If I read as many books ....

Sometimes I wish I spent more time reading deep books, and less time on the Internet. And it's true that the Internet can be addicting. But it also tosses up the weirdest intellectual flotsam and jetsam, and sometimes this detritus can trigger interesting thoughts on its own.

It can be reassuring to know that even Thomas Hobbes, for his part, felt he hadn't read as much as many others had. But he reframed it as a strength. Maybe some day I can aspire to that.

 

          

Education for servitude

The United States prides itself on its democratic heritage. We believe in educating our children, and our neighbors, in the virtues of democratic citizenship. Or we say we do. But what does an education like that really mean?

In Book 3 of the Politics, Aristotle writes:

But [besides rule … over persons in a servile position] there is also rule of the sort which is exercised over persons who are similar in birth to the ruler, and are similarly free. Rule of this sort is what we call political rule; and this is the sort of rule which the ruler must begin to learn by being ruled and by obeying—just as one learns to be a commander of cavalry by serving under another commander, or to be a general of infantry by serving under another general and by acting first as colonel and, even before that, as captain. This is why it is a good saying that 'you cannot be a ruler unless you have first been ruled.' Ruler and ruled have indeed different excellences; but the fact remains that the good citizen must possess the knowledge and the capacity requisite for ruling as well as for being ruled, and the excellence of a citizen may be defined as consisting in 'a knowledge of rule over free men from both points of view.'

⸻Aristotle, Politics, Book 3, 1277b, ed. and tr. by Ernest Barker

(Oxford University Press, 1946, 1980), pp.104-5.

Ruling and being ruled. That's the key for Aristotle, and it makes sense. On the one hand, a free man should be able to rule his own affairs, and this means (in particular) knowing how to rule something successfully. On the other hand, no society can have everyone rule at once. (When I was a child the expression to describe that latter situation was, "All Chiefs and no Indians," but I suspect nobody says it that way any more.) So in a free society, responsible adults have to be able to pass back and forth smoothly from one state to the other. And the only way to learn this skill—Aristotle says this clearly too—is through practice.

How do we get that practice? Once upon a time, there were a number of ways.

• 
  If you go far enough back in time, most Americans lived on farms. Of course you might have been a hired hand on such a farm, or a cousin visiting for the long term; but if you owned the farm then you were responsible for it. The farm functioned like a small community. Whoever owned it (typically a Mother and Father) allocated chores among the people who lived there (themselves, and also the children and hired help, if any) and made decisions about how to use whatever was produced (what to consume, what to sell, what to buy with the proceeds). At the same time, a farm was likely not completely self-sufficient; so the owners of the farm were also members of a larger civil and political society, including church, schools, and towns of some kind, all governed by laws. While they ruled at home, in these other domains they were ruled by others.
  
  
• 
  Then there were townsfolk. These might be merchants or doctors, blacksmiths or lawyers, barbers or barkeeps, preachers or teachers. But again, if you go far enough back in time most of them were sole proprietors, or close enough. A successful merchant might hire a couple of men to handle his warehouse; a successful lawyer might take on a likely lad as a clerk. But in time the clerk could learn the law and might start his own practice; a man who started by heaving and stocking dry goods in a warehouse might go into business on his own moving and hauling. So the distance between the working man and the customer was small; and in this sense, many townsfolk were masters of their own affairs. At the same time, naturally, they were ruled in various ways by city, county, and state governments.
  
  
• It's also true that somebody had to hold these government positions, and frequently they were not full-time jobs.* So a prosperous farmer or a successful townsman, someone who could afford time away from work, might well run for office for a term or two and then go back to private life. Again, we see the alternation of ruling and being ruled.
  
  
• 
  And of course there were service clubs, fraternal organizations, and other kinds of voluntary groups. Most of them involved some level of governance, however minimal; most of those chose their officers according to some kind of vote for some kind of period, after which the office would expire and be conferred on someone else. Someone who didn't have time to run for City Council might be elected to head his local Rotary Club, or volunteer for a leadership position in 4-H, or Scouting.**

One way or another, then, it was not unusual for adult Americans to have some experience of leadership or responsibility over some group of other people, however small or temporary. And our idea was that this experience made us all better citizens. By diffusing the experience of command throughout the society, we thought we were making it less likely that we would later accept servitude or despotism. If we were used to standing up straight, we would find it harder to bow.

Sounds great. How's that working out for you?

These days? Not so well. 

The problem is that none of these avenues towards responsibility and the experience of temporary rulership has the same meaning it once did.

These days, fewer than 2% of Americans live on farms; so while the farm household might still function as a small-scale political community, it is not available as a learning environment for the overwhelming majority. 

In fact, never mind farms: even the ownership of real property—land—doesn't mean what it once did. At the time of the American founding, voting rights depended (among other things) on owning property, because property meant independence. The fear was that a man without property would vote however his employer told him to vote. But back when I owned a house, it didn't make me independent. All it meant was that I had a mortgage to pay every month, so I had a strong incentive to keep my job. If there had ever been a measure on the ballot which hurt my employer, I would have voted against it blindly, without a second thought—so I could keep paying my mortgage. So much for independence. 

Government jobs are full-time and professional now. (For the implications of this shift, see this wonderful essay by Charlie Stross.) Even towns and cities are mostly large enough that you are unlikely to be ruled by your neighbors anyway. I don't know many cities that still hold Town Meetings.

Fraternal organizations appear to be in decline. I can't speak for volunteer organizations of other sorts; but when my kids were in Scouts and Little League (and I was serving in the PTA), it seemed like I kept meeting the same small group of parents volunteering in one venue after another. (And of course they kept meeting me.)

But in some ways the biggest change—as monumental in its effects as the disappearance of our farm population—is the change in the nature of work. In most places, in most professions, sole proprietorship has disappeared. The polite question, when you meet someone new, is no longer "What do you do?" but "Who do you work for?" Economically speaking, Americans—rich and poor alike—are mostly employees. And American workplaces are not designed to be democratic institutions! Swedish managers may have to discuss a new initiative with their employees to get buy-in before implementing them. German managers have to get permission from the Betriebsrat before instituting major changes. American managers are free to call out, "Hey everyone! Gather 'round and listen up. Effective immediately …!" Don't like it? No hard feelings. You can always quit. It's a free country, after all.

"It's a free country," but in our daily working lives, as employees, our experience is of obedience to authority. This is true at the operational, or ground-floor level; but it's often true to some considerable extent in management as well. I worked once at a company where one of our Directors confided quietly to me that he was feeling really bad about his job because the VP that he worked for was regularly overruling all his decisions. This is the kind of management that Scott Adams lampoons so famously in The Pointy-Haired Boss, and Adams couldn't have made such a profitable career of his cartoons were it not that so many people recognized the scenarios on a visceral level.

Of course, workplaces differ, and I don't mean to sound bitter. On the whole my own experience with workplaces has been very pleasant. And in some workplaces, a measure of distributed responsibility is still possible. I have sometimes speculated that the closest I've ever come to the Aristotelean ideal of "ruling and being ruled" was when I managed a small department for a struggling technology start-up. My department had a critical (but very narrow) role in the operations, loosely characterized by everyone else as "the stuff that Hosea's group takes care of"; I was consulted on all major decisions that affected our work; then once a decision was finally made I saluted and went to implement it (even if I had argued the other way). Ruling and being ruled. And while I had no legal responsibility for the company (and no financial stake besides my salary and a few stock options), I was able to base my contributions on the company's overall needs and goals (as I understood them). This is what political engagement ought to look like, and what strikes me most is that it almost never does.

Certainly my engagement with the political entities where I live has never looked like this. Those organizations—city, county, state, and federal republic—ask me to cast a ballot every two years, and I do it because it is the right thing to do. But I can't believe it matters. My vote for Senator or President must surely disappear in the collective pool of votes as less than a rounding error. My vote for Mayor probably makes a little difference, because I don't live in a big city. Even so, I don't have any sense that the city is some kind of collective enterprise which needs my input. Voting is just a ritual, so I do it for the same reasons I celebrate holidays.  

I seem to have wandered some distance from my original topic, but the basic point remains. If a Man From Mars studied the way that most Americans live their lives on a daily basis, he would never call us a democracy. He would point out that as children we go to schools where we have to do what we are told; then as adults we go to jobs where we have to do what we are told. Outside of work, well, there are doctors and insurance companies and agencies and bureaus of one kind and another. The Man From Mars would tell us that our whole experience, most of the time for most of us, is that of obedience to authority. In practical terms, our lives are one long education for servitude.      

This essay is not a call for revolution. It is not an incitement to any kind of change. These conditions have grown up for reasons, which means that trying to make a sudden, abrupt, arbitrary change will be no help at all. But it is helpful to understand where we really are, especially when that point differs so far from the story we tell ourselves.

__________

* As late as the 1980's, when Howard Dean was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives and then later to the Vermont lieutenant-governorship, all of those roles were part-time positions and he maintained a private medical practice alongside to pay the bills. (Reference.)   

** And yes, I am conflating different decades here. Rotary and 4-H and Scouting were all founded in the first years of the 20th century, as the period of family farms and small towns of sole proprietors was beginning to recede into the past. But the point is that even as some opportunities for "ruling and being ruled" faded away, others came forward.   

                

Conquest's three laws

Yesterday, I was looking for something else on the Internet and I stumbled across something called "The Three Laws of Politics," from Robert Conquest. They go like this:

1. Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. (Also called O'Sullivan's First Law.)
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. (Also called Conquest's Second Law.)

OK, they are funny. But why am I writing about them? My aim is to see whether I can give rational explanations for each one. I think I can.

Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.

The Wikipedia article about Robert Conquest gives an example to illustrate this law:

In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.'

Fair enough, but why should it be true?

I think the reason goes something like this. To begin, "reactionary" is a term that contrasts with "progressive." People are "progressive" on a topic when they favor new methods; they are "reactionary" when they prefer old ones. 

Now, when you really grapple with a topic—carpentry, say, or music, or teaching—you learn from experience what works and what doesn't. And over time you learn where there are seductive-looking shortcuts that actually make the work worse rather than better. For the most part, the methods that work will be the same ones that successful practitioners have used in the past, because the discipline itself isn't going to change in a few paltry years, or even in a generation. The nature of the material will remain the same (the wood, say, or your instrument, or your students), and so will the successful methods. Consequently, when you really know a topic, you are likely to respect the wisdom of the traditional ways of handling it; and you will see the folly lurking behind attractive new methods, because you yourself probably tried something similar years ago and saw first-hand how it failed.

Therefore, by knowing the topic well, you will be reactionary about it.

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Again, the Wikipedia article gives examples: the Church of England, Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the Ford Foundation. But why should it be true?

The point of this principle seems to be that the natural tendency of any organization is to drift leftwards; therefore unless the organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing it will end up left-wing. (Presumably if an organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing, that might be enough to slow or even halt its natural drift.) So we can rephrase the question to ask: Why is it in the nature of organizations as such to drift to the left-wing?

You can find here the article (by John O'Sullivan) that originally proposed this law, but it doesn't give a very good explanation. All it says it that the "people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world"—but it doesn't say why that should be.

So let's start by understanding the terms left-wing and right-wing. These terms originated from the seating patterns in the French National Assembly, during the early days of the French Revolution. Those members of the Assembly who cared more passionately for social equality sat to the left of the President of the Assembly, while their opponents sat to the right. But in any society, the party which cares most about equality are always the Weak. The Strong are sure of their place and therefore are less likely to spend time thinking about equality; but the Weak fear being trampled by the Strong, and therefore cling to the ideal of Equality in self-defense.

In today's world, people who are sure of their own strength most often want to use that strength to make money. They are the ones who light out on their own to start businesses, or who rise quickly to the top to lead them. The people who do like "private profit, business, making money" are the Strong. 

The Weak, by contrast … well, of course there are gradations. The weakest simply fall through the cracks of society and end up on the bottom, no matter what. But there are others who are able to make a living for themselves, but who feel nonetheless far more kinship with the Weak than with the Strong. Perhaps we can call them the middling-Weak. These people become employees (almost never employers), because employment means a kind of security with only a narrow scope of responsibility. (The Owner or the Boss, by contrast, is responsible for everything.) And the best employer from the perspective of the middling-Weak is a large organization or institution. Organizations are force-multipliers. Organizations are like walled cities for the middling-Weak; and as long as they do their jobs faithfully, their organizations will protect them.

Therefore organizations (especially large ones) attract the middling-Weak; at the same time they tend to repel the Strong, because the Strong find them constraining. So over time, organizations (especially large ones) are staffed and managed predominantly by the middling-Weak. They may have been founded by strong men—John D. Rockefeller, say, or Henry Ford—but the strong men die after a time and a management team takes over. The management team contains a number who are middling-Weak, and every decade there are a few more. Consequently, over time the management team comes to feel more and more sympathy with the Weak in society at large. Over time, they throw the organization's weight behind causes that support or favor the Weak. And this is to say that over time they drift to the left-wing. 

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.    

For this law, the Wikipedia article quotes one remark to the effect that "a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service." Even when such overt subversion is not literally at issue, though, the point is that bureaucratic organizations often behave in ways which are baffling if you consider their stated goals. I think that—again, leaving out overt subversion—I can identify two reasons.

First, the directors of the bureaucracy have their own private interests, which are bound to differ (in at least some respects) from the interests of the organization itself. So when they make choices, those choices are likely to be at some kind of angle from the organization's own interests. I don't mean that the directors simply exploit the organization cynically as a cover for their own actions. Doubtless that happens from time to time; but I think far more common is the case where the final decision is some kind of weird vector-sum of the interests of all the important directors individually, plus the interests of the organization simply. Trying to unravel the logic afterwards is likely to be very difficult. Hence the note of despair implicit in this law.

Second, the directors of a bureaucracy are often not as enlightened and perspicacious as we think they ought to be given their exalted position. Even the ones at the very top are human beings like you and me: and they are just as capable of being short-sighted, muddled, and confused as we are. When they make decisions that look gobsmackingly wrong-headed, of course it is possible that they are trying to subvert the organization from within (as per Conquest's Third law); and it is also possible that they are playing four-dimensional chess, so that things will all turn out fine for reasons we can't even imagine; but it is just as likely that they made a simple mistake.

Robert J. Hanlon summarized this last possibility in Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

So much for Conquest's Three Laws. 

               

Rousseau, rats, and the cuckoo-clock

A month ago I posted an interesting observation. In his famous work The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposes a simple criterion to establish the best governments in the world. "What is the purpose of any political association?" he asks. "The preservation and prosperity of its members.… [Therefore] other things being equal, the … best government is the one under which the population increases most…. The government under which the population shrinks is the worst. Over to you, Statisticians—count, measure, compare!" 

A simple lookup of countries ranked by rate of natural increase then shows us that—according to Rousseau—the best-governed countries in the world today are Niger, Uganda, Angola, and Benin. All have a rate of natural increase over 33‰.* If you want to pick one of these countries to move to—because they are so well-governed, I mean—you might make your choice based on what languages are available. (Looking only at European languages, you could choose from French, English, Portuguese, or French, respectively.)

But what are we to learn from this fact? Those of us who live today in the modern, advanced West are likely to view with alarm any suggestion that we move to one of these countries. Economically they are poor and struggling; politically they are far from free; even in the best country of the four, 17% of the population do not have access to an improved water supply.** Would Rousseau really have stuck to his guns, if he had known these facts, or would he have changed his mind about what criterion indicates the best government? Put more simply, was Rousseau merely ignorant, or was he crazy?

Or is there something more to these results than we see at first?

Between 1958 and 1962, the American ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of studies on rats. Specifically, he created "rat utopias"—artificial environments with unlimited amounts of food and water (but finite living space), and with no risk from predators. After a couple of generations, the rats went crazy. They stopped reproducing: many female rats could no longer carry babies to term, and many male rats lost interest in sex. There were other dysfunctions too. Rats stopped grooming; heart attack and cancer rates soared; some turned to cannibalism or "frenetic overactivity," while others fell into "pathological withdrawal." These results seemed to correlate with overcrowding, but in fact the rats voluntarily increased their own overcrowding by choosing to eat all at once rather than waiting till others were not around. All kinds of discipline broke down; normal social behaviors vanished. The "rat utopias" became nightmares.***

No analogy is exact. But how hard is it to see the modern, advanced West as a human version of the "rat utopias"? Of course there are still pockets of poverty and deprivation in our societies, but many of us have all the food and water we need, even while we live in confined spaces. Many of us have minimal experience of violent crime, and none at all of warfare (the two most obvious forms of "predation" to which humans are subject in modern societies). And sure enough, our numbers are dropping—just like Calhoun's rat populations did. If Rousseau were evaluating Calhoun's experiments, he would have had no trouble at all concluding that the rats were miserable. He would have had no trouble at all identifying this misery as the source of the declining numbers.

Why shouldn't the very same argument apply to us? Because we like having enough to eat? Because we like being free from predators? 

I mean, … sure, of course we like those things. I like them! But if our objective behavior looks pathological, isn't it at least possible that we are confused or mistaken about what is good for us? Isn't it at least possible that we like peace and plenty the way a drunk likes his whiskey even while it is poisoning him? (For a further consideration of the ways in which modern Western society creates profoundly anti-natural stresses, see the extended discussion in this post here of the thought experiment from Frederica Mathewes-Green.) 

I don't want to argue in favor of hunger and repression, scarcity and warfare, as ideals necessary for human thriving. Really, truly, I don't. Show me where the argument is wrong.

Of course it is possible to spin this result in an idealistic direction, or in a coldly cynical one. As an example of the first, John Eldredge argues in his book Wild at Heart that we are built for combat and conflict because God created us in the middle of a world at war; and so long as Satan continues his war against God, so long will our lives require us to fight hard to win and guard everything good in them. Eldredge uses this idea to construct a spirituality that is at once modern, martial, and Christian. And yes, idealistic.

There's another way to interpret the insight that we somehow need deprivation and conflict to rise to our human potential. It's an interpretation put into the mouth of Harry Lime, in The Third Man. I think you know how it goes:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Show me where the argument is wrong. 

__________

* That's 33 per thousand. 

** The respective percentages (of people without access to an improved water supply) are: Niger, 31.43%; Uganda, the best of them at 16.86%; Angola, a whopping 33.54%; and Benin, 25.27%.   

*** For a more detailed account of the results of Calhoun's experiments, along with some of the lessons for human populations, consider for example this article here.