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Thursday, February 18, 2010
Talking to
Thucydides
You've got to admit. It's an honor to swap words with Thucydides.
PRECEDENT. As I recently pointed out, sometimes a comment should be a post. There's an opposite situation too. Sometimes a comment requires a post. I started this one as a response to commenter Thucydides, but before I hit the ENTER button I realized some of the rest of you might enjoy the conversation. So now it's a post. Such is the lottery called life. It started with this response by Thucy to an earlier back and forth between us on my recent entry about the Global Warming scandals. (He provided a link that didn't work; I've since tracked it down, so the one below gives you more information than I had at first.)
I found the more despairing perspective
of the "corollary"
I suggested a useful one in combination with your other works on this
subject.
Moldbug is a "royalist," of course, so his perspective on our dilemma tends towards the conclusion that our political system at its heart is heading towards two undesirable goals (democracy red in tooth and claw, or tyrannical statism). His point, as I took it, was that there is no reform or return possible which will correct the errors which have led us to this pass. We simply do not have the political leadership necessary to steer a third course, and will not have such leadership because the current system not only doesn't produce them, it actively hinders them from developing.
I suggested the linked essay as a corollary, but perhaps a better word would be 'test'. It raises questions which have to be answered before we set ourselves to any political work to be done. Many of us might agree that our system of government is "incurably insane" - but what system? The post-LBJ government? The post-FDR government? The post-Civil War government? The system described by the Constitution? The author of the essay I linked might offer a "yes" to all of these - and thus I find it a useful corollary to your work because, at least as I understand it, you wouldn't answer "yes" to all.
In other words, I found that essay's take on what the "heart of the matter" was different from your own in an interesting way - and I was a bit curious what you and the commenters might make of those differences.
Moldbug is a "royalist," of course, so his perspective on our dilemma tends towards the conclusion that our political system at its heart is heading towards two undesirable goals (democracy red in tooth and claw, or tyrannical statism). His point, as I took it, was that there is no reform or return possible which will correct the errors which have led us to this pass. We simply do not have the political leadership necessary to steer a third course, and will not have such leadership because the current system not only doesn't produce them, it actively hinders them from developing.
I suggested the linked essay as a corollary, but perhaps a better word would be 'test'. It raises questions which have to be answered before we set ourselves to any political work to be done. Many of us might agree that our system of government is "incurably insane" - but what system? The post-LBJ government? The post-FDR government? The post-Civil War government? The system described by the Constitution? The author of the essay I linked might offer a "yes" to all of these - and thus I find it a useful corollary to your work because, at least as I understand it, you wouldn't answer "yes" to all.
In other words, I found that essay's take on what the "heart of the matter" was different from your own in an interesting way - and I was a bit curious what you and the commenters might make of those differences.
Thucydides is impeccably polite, so when he responded I wanted to be the same without entirely discarding my customary Tesla-esque death-ray approach. I thought I was dealing with a narrow academic question that wouldn't be of interest to most. I was wrong. Thucy's careful language misled me. He was talking about important things. Very important things. Which I, in all my casual superciliousness, finally realized just before completing my response in the comments. That's why you all have to endure my thoughts on his questions now:
Sorry if I misunderstood. I do that.
You write more like Samuel Johnson than Walter Winchell. I don't always
pick up on the difference.
Now that I understand the point, I will (I'm sure) not disappoint if I disagree with the royalist.
The problem with intellectual analyses is that they use too much logic. They fall in love (ironically) with their own use of reason. A contradiction exists. The contradiction is followed to its fatal extreme. Result? Disaster.
Brilliant rationalists have foreseen the end of the world a million times, though fortunately their exquisite taste in port wine has saved them from utter despair. Europeans are especially skilled in this kind of rational Armageddon, perhaps because of their access to exquisite port.
However. The American experience is not rational, not in its adaptations anyway, despite the glorious reasoning embodied in the Constitution. (We could call that the American Paradox, but that would be a whole other essay.)
You see -- and I don't want to sound reductive or simplistic here, but I accept that I probably will -- America is the longest running and most successful rebuttal of Zeno's Arrow. Thanks to the peculiar dynamics -- dare I say physics? -- of the Constitution, the enormous body of average voters do, despite all the corruptions of politics generally, get to say, at least every two years, "That's horseshit. Stop it."
You can fire an arrow but no matter how you parse it and protect it with words, it does reach its target. The result is a yelp. And interestingly, the physics of human nature seems to be on the side of those who recognize horseshit when they see it. Dumbshit takers tend not to vote; impassioned citizens with something to lose tend to swarm the polls when there's something vital at stake.
Which is to say that defining the problem in terms of "leadership" is the rational but erroneous inference of a, well, 'royalist' mentality. When the people are pissed off, they will bubble up their own 'leaders.' Whether they're anointed by the leadership class or not.
A seeming sidebar that isn't: Intellectuals are fond of citing the fact that all civilizations fail in the end. That is, they all fall into ruin. What they never cite is the fact that even ancient civilizations were incredibly hardy. People respond, adapt, solve extraordinary problems with almost numbing regularity. In every recorded history, the evidence of human ingenuity in the face of incredibly daunting obstacles is awe-inspiring. Why are there six billions of us? Because we know how to survive like nobody's business.
On the other hand, the history of declines and falls is depressingly uniform. The elites gather unto themselves too much of the power and resource and make it impossible for the people to exercise their talent for survival. Which is never about reason but plumbing, farming, making, and simple fixing.
Civilizations fell in the past because the people gave too much power to elites. The American experiment, very deeply rooted in all of us (even in trailer parks), is that we all have a voice when and if we want to use it.
You can draw all the vectors of hopeless philosophical conflict you want. Delineate whatever allegory of competing ideas you want. But that won't make you right. The genius of the American idea was the discovery that humanity is not about ideas at all, but making space for the irrational aspirations of human beings to exercise their own ingenuity in responding to the unfair demands of life.
AS LONG AS WE HAVE OUR CONSTITUTION TO KEEP US FREE, Americans will bust through all the walls of ideas and fix the day to day problems life is heir to -- which tend to be about plumbing, farming, making things, selling things, improving their property, raising their children, and getting along with their neighbors.
The brainy doomsayer essayists have never ever understood this. That's why they hide in universities, protected by tenure. Yes, they can do damage to the populace by causing them to doubt their own experience. But when push comes to shove, the people will invariably choose their own mud and blood experience over the mere ideas they've been force-fed by their 'betters.'
In sum, I don't see an apocalypse of any kind in this particular situation. Government is always "incurably insane." Here in the U.S., and perhaps here only, what matters is how voters react to the most recent and most egregious insanities. In the case of AGW, I see (maybe too hopefully) a mere blip on the screen. Some smart people tried to fool us, but that's going to get taken care of. And I don't think intellectuals or professors or other of our 'betters' are going to have that much say about how it gets taken care of.
Will there be other possibly fatal assaults on our ignorant credulity? Yes. Undoubtedly. But the wheels grind on, and they grind fakers mostly equally, even the ones with PhDs. I retain my faith in our miraculously rational constitution and the remarkably irrational ordinary people it was so brilliantly conceived to protect. Does that answer your question?
Now that I understand the point, I will (I'm sure) not disappoint if I disagree with the royalist.
The problem with intellectual analyses is that they use too much logic. They fall in love (ironically) with their own use of reason. A contradiction exists. The contradiction is followed to its fatal extreme. Result? Disaster.
Brilliant rationalists have foreseen the end of the world a million times, though fortunately their exquisite taste in port wine has saved them from utter despair. Europeans are especially skilled in this kind of rational Armageddon, perhaps because of their access to exquisite port.
However. The American experience is not rational, not in its adaptations anyway, despite the glorious reasoning embodied in the Constitution. (We could call that the American Paradox, but that would be a whole other essay.)
You see -- and I don't want to sound reductive or simplistic here, but I accept that I probably will -- America is the longest running and most successful rebuttal of Zeno's Arrow. Thanks to the peculiar dynamics -- dare I say physics? -- of the Constitution, the enormous body of average voters do, despite all the corruptions of politics generally, get to say, at least every two years, "That's horseshit. Stop it."
You can fire an arrow but no matter how you parse it and protect it with words, it does reach its target. The result is a yelp. And interestingly, the physics of human nature seems to be on the side of those who recognize horseshit when they see it. Dumbshit takers tend not to vote; impassioned citizens with something to lose tend to swarm the polls when there's something vital at stake.
Which is to say that defining the problem in terms of "leadership" is the rational but erroneous inference of a, well, 'royalist' mentality. When the people are pissed off, they will bubble up their own 'leaders.' Whether they're anointed by the leadership class or not.
A seeming sidebar that isn't: Intellectuals are fond of citing the fact that all civilizations fail in the end. That is, they all fall into ruin. What they never cite is the fact that even ancient civilizations were incredibly hardy. People respond, adapt, solve extraordinary problems with almost numbing regularity. In every recorded history, the evidence of human ingenuity in the face of incredibly daunting obstacles is awe-inspiring. Why are there six billions of us? Because we know how to survive like nobody's business.
On the other hand, the history of declines and falls is depressingly uniform. The elites gather unto themselves too much of the power and resource and make it impossible for the people to exercise their talent for survival. Which is never about reason but plumbing, farming, making, and simple fixing.
Civilizations fell in the past because the people gave too much power to elites. The American experiment, very deeply rooted in all of us (even in trailer parks), is that we all have a voice when and if we want to use it.
You can draw all the vectors of hopeless philosophical conflict you want. Delineate whatever allegory of competing ideas you want. But that won't make you right. The genius of the American idea was the discovery that humanity is not about ideas at all, but making space for the irrational aspirations of human beings to exercise their own ingenuity in responding to the unfair demands of life.
AS LONG AS WE HAVE OUR CONSTITUTION TO KEEP US FREE, Americans will bust through all the walls of ideas and fix the day to day problems life is heir to -- which tend to be about plumbing, farming, making things, selling things, improving their property, raising their children, and getting along with their neighbors.
The brainy doomsayer essayists have never ever understood this. That's why they hide in universities, protected by tenure. Yes, they can do damage to the populace by causing them to doubt their own experience. But when push comes to shove, the people will invariably choose their own mud and blood experience over the mere ideas they've been force-fed by their 'betters.'
In sum, I don't see an apocalypse of any kind in this particular situation. Government is always "incurably insane." Here in the U.S., and perhaps here only, what matters is how voters react to the most recent and most egregious insanities. In the case of AGW, I see (maybe too hopefully) a mere blip on the screen. Some smart people tried to fool us, but that's going to get taken care of. And I don't think intellectuals or professors or other of our 'betters' are going to have that much say about how it gets taken care of.
Will there be other possibly fatal assaults on our ignorant credulity? Yes. Undoubtedly. But the wheels grind on, and they grind fakers mostly equally, even the ones with PhDs. I retain my faith in our miraculously rational constitution and the remarkably irrational ordinary people it was so brilliantly conceived to protect. Does that answer your question?
Thank you, Thucydides.
The rest of you? Discuss.
