorry, but there is no housing crisis or affordability (cost of living) crisis. They are problems, and calling them crises only encourages non-humilitists to come up with “solutions” that will make the problems worse.

Thomas Sowell’s aphorism that “There are no solutions, only trade-offs,” is humilitist. But it doesn’t make for a compelling battle cry.

Although humilitism is far from a majority, I suspect that it is more popular than it appears to be. The ideologues and the extremists make more noise. Like pufferfish, they make themselves look bigger than they are, to try to intimidate others. Humilitists, by comparison are not going to look as imposing. But humilitism is a fine cause.

And I am open to suggestions for a better name.

1. According to Wednesday reports from the New York Post and others, the terror group hid massive stockpiles of baby formula and children’s nutritional shakes inside a Gaza warehouse, letting children starve to sabotage Israel’s credibility. Anti-Hamas Palestinian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who posted video evidence of the hoarded supplies to social media, said on X Tuesday that Hamas also intentionally withheld the aid to force the return of the United Nations’ distribution program and oust the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). (Source)