Preview of a New Podcast

And reflections on the birth dearth, psychological safety, and knowledge

Welcome to another edition of The Mueller Report!

Updates

I had a short work trip to Montgomery this week. I thought I was being clever (and thrifty) flying into Atlanta and driving two hours rather than hopping through Birmingham down to Montgomery. Maybe that was right, but I am not a fan of the Atlanta airport, or the surrounding area, or the rental car company I used.

Despite touching down around 6:10, I didn’t leave the rental car place until about 7:45. The taxing was normal, but then it took 15 minutes to get to the baggage claim, an additional ten-minute wait for the bags, close to ten minutes to take the Skytrain to the rental car area, and then a twenty to thirty minute wait for the shuttle.

Then, in returning, it took me a good 15-20 minutes to find a place to get gas near the airport – traffic and some really rundown gas stations contributed to this. In fact, I ran into many run down places in south Atlanta and in Montgomery… When returning, I took an Uber from the rental car place (having learned my lesson), and then had a mediocre security screening experience. All in all, I felt very underwhelmed by America’s busiest airport.

The conference itself was great. About a dozen of us were workshopping a series of papers on ESG for a special edition of a journal. When you get a good mix of people in the room, the conversation flows well and raises many interesting ideas and perspectives. It’s nice to be able to participate in these kinds of events still.

Writing

I had a piece on Volkswagen and German industrial policy come out this week at The American Spectator: Import Germany’s Cars, Not Its Policies. I submitted a book review and a column about housing that will come out sometime in the next few weeks. Here’s an excerpt from the book review of Hannah’s Children:

Birthrates around the world are plummeting. In the United States, birthrates have declined from over 3 births on average per woman to 1.7 births on average per woman in 2024. The vast majority of countries in the world have birth rates below replacement (China – 1.2, S. Korea - .8, Italy – 1.2, Jamaica – 1.3, etc.). There is not a single country in the world whose birthrate is trending up. Secularization certainly drives much of this trend, but even religious communities have seen steady declines in their fertility rates. Significant economic forces and technological developments are at work. Yet it turns out that subjective value can more than offset these forces.

At the same time, as children became less important as producers in a family, they became more important as consumers themselves and in the “consumption” of their parents. The cultural expectations of what parents ought to spend on their children to maintain external status or to feel good about their parenting, rises dramatically as families become wealthier. From clothes to sports to music lessons to vacations to dental and orthodontic work, it has become possible to spend increasing amounts of money on one’s children to “keep up with the Jones’.”

Even as the monetary benefits of children declined to negligibility and the monetary costs associated with children grew rapidly, a third phenomenon took place. The opportunity cost of having children rose dramatically and relentlessly, especially for women.

Although religious belief seems to be a necessary condition (with only one exception among the fifty-five cases that seems to prove the rule), Pakaluk emphasizes that religion is far from sufficient. Average fertility in basically every religious group has seen similar declines to the non-religious. Even Utah’s birthrate has dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. The women in this study are truly outliers based upon how they value children. Far less important was how wealthy they were, how large of a family they grew up in, or being religious.

Pakaluk’s findings suggest that government programs to increase birthrates will not have much of an effect because they do not change women’s demand for children, only the quantity demanded. It only changes the price – which leads to small increases on the margin when the demand curve is small and inelastic. Such policies will not create the step-change politicians want to achieve.

Changing women’s demand for children requires something else; a subtle but critical shift in how they value children altogether. Tastes, preferences, beliefs, these matter most when it comes to having many children. For the women Pakaluk surveyed, dollars and cents were only a drop in the bucket of their decision to have children.

Reflection

Pastor Tanner brought up the idea of “psychological safety” in his sermon this past Sunday in the context of truth-seeking. He argued that many people hear the truth rarely or never because they react angrily, even violently, to the message and/or the messenger. If you do this, he said, people will stop telling you the truth. This is the case for individuals as well as for organizations.

I reflected on the term “psychological safety” and how it has been twisted and misused in our society. Many people use the term to justify the need for “safe spaces,” censorship, and the idea that speech can entail harm, even violence. After all, if there can be psychological safety there can also be psychological danger.

So how do we reconcile or distinguish the positive uses of the term from the negative? Because Christians should work towards creating psychological safety – which is really simply an outworking of humility, kindness, and charity. But does that mean Christians should be silent on topics that make people feel “unsafe” or “uncomfortable?” I think not.

The confusion of modern society stems from thinking that psychological safety/unsafety depends on the content of what is said. They think that certain ideas or claims – truth even – can be “unsafe” because it offends or “threatens” those who disagree. But this is not right. A proper understanding of psychological safety turns on the conduct, behavior, or actions of people when they speak, not the content of their speech.

Another way to put this is that one’s demeanor matters for promoting psychological safety, not one’s opinions or beliefs. This is obvious when you consider how human beings interact. Deeply offensive or troubling ideas can be put forward gently and thoughtfully while what should be uncontroversial truths can be put forward bombastically or angrily. The loss of this distinction leads to cancel culture and censorship.

It’s critical that we hold the line on this distinction so that we can be truth-hearers and truth-tellers

Bookshelf

Before laying out some of Polanyi’s ideas in part two of Personal Knowledge, I’m excited to give you a preview of the inaugural episode of a new podcast a couple friends and I are launching (tentatively called “Beta Thinking”). The conversation is about seventy minutes long. There is also a video of the conversation as well if you are interested. The audio and video will be better for our second conversation. Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

In part two, Polanyi has three long, seemingly unrelated chapters: Articulation, Intellectual Passions, and Conviviality. Though the chapters seem disconnected, they all touch on how and why we know things. In his chapter on Articulation, Polanyi claims that language and speech are the foundation of man’s intelligence. It not only separates us from animals in terms of our ability to communicate, but more importantly in terms of our ability to think.

This is not a particularly new insight – Aristotle noted a couple thousand years ago that speech was fundamental to human society, culture, and thought. Polanyi has a nice discussion of language though. He divides language into two types, representation and operation. Representative language are words that correspond to objects and traits in the world (i. e. tree, green, car, sky). Operational language are words that connote activities and relationships – verbs, prepositions, adverbs, etc. (i. e. is, will, like).

Language is extremely powerful because it is “under-determined” – meaning that words can serve double and triple duty in terms of their meanings. They also have less precision than mathematics. But this makes them incredible tools for thought. Polanyi points out that in a library of a million volumes, a mere 10,000 words or so make up more than 90% of those volumes.

Because language develops thought, we should handle it thoughtfully: “To speak is to contrive signs, to observe their fitness, and to interpret their alternative relations; though the animal possess each of these three faculties, he cannot combine them.” He has a several other interesting comments including: “we can never quite know what is implied in what we say” and “We have a comparatively safe knowledge of the most frequently used words, but this assured vocabulary is surrounded by a swarm of half-understood expressions which we hardly ever venture to use at all. This hesitation reflects a sense of intellectual uneasiness, which induces us to grope for greater clarity and coherence.”

He uses a personal example of how language gives us access to knowledge beyond the language itself. He studied to be a doctor in Hungary. When learning pulmonary radiology, initially the x-rays meant nothing. Listening to doctors talking about the x-ray did not mean much to him. But over time, as he learned the language of pulmonary radiology he developed categories to analyze and understand what he was looking at in the x-rays.

What is particularly interesting, though, is he talks about moving to the UK and working as a scientist for many years. He didn’t know all the English terms for pulmonary radiology, and he forgot some of the Hungarian terms in pulmonary radiology, yet he still mostly knew how to analyze x-rays and diagnose the problems nonetheless. Language was the gateway to knowledge, but much of that knowledge, once gained, remained even when much of the language was forgotten.  

Polanyi describes education as “latent knowledge.” His discussion implies a couple things. First, it explains why we shouldn’t (and can’t) outsource all of our knowledge to Google or ChatGPT. Our ability to think depends on language and content in our minds. Without “latent knowledge,” we won’t even know what questions to ask AI agents, let alone interpret and assess their responses. Although encyclopedic knowledge, especially of minutia, matters much less with modern technology – education probably matters even more.

A second implication of this chapter is that we should prioritize language acquisition for ourselves and our children. Having a simple, limited vocabulary constrains not only our ability to communicate eloquently, but even our ability to think well. Those with limited language have fewer categories, less fine distinctions, less precision, and less clarity. Fuzzy or emotive thinking are often the result of limited language acquisition.

Polanyi’s next chapter on “Intellectual Passions” explores why and how people pursue knowledge. From the title, you can guess that passion drives much of this. Polanyi argues that passion is a kind of “heuristic” or aid for discovery. Kepler and Einstein were not dispassionate, disinterested scientists. They were extremely passionate about their theories. Part of their passion derived from the eloquence and the beauty of their theories. Polanyi suggests that the beauty of a theory also represents its power to reveal truth about nature.

He also makes a useful distinction between a competent authority and a supreme authority. Scientific opinion he recognizes as a competent authority and so he will submit to its judgment in most things. Yet scientific advance comes about precisely because that authority is not absolute and can be questioned. I believe this has a parallel in how members of a church should think about their leaders – a competent, but not supreme, authority.

This chapter also distinguishes science from invention and from mathematics. Science observes. Invention contrives. Mathematics understands. We judge success in these fields differently. Is it true or false? Did is succeed or did it not succeed?

Polanyi has a nice comment about contemplation: “Contemplation dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them.” Christianity is important, in this respect, because “Christian worship sustains, as it were, an eternal, never to be consummated hunch” and “sedulously fosters, and in a sense permanently satisfies, man’s craving for mental dissatisfaction by offering him the comfort of a crucified God.”

The end of the chapter says some important things relevant to “enchantment” and “disenchantment” (for those of you who are familiar with Charles Taylor’s work). Mystery and understanding can actually be closely related. In a certain way, as we understand things, they become less mysterious. Yet in another way, greater understanding often opens up new vistas of mystery to our minds. Polanyi argues that although our knowledge is personal, it is not necessarily subjective.

Personal knowledge goes through a process of verification and validation. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is not verified or validated – it is merely authentic “and authenticity does not involve a commitment in the sense in which both verification and validation do.” Therefore, someone’s feelings and impressions can be authentic without constituting knowledge.

Returning to the ideas of psychological safety above, someone may be truly offended or even a little scared by certain ideas, without their feelings having any bearing on the ideas themselves. Like I often tell my children, “I realize you feel that way, but that feeling is not really appropriate or right,” when the catastrophize things, for example, or lose their tempers.

One of the most chilling and important passages from this chapter lays bear the evils of “deconstructionism”. Polanyi writes:

“You can destroy meaning wholesale by reducing everything to its uninterpreted particulars. By paralysing [sic] our urge to subordinate one thing to another, we can eliminate all subsidiary awareness of things in terms of others and create an atomized, totally depersonalized universe. In it the pebble in your hand, the saliva in your mouth and the word in your ear all become external, absurd and hostile items. This universe is the counterpart of the cosmic vision, with despair taking the place of hope. It is the logical outcome of utterly distrusting our participation in holding our beliefs. Left strictly to itself, this is what the world is like.”

His chapter on Conviviality explores the community in which knowledge can be verified and validated. He argues that societies need a significant amount of trust in order to filter knowledge appropriately. The Soviets were an example of how truth itself seemed to lose its meaning as the authorities tried to “define” what is true and what is not. It is like in George Orwell’s 1984, where truth itself is abolished in favor of propaganda. In this environment, Soviet dissidents in the easter bloc and like Solzhenitsyn, had a heightened appreciation for truth – both ontologically and as a personal commitment.

Unfortunately, authoritarian ideologies, like Marxism, have taken the moral high ground by 1) purporting to be scientific and 2) laying bare the bankruptcy of morality itself. The deep irony, of course, is that Marxism or materialism is laden with morality. And it is seen as a moral authority because it debunks morality. This path leads to nihilism, or as Polanyi writes: “Having arrived at this stage, the modern intellectual will include himself in his nauseated contempt for the moral and cultural futility of his time. Have rendered the universe utterly meaningless, he himself dissolves in a universal wasteland.”

If that doesn’t describe the fate of modern philosophers like Sartre, Derrida, and a host of others, I’m not sure what does. Furthermore, “The elite of a modern revolutionary party is trained, on the contrary, to exercise its political bias to the utmost. “Its members’ whole education’ (writes Hannah Arendt) ‘is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and fiction. Their superiority consists in the ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.” Sounds a lot like our modern media…

I hope that gives you a sense of what Polanyi writes about in part two. The second episode of our podcast is a ninety-minute conversation about these three chapters.

Game Corner

My youngest has really gotten into a game called Spot It. The game play is easy and engaging. There are circular cards with about a dozen images on them. Each player starts with a card. The stack of remaining cards is placed face up. When a player finds a similar image, they call it out and put that card on top of their stack. Every card shares only one image with every other card. The images vary in size across the cards. Whoever collects the most cards wins.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!