Knowledge And Decisions

In many areas, these trends have clearly continued, but in some — especially in the economic area during the 1980s — there was some movement toward reversing such trends. From a global perspective, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s both represent trends towards greater individual freedom. What history will make of these mixed trends of the past fifteen years is of course a question which only the future can answer. What can be done today is to examine these developments in more detail in social, economic, and political terms.

SOCIAL TRENDS

In one sense, it might seem that there has been a growing trend in the United States, and in Western civilization generally, toward greater individual freedom from both government control and social control. Words that could not have been used in public just a generation or so ago are now broadcast through the mass media. Both still and motion pictures that would have been banned then are today not only widely available but are even being shown to children in the public schools. Flouting convention haws become almost a convention itself and, for critics of existing society, indignation has become a way of life. As with so many other seemingly revolutionary developments in history, however, the question must be raised whether there has been a net diminution of taboos or a substitution of new taboos and repressions for old. From the standpoint of a study of the social coordination of knowledge and the role of decision-making processes, further questions must be raised as to whether these new social trends represent better or worse ways of coping with the inherent inadequacies of human knowledge when making decisions.

One of the central themes of Knowledge and Decisions is that feedback mechanisms are crucial in a world where no given individual or manageably-sized group is likely to have sufficient knowledge to be consistently right the first time in their decisions. These feedback mechanisms must convey not only information but also incentives to act on that information, whether these incentives are provided by prices, love, fear, moral codes, or other factors which cause people to act in the interest of other people. Moreover, not all information is new information. History is a vast storehouse of experience from generations and centuries past. So are traditions which distill the experiences of millions of other human beings over millennia of time. How are all these things affected by the new social trends?

Whether in the media, the arts, or educational institutions from the kindergarten to the university, old taboos have been replaced by new ones. Well-known entertainer Anita Bryant vanished from the media and became a nonperson almost immediately after voicing criticisms of homosexuality. Criticism of any aspect of the values or way of life of any racial or ethnic minority would threaten a similar social extinction to the career of any television commentator, university professor, or newspaper editorial writer so bold as to challenge the new taboos. Merely a failure to use the ever-growing list of “politically correct” terms for all sorts of things can have serious repercussions. Moreover, more than a passive imposition of taboos is involved. Very often, these taboos are accompanied by militant promotions of new social visions throughout educational, religious, and other institutions. The instruments of intimidation include vaguely-worded speech codes under which students may be punished or expelled from many colleges, insulting harangues by “diversity consultants” employed by corporations, colleges, and other institutions, and threats to the careers of military officers, civilian officials, and corporate executives who do not march in step with the new orthodoxies.

The specifics of these visions can be left to be explored elsewhere, as they have been.⁴ What is important in the present context is the question as to how they affect the coordination of knowledge and the functioning of feedback mechanisms that govern decision-making processes.

Many representatives of the new orthodoxies question the very existence of the knowledge which is crucial to decision making. To them, tested knowledge is nothing more than “socially constructed” beliefs — which can be readily replaced by other beliefs which they will construct. The many social verification processes which weed out failing notions and preserve validated knowledge thus disappear from the discourse, as if by sleight of hand, when ideas and practices are seen as merely “constructed” and thus capable of being “deconstructed,” whether in literature, law, or other fields.