The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny

From Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest. Page 30.

The first questioning of the existing state by the pre-Socratics and the eventual rise of a variety of Greek regimes which gave Aristotle the material for his empirically comparative work - all this is deep in our background; but it had little directly to do with the emergence of the pluralistic order in the West, with which we are here concerned, where "democracy" in principle opposes the rights of a majority to, in Madison's words, act in a way "adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Other founders or refounders of the American system, like Jefferson, were equally clear about the danger of the "tyranny of the majority."

Above all, it is no part of its culture that a government elected by a bare majority, or even by a fairly large majority, is thereby empowered to totally reconstruct the social and political order by sacrificing the minority. That great political philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that for some people government is "an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire." For others, which is to say, in general, for thos who have a traditional regard for the unity and continuity of a culture, the business of government is something different: "to restrain, to deflate, to pacify, and to reconcile, not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down," on the grounds that, as Oakeshott puts it, "the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny." For it is a basic principle of true, as against despotic, politics that it is more important for the civic system as such to be unshaken than for particular measures to be opposed or insisted on to the limit. A democratic community enjoying political liberty is only possible when the attachment of the majority of the citizens to political liberty is stronger than their attachment to specific political doctrines. And this is to say that on many controversial issues a certain comparative apathy must prevail among a large part of the population. But apathy cannot appear avirtue to the man who has committed himself to an intellectually elaborated scheme or policy.

In a famous investigation of the politics of the small town of Elmira, New York, in the 1950s, the scholars concerned (Paul Lazarfield, Bernard Berelson, and William McPhee) were at first surprised by the results. The democratic processes had worked very satisfactorily in the town for a very long period. So, on theoretical principles, the researchers expected to find the citizenry well informed about political issues, with firm and clear-cut opinions. They found, on the contrary, that the majority were fairly ill informed and fairly apathetic. They concluded, after admirable heart-searching on their own part, that this was the condition for a working democracy. On the other hand, it may be urged that the instability of many of the Greek states was due to the devotion to politics of all concerned and that, to a lesser degree, this has been the cause of many of the difficulties met with in France in the last fifty years (though it has been suggested that the ideological enthusiasm of the French electorate was to some extent compensated for by the cynicism and apathy of the deputies themselves).

At any rate, all the major troubles the world has had in our era have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania. The politician should be servant and should play a limited role. For what our political culture has stood for (as against principles of total theorists and abstractionists) is the view of society as a developing and broadening of established liberties and responsibilities, and the belief, founded in experience, that in political and social matters long-term predictions, however exciting and visionary, seldom work out.

Reviewing James Scott's See Like a State in The New Republic of 18 May 1998, Cass R. Sunstein sums up one of Scott's main points: "States should take small steps rather than large ones. Policies are apt to be more successful if they can be reversed once they start to go awry, and so good panners ensure reversibility." The point, obvious enough but not available to many enthusiasts, is what one might have thought the well-established conclusion that actions have unexpected results. Or, to put it another way, that in the human context we cannot predict on the basis of theory.

Meanwhile, we can again stress that it is part of the heritage of sanity, or of political adulthood, to admit that any real order cannot be perfect. But this does not mean that we can ignore, or fail to combat, tendencies to degeneration of the civic order - in part due to penetration of its intellectual atmosphere by the direct, or dilute, effects of the totalitarian ideas.

Roman dodecahedra

I really love the mysteries of the world. Here is one of them. Roman Mystery Object by David Zincavage referencing Roman dodecahedra. Wikipedia's description:

No mention of them has been found in contemporary accounts or pictures of the time. Speculated uses include candlestick holders (wax was found inside one example); dice; survey instruments; devices for determining the optimal sowing date for winter grain; gauges to calibrate water pipes or army standard bases. Use as a measuring instrument of any kind seems to be prohibited by the fact that the dodacahedrons were not standardised and come in many sizes and arrangements of their openings. It has also been suggested that they may have been religious artifacts of some kind. This latter speculation is based on the fact that most of the examples have been found in Gallo-Roman sites. Several dodecahedrons were found in coin hoards, providing evidence that their owners considered them valuable objects.

Regarding the religious explanation - That might be right but it has been my experience that archaeologists and anthropologists, when faced with a material item they can't otherwise explain, always default to "a religious object" as an explanation.

This is, though far simpler, not dissimilar to the Antikythera mechanism. We have the object, and have been able to infer what it was used for, but there is no other extant evidence explaining how it was developed, why it was used, etc. It is a piece out of time. It is so complex and so sophisticated that it couldn't have just been conjured out of the air. There had to be all sorts of predicate technologies and capabilities in order to build such a device, but we have no evidence of those necessary predicate capabilities.

No one has a good explanation for it.

I think what both of these illustrate is that there is a much larger gap in our knowledge of the past than we acknowledge. Likely less than a fraction of 1% of all written materials have come down to us. Sure much of the rest would be shopping lists, and scatalogical diatribes, and records of how Merkos stole a sheep but amongst all the detritus there would be some beautiful poems and transporting plays, and possibly, just possibly, some hints about technological capabilities of which we are completely unaware other than the existence of such items as the Antikythera mechanism and the Roman dodecahedra.

When disputes over facts are misconstrued as disputes over principles, the entire project of Enlightenment democracy it at risk.

Torture Report, Rolling Stone and False Dilemmas by Stephen L. Carter

Nowadays, narratives are all the rage, and inconvenient facts and testimony are generally left out of the story. This is exactly what got Rolling Stone magazine in trouble. Even back when I was a college journalist, we never ran a controversial story without seeking a response from the other side. But Rolling Stone, in its vivid account of a rape alleged to have occurred at a fraternity house on the University of Virginia campus, did exactly that. No comments from the accused; no comments from the fraternity; no comments from the accuser’s own friends. The accuser supposedly placed these limits as a condition of writing the story. Why on earth did the magazine go along?

Surely the same explanation applies. To do otherwise would have disturbed the narrative. Sexual assault is said to be rampant on campus, and Rolling Stone had a powerful story to tell. Adding even routine denials, to say nothing of the sort of widely varying accounts that a serious investigation would surely have unearthed, would have reduced the power of the tale.

[snip]

Similarly, had the staff of the Senate committee decided to interview CIA officials with deep knowledge of the detainee program, the report might have had more trouble reaching the bald conclusion that no actionable intelligence was ever produced. Here the narrative was caught up in the need to avoid moral nuance. It’s a defensible position -- and, I think, a correct one -- to argue that the enhanced interrogation program was wrong whether or not it produced occasional results.

But that entirely sensible argument is difficult to present in a world of Twitter and television talk shows. Had the otherwise excellent report admitted so much as the smallest possibility that anything useful ever came from the programs, the headline would have been “Senate Committee: Torture Works!”

In this sense, the traps into which both the Senate staff and the Rolling Stone editors fell are a predictable and unhappy result of life in a swift and unreflective era. Slogans have always been easier to repeat than arguments; the danger now is that we have come to confuse the two.

[snip]

But this reaction confuses the narrative with the reality. To this day, CIA veterans insist that this aspect of the film was accurate. Maybe they’re wrong. Because I think the detainee program was immoral and a grave mistake, I’d very much like them to be wrong. Still, I have no principled basis to insist that they’re wrong simply because it helps my argument. Put otherwise, offered a choice between those who say the programs helped and those who say the programs didn’t, I shouldn’t base my decision on which side I want to be right.

Alas, the narrative is constructed otherwise. Most of today's narratives are. Thus early critics of the Rolling Stone story were treated as doubting not the story, but the narrative. If they thought this particular exercise of journalist craft seemed full of errors and unlikelihoods, they were minimizing the problem of sexual assault itself. This approach is a classic example of the fallacy of the false dilemma: There is actually no inconsistency in believing simultaneously that sexual assault is a serious problem and that this particular account doesn’t hang together. Similarly, there is no inconsistency in simultaneously believing that the detainee program was wrong and accepting that it might occasionally have produced actionable intelligence. It’s only our own lack of moral seriousness that causes us to confuse the two.

When disputes over facts are misconstrued as disputes over principles, the entire project of Enlightenment democracy it at risk. The liberalism of the Enlightenment rested critically on the supposition that agreement on the facts was a separate process from agreement on the values to be applied to them. The social theorist Karl Mannheim, in “Ideology and Utopia,” argued that we would never be able to separate the two, that we would always wind up seeing the facts through the lens of our preformed ideologies. Thus liberal democracy, in the Enlightenment sense, was bound to fail.

Let me here avoid the false dilemma. As a believer in democracy, I want Mannheim to be wrong. But our increasing elevation of preformed narrative over hard-eyed pursuit of truth suggests that he may turn out to be right.

When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.

Provocative and interesting discussion at Zuckerberg on Facebook v. Apple by Alex Tabarrok. Illuminating pushback in the comments.

Tim Cook, echoing others, recently said “When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg took umbrage in an interview with Time:

“A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers,” Zuckerberg says. “I think it’s the most ridiculous concept. What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper!”

Zuckerberg is only partially correct. Apple and Facebook both want to maximize profits but for Apple a key element in profit is increasing price above cost. Zuckerberg’s point is that one way of doing that is to take advantage of market power and raise price against the interests of customers. But Apple’s market power isn’t a given, it’s a function of the quality of Apple’s products relative to its competitors. Thus, Apple has a significant incentive to increase quality and because it can’t charge each of its customers a different price a large fraction of the quality surplus ends up going to customers and Apple customers love Apple products.

Who pays the bills is always a revealing question in its own right. But I like the corollary questions. Is there a quantifiable difference in outcomes based on your motivation based on whether you are serving customers directly (Apple) or indirectly (Facebook)?

80% believe that the future mostly depends on their own actions and behaviors

Well this is very interesting, Focusing Behavioral Economics on Development Professionals by Timothy Taylor.

The 2015 World Development Report from the World Bank, with the theme of "Mind, Society, and Behavior," offers an useful overview of the way in which these issues of "behavioral economics" affect the welfare of low-income people around the world. But at least to me, the the single most striking part of the report is that it focuses the lens of behavioral economics not just on people in low-income countries, but also on development professionals themselves.

Excellent.

Most experts perform worse at forecasting than a panel of informed laypeople. Partly that is because the experts lose contextual knowledge that often impact the accuracy of their forecasts. What this report suggests is that another contributor might be that experts (in whatever field) lose sight of influential unacknowledged assumptions to which laypeople are more sensitive.

A final example looks at mental models that development experts have of the poor. What do development experts think that the poor believe, and how does it compare to what the poor actually believe? For example, development experts were asked if they thought individuals in low-income countries would agree with the statement: "What happens to me in the future mostly depends on me." The development experts thought that maybe 20% of the poorest third would agree with this statement, but about 80% actually did. In fact, the share of those agreeing with the statement in the bottom third of the income distribution was much the same as for the upper two-thirds--and higher than the answer the development experts gave for themselves!

I see this all the time among social justice advocates: 1) they fail to acknowledge other important goals and the interplay and trade-off decisions amongst multiple goals and 2) they act on behalf of others without actually understanding the circumstances of those others. Hence the almost uniform outcome of unintended negative consequences despite the genuineness and intensity of the good intentions.

Much of this is touched on by Christopher J. Coyne in his very good Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails!

But independent of the failure of development economists to understand those at whom they are targeting their policies, I find it immensely heartening that 80% of all people, rich and poor, believe they are responsible for their own future.

Enui, the great slayer of civilizations

Tired Tim
by Walter de la Mare

Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.
He lags the long bright morning through,
Ever so tired of nothing to do;
He moons and mopes the livelong day,

Nothing to think about, nothing to say;
Up to bed with his candle to creep,
Too tired to yawn; too tired to sleep:
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.

The very poetical definition of enui, the great slayer of civilizations.

Both staggering and humbling

Came across this in a comment on Pearl Harbor Day. I have long been fascinated by the staggering productivity of the US during World War II. I have not checked these numbers but they look right and there are four I know are correct.

During the 3-1/2 years of World War 2 that started with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the Surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, "We the People of the U.S.A." produced the following:

22 aircraft carriers,
8 battleships,
48 cruisers,
349 destroyers,
420 destroyer escorts,
203 submarines,
34 million tons of merchant ships,
100,000 fighter aircraft,
98,000 bombers,
24,000 transport aircraft,
58,000 training aircraft,
93,000 tanks,
257,000 artillery pieces,
105,000 mortars,
3,000,000 machine guns, and
2,500,000 military trucks.

We put 16.1 million men in uniform in the various armed services, invaded Africa, invaded Sicily and Italy, won the battle for the Atlantic, planned and executed D-Day, marched across the Pacific and Europe, developed the atomic bomb, and ultimately conquered Japan and Germany.

Plus, we built the Pentagon in 2 1/2 years. And this is the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't cover the ports and harbours built, railways refurbished, highways, airports, etc. For example, the 1,700 mile Alaska Highway was begun March 1942 (three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor) and completed eight months later in October, 1942.

Granted, consumer consumption plummeted but none the less the quantities and achievements are both staggering and humbling.

Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous.

Bertrand Russell in History of Western Philosophy. As happens with Russell a little bit of nonsense intermingled with insight.

Civilization checks impulse not only through forethought, which is a self-administered check, but also through law, custom, and religion. This check it inherits from barbarism, but it makes it less instinctive and more systematic. Certain acts are labelled
criminal, and are punished ; certain others, though not punished by law, are labelled wicked, and expose those who are guilty of
them to social disapproval. The institution of private property brings with it the subjection of women, and usually the creation
of a slave class. On the one hand the purposes of the community are enforced upon the individual, and, on the other hand the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Dionysus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. The Bacchic ritual produced what was called "enthusiasm," which means, etymologically, having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god. Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.

We chaired you through the market-place

To an Athlete Dying Young
by A.E. Housman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

The books are visitors from another time and place

From The romance of certain old books by D.G. Myers.

Books could be time machines, but rarely are. They are sadly familiar to us, because they are canonical; that is, because we read them in the present, with the standards and expectations of the present, as towering figures of the present. To be borne into the past, boats beating against the current, the best books are those which are least familiar: the books no one is assigned on any syllabus, the books discussed in no classroom. If nothing else, you have to read these “forgotten” or “neglected” books in editions from the period in which they were originally published, since many of them have never been reprinted. The cover art, the dust-jacket copy, the yellowing pages, the formal typography, the out-of-fashion author photos—even as physical objects, the books are visitors from another time and place.

Besides, there is the intellectual challenge in deciding for yourself whether a book is any good. The celebrated titles of this publishing season are surrounded by publicity; even an independent judgment sounds like an echo of the blurbs. And no one is ever surprised if you like Roth (or don’t). But what about Allan Seager or James B. Hall? Will Amos Berry or Racers to the Sun repay your time, or only waste it? Are you willing to accept the risk of recommending either of them to a friend? If you take seriously the adventure of reading you must involve yourself, sooner or later, in the romance of certain old books.