Ironically, I agree with the big picture of this article (frustration with people who have certainty in the face of big complicated questions and offer simplistic assessments), but I think this piece over-simplifies the actual situation (hah!). Perhaps I am also falling into the trap described, and if so I would appreciate a reality check.
There seems to be a continuum that starts at "simple an has worked". You could identify 3 points on that continuum:
1. Ones which really have no known situation, such as homelessness.
2. Ones which have arisen because of the current focus on oppressor/oppressed. Trans rights and Isreal / Palestine fall into this category. A coherent position is that the solution is simple yet would reduce the power of the oppressed groups, and that tradeoff seems like an extremely easy one to take. For Trans, I think the conservative position is "how it was in 2014", which is simple and constrained, or "Stop aid to Palestine, and stop pressuring Israel to go easy on them".
3. Ones where the direction of development seems clear but I have not seen anyone espose anything like a complete vision. On Education I think a reasonable position which would nonetheless be "unconstrained" is that the currently-mandated 12 years + university as generalist education for all is a good fit for elites and a poor fit for a majority of the population. I think a typical conservative position is that reducing government intervention in education and increasing the prevalence of teaching kids specific things (e.g. trades) would be a big improvement in their lives and improve overall productivity in society.
I completely agree with this analysis, but I think the Elephant in the Brain -- Robin Hanson's term -- is that many people _aren't_ professing these beliefs because they believe in the unconstrained vision, but because they are pushing it even though they don't believe it. They're in it for some other reason. And sometimes there _is_ or _might be_ a simple solution to a problem, but the people who won't look at it have some other sort of agenda.
For instance -- about 50 years ago, my grandmother read -- I believe in that in that esteemed medical journal *Readers Digest* -- that lack of vitamin D contributed to both your likelihood of catching a respiratory infection in the winter and how severe it would be if you caught it. She bought supplements, took them, and had me promise to take them too. But, when I went away to university I thought that this was one of those promises I could let lapse.
My peer group thought that people who popped vitamins and supplements were irrational -- neurotic hypochondriacs. Any benefit would come from the placebo effect. So, in part because I didn't want to come across as irrational, and in part because I wanted to save on the expense, I stopped taking them. That winter I came down with a terrible cold. "Co-incidence!" I thought loudly to myself. Next winter, I caught bronchitis that kept me in bed for a week. I went back to taking vitamin D, and winter colds went back to being mild things. This still could be a co-incidence. Or the placebo effect. But I know what trade-off I want to make. :)
But when covid came around, many people thought that I should *stop* taking the vitamin D. Otherwise people might confuse me with those low-status uneducated people who were suddenly becoming vitamin-D advocates. I thought that the hospitals around here should see if the people who were being hospitalised for severe covid were also low in vitamin D. Learning that there was no relationship would advance knowledge a lot. Finding one would be grounds for more study. I also thought that people in nursing homes should be part of randomised trials. Half of them get vitamin D supplements and Half of them get placebo. Surely some of the nursing homes will be stricken with covid in the future. When this happened we would see if it had any effect.
But the pushback on that idea astonished me. So many, many, many people didn't want to find out that there was a simple way to prevent severe covid that didn't involve the planned vaccines, which we didn't have. Even if people were dying now. I managed to get several of them on record. *Even if it were the case that vitamin D supplements lowered the risk of severe covid a whole lot, they didn't want people taking them because if they worked, the future demand for the vaccines would dry up*. It's really hard for me to not think of these people as evil. But I was the one that got castigated for 'naive realism'. 'If something as simple as vitamin-D worked, we would already be doing it' they said. And remember, I wasn't arguing that it worked, only that we had a chance to find out, and should use it.
Scott Alexander had an essay a few years back about how irrational or highly questionable beliefs actually work better than rational ones for building a group or coalition. Hardly anybody reasons their way to such beliefs, so professing them essentially function as a loyalty oath, and helps to divide ingroup members from outgroup members.
I had a similar thought the other day when I saw something Kari Lake said, that was not, let’s say, very nuanced or thoughtful…
The thought was that a significant part of our politics today isn’t about proposing solutions, using logic, etc. but rather is about announcing, in the most dramatic unambiguous way possible, what side you’re on. The more it stands out as making any sense or being decent or reasonable, the better at signaling, apparently.
It’s weird to me and I wouldn’t have thought it was a thing, but I can’t understand in any other way why so many people say things that stand up to approximately zero scrutiny or thought.
I don’t mean to pick exclusively on the MAGA right, either: take “the gender binary is a socially constructed myth.” I mean, no. That doesn’t stand up to 15 seconds of thought if you have a very basic understanding of animal and plant evolution over the past billion years… and yet books will be published and fawningly reviewed in left-leaning news outlets.
But, again, the only way I can make sense of all of this is that people say things because they signal certain things about who the speaker is, rather than providing some actual information or facts or thought about the real world.
I believe there is something deeper at work in naïve realism in addition to the factors mentioned. In a post-religious age, we seek consolation in the hope that there could easily be a collective rational management of human affairs that would ward off tragedy and contingency from our lives. British philosopher John Gray wrote about this years ago in his Enlightenment's Wake.
Every day I wake up to people not taking seriously enough the consideration that the evolutionary / game-theoretic equilibrium involves harming other people as much as possible, so long as one can avoid being perceived as intentionally harming them.
My "naive realism" is that everything is a trade off and we should try to center our political disagreements on the parameters of the trade off function. To _ME_ that is the obvious solution and people who disagree just flunked econ 101! :)
"if you dare to disagree with a commonly-held simplistic belief about the solution to a complex social problem...you will be regarded as evil."
The need for 'social justice' is a case in point. "It has become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
While I understand Mr Sowell's origination of the phrase, it might be useful to recognize that the 'unconstrained' often simply want to constrain different things.
Take health care funding for an example. Those of us with constrained vision recognize many of the problems with access to health care. Our proposals for changes, however, are bounded by the realization that there is some limit to the amount of care that can be provided overall as well as other constraints such as the fact that we can't make health care providers work for free nor expect medical developments to occur without the developers getting remuneration. You can make health care delivery more efficient, and provide people with limited means access to some kind of health care but you are never going to provide everyone with every bit of care they may want.
The 'unconstrained' view is often that we have plenty of health care resources to provide everyone with care but the problem is the wrong people aren't constrained from using 'more than they need', and if we'd just punish the hoarders and wreckers then everything would be resolved.
Throughout most of history, people weren’t trying to solve as big of problems as we are now. So, simple solutions to problems like “how are we going to stave off starvation” often worked. Nobody was even attempting to solve problems like “how can we provide healthcare to everyone”.
Well, first off, mad props to Williams for dusting off Lippmann. So often proponents of “the world is too complex for democracy” spout their slogans as if they were something new or novel and had not in fact been part of democratic tensions for millennia. And most of Lippmann’s books, including Public Opinion (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6456 ) are now in the public domain. Moreover, Lippmann’s views were far from static. It is quite interesting to contrast the pre-WWI progressivism of A Preface to Politics (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20125 ) to the conservatism of his 1955 The Public Philosophy ( https://archive.org/details/essaysinpublicph00lipp ). See, for example,
And happily some of John Dewey’s responses to Lippmann, that argue in favor of a role for the public, The Public and Its Problems,
Chapter 2, “Lippman and Dewey” Jeffrey Friedman’s Power without Knowledge (a book that previously has received attention in the Klingverse) describes Lippmann as something of a naive agnostic, “he worried about whether, in a complex society, well-meaning people who favor the public good, who agree roughly on what it would entail, and who are willing to listen to each other’s arguments about how to achieve it, can determine which of these arguments are correct.”
For Dewey, he writes, “Lippmann’s epistemological doubts posed a potentially fatal threat” to the “democratic technocracy” of progressivism. Friedman writes “Dewey had come to agree in principle, with Lippmann’s chief premise, that modern society is epistemically complex” but that Dewey “left one important question in dispute: whether it is necessary, as Lippmann suggested, to respond to espistemic complexity by cutting the public out of the policymaking loop, leaving decisions about means to epistocrats.” Friedman goes on, quite interestingly, from there, but perhaps a bit abstractly. Simple minded types like myself, are left wondering whether Team Lippmann or Team Dewey attracts more naive realists. Dewey’s call for better journalism and Lippmann’s for a “bureau of experts” as solutions to the problem of a pluralist public composed of autonomy-valuing individuals who sometimes have the temerity to think for themselves are sadly amusing at best.
One wonders if naive realism might actually be a feature, not a bug. Guizot explained the history of civilization in Europe as one of “irreconcilable pretensions” in which “Political legitimacy attaches itself to liberty as well as power; to individual rights, as well as to the forms according to which public functions are exercised.” “This confusion, this diversity, this struggle, have cost us very dear,” he concedes, but “Nevertheless, I do not think we need regret them. To people, as well as to individuals, the chance of the most complete and varied development, the chance of almost unlimited progress in all directions, compensates of itself alone for all that it might cost to obtain the right of casting for it.” One is inclined to suggest that any successful resolution to the challenges of naive realism would be antithetical to “the chance of almost unlimited progress.” I have lost the exact quote and who said it, but someone, I want to think Gladstone, Churchill, or maybe Bagehot, to the effect that the lowly vegetable vendor knows the size of his stall, knows how quickly his inventory is sold, and what the conditions of the marketplace are generally, and this information is enough to justify his stepping into the public square of political debate. This tension between populist knowledge and establishment knowledge embodies Guizot’s theme of struggle.
In this regard, perhaps, perceptions of the problem of naive realism might be better informed in a broader context. The other day, the World Happiness Report was released and the United States fell to 36th place in the national rankings (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-younger-the-older-and-those-in-between/#ranking-of-happiness-2021-2023 ) , the same spot it occupies on the Quality of Democracy index (https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking ). The top 5 happiest countries are Finland (3 on Quality of Democracy), Denmark (1), Iceland (15), Sweden (4), and Israel (35). Already one will hear that naive realist Americans are not qualified to express opinions on their personal happiness because it is too complex a topic for them to understand and that epistemic experts are better suited to debate about such esoteric determinations or that public subsidies to journalism are required to solve this problem of ignorance. When they get a break from telling us how we ought to think, however, the experts might consider what the apparent correlation between high quality democracy and happiness might teach us? At one time we had intellectuals like Robert Dahl and Arend Lijphart who were capable of communicating to the mass public through popular books about what might be learned from various differing patterns of democracy, but it seems like that universe has disappeared behind the paywalls of esoteric academic journals. Maybe someone else will arise anew with their humane attitudes and toleration of the idea of a need for practical public communications, will step up to fill that apparent void. Until then, I will happily bear the label “naive realist.”
#1 What is the *social* problem to which "go green" is the answer? What does "go green" mean here, to you or to whomever you are referencing?
#2 The simple-solution seekers. I think some people - maybe especially, women? - really do feel a genuine tug of the heart, which has in it no room for judgment or rationality, about an amorphous mass of people they will never know or interact with. In fact, some of them feel it so strongly they go out of their way *to* interact with members of those groups. My women friends spout no leftist nonsense and are by no means clueless but must believe, in order to attempt the Christian interventions and activities they do, that social problems are amenable to simple solutions *even as their private efforts make no difference at all* except in some Middlemarch way ("life was not so bad for you or for me or for total random stranger" due to such as she).
They *must* act. It is their nature. They are active people; others who feel similar concerns and do not act may simply be more lazy - not more realistic.
I can see this tendency clearly as I am a sort of failed woman in this regard. Not wholly: I cannot read a news story about the abuse or worse of a little child, particularly accompanied by a picture of the small vulnerable creature, without a rending of the heart.
But I can read about - and necessarily see with my own eyes - any number of social problems you mention - such as the homeless, or drug abusers - without caring one whit. I am not: caring-but-lazy. This is true indifference, but also a sort of feeling that - who speaks for the commons? Who speaks for the civic fabric? (Who speaks for aesthetics!) Doesn't anybody remember it didn't used to be this way? I guess in this scenario, I place myself in the role of the little vulnerable child, psychologically, and say, what the hell have you done to my world? And maybe a little bit of - if you really cared, you would do some harder thing than you are all doing/saying, that may not look like caring ...
A curious instance: once after a long drive to the shore, we had no sooner set out umbrella and towels, than somebody, not the parent, walked by on the crowded beach and asked, have you seen a little girl of such or other description, her family can't find her, some notion telegraphed that she might be mentally challenged. Everyone else about seemed to be able to answer in the negative and go on with their leisure - but after a minute of trying to do so, I found I could not. So I set off to look for an unattended little girl. I felt a pang for a mother, being next to the great ocean, with a child missing.
I did find the child, who appeared non-verbal and unfavored by nature, in the parking lot behind the sand, and walked her the quarter mile to the park headquarters, having no other notion of where to take her. They did not say, oh good, you found the lost child, but rather wanted to take down my name, as if I had spirited her away myself. I declined lol.
I have thought of that in connection with my inability to care about the mass of humanity. I am utterly wedded to the particular - and even that is extremely intermittent. I had no sooner dropped her off than I thought, uuugh: people.
In a way, understanding that this is a failure of empathy on my part, it makes me think you should not be so quick to dismiss the motives of those mindless bleeding hearts. I think there may be something fundamental and good there - only it's gotten distorted by ideology, as have so many things.
Another factor in what you're describing I think is that people tend to be naive realists about issues they care most about. Like I don't care very much about Israel and Palestine, and this is part of why I can sit back and view the problem as having no good option aside from politically infeasible ones. Whereas those who are strongly cheering for Palestine want global intifada and those cheering for Israel backed a war with no endgame.
So when people look at someone who isn't a naive realist, and say that person doesn't care so passionately, a lot of the time they're not wrong. It's a tragic truth.
If you say a problem is complex, this suggests that solving it may prove difficult, if not insurmountable. Perhaps the problem cannot be ever solved. In the case of the frustrated, perhaps it’s a lack of cognitive complexity, a black-and-white view of the world, where they believe their perspective is the only correct one, coming from self-imposed, limited exposure to diverse viewpoints or an inability (or unwillingness) to consider alternative perspectives. Or, even more fundamentally, their frustration is simply a lack of immaturity having grown up in a world where they always get their way and when they don’t get their ice cream, lay on the floor kicking and crying.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -H.L. Mencken
Ironically, I agree with the big picture of this article (frustration with people who have certainty in the face of big complicated questions and offer simplistic assessments), but I think this piece over-simplifies the actual situation (hah!). Perhaps I am also falling into the trap described, and if so I would appreciate a reality check.
There seems to be a continuum that starts at "simple an has worked". You could identify 3 points on that continuum:
1. Ones which really have no known situation, such as homelessness.
2. Ones which have arisen because of the current focus on oppressor/oppressed. Trans rights and Isreal / Palestine fall into this category. A coherent position is that the solution is simple yet would reduce the power of the oppressed groups, and that tradeoff seems like an extremely easy one to take. For Trans, I think the conservative position is "how it was in 2014", which is simple and constrained, or "Stop aid to Palestine, and stop pressuring Israel to go easy on them".
3. Ones where the direction of development seems clear but I have not seen anyone espose anything like a complete vision. On Education I think a reasonable position which would nonetheless be "unconstrained" is that the currently-mandated 12 years + university as generalist education for all is a good fit for elites and a poor fit for a majority of the population. I think a typical conservative position is that reducing government intervention in education and increasing the prevalence of teaching kids specific things (e.g. trades) would be a big improvement in their lives and improve overall productivity in society.
I completely agree with this analysis, but I think the Elephant in the Brain -- Robin Hanson's term -- is that many people _aren't_ professing these beliefs because they believe in the unconstrained vision, but because they are pushing it even though they don't believe it. They're in it for some other reason. And sometimes there _is_ or _might be_ a simple solution to a problem, but the people who won't look at it have some other sort of agenda.
For instance -- about 50 years ago, my grandmother read -- I believe in that in that esteemed medical journal *Readers Digest* -- that lack of vitamin D contributed to both your likelihood of catching a respiratory infection in the winter and how severe it would be if you caught it. She bought supplements, took them, and had me promise to take them too. But, when I went away to university I thought that this was one of those promises I could let lapse.
My peer group thought that people who popped vitamins and supplements were irrational -- neurotic hypochondriacs. Any benefit would come from the placebo effect. So, in part because I didn't want to come across as irrational, and in part because I wanted to save on the expense, I stopped taking them. That winter I came down with a terrible cold. "Co-incidence!" I thought loudly to myself. Next winter, I caught bronchitis that kept me in bed for a week. I went back to taking vitamin D, and winter colds went back to being mild things. This still could be a co-incidence. Or the placebo effect. But I know what trade-off I want to make. :)
But when covid came around, many people thought that I should *stop* taking the vitamin D. Otherwise people might confuse me with those low-status uneducated people who were suddenly becoming vitamin-D advocates. I thought that the hospitals around here should see if the people who were being hospitalised for severe covid were also low in vitamin D. Learning that there was no relationship would advance knowledge a lot. Finding one would be grounds for more study. I also thought that people in nursing homes should be part of randomised trials. Half of them get vitamin D supplements and Half of them get placebo. Surely some of the nursing homes will be stricken with covid in the future. When this happened we would see if it had any effect.
But the pushback on that idea astonished me. So many, many, many people didn't want to find out that there was a simple way to prevent severe covid that didn't involve the planned vaccines, which we didn't have. Even if people were dying now. I managed to get several of them on record. *Even if it were the case that vitamin D supplements lowered the risk of severe covid a whole lot, they didn't want people taking them because if they worked, the future demand for the vaccines would dry up*. It's really hard for me to not think of these people as evil. But I was the one that got castigated for 'naive realism'. 'If something as simple as vitamin-D worked, we would already be doing it' they said. And remember, I wasn't arguing that it worked, only that we had a chance to find out, and should use it.
My PhD advisor used to tell a joke about philosopher-baseball umpires:
The naive realist says, "I call 'em like they are."
The logical positivist says, "I call 'em like I see 'em."
The solipsist says, "Until I call 'em, they ain't."
Scott Alexander had an essay a few years back about how irrational or highly questionable beliefs actually work better than rational ones for building a group or coalition. Hardly anybody reasons their way to such beliefs, so professing them essentially function as a loyalty oath, and helps to divide ingroup members from outgroup members.
I had a similar thought the other day when I saw something Kari Lake said, that was not, let’s say, very nuanced or thoughtful…
The thought was that a significant part of our politics today isn’t about proposing solutions, using logic, etc. but rather is about announcing, in the most dramatic unambiguous way possible, what side you’re on. The more it stands out as making any sense or being decent or reasonable, the better at signaling, apparently.
It’s weird to me and I wouldn’t have thought it was a thing, but I can’t understand in any other way why so many people say things that stand up to approximately zero scrutiny or thought.
I don’t mean to pick exclusively on the MAGA right, either: take “the gender binary is a socially constructed myth.” I mean, no. That doesn’t stand up to 15 seconds of thought if you have a very basic understanding of animal and plant evolution over the past billion years… and yet books will be published and fawningly reviewed in left-leaning news outlets.
But, again, the only way I can make sense of all of this is that people say things because they signal certain things about who the speaker is, rather than providing some actual information or facts or thought about the real world.
I believe there is something deeper at work in naïve realism in addition to the factors mentioned. In a post-religious age, we seek consolation in the hope that there could easily be a collective rational management of human affairs that would ward off tragedy and contingency from our lives. British philosopher John Gray wrote about this years ago in his Enlightenment's Wake.
Every day I wake up to people not taking seriously enough the consideration that the evolutionary / game-theoretic equilibrium involves harming other people as much as possible, so long as one can avoid being perceived as intentionally harming them.
My "naive realism" is that everything is a trade off and we should try to center our political disagreements on the parameters of the trade off function. To _ME_ that is the obvious solution and people who disagree just flunked econ 101! :)
"if you dare to disagree with a commonly-held simplistic belief about the solution to a complex social problem...you will be regarded as evil."
The need for 'social justice' is a case in point. "It has become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
While I understand Mr Sowell's origination of the phrase, it might be useful to recognize that the 'unconstrained' often simply want to constrain different things.
Take health care funding for an example. Those of us with constrained vision recognize many of the problems with access to health care. Our proposals for changes, however, are bounded by the realization that there is some limit to the amount of care that can be provided overall as well as other constraints such as the fact that we can't make health care providers work for free nor expect medical developments to occur without the developers getting remuneration. You can make health care delivery more efficient, and provide people with limited means access to some kind of health care but you are never going to provide everyone with every bit of care they may want.
The 'unconstrained' view is often that we have plenty of health care resources to provide everyone with care but the problem is the wrong people aren't constrained from using 'more than they need', and if we'd just punish the hoarders and wreckers then everything would be resolved.
Throughout most of history, people weren’t trying to solve as big of problems as we are now. So, simple solutions to problems like “how are we going to stave off starvation” often worked. Nobody was even attempting to solve problems like “how can we provide healthcare to everyone”.
Well, first off, mad props to Williams for dusting off Lippmann. So often proponents of “the world is too complex for democracy” spout their slogans as if they were something new or novel and had not in fact been part of democratic tensions for millennia. And most of Lippmann’s books, including Public Opinion (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6456 ) are now in the public domain. Moreover, Lippmann’s views were far from static. It is quite interesting to contrast the pre-WWI progressivism of A Preface to Politics (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20125 ) to the conservatism of his 1955 The Public Philosophy ( https://archive.org/details/essaysinpublicph00lipp ). See, for example,
And happily some of John Dewey’s responses to Lippmann, that argue in favor of a role for the public, The Public and Its Problems,
( https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-dewey/the-public-and-its-problems – Standard Ebooks, by the way, does a phenomenal job of making important and interesting books freely accessible to the public) is also in the public domain. Although see Michael Schudson’s “’Lippmann-Dewey Debate’ and the Invention of Walter Lippmann as an Anti-Democrat 1985-1996” (https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/343/229 ) on the “Lippmann-Dewey debate” issue.
Chapter 2, “Lippman and Dewey” Jeffrey Friedman’s Power without Knowledge (a book that previously has received attention in the Klingverse) describes Lippmann as something of a naive agnostic, “he worried about whether, in a complex society, well-meaning people who favor the public good, who agree roughly on what it would entail, and who are willing to listen to each other’s arguments about how to achieve it, can determine which of these arguments are correct.”
For Dewey, he writes, “Lippmann’s epistemological doubts posed a potentially fatal threat” to the “democratic technocracy” of progressivism. Friedman writes “Dewey had come to agree in principle, with Lippmann’s chief premise, that modern society is epistemically complex” but that Dewey “left one important question in dispute: whether it is necessary, as Lippmann suggested, to respond to espistemic complexity by cutting the public out of the policymaking loop, leaving decisions about means to epistocrats.” Friedman goes on, quite interestingly, from there, but perhaps a bit abstractly. Simple minded types like myself, are left wondering whether Team Lippmann or Team Dewey attracts more naive realists. Dewey’s call for better journalism and Lippmann’s for a “bureau of experts” as solutions to the problem of a pluralist public composed of autonomy-valuing individuals who sometimes have the temerity to think for themselves are sadly amusing at best.
One wonders if naive realism might actually be a feature, not a bug. Guizot explained the history of civilization in Europe as one of “irreconcilable pretensions” in which “Political legitimacy attaches itself to liberty as well as power; to individual rights, as well as to the forms according to which public functions are exercised.” “This confusion, this diversity, this struggle, have cost us very dear,” he concedes, but “Nevertheless, I do not think we need regret them. To people, as well as to individuals, the chance of the most complete and varied development, the chance of almost unlimited progress in all directions, compensates of itself alone for all that it might cost to obtain the right of casting for it.” One is inclined to suggest that any successful resolution to the challenges of naive realism would be antithetical to “the chance of almost unlimited progress.” I have lost the exact quote and who said it, but someone, I want to think Gladstone, Churchill, or maybe Bagehot, to the effect that the lowly vegetable vendor knows the size of his stall, knows how quickly his inventory is sold, and what the conditions of the marketplace are generally, and this information is enough to justify his stepping into the public square of political debate. This tension between populist knowledge and establishment knowledge embodies Guizot’s theme of struggle.
In this regard, perhaps, perceptions of the problem of naive realism might be better informed in a broader context. The other day, the World Happiness Report was released and the United States fell to 36th place in the national rankings (https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-younger-the-older-and-those-in-between/#ranking-of-happiness-2021-2023 ) , the same spot it occupies on the Quality of Democracy index (https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking ). The top 5 happiest countries are Finland (3 on Quality of Democracy), Denmark (1), Iceland (15), Sweden (4), and Israel (35). Already one will hear that naive realist Americans are not qualified to express opinions on their personal happiness because it is too complex a topic for them to understand and that epistemic experts are better suited to debate about such esoteric determinations or that public subsidies to journalism are required to solve this problem of ignorance. When they get a break from telling us how we ought to think, however, the experts might consider what the apparent correlation between high quality democracy and happiness might teach us? At one time we had intellectuals like Robert Dahl and Arend Lijphart who were capable of communicating to the mass public through popular books about what might be learned from various differing patterns of democracy, but it seems like that universe has disappeared behind the paywalls of esoteric academic journals. Maybe someone else will arise anew with their humane attitudes and toleration of the idea of a need for practical public communications, will step up to fill that apparent void. Until then, I will happily bear the label “naive realist.”
#1 What is the *social* problem to which "go green" is the answer? What does "go green" mean here, to you or to whomever you are referencing?
#2 The simple-solution seekers. I think some people - maybe especially, women? - really do feel a genuine tug of the heart, which has in it no room for judgment or rationality, about an amorphous mass of people they will never know or interact with. In fact, some of them feel it so strongly they go out of their way *to* interact with members of those groups. My women friends spout no leftist nonsense and are by no means clueless but must believe, in order to attempt the Christian interventions and activities they do, that social problems are amenable to simple solutions *even as their private efforts make no difference at all* except in some Middlemarch way ("life was not so bad for you or for me or for total random stranger" due to such as she).
They *must* act. It is their nature. They are active people; others who feel similar concerns and do not act may simply be more lazy - not more realistic.
I can see this tendency clearly as I am a sort of failed woman in this regard. Not wholly: I cannot read a news story about the abuse or worse of a little child, particularly accompanied by a picture of the small vulnerable creature, without a rending of the heart.
But I can read about - and necessarily see with my own eyes - any number of social problems you mention - such as the homeless, or drug abusers - without caring one whit. I am not: caring-but-lazy. This is true indifference, but also a sort of feeling that - who speaks for the commons? Who speaks for the civic fabric? (Who speaks for aesthetics!) Doesn't anybody remember it didn't used to be this way? I guess in this scenario, I place myself in the role of the little vulnerable child, psychologically, and say, what the hell have you done to my world? And maybe a little bit of - if you really cared, you would do some harder thing than you are all doing/saying, that may not look like caring ...
A curious instance: once after a long drive to the shore, we had no sooner set out umbrella and towels, than somebody, not the parent, walked by on the crowded beach and asked, have you seen a little girl of such or other description, her family can't find her, some notion telegraphed that she might be mentally challenged. Everyone else about seemed to be able to answer in the negative and go on with their leisure - but after a minute of trying to do so, I found I could not. So I set off to look for an unattended little girl. I felt a pang for a mother, being next to the great ocean, with a child missing.
I did find the child, who appeared non-verbal and unfavored by nature, in the parking lot behind the sand, and walked her the quarter mile to the park headquarters, having no other notion of where to take her. They did not say, oh good, you found the lost child, but rather wanted to take down my name, as if I had spirited her away myself. I declined lol.
I have thought of that in connection with my inability to care about the mass of humanity. I am utterly wedded to the particular - and even that is extremely intermittent. I had no sooner dropped her off than I thought, uuugh: people.
In a way, understanding that this is a failure of empathy on my part, it makes me think you should not be so quick to dismiss the motives of those mindless bleeding hearts. I think there may be something fundamental and good there - only it's gotten distorted by ideology, as have so many things.
Another factor in what you're describing I think is that people tend to be naive realists about issues they care most about. Like I don't care very much about Israel and Palestine, and this is part of why I can sit back and view the problem as having no good option aside from politically infeasible ones. Whereas those who are strongly cheering for Palestine want global intifada and those cheering for Israel backed a war with no endgame.
So when people look at someone who isn't a naive realist, and say that person doesn't care so passionately, a lot of the time they're not wrong. It's a tragic truth.
If you say a problem is complex, this suggests that solving it may prove difficult, if not insurmountable. Perhaps the problem cannot be ever solved. In the case of the frustrated, perhaps it’s a lack of cognitive complexity, a black-and-white view of the world, where they believe their perspective is the only correct one, coming from self-imposed, limited exposure to diverse viewpoints or an inability (or unwillingness) to consider alternative perspectives. Or, even more fundamentally, their frustration is simply a lack of immaturity having grown up in a world where they always get their way and when they don’t get their ice cream, lay on the floor kicking and crying.