Robert Conquest was a historian who published critical studies of the Soviet Union and whose famous “First Law” is, “Everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.” I did some searching on the internet, and the most authoritative source seems to be this quote from Conquest’s friend Kingsley Amis:
Further search led to this elaboration from philosopher Roger Scruton:
. . .
I agree with Scruton that we shouldn’t take the term “reactionary” (dictionary definition, “opposing political or social progress or reform”) too literally. Even Conquest, presumably, would not have objected to the law forbidding the employment of children as chimney sweeps.
The point of Conquest’s Law is that it’s easy to propose big changes in areas distant from you, but on the subjects you know about, you will respect tradition more, as you have more of an understanding of why it’s there. This makes sense, although I can also see the alternative argument that certain traditions might seem to make sense from a distance but are clearly absurd when looked at from close up. I guess it depends on the tradition.
In the realm of economics, for example, Engels, Keynes, and various others had a lot of direct experience of capitalism but it didn’t stop them from promoting revolution and reform. That said, Conquest’s Law makes sense and is clearly true in many cases, even if not always.
What motivated me to write this post, though, was not these sorts of rare exceptions—after all, most people who are successful in business are surely conservative, not radical, in their economic views—but rather an issue of selection bias.
Conquest was a successful academic and hung out with upper-class people, Oxbridge graduates, various people who were closer to the top than the bottom of the social ladder. From that perspective it’s perhaps no surprise that they were “reactionary” in their professional environments, as they were well ensconced there. This is not to deny the sincerity and relevance of such views, any more than we would want to deny the sincerity and relevance of radical views held by people with less exalted social positions. I’m sure the typical Ivy League professor such as myself is much more content and “reactionary” regarding the university system, then would be a debt-laden student or harried adjunct. I knew some people who worked for minimum wage at McDonalds, and I think their take on the institution was a bit less reactionary than that of the higher-ups. This doesn’t mean that people with radical views want to tear the whole thing down (after all, people teach classes, work at McDonalds, etc., out of their own free will), nor that reactionaries want no change. My only point here is that the results of a survey, even an informal survey, of attitudes will depend on who you think of asking.
It’s interesting how statistical principles can help us better understand even purely qualitative statements.
A similar issue arose with baseball analyst Bill James. As I wrote a few years ago:
In 2001, James wrote:
Are athletes special people? In general, no, but occasionally, yes. Johnny Pesky at 75 was trim, youthful, optimistic, and practically exploding with energy. You rarely meet anybody like that who isn’t an ex-athlete—and that makes athletes seem special.
I’ve met 75-year-olds like that, and none of them was an ex-athlete. That’s probably because I don’t know a lot of ex-athletes. But Bill James . . . he knows a lot of athletes. He went to the bathroom with Tim Raines once! The most I can say is that I saw Rickey Henderson steal a couple bases in a game against against the Orioles.
Cognitive psychologists talk about the base-rate fallacy, which is the mistake of estimating probabilities without accounting for underlying frequencies. Bill James knows a lot of ex-athletes, so it’s no surprise that the youthful, optimistic, 75-year-olds he meets are likely to be ex-athletes. The rest of us don’t know many ex-athletes, so it’s no surprise that most of the youthful, optimistic, 75-year-olds we meet are not ex-athletes. The mistake James made in the above quote was to write “You” when he really meant “I.” I’m not disputing his claim that athletes are disproportionately likely to become lively 75-year-olds; what I’m disagreeing with is his statement that almost all such people are ex-athletes. Yeah, I know, I’m being picky. But the point is important, I think, because of the window it offers into the larger issue of people being trapped in their own environments (the “availability heuristic,” in the jargon of cognitive psychology). Athletes loom large in Bill James’s world—I wouldn’t want it any other way—and sometimes he forgets that the rest of us live in a different world.
Another way to put it: Selection bias. Using a non-representative sample to drawing inappropriate inferences about the population.
This does not make Conquest’s or James’s observations valueless. We just have to interpret them carefully given the data, to get something like:
Conquest: People near the top of a hierarchy typically like it there.
James: I [James] know lots of energetic elderly athletes. Most of the elderly non-athletes I know are not energetic.