Russell's Fear That Culture Decides Truth

Many of the modernist philosophers — Russell prominently among them — were deeply afraid of a particular possibility: that culture is what determines what counts as reasonable.

If culture decides what is right and wrong, true and false, sane and mad, then there is no appeal beyond it. A society could declare anything, and there would be no standpoint from which to say it was mistaken. So they searched hard for an objective criterion, something outside the social process that could adjudicate it.

They did not find one. And I want to argue that the conclusion usually drawn from this failure is exactly backwards.

The Concession

They do not get their criterion — not even from science.

Science's test is statistical and empirical, verifiable by a large group of independent checkers. That is an extraordinarily good procedure and it has earned everything it has achieved. But it remains a social process. What gets accepted is what survives scrutiny by a community, using standards that community maintains, with instruments it agreed to trust.

It reaches conclusions far more objective than any other process we have. But not objective in the certain, Platonic sense the modernists wanted — not a direct line to the structure of reality that bypasses human judgement entirely.

So the fear was justified. Society really is what decides. The postmodern observation, stated carefully, is correct.

Why the Usual Conclusion Is Wrong

What is normally drawn from this is deflationary: if truth is socially determined, then no claim is better than any other, and the whole apparatus of evidence is a power move.

That does not follow, and the gap between the premise and that conclusion is where all the interesting work lives.

Grant that society decides. It follows immediately that how society is organised to decide is the most important question there is. Not a reason for despair — a reason for intense practical interest. If the mechanism is all we have, the mechanism had better be good.

Where Unreasonable Positions Come From

Here is the empirical claim that makes this actionable.

When a society adopts assumptions that are plainly stupid, look for the beneficiary. You will generally find a strong minority group pushing the adoption — racism, extremist religion, an industry with something to protect.

Wherever an unreasonable position holds durably, there is some group, usually a minority, that stands to gain from its being held. These positions do not arise from open discussion and lose; they arise from one group preaching to a majority that has no particular stake and no reason to check.

That is a mechanism, and mechanisms can be interfered with.

What Western Democracy Got Half Right

Its pluralism has genuinely moderated the influence of minority groups over public discourse. You can no longer easily prevent an opposing view from being stated, and that was real progress.

But it has not eliminated their influence over society as a whole. Minorities still make decisions, still set curricula, still determine which questions are fundable. The discourse was opened while the decision-making stayed where it was.

The remedy is not a better criterion of truth — there is not one on offer. It is to open the decisions the way we opened the discourse: a true democracy in which we argue about the issues rather than about who occupies which office.

The Conclusion

Yes, society decides what is true, who is sane, what is thinkable. That is the situation and no philosophy will get us out of it.

Precisely because that is the situation, we must ensure there are no strong minority groups able to drag the process toward unreasonable criteria. The postmodern observation is correct, and it is an argument for democratising the mechanism rather than for abandoning the notion of getting things right.

Russell was afraid of the right thing. He drew the wrong conclusion — that we need an escape from the social process. We need a better one.