Plutocracy and Communism aren’t the Only Two Options

No one can say for sure yet whether the Occupy Wall Street movement will articulate a core message, or if it would even be useful to do so. So far, the protestors have staked out a diverse set of grievances aimed at varying and, in some cases, contradictory targets. One of the prevailing sentiments of the movement has been that the gap between rich and poor — accelerated by the excesses, errors, and political influence of the financial system elite, at the expense of a large portion (perhaps not quite 99%) of the population — cannot stand.

A lot of good commentary has been posted about this, and I would only make one additional point based on reactions I have heard from conservative friends and pundits. If you are someone who thinks of the OWS movement as a kind of proletarian campaign for wealth-redistributive socialism, and if your reaction to this is that “yes, capitalism may have its problems, but look at how well socialism worked (not),” then you need to think more carefully about the issue.

There are plenty of problems with treating the current state of affairs as a direct outcome of financial elites victimizing helpless masses. The debt binge of the last two decades, as one example among many, demonstrates the danger of widespread unenlightened self-interest in the marketplace, and though that may have been a phenomenon that banks sought to capitalize on, it was not something that they were sociologically responsible for starting.

There are also problems, however, with taking the stance — still alarmingly popular in conservative discourse — that any advocacy of regulation or redistribution amounts to an endorsement of the Soviet Union. When reasonable people talk about introducing measures that redistribute wealth, or that promote equality of opportunity, or that guarantee basic provision of health care, education and nourishment, or that seek to balance our consumption of environmental resources, or that seek — for gosh sake — to separate proprietary trading from client-centric banking, they are not implicitly saying that we should go back to the labor camps and the gulags. They are simply pointing to areas in which a few “socialistic reforms” would bolster the social, moral and economic agenda that we all share. An inability to distinguish between the historical socialism of Mao and Stalin, on the one hand, and modern socialistic methods of democratic governance, on the other, is a really serious intellectual error, and one that seems to be rampant in conservative rebuffs of the Occupy Wall Street movement and even more mainstream attempts at reform.

So the next time you hear someone say, “I don’t support these protestors because socialism didn’t work,” don’t stand for it. Explain to them that they are dodging the issue, and get them to really defend their stance.

How to Respond to Public Choice Cynicism

Matt Yglesias has a nice takedown of public choice theory on his blog today:

For starters, even in the nightwatchman state we still have the nightwatchmen. We’re keeping the armed men, the dungeons, the handcuffs, the tanks, and the nuclear missiles. These — rather than, say, the librarians — are the really dangerous part of big government. If you look at a really poorly governed place (Congo, say) the problem isn’t that the people in charge of regulating air pollution aren’t doing their jobs correctly. The problem is either that the men with the guns and dungeons are corrupt, or else that they’re incapable of protecting citizens from other predatory gangs of men with guns, or some combination of the two. When I was in Russia, I was robbed by policemen on several occasions under the pretense of fining me for having my visa out of order, and upon leaving the airport security guards stole all my cash. In the United States, neither of those things has ever happened to me. The existence of the rule of law and secure property rights is, where it exists, a triumph of public integrity against the assumption of cynicism.

The observation that malgovernment is a major source of human ills is quite correct, but embracing fatalism about it only exacerbates the problem. What’s needed are efforts to push societies in the direction of taking honor and civic obligation more seriously, not less so. You want politicians and civil servants to feel worse, not better about behaving cynically…

From a theory perspective, it’s important to understand how this kind of argument relates to claims about the “state of nature” and the institution of organized government. A lot of modern and contemporary political philosophy (from Hobbes and Locke to Nozick and Rawles) takes as a basic premise the notion of a “state of nature.” Hobbes famously described the state of nature as a pre-social phase of human existence, characterized by nasty, brutish, and near-constant warfare and injustice. Philosophers who latch on to this notion, whether literally or hypothetically, will not give you the proper historical context for Hobbes’ description, however; he was actually writing, whether he knew it or not, about the horrors of the English Civil War. That is, the imagery he was describing was not of a pre-society, but of a society that had fallen into horrendous disrepair.

Perhaps history and philosophy are not to be mixed, but in my mind the failure to properly consider this historical context has perverted many works of political theory that have treated the “state of nature” as an intelligible, if hypothetical, concept. In my mind, it is not intelligible — man has never been outside or prior to society, and the periods of brutish warfare and injustice that we have witnessed throughout history have had a lot more to do with the failures of society than with the absence of society.

Which brings us back to libertarianism, and the unintelligibility of embracing a stance of fatalism about malgovernment. The way to repair malgovernment — and its attendant ills — is to repair it, not disband it. But, as Yglesias suggests, there is a certain level of self-interest that drives advocates of strong libertarianism. Such people are generally the sort of folks who feel that they don’t really need society — that they are hardworking, self-sustaining individualists, and that government is a failed method of addressing the ills that occur in the state of nature. It’s a charming idea for some, but on a practical level it makes no sense.

So how do you respond to public choice cynicism? You start by removing the premise that man can exist outside or prior to society; that is, you politely point out that real libertarianism is practically impossible and philosophically incoherent. Then you embark upon the onerous but very necessary mission of organizing the state such that everyone can embrace its existence, even if they disagree over the particulars of how it functions and what it provides.

 

iPhones Need to be Held, not Talked To

After thinking about it a bit, I’ve decided that I don’t quite understand the value proposition of Siri, or for that matter, of a minimally-upgraded iPhone with Siri built in. It seems to me that one of the core design principles of the iPhone, going back to the original model that came out in summer 2007, was to turn the cell phone — formerly a clunky and frustrating device — into something elegant, intuitive and even fun to use. Now we get an iPhone that is no more elegant, intuitive or fun to use than the one that came out 15 months ago, plus a voice-control app that reduces the need for the user to interact with the device (i.e. you don’t need to write an email anymore, you just tell Siri to do it).

This is not to suggest that voice technology isn’t worthwhile, but rather to point out that Apple is not in the niche software business; it is in the integrated hardware-software business. Every one of its successful products from the past ten years has been a marvel of hardware-software integration: the Mac and OS X, the iPhone and iOS, etc. A better, more Apple-esque move, I believe, would have been to release the iPhone 5 that everyone was hoping for, plus a new app called “Assistant” (especially for the folks who were familiar with Siri before Apple acquired it, to have a core app with a foreign name such as “Siri” just feels wrong — the way having “Address Book” called “Outlook Contacts” would just feel wrong). Perhaps this “Assistant” app would have come with more than just voice control options, and for the verbally-inclined, would have included the option to give your assistant a name.

The death of Steve Jobs has given people a chance to discuss his legacy, and here is a perfect opportunity. One of the features of said legacy is that, much like the Roman Empire, when you bring a new technology into the Apple realm, you make it Apple through and through, and then you subordinate it to the dominant design principles of the realm: elegant hardware-software integration, Apple nomenclature, etc. You do NOT let that new technology keep its name and role, and then make it the centerpiece of a new product release.

You can chalk this one up to (understandable) preoccupation with the loss of Steve Jobs, but this nevertheless looks like a misfire.

Who Needs Reasons?

Michael P. Lynch, a professor of philosophy at UConn, worries that there is an epistemic impasse in modern political discourse:

Rick Perry’s recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his confident assertion that “God is how we got here” reflect an obvious divide in our culture. In one sense, that divide is just over the facts: Some of us believe God created human beings just as they are now, others of us don’t. But underneath this divide is a deeper one. Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust. Thus while a few people may agree with Perry because they really think that the scientific evidence supports creationism, I suspect that for most people, scientific evidence (or its lack) has nothing to do with it. Their belief in creationism is instead a reflection of a deeply held epistemic principle: that, at least on some topics, scripture is a more reliable source of information than science. For others, including myself, this is never the case.

Disagreements like this give rise to an unnerving question: How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.

Divisive disagreements can be “about the best way to support our views of the facts.” But there is something else that can cause disagreements to be divisive, particularly in the world outside the classroom: some people do not think their views ought to be dependent on facts. Some people, that is, do not subscribe to the scientific sentiment that as facts change, so too should their views. This, more than the question of how we ought to support our views of the facts, is what really causes arguments to become divisive and ultimately intractable.

Just think of a passionate argument you have ever had with a loved one; is it plausible to think that such intractability is rooted in different epistemic convictions? Rather, what becomes a much greater hurdle in the course of argumentation is that people hold onto their views passionately, and without much regard for any facts that may exist. A reasonable person will, as Lynch suggests, commit to a knowledge structure that says, “if the facts change, then my views will change accordingly.” But an unreasonable person of the type Lynch is describing, will commit to something very different: “if my views change, then my views change.”

It is important to remember that most people don’t know what epistemology is. Rick Perry may be one of them. To suggest that serious political disagreements can be traced to differences in the way that people seek to support their views of the facts, is to assume that everyone partaking in political discourse nowadays is reasonable and committed to a fact-based style of argumentation — and that is a very unreasonable assumption.

Lynch doesn’t give us much on the sociological front here, but on the philosophical front, he reminds us that reasons matter for people who care about reasons. That has always been a rallying cry for philosophy professors, I suppose.