Science is often compared with, unfavorably or favorably depending on who you ask, religion. While religion is closed, science is open. Religion is unempirical while science seeks to understand the natural world. Religion requires faith while science requires evidence. Science is, of course, immensely important to modern life. Unfortunately, the popularization of science is undermining some of the very values which make science so useful.
Science has become a buzzword. You can buy t-shirts with the phrase “because science.” By itself, this is not objectionable. It reflects wonder at our understanding of the laws of nature which govern our existence. However, it also reflects more disturbing trends. The idea that science reveals Truths, with a capital T. Science is no longer about the process of discovery, but rather the forced acceptance of certain facts. Rejection of those facts implies anti-thesis to science.
I don’t mean to science should never be used to inform the ignorant. Vaccines are a perfect example of established science being ignored with deadly consequences. GMOs are another example. However, too often the certainty of the hard sciences is applied where no such certainty exists.
Bill Nye embodies some of the less admirable qualities of the trend. As a popularizer of science, he displays a confidence in some of his beliefs far above the degree warranted. For example, he claims it is a myth that “we give money to Africa and nothing changes.” Then he summarizes data showing that infant mortality has improved. While not technically false, he shows a basic misunderstanding of the complexity of economics. The fact that infant mortality improved as aid was being given hardly proves that aid itself improves infant mortality. Further, economists have reached a consensus that foreign aid, while able to improve lives, cannot spark economic growth.
Every so often, David Brooks comes very close to getting it, but he’s never quite willing to take his arguments to their logical conclusion. Like back in March, he wrote that “The real power in the world is not military or political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their consent.” Or this week:
The answer is to use Lee Kuan Yew means to achieve Jeffersonian ends — to become less democratic at the national level in order to become more democratic at the local level. At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections.
The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms.
This is an obvious contradiction, and Larison calls him out for it:
Brooks doesn’t explain how making the federal government even less responsive and accountable than it is now will improve or strengthen local government. It’s just supposed to happen. If Brooks’ idea were ever put into practice, it would likely to generate even stronger resentment of the entire political system, and it would produce a backlash against the concentration of power at the federal level.
*****
On Tuesday evening Mark and I caught a think-tank salon double feature, starting at AEI to see Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge talking about their new book The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (not to be confused with Herr Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory), followed by F.H. Buckley on his new book about the “rise of crown government in America.”
In a sense the two were polar opposites of one another; in person the two Economist editors had the same eternal optimism that characterizes the magazine’s editorial voice, whereas Buckley’s talk consisted mostly of gloomy aphorisms. On a conceptual level too, though all were deeply concerned about structural deficits and entitlement sustainability, the two Brits’ contention was essentially that Reagans and Thatchers eventually come along to fix these things.
And yet, if the postwar West demonstrates anything, it’s the ability of democracies to decay resiliently. In the Q&A Mark raised the possibility that America could easily muddle on with high inflation and unemployment for years; there isn’t some sort of Reagan kill switch to flip when things get especially bad, and the exigencies of our quadrennial presidential elections mean that the right man for the job could take several cycles to come around.
They claim the challenge for the West — to “get fit,” as they put it, for a competition with Chinese authoritarian capitalism that represents a “much more profound” challenge than the Soviet Union ever did — is an existential one. They pointed, somewhat suspiciously, toward Indian PM-elect Narendra Modi’s stated desire to emulate Chinese growth, as indicating the stakes involved. Shinzo Abe is also concerned.
The trouble is that eventually social-democratic turpitude gets so bad that the inevitable reaction is too immoderate for good classical liberals like Micklethwait and Wooldridge to support — witness the Economist’s hostility to Modi. They’re also somewhat hostile to decentralization in general — during the talk, Micklethwait expressed doubts about the scalability of Singapore-style public services.
So, we seem to have reached an impasse. We are told to wait for a budget-cutting savior — somehow put in power by an electorate that gets more economically left-wing every election — at which time, pace David Brooks, a cadre of expert technocrats will balance the budget, enact populist tax reforms, and deign to grant the states some token of decentralization. Maybe they can set their own drinking ages again, or something.
Does this strike you as a wise course of action? Does it make any sense at all?
In America, what seems clear is that getting out of our social-democratic morass requires a withdrawal of consent at the state level, where political power still lies with the Republicans. The tea party seems to be coming to the conclusion that an Article V convention is the best way to accomplish that, though the devil is in the details (wording of the petitions, exactly what amendments will be up for debate, etc). For what it’s worth, here are some that have been debated; I’m much more enthusiastic about the first four than the last two:
Repeal the 17th Amendment to make senators accountable to their states, not parties and special interests.
Repeal the Apportionment Act and bring the size of Congress more in line with a country of 300 million people. If progressives object that this would be unruly, that’s simply a reason for them to meet less often.
An amendment to allow a majority of state legislatures to veto tax increases.
Some sort of repeal amendment, to make sure there is some state-level recourse for things like Obamacare, which has a somewhat dubious provenance.
A Niskanen/Amash-style balanced budget amendment that allows some countercyclical spending.
Repeal the 26th Amendment — States should be able to set their own voting ages, because screw you kids.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge suggest to today’s right-thinking progressive that today’s overburdened social democracies raise the question of, ‘what is the state for?’ In other words, what is the minimum amount of services we expect it to provide for people. This is inherently threatening to the sort of person whose answer is always ‘more’ and ‘by any means necessary.’ And in a country as notoriously moderate and deliberative as the U.K., maybe that conversation is possible, but neither American party seems interested in having it.
The Article V-ers are asking a very different, nomocratic question: How can we arrange the structure of American government to produce better outcomes in the long-run, and mitigate the short-term bias problems of democracy? I’m not sure our center-right thought leaders are quite as serious. To the extent that those in power aren’t willing to talk about this kind of structural reform, extraconstitutional means of withdrawing consent do start to become more attractive.
It has become cliché to make comparisons of the modern world to Orwell’s 1984. Government collection of metadata means we are always being watched. Homeland Security illustrates the penetration of doublespeak in our lives. That we are engaged in a never-ending war against terrorism is analogous to having “always been at war with Eastasia.”
However, despite many important parallels, I find the primary theme of 1984 to be an inaccurate portrayal of modern life. 1984 imagines the evil of unified power. It is personified through Big Brother. The primary theme, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” is simply not apt.
Most people do not feel the boot on their face. Obama, despite the fact he occasionally drones children, is not Big Brother. Homeland Security is not the Ministry of Love, it is the DMV with police powers. Rather than the horrors of totalitarian dictatorship, we have the horrors of rampant, dysfunctional bureaucracy.
“Brazil,” directed by Terry Gilliam and loved by those who have seen it, captures these themes expertly. It follows Sam Lowry, a low-level bureaucrat with fantasies about saving a woman from his dreams.
A clerical error leads to the imprisonment, looking very much like a modern SWAT raid, of a Mr. Archibald Buttle, instead of terrorist Archibald Tuttle. This is reminiscent of putting Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list because of a clerical error. It took 8 years for the government to admit its error.
Later, Archibald Tuttle, an air conditioning repairman gone rogue because of his dislike of paperwork, helps Sam fix his air conditioning. I can’t help but think of licensing laws and how they keep people impoverished.
Overall, the picture is painted is not one of evil, but incompetence. The bureaucracy is impossible to navigate, but no one is responsible. It is the result of human action but not human design. Our world today is the same.
Just a thought: the editor of the New York Times is a Southerner for the first time since Howell Raines, and the editor of the New York Times Magazine, while not technically from the South, was educated in Virginia and has spent most of his career in Texas. In any case, Silverstein’s hiring has been characterized as bold and slightly exotic; a line like this is typical, “an eyebrow-raising choice that brings a bit of Southwestern swagger to a position traditionally held by New York media insiders.”
Richard Fossey also hopes the elevation of Baquet, who is from New Orleans and went to Catholic school, means they’ll lighten up on the Catholic-baiting.
Anyone who has bothered to read Ludwig von Mises immediately knows that the answer is no. However, because of a few out of context quotations from his book, Liberalism, every few years he is attacked as one. The most recent offender is Michael Lind, making such ridiculous arguments I wonder if Poe’s law applies to Salon.
He quotes Mises:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Now this quotation looks bad. Mises literally writes that fascism has saved European civilization. However, it is important to consider the context within which Mises was writing. The Soviet Union was about a decade old and had already starved 3-10 million people under war communism. The output of heavy industry had fallen to 20 percent of 1913. Communist parties were all over Europe and close to power.
Mises, out of all people, stood to be most horrified by this. He wrote the most penetrating critique of communism, warning of the impossibility of rationally allocating resources without prices. Prices were only meaningful with private property and market transactions. Fascism, on the other hand, was a new phenomenon. Hitler hadn’t taken power in Europe. Fascists had not started any wars. They had not yet committed genocide.
Hindsight is 20-20. Perhaps it is too much to expect Mises to be knowledgeable about the future evils of fascism — wait, no it isn’t. Mises was a genius. Let’s quote the entire passage rather than the two sentences Michael Lind does.
So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
So, not only does Mises dislike fascism in 1927, he also fully realizes the threat to European peace that it is. He takes the likelihood of what fascism will lead to as so obvious it “requires no further discussion.” Viewing fascism as anything more than an “emergency makeshift” would be a “fatal error.”
Reading the full passage it is clear that Mises had a nuanced and amazingly prescient understanding of fascism. Forced to choose between two of the greatest evils of the 20th century, he chose the fascists, fully recognizing where they would lead if they retained power and warning against it.
Now, unlike Michael Lind I try to be reasonable. I read passages in full, and do not selectively quote to obscure meaning. That being said, based on my reading of Liberalism I am forced to conclude Mises was a time traveler. It is the only possible explanation of such brilliance.
As a bonus, if you’re interested in what Mises wrote about the domestic policy of fascism:
Many people approve of the methods of Fascism, even though its economic program is altogether antiliberal and its policy completely interventionist, because it is far from practicing the senseless and unrestrained destructionism that has stamped the Communists as the archenemies of civilization. Still others, in full knowledge of the evil that Fascist economic policy brings with it, view Fascism, in comparison with Bolshevism and Sovietism, as at least the lesser evil.
This sort of thing has a lot to do with why, if I could do it over again, I wouldn’t have bothered with anthropology. Reading a review like Jon Marks on A Troublesome Inheritance, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that refusing to consider the implications of Wade’s argument has everything to do with protecting the academic turf anthropologists have carved out, and nothing to do with scientific inquiry or truth.
It would be one thing if Marks just thought Wade was wrong; he’s a geneticist (as is Greg Cochran, who was also unnerved by some of the sources), Wade isn’t. But he doesn’t even bother to argue with the thing, he just calls it “idiocy,” “fundamentally anti-intellectual,” and “as crassly anti-science as any work of climate-change denial or creationism.”
If you’re paying attention, Marks tells us what this is actually about: “Wade’s book is of a piece with a long tradition of disreputable attempts to rationalize visible class distinctions by recourse to invisible natural properties.”
What really chaps the good professor’s ass is that Wade has violated political dogmas, not scientific ones — because genetics itself, to Marks, is a political dogma. I’m not exaggerating.
Note that the review also appears in a labor rag. And that he once tried to get someone fired over Wade’s invitation to speak at a Leakey Foundation audience on one of his earlier books. And that Savage Minds has declared war on A Troublesome Inheritance, in between unbelievably stupid posts about anthropologists as “scholarly hipsters.”
Further Reading
The AAA debate between Wade and Agustín Fuentes is online, and can be streamed here. It’s worth a watch. More debate here, and here’s Steve Sailer’s old piece on reading Marks’ Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History.
I also can’t resist linking to this epic rant from A.J. West back in January on why he regrets studying socio-cultural anthropology:
I want to emphasise that I am not in any way a political conservative and I don’t oppose the social and political aims that have become entrenched parts of anthropology departments. But I don’t think those aims are what anthropology is about, I don’t think obscurantist pseudo-philosophy is a good way to achieve them, and I don’t think writing obscure academic texts about how humans are now trans-human feminist cyborgs empowers minority groups or the working class, or achieves any worthwhile aim in any sphere of human activity.
