What a Society's Conventional Wisdom Says About It

Some time ago I devoted a post to the concept of the "conventional wisdom." Most of the time people speak of it with respect--but as John Kenneth Galbraith discussed it, when actually coining the phrase, he assumed a critical standpoint. He presented an essentially pragmatic case for the value of a conventional wisdom, specifically saving people the time and trouble of figuring every little thing out for themselves, and arguing over it every time they dealt with another person. But that did not mean that a particular piece of conventional wisdom was sound--and indeed the whole reason for the discussion was that, as he saw it, the conventional wisdom with which he was concerned was simply wrong (as he sought to demonstrate in the relevant book).

Looking back it seems worth acknowledging that the reliance on conventional wisdom is probably unavoidable in social life--because no one has enough time to have a genuinely well-considered opinion on everything. But in a society in a healthy state--where those who take the lead in figuring things out are willing and able to face up to the task, where the "marketplace of ideas" is genuinely operative because of a free flow of information and debate rather dogma--that conventional wisdom is apt to decently, usefully, approximate reality.

In a society in an unhealthy one it is otherwise, perhaps to the point that looking at the conventional wisdom in area after area of life an intelligent person sees little but idiocy.

Few, I think, from any point of the ideological spectrum, would care to insist that the state of things today is healthy.