Anti-fragile Faith

Among the items in the toolkit of the engaging and provocative writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, probably best known for The Black Swan, is the triad fragile, robust, and anti-fragile. Fragile things are highly vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed by the vicissitudes of time. Things that are robust are largely invulnerable to them. Things that are anti-fragile are strengthened and improved by events that destroy things that are fragile and which have no effect on what is robust.

It is interesting to apply this to systems of belief, such as those presupposed by one’s Christian faith.

One familiar possibility: someone acquires a system of beliefs in virtue of growing up in a particular community, where everyone she knows and trusts has the same beliefs. Naturally, she has them too. When she achieves adulthood and leaves that community, she encounters problems that seem insoluble, questions she cannot answer, and so on. Unsustained by the community, she abandons her faith. The likelihood of this is exacerbated when she makes no distinction between essential and inessential components of the system of beliefs. When one goes, they all go. Her beliefs form a fragile whole and do not survive the encounter with reality.

For others, beliefs are robust. All challenges, objections, questions simply bounce off, often because of an unwillingness to listen or take them seriously. Or, when they are listened to, they are met with ad hoc answers. The believer seeks to make his beliefs unfalsifiable. The belief system is a non-negotiable ideology. Taleb admires Karl Popper’s fallibilism, a view of scientific reasoning that can apply to rational thought in general. The idea is that we should not seek evidence that confirms what we believe, but aim to falsify it. We are never entitled to say that our beliefs have been corroborated, but simply that so far they have resisted serious attempts to falsify them. (This falsificationism as a general account of what scientific reasoning is, or ought to be, is undermined by the Quine-Duhem thesis. It reminds us that nature speaks no more unambiguously in disconfirmation than in confirmation, for the evidence never falsifies an hypothesis on its own, but only in conjunction with a never fully-articulated set of background assumptions. Thus, what we observe never forces us to acknowledge that a beloved belief is false.) People find it difficult to see that what they should want is belief that it easily falsifiable yet not falsified, not belief that cannot be falsified. For those with robust beliefs, their convictions endure but do not change or grow.

The third possibility is that a system of beliefs is anti-fragile. The believer takes questions, challenges, objections and so on seriously. Indeed, she takes the lead in finding challenges and objections. She sometimes modifies her beliefs in light of them. Because of this, the system of belief does not just survive, as if it were merely robust, but it improves. Taleb points out that what makes complex systems anti-fragile is the fragility of their components. Parts of the whole die with the result that the whole flourishes. Thus, for systems of belief to be anti-fragile, the distinction between essential and inessential beliefs is crucial. We need not suppose that this is a categorical distinction, with a sharp line between what is and what it not negotiable. Rather, some beliefs are more deeply entrenched in the system than others, and it takes relatively more to unseat them. Nothing is absolutely immune to falsification.

The aim of an intellectually honest faith is anti-fragility. Hard questions make it better.