Swamps v Sceptics

It can’t be a wildly uncommon issue this. You have a friend, relative or acquaintance who is pleasant, easy to talk to, intelligent and quite well-informed. Yet something is missing - you sometimes wish that he or she would be more sceptical.

Perhaps you wish that this friend, relative or acquaintance would be less inclined to believe official explanations, the media or TV news. Less prone to accept conventional viewpoints as facts without questioning them.


The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular; nor does it assure me that not to live would not, for this very reason, be far safer and saner. To be dead and have no opinions would certainly not be to discover the truth ; but if all opinions are necessarily false, it would at least be not to sin against intellectual honour. Let me then push scepticism as far as I logically can, and endeavour to clear my mind of illusion, even at the price of intellectual suicide.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


Suppose we consider two aspects to intelligence. Firstly the traditional aspect of IQ and some vague add-ons such as retained knowledge and verbal agility. Secondly Santayana’s scepticism, clearing the mind of illusions about good or bad, true or false, dishonest or honest and so on.

Of the two, scepticism seems to be more important in that it is much less likely to lead us into illusions. As communication has become easier and broader over the past century or so, and especially in the digital age, popular illusions have become bigger, far more heavily promoted and more swamp-like. Even people who may be conventionally intelligent are sucked in if they are not natural sceptics.

Can scepticism be taught and learned? Possibly not.


…the faculty of judgment is a special talent which cannot be taught, but must be practised. This is what constitutes our so-called mother-wit, the absence of which cannot be remedied by any schooling. For although the teacher may offer, and as it were graft into a narrow understanding, plenty of rules borrowed of others, the faculty of using them rightly must belong to the pupil himself, and without that talent no precept that may be given is safe from abuse.

Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (1781)


Kant’s mother-wit is a close relative of scepticism in this respect - without that talent no precept that may be given is safe from abuse. Including the scientific method, basic economic realities and even simple arithmetic.

An unfortunate effect of this vast swamp-like nature of modern illusions is that they resist change. Money is involved, often huge amounts of money. Plus reputations, education, careers, mortgages and an impossibly complex morass of vested interests.

Sceptics need the patience of Job in addition to their scepticism, because reality may take decades to drain away yet another swampy illusion.