The Dog That Didn't Bark
From the Sin of the Spies to Sherlock Holmes and George Soros
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
“Send agents to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people…” (Numbers 13:2)
Now it happened to be the season of the first ripe grapes. They went up and scouted the land…They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes—it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them—and some pomegranates and figs. (Numbers 13:20-23)
Had the people spied out the land when it was not the season of the first ripe grapes, perhaps they would have seen nothing remarkable. The timing of their expedition ensures that they encounter both the bounty of the land they are promised and the fearsomeness of its gargantuan proportions. In this week’s parasha, Shlach, the expedition is mandated by God, meaning that it is a test. God knows they will see the large grapes and wants to see if they’ll take the bait.
God tells Moses that God is giving the land to the people. Thus, the scouting expedition is not for the purpose of deciding whether to enter the land, but how. Their risk/reward assessment is to determine their strategy for conquest, not to undermine the goal. But science—empirical investigation—is an ambigous adventure. You can’t set out to prove your priors through data-gathering without risking a change of heart in the process. What if the data proves you wrong? Or is inconclusive?
The scouts think they’re clever to highlight the risk of fighting with giants, but they don’t consider that their risk assessment is itself biased. It’s literally sample bias in the sense that they’re picking a time of particularly voluminous harvest, but it’s also sample bias in the sense that they cut a branch (zamora) and allow it to stand for the whole. The fruit and the giants stand out? But, these are obvious. What about “the dog that didn’t bark?” The error of the scouts was not that they found challenges and obstacles that made them doubt, but that they accepted their own doubt as dogma. For all the large grapes, there were plenty of normal crops. For all the giants, there were plenty of regular sized inhabitants.
“The whole community broke into loud cries, and the people wept that night.” (Numbers 14:1) What begins as just looking at the facts and examining the data turns to mass hysteria. The people are sent on a deductive expedition (find out how to make X true) but take it as an inductive one (see if X is true or not). What they end up doing, though, is not really inductive either. They simply reject the premise. Because I’m being asked to accept X as true (the land is conquerable), I’m going to insist that X is false (the land cannot be conquered). Moreover, the spies fail at modal logic—no amount of description of what is the case can secure us against what might become the case.
What is true, though, is the reflexive nature of their endeavor. Their panic ensures that they fail to enter the land. God doesn’t simply punish the people for their error, but, we might say, in secular terms, simply gives them back what they ask for. They create a kind of self-fulfilling bubble. The Torah offers us a skepticism about the human ability to find objective truth. Whatever we think is wrong. It’s just a question of how wrong. We can aspire to be less wrong, but not without bias. According to Gödel there is a truth that lies outside of any given system which cannot be proved within that system. That truth, in our parasha, is that the people are being given the land. This given can’t be determined by scouting, but must be accepted on faith. The land is a stand-in for the given itself, the idea that some truths must be accepted as gifts, rather than acquired through reason. At the same time, the people must enter the land using human tools, and engaging in risk assessment, so the challenge is how we marry the two. Faith without empiricism is empty, empiricism without faith is directionless or self-inflated.
In the middle ages, it was common to seek to prove God’s existence. But the Torah may offer us a more radical point: God is that which casts aspersion on proof. God is that which tells us that very little can be inferred from fat grapes. It’s an iconoclastic message, one which we find in the Midrashim about Abraham’s relationship to idols. Idolatry is certainty. Certainty is idolatry. Negative certainty, certain negativity, is just as much a problem as naive belief. The gullible contemporaries of Abraham who bowed down to idols are not dissimilar from the militant materialist atheists who insist that what we see and measure exhausts what is. Monotheism asks us to listen out for the dog that didn’t bark. Incidentally, this also seems to be the method of investor George Soros, who takes the view that all systems are vulnerable and fundamentally imbalanced. What a profound lesson to take with one even as one fights, even as one seeks to fulfill promises, even as one pursues sovereignty, and a life of devotion and goodness.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins