Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with desiring clear and precise ideas. And there are plenty of cases in which the truth is fairly simple. Being honest, working hard, and persevering through difficult times — these are clear and precise ideas that are also true. We only make them complex when we’re trying to get around them!
Similarly, the modern scientific process has helped explain millions of things about the natural world over the past several centuries, introducing clarity where there was much confusion. The modern engineering process has likewise enabled us to design precise tools that have brought about unparalleled prosperity in the past several hundred years.
But the above sentence is a trick quiz — it wasn’t science and engineering alone that caused this tremendous increase in prosperity! The advent of liberal democracy, the reformation of religious views, the introduction of freer trade, “great men” from Martin Luther to George Washington to Winston Churchill — or Jethro Tull to John Deere to Luther Burbank, to use agricultural examples — all contributed to this. In other words, our modern freedom and high standard of living does not have a monocausal explanation.
We should be great skeptics of monocausal explanations. The world is too complex for a single thing to be the cause of any other thing. Our ecological understanding of plant-microbe interactions is a great example of this — the deeper we dig into these synchronous relationships, the more complex it becomes.
Consider a modern debate in which both sides have taken up monocausal explanations. The one team says that vaccines cause autism. In its purest form, this argument is literally impossible to prove. We can’t do controlled, double-blind tests on humans — that would be unethical — so we can’t say with certainty that this one thing causes autism. The other tribe argues just as vehemently that vaccines don’t cause autism. But the same logic applies — we haven’t subjected human beings to lifelong laboratory tests, so we can’t say this with absolute confidence.
On both ends of the spectrum, then, is a clear, but false, idea. Both arguments are very 140-character-tweetable. But the truth, which isn’t as easy to communicate on social media, is more complex. Vaccines probably cause inflammation … but so do many things. What about all the other environmental factors? Pesticides, heavily processed foods, endocrine disruptors in water supplies, etc. All could be contributors to the increase in autism. And what about the benefits of vaccines? It’s not ridiculous to argue that the benefits of not having polio outweigh the potential risks.
In other words, monocausal explanations — attributing complex outcomes to a unique, simple reason — is the singular problem of our society today.
Or … it’s at least one of them. There are many casualties when we engage in monocausality.
And that’s the view from the country.
