An Information-Age Fallacy

An Information-Age Fallacy
He invented the Internet. Now he wants to invent votes, under the guise of perfecting the data.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, December 7, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

--T.S. Eliot, Choruses From "The Rock"

Somewhere in this intricate endgame for the U.S. presidency there looms a warning bigger than politics. Here we are, superpower of the world, computers at our fingertips, flush with round-the-clock televised expertise on all things, the epitome of the Information Age. And a thunderclap message of these election follies is--or ought to be--that information alone does not confer wisdom.

In the case of this long and abrasive election, what was missing until the courts this Monday began ruling in favor of reason was some basic wisdom about how to settle a close vote. The core fallacy tracks back to Al Gore's original crusade not to concede a very narrow loss, but to uphold "the will of the people" by determining from badly marked ballots the supposed intent of all voters--or at least all voters in a few carefully targeted Democratic counties.

Mr. Gore, while attempting a naked power grab, has been asking the country to believe he is on an Arthurian quest for absolute truth about the vote count--demanding a state of perfect knowledge that he maintains could be had if only we count fervently enough.

By now, of course, this sounds disingenuous, with Mr. Gore waiting in hope that a judge will order predominantly Republican Seminole County to scrap a decisive number of votes for President-elect Bush by throwing out absentee ballots--ballots that do show the clearly marked will of thousands of voters.

But the idea of extracting absolute truth of intent from ever closer scrutiny of each and every questionable chad was always peculiar, because it is not humanly possible. The closest we can come in such endeavors is to devise a uniform standard to provide a reasonable guess--something already provided in the initial count and recount. Yet Mr. Gore and his circle talked on and on about making sure that not one intended vote should go unheeded. As if anyone could be sure. Yet lots of Americans bought it.

Why? My guess is they went along so readily with Mr. Gore's quest for the absolute because we live by now so deep in a flood of data that it sometimes seems that finding the total truth is largely a matter of just figuring out where to look it up, or add it up. Surely if we send in enough technicians, or spend enough time on the Internet, or watch enough television, we can master just about anything we really want to know.

Would that it were so easy.

More than at any time in history, we are able these days to measure, weigh and cross-tabulate zillions of details, from calories burned on treadmills to trade deficits with China. On my desk at the moment sit the page proofs of a new book, "The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900-2000," compiled for the American Enterprise Institute Press by Theodore Caplow, Louise Hicks and Ben Wattenberg. Offering sometimes-surprising statistics on everything from bicycle sales to book publishing, this volume makes for interesting browsing. But the authors offer the important caveat that "measurement in the social sciences does not yield certitude. The measurers, the social scientists, the politicians, the advocates, and the activists often disagree about what the data really mean."

Indeed, the disconcerting record of human experience is that often the deeper we look, the greater the mystery. Start with the neat Ptolemaic system in which the heavenly bodies revolve around the earth; proceed to the Copernican system in which the earth goes around the sun; then strap on your seatbelt for Einstein's relativistic universe and modern mankind's ability to map thousands of galaxies beyond our own. You're still stuck with the question of how it all got there, and what--in all its ever-clearer complexity--we do with it.

Not to belittle the value of information, or of knowledge that tries to knit things together. Knowing more about ourselves and our world has brought huge advances in wealth, health and, in some cases, the pursuit of happiness.

And certainly not to belittle the importance of an accurate vote count, if it is done within the realm not of political strategy but of justice. But the arrogance of assuming we can know absolutely the aims and desires of every fellow citizen--even those who muddle their ballots--is dangerous. This was the approach that on a grand scale this past century brought us the huge and costly fallacy of central planning in places from Moscow to Rangoon. Communist leaders presumed that if only they did enough monitoring and measuring, they would know how best to manage the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We know how that went.

During some of the more appalling moments of the Florida recount, my own main refuge has been literature, which at its best lays few claims to absolute truth and thereby comes closer to wisdom. For this occasion, I recommend in particular a 1944 novel by Joyce Cary, "The Horse's Mouth." Styled as the confessions of a scoundrel and con man who happens also to be a brilliant painter, this is the story of Gulley Jimson, who, whatever his petty deceits, remains true to his art.

There comes a moment when Gulley is invited to admire the boring watercolors of a rich woman who prides herself on her study of technique. If he is only polite enough, she may give him some money he wants very badly. He tries. But in the end, he can't resist telling her that while technique can be handy, she has missed the main point: "What I say is, why not do some real work, your ladyship. Use your loaf, I mean your brain. Do some thinking. Sit down and ask yourself what it's all about."

Another artist whose work offers perhaps a word of cheer on this latest political circus is the pre-Information Age poet William Blake, whose "Proverbs of Hell" include this observation: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

I hope so.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."