No amount of data will give you a good life

Have we lost the ability to make decisions without "studies"?

I’ve been thinking about an off-hand comment made by Ezra Klein in a recent podcast episode, in conversation with Jia Tolentino. They were talking about the terrifying landscape of toddler TV, à la “CoComelon.”

Tolentino was discussing the studies she’d read about the educational value of these shows and others like it. She implied that parents should know about the results of this research, so as to make a judgment call about what their children could watch. But Klein doesn’t pick up that thread.

Instead, in a somewhat clipped and impatient tone, he says:

“I am unnerved by how much we feel the need to net everything out, whether culture is good or bad, to these very measurable outcomes about school achievement or income in 20 years or teen mental health. And it feels to me like we’ve just lost the ability to make judgments based on sort of virtues and values about when things are good and bad, like whether it is better to read a book or look at TikTok.”

We’ve lost the ability to make judgments based on virtues.

Klein was talking about parenting specifically, but I feel this in almost every realm of modern life.

We feel like we have to know what all of the research says before we can make a decision. We need to see the evidence. We need Emily Oster to tell us right from wrong. We don’t even know what our values are. And so, we hope science will tell us.

“Jalais Hill, Pontoise,” Camille Pissarro (1867)

I feel the full weight of this critique.

I’m all up in my head, my head is where I reside, and so I’m tempted to believe that data will reveal the path to a better life. If I have enough studies, if I read enough peer-reviewed research, if I comb through the evidence, I will be OK. My children will be safe. My health will not suffer. My marriage will remain strong.

Access to vast amounts of “data” and “research” make people like me feel secure.

It’s a comfort, because having a moral compass sounds complicated. And aren’t those unfashionable anyway? We’ve lost the ability to tell right from wrong, good from evil. Instead, we say, “you do you,” and “do what feels good,” and “so long as it makes you happy,” and “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

These sentiments are dead ends. The shallowness of secular humanism becomes painfully evident as soon as you start parenting—or doing anything else that’s difficult and requires you to make moral judgments.

To wit: The study said robot-generated children’s YouTube was fine, and my toddler loves it, so we just let her go at it because we can’t deal with the tantrums if we take it away. Watching porn on an endless loop feels good to my teenage son, so you do you, kid. It makes my daughter “happy” to spend nine hours a day on Instagram, learning about her self-worth and cultivating her consumerist impulses, so do what feels good, sweetheart.

Even the most devoted secular humanists start to feel icky about these sentiments. But in the absence of a moral code, to whom shall we turn? Who can tell us how to live?

If it’s no longer acceptable to say one way of living might be better than another way, we hope that “studies” will guide us. The research will tell us how to live: what kinds of groceries to buy, what amount of screen time is appropriate for our children, which disciplinary methods are most effective.

This seems like it’ll work. I don’t need a religion; I don’t have to adopt an ethical framework; I can just have science. Because science has never been wrong about anything. I will just live by the facts and the facts alone. I don’t need any person, any moral community, so long as I have a stable Internet connection and AI-powered search results.

I sometimes endeavor to live in this reality. I sometimes fool myself into thinking that I can. If I read 100 books a year and more articles than I can count, I can fashion a good life. I can be able to tell right from wrong.

Yet I’ve never been farther from the truth than when I believe in this impulse.

Studies can’t offer us morality. Even if they could, most of what we’re consuming by way of “research” is smoke and mirrors. We skim the headlines and think we know something. Most of Emily Oster’s content, for example, tells us that we can’t fall prey to panic headlines, that there hasn’t been enough research to draw any meaningful conclusion, and that there’s actually very little that science knows for certain.

If science isn’t enough, what is? My own “instincts”? Those are whimsical and weak. They may give me some good action points in a moment (i.e., does the baby need to go to the doctor, or should we just ride this one out?), but they come up short with complex situations (i.e., why should a marriage strive for fidelity and intimacy? What does that even mean?).

What Klein is getting at, albeit obliquely, is that we can’t come up with virtues on the fly, and they won’t come from a study. They need to come from somewhere else, somewhere durable. If it’s not from science and studies, virtues come from religion. For millennia, religion has provided human beings with a collective moral center, a time-tested path for deciding right from wrong, a framework for living.

The benefit of a religion, regardless of the faith tradition, is precisely that it’s a tradition. Centuries of people before you have been creating frameworks for ethics and morality and virtuous living based on our conception of the Divine.

You don’t have to go to church. You don’t have to know your Bible inside and out. But you shouldn’t rely on yourself—or a handful of academics—to determine your moral code. It has to come from without.

In this way, I am perpetually struck by the rootlessness of secular humanism. Adherents claim that their morals are based on logic and reason, but when you pull a thread, you find out they’re really just based on Judeo-Christian thought.

Here in Christendom, we’re all a little bit Christian, whether we like it or not.

As atheist David Perell writes in his essay “Why You’re Christian”:

“Our mainstream notion of human rights is also a byproduct of Christianity. Human rights exist in their modern form because the Bible says that every person is made in the image of God—imago dei. In turn, each person is granted unalienable rights, and those rights can’t be taken away. But the contract breaks down if human beings aren’t special. If humans are in the same category of every other animal, there is no intellectual scaffolding to uphold either human rights or the legal equality of man. Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.

“Without the word of God, all we have are opinions. Morality and justice are downgraded from indisputable truths to mere preferences and shared fictions. Both of those can change on a whim. In a world of one person’s word against another, the most powerful person will control the moral landscape.”

Perell writes about how the most vocal secular elites are often the most Christian of all, unwittingly. He calls this group “religious atheists” and says he’s one of them. He writes:

“I realized that society’s most passionate critics, most of whom claim to be secular, usually have the most Christian values of all. They’ve studied in elite universities, they live in major cities, and they’re proud members of the intelligentsia. Human rights, a centerpiece of their moral outlook, is inconsistent with the rest of their worldview. Though they pride themselves on evidence-based thinking, they’re intellectually bankrupt on the topic of human rights. They look down on people who inherit religion from their parents, but unquestioningly inherit ideas from the culture in which they swim and the media they consume. Though they explicitly reject the Cross, they are de facto mouthpieces for the itinerant preacher who lost his life on it. And of course, their ‘self-evident’ commitment to human rights is self-evident only because of the heavy, but unseen, hand of Christianity.”

The studies won’t save us. They won’t show us a better way. I won’t stop reading (I can’t, I’d die), but Klein’s comment has functioned as a much-needed check on my behavior.

The peer-reviewed research shall not bring about my salvation; it shall not make my family better; it shall not ultimately shape a good life. I have to consciously choose something external, something ancient, something that has endured, something that is much bigger and more mysterious and more beautiful than myself.

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