Open Society

So Isaiah Berlin, living in the middle of the 20th century, looks around him and sees totalitarianism in mass claiming to have a universal understanding of human nature or how to structure a society. He sees people viewing themselves as total individuals, completely alienated from people around them, starving for a sense of community. He sees the reality of modern work and how only the most privileged can ever go outside and try to connect with the natural world around them. Most of all though, he sees within the politics of his time the ever-presence of this moral monism that was so popular in our thinking for 2,500 years -- the idea that, when it comes to my moral or political views, there is one single answer to be arrived at, that I’ve discovered that right answer, and that my political views deeply inform a single cohesive worldview that I have that is correct.

We were in such a state of delirium thinking about how great science and reason were that we ignored one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of human thought, the call by these thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment for us to move away from monism and towards what Isaiah Berlin called “pluralism.”

There’s a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Now, in this essay he provides a sort of spirit animal for these two very different kinds of thinking. The classic line from the essay is that the hedgehog sees one big thing while the fox sees many things: the hedgehog obviously representing the thinking of a typical monist, the fox representing the approach of a pluralist. To Isaiah Berlin, the hedgehog, or the monist, is operating from a very limited vantage point where they can really only see in one single direction, and they’re assuming that’s all there is. They think about understanding the world always in relation to how it fits into some sort of overarching structure, seemingly just for the sake of having a cohesive worldview which they assume is possible.

But the fox, on the other hand, doesn’t look at the world in the same way as the hedgehog. Berlin says the fox understands that the range and complexity of everyone’s human experience is so massive -- the way different languages orient people with the world, the way our different personalities orient us, the different preferences, feelings, experiences -- what it is to be a human being is far too complex to ever have a single spokesperson.

But, to the initial charge that the pluralist is actually just a relativist, Isaiah Berlin might reply with the famous quote from his work, “I prefer coffee; you prefer champaign. We have different tastes. There’s nothing more to be said. That is relativism. But Herder’s view and Vico’s,” two thinkers of the Counter-Enlightenment, “is not that. It is what I should describe as pluralism, that is the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational.”

Now, even these two things might be enough for us to take a closer look at monism throughout history but, it just so happens, Berlin is making an even bigger claim here. Think of how this monism applies to that dogma of the Enlightenment within moral or political philosophy that he referenced. The idea that rationality -- that if only we think about things clearly and distinctly enough, we can come up with a single correct answer for how to live as human beings, and that answer is going to fit perfectly into a single cohesive worldview, completing the cosmic jigsaw puzzle -- this is just another example of this monism that’s existed all throughout the history of thought. And it is monolithic; it’s overly ambitious, given what we know about human existence, and ultimately leads to the totalitarianism of the political landscape in the early 20th century. Because if you can believe that rationality will provide us with scientific-like certainty or probability when answering questions about what it's like to live for people with numbers in the billions, then you end up with things like Marxism. You end up with National Socialism. You end up with late-stage capitalism. This attempt to use reason to arrive at something that’s supposed to work well for everyone in the world is an outdated concept.

So, what happens is, Berlin realizes this and then transforms into more of a historian of ideas. He wants to go back and figure out whether there were any thinkers during the beginning of the Enlightenment that saw something like this coming. What he comes across is a group of thinkers that are often referred to as the Counter-Enlightenment. And, simply put, Isaiah Berlin thinks this group of thinkers were some of the most underrated thinkers in the history of the world.

When the Enlightenment focused on universals and an eternal understanding of things, the Counter-Enlightenment called for a focus on particular examples and the historical or cultural influence on our understanding of things. When the Enlightenment focused on the individual, the Counter-Enlightenment focused on community and our identities as members of a tribe. When the Enlightenment produces the possibility of modern factory life, there’s a Counter-Enlightenment revival of romanticism and a call for us to return to an earlier time when human life was more connected to nature.

Two different people using the exact same process of rationality could arrive at very different conclusions about moral or political values simply because of the complexity of human experience. And, here’s the kicker that will make this have such an impact on political thought, both of those conclusions are intelligible and rational. There’s no ultimate organizing principle. There’s no logical conclusion we’re going to arrive at. There’s no mathematical or scientific answer to questions about values. There’s only human rationality and the vast array of experiences and tools that we have to pull from that will determine these “blurry answers” we’re capable of coming up with. Well, that and, to Berlin, everything that’s common among all human beings regardless of culture.

Nine preregistered studies (n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful.

This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

A funny thing happens when engineers make mistakes and feel safe when giving details about it: they are not only willing to be held accountable, they are also enthusiastic in helping the rest of the company avoid the same error in the future. They are, after all, the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items. So technically, engineers are not at all “off the hook” with a blameless PostMortem process. They are very much on the hook for helping Etsy become safer and more resilient, in the end. And lo and behold: most engineers I know find this idea of making things better for others a worthwhile exercise.

What does it mean to have a ‘blameless’ Post-Mortem? Does it mean everyone gets off the hook for making mistakes? No. Well, maybe. It depends on what “gets off the hook” means. Let me explain. Having a Just Culture means that you’re making effort to balance safety and accountability. It means that by investigating mistakes in a way that focuses on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism and the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure, an organization can come out safer than it would normally be if it had simply punished the actors involved as a remediation. Having a “blameless” Post-Mortem process means that engineers whose actions have contributed to an accident can give a detailed account of: what actions they took at what time, what effects they observed, expectations they had, assumptions they had made, and their understanding of timeline of events as they occurred. …and that they can give this detailed account without fear of punishment or retribution. Why shouldn’t they be punished or reprimanded? Because an engineer who thinks they’re going to be reprimanded are disincentivized to give the details necessary to get an understanding of the mechanism, pathology, and operation of the failure. This lack of understanding of how the accident occurred all but guarantees that it will repeat. If not with the original engineer, another one in the future.

If we have developed mutual aid networks that were well supported, along with cash income, and other kinds of support — such as universal, high-quality health care, universal high-quality education, universal high-quality housing for everybody — we would go a long way to abolishing this system. There simply would be no need for it.