Letter From The Editor

When I first read Isaac Asimov’s classic, science fiction Foundation trilogy it was hard for me to accept the basic premise of the world: an advanced science called “psychohistory” is developed far into the future which allows scientists to predict the future and guide human development. This “science” isn’t good enough to predict every future event perfectly, but given a large enough population and precise enough statistics one can predict major historical events. I felt as though Asimov was using science like a crystal ball, granting magical powers to statisticians to peer into the future. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading the trilogy, but I struggled to suspend my disbelief that science could ever be so precise and predictive about human behavior.

But this was before Freakonomics, the book by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, had made microeconomics a popular concept, and before Target was predicting pregnancies based on their vast data on consumer buying habits, and before we carried around pocket computers which could calculate and chart how many calories we burned each day, down to the minute. A decade or so after I first read Asimov’s trilogy, the concept of using incredibly complex calculations to predict the future seems almost commonplace.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had a quite different reaction to reading Foundation: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon [the founder of psychohistory], using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.” He goes on to admit that “on good days” he still feels “as if we’re making progress in” shaping human development through fields like economics. For Krugman, psychohistory is an exaggeration of our abilities, but it is not fundamentally a misguided concept.

Certainly, “psychohistory” is still fiction, but the essential concept behind it–that we can achieve an almost god-like perception on our lives through careful planning and calculations–this is the world we live in, now. Given enough data about our world, and enough time and minds to work on it, we can discover the optimal way to do anything–pragmatism has come of age.

Maybe the most obvious place to see this is in government policies. The spirit behind soda bans, for example, is a pragmatic vision of how to shape communities’ health. In principle, there’s nothing dangerous about a Big Gulp, but from the perspective of statistics and human behavior, it’s not hard to see how reduced soda sizes would have a dramatic effect on the well-being of a population. By altering society in this small way, we can save billions in health care costs in the future. We object, and rightfully so I think, that such bans are examples of a Nanny State, attempts at social engineering. And that’s right. This is social engineering. But what isn’t, these days?

This move toward pragmatism has influenced Christian rhetoric as well and has produced a quite fierce reaction from some believers. A good friend once said to me concern the evangelical pro-life movement, that we need to decide whether our goal is to reduce the total number of abortions performed, or to outlaw abortions, because they aren’t necessarily the same goals. He was correct, I think. And this line of thinking has led to pro-life actions like pregnancy counseling centers, which reduce the perceived need for an abortion by equipping and caring for mothers. On the other side, some evangelicals argue from their principles that if you don’t call the mother who aborts her child a “murderer,” then you are lying to her.

It also affects our policy selection. In our arguments against same sex marriage and abortion and a myriad of other issues, we have often taken the lead of our secular counterparts by citing the harm these sins do to the world. This is an essentially pragmatic argument: same sex marriages produce mentally unstable children, therefore it ought to be banned.

Of course, the great problem with the romantic optimism of pragmatism is that despite how careful and knowledgeable we are now, we still misinterpret the data. If our argument against same sex marriage is based on studies which have shown it to be a harmful institution, what will we do when studies show the opposite? Will we abandon our prophetic voice when our only reason for opposing an act is that God has called it sin?

These are the kinds of hard questions believers need to ask themselves. Pragmatism calls us to systematically program our lives until we run at optimal efficiency. But principles have their weaknesses as well. Ignoring the facts about our world–how we live, and the effects of the millions of little decisions we make each day–in the name of principles can be destructive in its own way.

Alternatively, I believe Christians should seek to live as wise stewards of their lives, a people who delight in the allusiveness of the world–a world which cannot fundamentally be reduced to any series of studies or research. We need a Christian humanism that embraces the value of pragmatism without being enslaved by it. As our society becomes increasingly guided by the wisdom of “Studies have shown that,” our challenge will be learning to be faithful to the wisdom of Scripture as it speaks to our lives and society, while discerningly using the insights of sciences.

–Alan Noble, Managing Editor