Equality and Domination (A footnote on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone).

I should find this book more appealing. I mean, I am receptive to its basic thesis: that high inequality is bad for a society. I find it plausible to think that societies with a high level of status inequality and status competition do worse in a variety of ways than more equal societies, and in particular that large inequalities may induce bad health effects via elevated stress levels (as they apparently do in all hierarchical primate societies). (Indeed, I do not object to the kinds of comparisons between people and other primates that Wilkinson and Pickett use: they seem fruitful enough to me). But there is something that bothers me about it. Since I am supposed to say something about it from a political theory perspective in a “policy forum” here at VUW in a couple of weeks, consider the (extremely long) post below my attempt to make sense of why I find it unsatisfactory, or perhaps more accurately, my attempt to clear my mind about what it is that is problematic (or not) about inequality.

Before I get to the point, however, I should say that the book does not strike me as an example of good social science. To be sure, most claims in it are supported by an impressive array of footnotes to other research and scientific-looking scatterplots, but even for a lowly political theorist like me some problems were obvious: there is sample selection bias (why should places like South Korea, Israel, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Taiwan be excluded from the analysis, even though they have per capita incomes comparable to if not higher than that of Portugal, which is included?); the graphs all represent static pictures, which fail to control for any factors which may interact with inequality, and often seem to be driven by one or two outliers; there is little discussion of time trends, and what little there is seems unduly focused on the UK and the USA and does not always support their argument; and there is a lot of dubious sociology (one thing that jumped at me is the claim that the Japanese level of income inequality means that Japan is a highly equal society; passing acquaintance with Japanese society indicates that though Japan may be a highly equal society in terms of income, it is also a highly hierarchical society, which would seem to conflict with the mechanism Wilkinson and Pickett identify as responsible for the bad effects of inequality).

I understand that some of these issues have to do with the availability of comparable data on income inequality, and that many of them would have been addressed in some of the studies they cite; but I find that these issues raised enough doubts in my mind to find critiques like Christopher Snowdon’s plausible (the title of Snowdon’s book tells you pretty much what he thinks of The Spirit Level: it’s called The Spirit Level Delusion). On issues that I know a little bit more about, though still not much – like the political science literature on the determinants of inequality, or the literature on happiness and income – I found their summary of other people’s research superficial and sometimes misleading. And obvious alternative mechanisms for the effects they see are simply not explored: for example, it may be that the key variable here is exposure to labor market competition; it is the fear of losing a job that generates stress and bad health effects, but this variable may be systematically associated with inequality. (I am not claiming that this is the case, but it seems like something worthy of investigation).

But I am not a specialist on the literature on health and inequality, and at any rate nothing hinges on any one study or picture. It is the cumulative evidence that matters, and I would not be surprised if something like the Wilkinson-Pickett thesis on inequality were reasonably close to the truth, though probably in a more qualified way. Inequality probably interacts with other factors, including “cultural” factors, in complicated ways; but I imagine that at least some of what they are saying reflects the broad trends of research on inequality (though I could be wrong). I do not, at any rate, have the time or inclination to fact-check the book and wade through the many studies they cite, so I shall take what they say as generally on target, even if subject to discounting.  

Moreover, it would be quite surprising if high levels of income inequality did not have any bad effects on social life. Income inequality may be a highly imperfect proxy for the main hierarchies of status and power that structure a complex society like our own, but it probably is correlated with such hierarchies; and highly status-stratified societies are unlikely to be “well integrated.” (The idea that there are “happy hierarchies” – of caste or occupation or the like, where “each is set in his own rank,” to use the words of an ancient defender of hierarchy – is a figment of the ideological imagination). To be sure, the kinds of status anxieties and status competition that Wilkinson and Pickett believe mediate the effects of income inequality on bad social outcomes are typically centered on one’s neighbours, not on distant rich others, but this does not prevent such competition from having effects across the entire hierarchy. I am reminded of some of the things Don Herzog describes in his book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (discussed in a previous post): in the England of circa 1817, a highly unequal society in almost every respect, each social group sought to preserve its own status by despising those below them in the status hierarchy, a chain of contempt that was created by local effects yet had global implications. This was not merely a “psychological” reaction, but part of a system through which the “lower orders” were put in their place: inequality here was translated into domination and subordination.

But even if the specific mechanism that Wilkinson and Pickett favour to account for the effects of inequality (the induced stress resulting from higher levels of status competition in unequal societies) turns out to be wrong or highly exaggerated, the claim that wealth or income inequality (and not just poverty) is bad for societies has a long and distinguished pedigree. It is interesting to note that many defenders of hierarchy in the history of political thought – writers who did not think human beings are of equal moral worth in the sense that we think they are, and who were willing to defend slavery and other practices we would find abhorrent – thought that, among people who are presumptively equals (like free male citizens), large income inequalities were corrosive of political and social life and generally to be avoided. So there may be something to it.

Instead of debating the factual basis of Wilkinson and Pickett’s views, then, I want to ask about the reasons we should care about (income) inequality, and about how much we should care. Wilkinson and Pickett’s view for why we should care about income inequality is essentially consequentialist: we should care about inequality because having less of it would make us healthier and happier. But, even if we accept this consequentialist framing of the question (about which more in a minute), we would still have to ask how much less income inequality would we want, and at what cost to other values, including other forms of equality.

Consider a simple example. The communist societies of Eastern Europe typically had very low income inequalities, as Wilkinson and Pickett are well aware. And some of them even achieved relatively high levels of “development,” measured conventionally (e.g., East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Yugoslavia of Tito; Cuba is a non-European example today, with its high levels of “human development” – though the typical figures cited in this connection are more than a little dubious these days). Yet most of us would agree that the mechanism through which income equality was achieved in these cases violated rights that we would consider to be fundamental. Indeed, Wilkinson and Pickett say so. But more importantly for my purposes here, these societies were not really equal in an important sense of the term: though income differentials didn’t matter much for social life, inequalities of political access mattered enormously. Today North Korea serves as an extreme example of the sort of “caste” society that can emerge even in the almost complete absence of income differentials; where money has very little value, family background, regime loyalty, etc. can all become terribly important. (And even here, there are nuances and interesting complexities: since the famine in the 1990s, political controls have eroded, money and markets have become more important, and income inequality has increased. But this has been, on the whole, a good thing for a lot of people!).

Now, someone may object that this is obvious and irrelevant: nobody is arguing that we should implement a system of state socialism in order to diminish income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett’s proposals tend more towards ideas for worker self-management within a democratic framework, though the political mechanisms through which they expect such a system to sustain itself remain woolly. (It is worth noting that however attractive such proposals may appear – and I am not immune to their charms – the most extensive and successful system of worker self-management, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, did not survive the partial democratization and collapse of the country at the political level, and indeed seems to have precipitated the enormous Yugoslav economic crisis of the early 1990s). At any rate, the levels of equality in Sweden or Japan – the countries that Wilkinson and Pickett single out as the most equal - can be achieved within the framework of a typical capitalist economy (something that Wilkinson and Pickett seem to forget in their last chapters, where they basically attack capitalism as such). No complete transformation of property relationships is needed to reduce income inequality substantially through taxes and transfers (within the limits given by the efficiency losses induced by high taxes, available technologies of tax evasion, the political resistance of the rich, and cultural ideas about what constitutes “excessive” taxation).

But the problem is that simple income equality is unlikely to be what we are really looking for, as Wilkinson and Pickett seem dimly aware of in their last chapters with their proposals on worker self-management. When money fails to serve as an indicator of distinction, other things may easily take its place. Consider the fact that Japanese CEOs get paid less in money than American CEOs (who many people consider to be obscenely overpaid relative to workers), but more in deference and perks. This may be good or bad, but it is not altogether obvious that one sort of inequality is preferable to the other, even if Japan is in fact a healthier society than the USA for any number of reasons. (Indeed, I rather prefer the money inequality to the status inequality in this case: at least the money inequality does not involve direct subordination. Marx himself considered the “cash nexus” of exploitative capitalism an advance over the sorts of paternalistic subordination typical of “feudal” relations). So if we are interested in equality, we need to think clearly about what, exactly, is bad about income inequality, and whether the means we could use to eliminate it simply introduce other perhaps even more invidious inequalities in their wake.

This is a point made more elegantly and generally by Michael Walzer in his book Spheres of Justice. In Walzer’s view, the different goods produced by social cooperation have different meanings that indicate the appropriate way to distribute them; principles of distribution make sense only in specific spheres. Grades should not be distributed according to wealth, or emergency healthcare according to ability to pay, and more generally, not everything should (or could!) be distributed according to money. But most goods can also “cross spheres,” money and political power being the most obvious cases. It is the convertibility of goods that raises problems; if money could never be converted into status, political power, personal domination, and so on, income inequality would be far less problematic. So an egalitarian society, in Walzer’s view, limits the convertibility of the various goods produced by social cooperation. In particular, an egalitarian society should limit political power from being easily transformed into wealth, and wealth from being easily transformed into political power and social status. But an egalitarian society would not, necessarily, limit inequalities in wealth except to the extent that such limitation arises endogenously from the attempt to prevent wealth from turning into political power, status, and domination over others (Walzer thinks, for example, that some forms of large-scale property are inherently political, and hence ought to be limited or regulated by “voice”). There are complications here, for political power and money are both special sorts of goods (they “seep” through all the other spheres of distribution, and sometimes what looks like one is really the other), and there appears to be no stable equilibrium that completely guarantees the nonconvertibility of coercive political power or dominating social status into personal income and vice-versa (indeed, there are some problems with the very coherence of Walzer’s proposals, but discussing them would take us too far afield).

But in general Walzer’s intuition is that when we say that we are interested in equality, what we (should) mean is that we are interested in nondomination, and this intuition seems reasonably sound. We are not actually interested in income equality or inequality (at least to the extent that we are not simply motivated by envy), but in not being dominated by those with money and in retaining our self-respect as equal citizens. A similar point was made in a very influential article by Elizabeth Anderson entitled “What is the Point of Equality?” Anderson was criticizing what she considered to be the pernicious position of “luck egalitarians” (a term she coined, but which has been embraced by proponents of this form of egalitarianism). Luck egalitarians argue that the point of justice is to neutralize those differences in welfare and resources for which an individual cannot be held responsible. In its most persuasive form, luck egalitarians start from the common intuition that luck (chance) neutralizes desert and responsibility: someone who inherited lots of wealth could not be said to “deserve” it, and someone who does badly because of factors that are outside his or her control cannot be said to be responsible for his or her misfortune. But, by the same token, we do not deserve our good fortune in the form of good parents, or natural talents, or place of birth, all of which are factors that greatly influence whether we make lots of money or not, and whether we live satisfying lives or not. Exactly what we “deserve” in this sense is difficult to say; some luck egalitarians like G. A. Cohen seem comfortable saying that we basically deserve nothing save perhaps a bit of our effort, though others are more generous. This already seems to miss the prospective elements of desert – maybe you eventually come to deserve those opportunities, as David Schmidtz argues – but the more controversial move that luck egalitarians make is to argue that justice requires that those who are fortunate in ways for which they cannot be held (ultimately) responsible compensate those who are less fortunate. Luck egalitarians thus argued for things like a universal “basic income” and for various sorts of subsidies to equalize the prospects of the fortunate and the unfortunate (an example, taken from Anderson’s article: subsidized or free plastic surgery for the ugly), though they mostly accepted the legitimacy of market societies (with some exceptions, like G. A. Cohen, who was a sort of Marxist), and suggested that once inequalities of fortune have been equalized, inequalities resulting from “bad choices” are to be tolerated (even if they turn out to be quite large).

Anderson argued that this position was open to all sorts of objections (which I won’t rehearse here), but her main point was that we should care about equality as a matter of justice (in contrast with charity or humanitarian concern) not because we are interested in fixing the great “cosmic injustice” of individual differences, but because we are interested in not being oppressed and dominated and treated contemptuously by others. Luck egalitarianism, in her view, fails to care about those things; it fixates on natural differences rather than on the ways in which societies transform human diversity into rungs of hierarchy, it privileges envy rather and contemptuous pity rather than self-respect as the key moral sentiments, and it promotes intrusive forms of paternalism in order to avoid excessively bad outcomes.

Extremely long story short, I agree with this; I take it that we should care about income inequality to the extent that income inequality undermines the possibility of a society of equals in the sense of people who cannot dominate one another, and hence can respect each other’s liberty. Now, there’s a great deal of dispute about exactly what is needed for such a life in a modern complex society (do we need a more equal distribution of the means of production? do we need a universalistic safety net or some kinds of public health? do we need a minimum wage?); accepting this view does not say much about which institutions best enable a society of equals. One can certainly imagine that, as income differentials increase, these are translated more easily into power and dominating social status, and there seems to be some evidence for this view. But the same can be true of interventions designed to decrease income inequality – they may also enhance the power or status of some over others in unjustified ways, especially if they take the form of opaque and bureaucratic administrative programs rather than simple transfers. At any rate, in the grand scheme of things, income inequalities seem to be less “coupled” with power and status inequalities in modern capitalist democracies than in many other kinds of society, even if they could do better.

Moreover, there are other considerations that should limit the reach of egalitarian measures. Considerations of ownership matter to our moral thinking, though they are not always decisive. The income that we propose to redistribute is always somebody’s income; can the redistribution be justified in ways that are reasonable? Just saying that the redistribution will probably make people healthier, or that the person “doesn’t really need” the income, is not obviously sufficient, though it may serve a purpose in the political debate over equality. Considerations of past injustice also matter. If Maori have lower income than others in New Zealand, or blacks in the US, the relevant consideration is not necessarily the income inequality, but the past injustice by which such lower income was produced, and which may need to be rectified.

So, does it matter very much if Wilkinson and Pickett are right and more (income-) equal societies are healthier? It would certainly be nicer to have healthier and happier societies, but I am wary of saying that we should engage in large-scale redistribution just because we might gain a little health and happiness (the effects Wilkinson and Pickett note seem to be quite small in absolute terms). The consequentialist frame is too thin to hang the argument for equality, and it is always at the mercy of other research showing that no, inequality is not really associated with worse health and happiness. To the extent, on the other hand, that there are specific inequalities that prevent some people from living the life of a self-respecting, equal citizens – or that enable some to transform political into economic power or vice-versa - then I am more receptive.

And if you, kind reader, have made it this far, you probably deserve a prize. But there isn’t one. Tough luck.   

Contempt and the Public Sphere (A Footnote on Don Herzog's "Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders")

Like many other people, when reading the political blogosphere I am often struck by the prevalence of expressions of contempt. It is not simply that the “political public sphere” in the internet hardly corresponds to the Habermasian ideal of deliberation in which only the force of the better argument prevails; rather, expressions of contempt for the views and sometimes persons of others thoroughly pervade political argument. It is common to find claims that certain others have no (moral) “right” to speak on certain issues, or that their views should be ridiculed or ignored rather than engaged.

I am less interested in condemning this state of affairs (a pointless exercise anyway) than in trying to understand whether contempt is inextricably linked with public political argument. The thought crossed my mind while reading Don Herzog’s interesting book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, which I discovered via Adrian Vermeule’s Law and the Limits of Reason. Herzog’s book could be described as a look at the political blogosphere in the British Isles circa 1817; he seems to have looked at every political pamphlet, newspaper, minor novel, and even popular song published between 1789 and 1834, and examined how coffeehouses, alehouses, and hairdressers' shops functioned as sites of political debate. It’s impressive, though I do not envy the undertaking (just imagining trying to write the contemporary version of this book makes me nauseous). 

As Herzog makes clear (at sometimes excruciating length, in fact), the political public sphere of the time was as filled with expressions of contempt, or perhaps more so, than the current political public sphere. Contempt was directed towards women, blacks, Jews, workers, rich people, poor people, politicians, hairdressers, etc.; reading Herzog, in fact, one gets the impression that most political argument at the time was simply composed of expressions of contempt by contending parties. (So much for the good old days before the internet). Moreover, though Herzog stresses that contempt was tightly linked to the “conservative” project of preserving hierarchies and preventing the transformation of “subjects into citizens,” the book makes it clear that contempt was deployed both to sustain hierarchy and deference on the part of subordinate groups and to undermine such hierarchy and deference; it was not the specific property of particular parties or groups (though conservatives and radicals typically expressed contempt in different ways, and made use of it for different purposes).

What makes the book interesting, beyond its account of the historical debates that shaped the emergence of a distinctively modern “conservatism” in Britain during those decades, is the way Herzog links the question of contempt with questions about epistemic authority: who is worth listening to, and who is not, and what norms should apply to apply to political debate.

Norms of political debate are not neutral with respect to epistemic authority. The Habermasian ideal of deliberation, for example, implicitly grants all citizens equal epistemic authority: all arguments are to be judged on the merits, not with respect to any characteristics of the person making them. This may imply, among other things, that one should deploy arguments sincerely rather than strategically, be open to correction, and extend interpretive charity to the positions of others (at least ideally).

But what if one thinks that the characteristics of some people – e.g., people who are far from me politically – are useful proxies for the likelihood that their arguments are worth listening to? (Life is short, after all – do I really have to listen to what everyone has to say?) And what do we do about people who violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the norms of debate – deploying arguments dishonestly or strategically, “concern-trolling,” refusing to accept evidence, etc.? Do we engage with them or punish them through expressions of contempt etc.? (And it is not always possible to determine who is behaving strategically and who is not; what looks like trolling to some may look like perfectly reasonable argument to others). Or how about people who have more influence than their (actual, rather than perceived) epistemic authority warrants? (What if we think, for example, that particular bloggers we dislike are more influential than their arguments warrant?) Do we engage with their views sincerely, in the confidence that “the truth will out,” or try to diminish their influence by attacking their epistemic authority by other means – ridicule, contempt, ad hominem argument, etc.? (Consider here debates about climate change or creationism in schools).

Herzog’s key idea (and here I sense a criticism of Habermas, though AFAIK Habermas is not mentioned in the book) is that distinctively political debate is always in part about the distribution of epistemic authority, i.e., about who has a “right” to speak and whose views are worth being listened to. Conservatives and radicals in the England of 1817 disagreed not merely about the merits of particular proposals (about suffrage, etc.), but about whether certain groups of people were worth taking seriously. And there is no neutral standpoint to determine who can or cannot be admitted to the public sphere, no neutral view that reveals the true distribution of knowledge and indicates what the true distribution of political influence should be; political debate is always (among other things) the attempt to shape the distribution of epistemic authority, and this attempt seems to be inescapably accompanied by the deployment of contempt. (Consider, by contrast, debates where epistemic authority is relatively uncontroversial, as in some purely scientific debates: the debate is non-political to the extent that the standards for evidence and argument are widely shared among participants, and hence to the extent that there is wide agreement among participants regarding who is or is not worth listening to).

The point I am trying to get at goes beyond the observation that party boundaries in politics are typically policed by expressions of contempt, and partisanship is inescapable in democratic politics (and at any rate there are good things to be said for partisanship in the public sphere). The question is whether one can one imagine a deliberative form of politics that is not underpinned by the deployment of contempt towards those who are not considered to be worth listening to? Are judgments that some people are not worth listening to necessarily expressions of contempt? And are the sanctions that we may think are necessary to keep debate healthy necessarily contemptuous?

I do not know the answers to these questions, but I suspect that it is impossible to police any set of norms of debate without using sanctions that express contempt. To the extent that the public sphere is a political sphere, it will be pervaded by contempt (though to a greater or lesser extent), and hence the lamentations about the quality of our public discourse will always be with us. Democracy, in other words, may be structurally unsatisfying, no matter how deliberative it may be; a public sphere without contempt would be a public sphere from which politics properly has been excluded, either because of an accidental harmony of interests among its participants, or through the kind of coercion that prevents certain people from participating in it.

The Ancient Ones

R. John Parkes, a researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, studies microbes found in core samples collected by the Ocean Drilling Program from rocks deep below the ocean floor. “For a long time, these deep sediments were thought to be devoid of any life at all,” he says. There’s life down there, all right, but talk about slow metabolism: When Parke analyzed 4.7 million-year-old organic sediment in the Mediterranean, he estimated the average time it took for resident microbes to reproduce by cell division at 120,000 years. And he reported finding living bacteria just over a mile below the seafloor, in sediments 111 million years old and at temperatures of 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

More here.

Too many gods

The pot is a god. The winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so many there’s no place left for a foot.

Quoted here, from the 12th century South Indian poet Basavanna.

Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought).

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia pointed me in the direction of thinking about the place of “hills” and “valleys,” state spaces and stateless places, in political theory. Scott claims that both Southeast Asian and Western political thought have stigmatized those hill-dwellers who have no permanent residence (p. 101), and identified civilization with the settled states of the valleys (pp. 100-101), though he also pays homage to Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqaddimah (p. 20), a work which does not stigmatize the stateless (at least so far as I remember; it’s been a while). He even notes that Aristotle famously argued that human beings were political animals, i.e., animals that live in poleis or cities, a characterization that suggests that people who do not live in cities are not fully human (p. 101 – though Scott fails to note that for Aristotle such people can be both above and below the level of humanity). I cannot speak about Southeast Asian political theory, but it seems to me that at least with respect to Western political theory the picture is a bit more complicated, even if Scott is correct overall.

For example, Aristotle’s famous pronouncement about the polis-nature of human beings is complicated by the fact that the polis was most certainly not an agrarian state – the “statelessness” of the polis is well known, though some of the larger poleis did eventually develop something like police forces and other aspects of statehood – and that Aristotle did not define the polis in contrast to nomadic life and in terms of settled habitation, but in contrast to the family and in terms of its purpose. Indeed, he takes pains to distinguish the polis both from the great empires of his time (which were true extractive agrarian states of the sort that Scott discusses in his book) and from mere settlements (whose focus on “mere life” did not qualify them for civilization). The barbarian empires were “uncivilized” despite their possession of large and powerful states, and the city-less are low less because they are scattered than because they have no “clan” and are “lovers of war,” i.e., because they are insufficiently social.

Thus, though Aristotle does seem to indicate that nomadic peoples are “primitive” (the Cyclops, who are traditionally represented as a nonsedentary people, appear as an instance of the “old ways” of political organization), there is no clear indication that sedentary existence per se is necessary to the polis, or that it is in itself valuable. In this Aristotle is in keeping with what I take to be the traditional Greek way of thinking, where not the physical location but the citizens constituted the city: “For the men, not the walls nor the empty galleys, are the city,” and so “Wherever you settle, you will be a polis” as Nikias tells his soldiers in a speech Thucydides either invented or recreated for his History of the Peloponnesian War. To be sure, this is still consistent with the story that Scott tells about the importance of men, rather than land, in the construction of states; but it ought to put a wrinkle in the “stigma” thesis.

But it is in Plato that we find an explicit consideration of the valence of “hills and valleys” in the sense that Scott is really concerned with. In book III of his long dialogue Laws, Plato develops the contrast between the hills and the valleys through a speculative history which he uses to isolate those factors that gave rise to politeiai (political organization) and laws, both of which are associated with the cities of the plain and the states they controlled. (Ancient speculative histories are fascinating. I suspect they functioned among ancient thinkers much as economists’ or political scientists’ models function today: as interesting simplifications with some explanatory value that isolate general reasons for action operating in particular contexts.).

The narrative is more or less as follows. The Athenian Stranger (the leading character in the dialogue) asks his interlocutors to imagine a situation where, thanks to some massive flood, the states of the plains were destroyed, leaving only a slight remnant of pastoralists high up in the hills (677a-b). This catastrophe not only radically simplified technology (most arts and sciences are lost), but also greatly reduced exposure to the various forms of greed and morally dubious competition prevalent in cities (677b-c). In fact, the catastrophe destroyed the memory of cities and politeiai and laws: the hill peoples are clearly stateless in a radical sense (678a). But laws and political life are not necessarily good; the Athenian stresses that with laws and political life properly speaking you can get both virtue and vice (and more often the latter than the former, especially in the form of warfare). By contrast, the hill peoples are naïve or artless (εὐήθεις; literally having “good habits”), not educated (or mis-educated) by urban artifice, and rather peaceful.

Indeed, war is presented in the story as an artefact of civilization (678d-e); so long as land is abundant, and the memory of catastrophe is recent (the “fear of the plain”), the hill peoples do not fight (and at any rate they do not have much of the technology and arts of war, so their fighting is not, the Athenian speculates, highly destructive). On the contrary, they welcome each other (679a) and have pleasure in each other’s company (given low population densities, they do not meet each other that often), and because their societies are less unequal than urban societies (with less of both poverty and wealth, as well as less hierarchy and subordination), they develop in an environment that ultimately makes them more courageous, moderate and just than urban peoples (679d-e). It’s an idyllic picture (and not a terribly bad description of forager/pastoralist societies in the absence of states, either, though idealized in some respects). How do laws emerge, then? What are they for?

The first step towards law and political life is made possible, in this speculative story, by the very naïveté or artlessness of the hill peoples. Because they did not have the cunning and scepticism of urban peoples (who are experienced about deception, both as agents and subjects of it), they believed any old story that they were told about “gods and men” (679c), and adopted these stories as the basis of their customs. (Note the dig here towards all mythical stories of founding and legitimation; most of these stories are simply nonsense, in the Athenian’s view). These customs were not yet laws; their orality disqualified them from this status. (The hill peoples are illiterate, 680a). But they did not need to be laws in order to regulate their social life, which was still quite self-contained.

Their self-containment could be interpreted as a form of “savagery” (680b-d), or perhaps more accurately a lack of “domestication,” as the Athenian notes by comparing such hill peoples to the mythical Cyclops described in Homer. Yet he does not himself endorse the comparison, which seems at any rate inconsistent with his previous praise of the justice and moderation of the hill peoples; the one who proposes it is Megillos, the representative of the slave-holding valley state par excellence, Sparta (680d3), which was also known for its "savagery" (cf. 666e, where the Athenian calls the Spartan system "savage"). To be civilized, for Megillos, is to become domesticated; but the metaphor of domestication is not altogether unambiguous in Plato (sheep and pigs are also domesticated, after all).

But this self-containment cannot last. As the memory of the initial cataclysm fades (perhaps an echo of a collective memory of an old fear of the cities of the plain? Fears of slave-raiding, for example, as Scott suggests in his discussion of the stories of hill peoples from Thailand and Burma? Not that Plato mentions such fears), hill peoples move down, and some turn to farming and a sedentary life (681a), coming in contact with other recent transplants from the hills. But now they need to coordinate regarding which of their various and incompatible customs (based on the random stories mentioned earlier) is to regulate their common life; and here we have the origins of legislation properly speaking (681b-d).

From here the Athenian shifts from speculating about the origin of valley states to recounting the history of the first Greek valley states, in particular the Dorian states (Sparta, Argos, and Messene), a history that would have been familiar to his two interlocutors (the Spartan Megillos and the Cretan Kleinias). This narrative is then put to use in order to understand why in some states (Sparta) the rulers were more constrained by laws than in others (Argos and Messene), despite their various similarities. This is perhaps the first systematic empirical comparison in political science, using a “most similar cases” design, but the Athenian no longer mentions hill peoples, so I shall not summarize the rest here.

This speculative history is notable in two ways. First, it marks a contrast between the natural but “naïve” or “artless” goodness of the peoples of the hills and the potential for both virtue and corruption of the cities. The hill peoples do not need “technical” or "artificial" virtue to live well; their natural virtue is enough. But cities do need such “artificial” virtue (or rather, they need real knowledge), and it is not obvious that this is not a curse, since such knowledge is exceedingly scarce. As the Athenian notes in the “historical” part of his narrative, life in most valley states seems to end in some form or another or tyranny due to a lack of knowledge and virtue; the hill peoples had it better in that respect.

But second, the narrative suggests that short of a major cataclysm, there is no going back to hill life. Indeed, the point of the Athenian’s political theory in this part of the dialogue is to find a way to realistically mitigate the evils of life in settled valley societies; and for this, he will introduce for the first time a systematic theory of the “mixed constitution” - the ancient predecessor of our theories of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” (though the theory is in many ways quite different from our modern equivalents; more in a future post, probably). It is precisely the possession of something like a “mixed constitution” that enabled Sparta to become a relatively law-governed state, in contrast to the situation in Argos and Messene, which degenerated, in the Athenian’s telling, into more arbitrary regimes. But this did not make Sparta perfect; on the contrary, he had criticized it earlier as an “armed camp” more than a city (666e).

One could note that the Athenian’s narrative is still valley-centric; there is no mention of flight into the hills, for example, and certainly the background fact of slavery as a requirement of the valley states is kept deep in the background. At any rate, it seems that, from the point of view of a fourth century Greek like Plato, the hill frontier had more or less closed, or had become an unrealistic option (or perhaps it was all only a thought experiment to begin with). And the full flourishing of human life does seem to go through urban life, but in Plato (in contrast, perhaps, to Aristotle’s more optimistic take later on) this is a road that is almost certain to lead to disappointment. The hill peoples had it better.

Now, it is possible that canonical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were not representative of the tenor of Greek political thought on the question of the valence of hills and valleys. One probably would have to scour a much larger sample of writings, and our sources are often fragmentary and biased. And though the “anarchism” of the early Stoics and Cynics is reasonably well attested, as well as the antipolitical attitudes of the Epicureans (or at least as well attested as the meagre fragments of their texts that survive allow), these attitudes clearly soften in later thinkers identified with these schools (and more from these later people survive). Moreover, the evidence of etymology supports the “stigma” thesis; the word asteios, for example, which originally meant something like “urban” in a neutral sense, eventually came to mean something like “good.” At any rate, canonical thinkers like Plato clearly tend to be unrepresentative; that is part of the reason why their thought can be continuously re-appropriated by later generations, and why it remains interesting beyond the narrow context in which it emerged. But still, in general it seems that there was more ambivalence about the identification of states and civilization in Greek political theory than Scott suggests, and this ambivalence does not simply die off. Beyond Plato to Augustine to Rousseau there is a strand of Western political theory that is willing to call most states “bands of robbers” and has difficulty making its peace with them; and as with Rousseau, this strand sometimes comes close to saying that a stateless existence would be better, even if they also acknowledge its impossibility in a world where the valley states are dominant.

Footnotes on things I've been reading: James C. Scott's "The Art of Not Being Governed"

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, which had been highly recommended to me by a number of people. All I can say is, what are you waiting for? Go read it! It’s great!

Scott starts from a couple of observations that are obvious when you think about them but are illuminating when stated explicitly and applied systematically. First, the vast majority of the subjects of pre-modern states (in all parts of the world, not just Southeast Asia) have been unfree – slaves, bondsmen, serfs, etc. In fact, the pre-modern state (a problematic term, but let’s let that pass for the moment) was basically a technology for coercively extracting surpluses from sedentary agricultural laborers. Second, for most of human history the geographical reach of any state was sharply limited by the characteristics of the terrain, especially elevation (moving grain by oxcart quickly becomes prohibitively expensive over relatively long distances or as the elevation increases, for example).

Going up (or into swamps or other inaccessible terrain) thus meant going out of what Scott nicely calls “state space.” It is worth stressing that stateless spaces do not imply a lack of sociality, or a horrendous Hobbesian "state of nature." Stateless societies tend to be relatively egalitarian, small, mobile, and based more on gift exchanges than on the coercive extraction of resources – just like the forager bands that dominated human history for most of the 100,000 years or so since Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as a distinct species of primate. In comparison to many pre-modern states, the stateless hill societies Scott describes had a more varied diet and more leisure, and in general they could be said to be far “freer” (less hierarchy and subordination, not to speak of taxes, corvée labor, strict gender roles, and the like). Leaving the state has not been a very bad thing for most people for most of human history, pace Hobbes.

Thus, so long as terrain imposes significant limits to state-building projects, you get a situation where many “subjects” of the state can and often do exercise their “exit” option: they can move to the hills. And state-makers, in turn, try to prevent them from moving, especially since under the typical conditions prevailing in most of human history (e.g., limited military specialization) manpower is identical with power. The primary project of pre-modern state-building has been to “sedentarize” people – to keep them near at hand to the ruler so that they can be mobilized for his purposes and his glory. (The “problem” posed by people leaving – for state-makers, not for the emigrants themselves - is not confined to pre-modern states; the communist regimes went to great lengths to try to prevent people from leaving as well, and like pre-modern states, they collapsed when they could not manage to keep them in.)

One might think that one way of preventing people from leaving would be to produce good government. And indeed, Scott notes how the desperate need for people of most Southeast Asian rulers produced a great deal of “social mobility” in what are otherwise highly hierarchical societies, and a certain amount of redistribution of material resources: slaves quickly became regular exploited peasants, for example, and there was lots of redistributive feasting. And there were some attractions to being near the culture of the court. But when there are always other petty tyrants busy trying to build their own tiny empires (full of "cosmologial bluster" about universal rule), there is a strong incentive for each of them to steal other people’s people. Pre-modern warfare (not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the Mediterranean world) is thus often indistinguishable from pure slave-raiding.

Moreover, producing good government is often actually contrary to the interests of the ruler. The ruler is interested less in the total amount of production (GDP) than on the total amount of accessible resources – men and storable crops; and these were often (and are often) very different things. While the farmer might want to plant root crops (which are not easily visible to the state officials), practice less labor-intensive swidden (“slash and burn”) agriculture, and in general have a more varied diet and life, the ruler would prefer that he stick to planting rice, which is easily surveyed and seized. (This continues a theme of Scott’s other great book, Seeing like a State; state-making has been historically concerned above all with making things visible to state officials so that they can be more easily controlled and seized). Indeed, rice made states in Asia; no rice, no states. (I wonder if the fact that Australia is and has been pretty dry explains why it was, until extremely recently in historical time, basically a stateless area; concentrated agriculture of the kind that can make states was probably not worth the trouble, and so political entrepreneurs intent on creating durable hierarchies simply did not have the sorts of resources necessary for the task).

Thus, at least in Southeast Asia, people often had both the incentive and the opportunity to escape states. But the availability of exit didn’t necessarily produce “good government,” though it might have mitigated petty tyrannies occasionally, and it certainly produced states that where cultural assimilation was possible and often quick. Competition between state-builders did not produce good Tiebout effects but rather a lot of what Weber called “booty capitalism” (and, it seems, a lot of misery; the history he tells is at bottom a dismal chronicle). More importantly for Scott, this dynamic also led to the formation of hill societies that were extremely concerned with avoiding the state. I haven’t gotten this far yet, but from the earlier sections it seems clear that Scott argues that, far from being “primitive,” many features of these societies – their forms of agriculture, their social structures, even their orality – are basically designed to prevent their incorporation into valley states – to become less legible and less controllable. The culture of the hills is the art of not being governed.

Yet I suspect that Scott makes too much of the “primitive”/ “civilized” dichotomy; the art of not being governed seems suspiciously like the art of living like a forager band, even if the hill societies he is interested in are not necessarily foragers (they practice swidden – “slash and burn” – agriculture, for example).

A couple of things I was thinking as I was reading. First, how far could you go in refining and formalizing Scott’s implicit model of statemaking? Scott is a classical “thick description” scholar, distrustful of simplified models, but I’m an unreconstructed theorist, and would like to understand more about the parameters governing the significance of exit and voice in the development of tolerable or bearable states. Maybe “voice” (e.g., democracy) only becomes a significant possibility once the possibility of exit is foreclosed yet production technologies are such that states cannot simply survey and seize productive resources at will?

And what about the significance of different technologies? Scott argues that his analysis does not apply today, when “distance destroying technologies” – helicopters, all-weather roads, etc. – make extending state spaces easier than ever, but those who wish to avoid the state are not standing still either; one thinks of the many ways in which financial technologies serve to take production away from the reach of the state, even as at the same time newer military technologies make the state less dependent on manpower and so less intent on "fixing" people in place.

I was also thinking about the hill/valley relationship in political thought. Scott notes how Ibn Khaldoun’s great work, the Muqaddimah (which is great, by the way!), is basically concerned with the complex dialectical relationship between state and non-state spaces, the Bedouin and the “civilized;” but he basically claims that for the most part political thought has simply reiterated the basic dichotomy of hill and valley (or civilized and barbarian, “raw” and “cooked,” and so on), valuing the valleys and dismissing the hills. This may be true in the aggregate, yet I kept thinking of the speculative histories of the origin of the state in Plato, especially the Laws, with its complex and by no means one sided evaluation of the virtues of the hills and the vices of the cities. (More on this later).

Anyway, there’s much more to it (I’m not finished with it yet), and it’s well written to boot. (I love the term “cosmological bluster,” for example). I'm considering assigning it to my honours seminar in political theory, even though it's not really a political theory text; yet it really makes you think about the nature of states from a "universal history" perspective that is too often obscured in the usual texts and debates on power and the state in contemporary political theory. 

Hermes, Lord of Robbers (Homeric Hymn #4)

As a picture book. Nancy found it in the public library, and we read it to our daughter. It is a fairly complete (and very nice) translation of the short fourth Homeric Hymn (to Hermes, Lord - or Leader - of Robbers - or Thieves), with some truly lovely illustrations. Some bits and pieces are missing (stuff about sacrificial meat that would be hard to explain in any book, an episode about Hermes' invention of fire that is incomplete in the original), but I suspect it is all the better for it (the original hymn lacks some thematic unity).

Hermes is born and the first thing he wants to do is steal Apollo's cattle, which he succeeds in doing that very night. He is clever and thus makes the cattle walk backwards, so that they leave tracks that point in the wrong direction, but he is seen by an old man, so Apollo quickly learns who stole his cattle. He goes to seek Hermes and accuses him, and some funny banter ensures (Hermes: "I was only born yesterday! My feet are soft, and the ground is hard!"). Apollo is not amused, and wants to beat Hermes up. Hermes appeals to Zeus, who laughs at his fibs and tells him to go get Apollo's cattle ("Dad, I really didn't do it. Zeus: ok, now go get the cattle"). They go (big brother and little brother: Apollo and Hermes are sons of Zeus) but Apollo discovers that Hermes has slain two of his cows (this is a bit abrupt in the picture book, since the stuff about sacrifice is omitted), so he gets really mad again and wants to beat Hermes up. But Hermes is clever again, and soothes him by playing music - and giving Apollo the lyre he had fashioned out of a turtle's shell. Apollo, grateful for the music, decides to let the matter go, and gives him a staff and tells him that he shall always be known as the prince of robbers - and so given the tribute and recognition he had craved since he was born (the day before). Hermes promises never to steal anything from Apollo's house. (I don't tell the story well enough. It really is charming, in a cheerfully amoral way, and the illustrations in the book are beautiful).

The hymn depicts a world that is truly different from our own - a world where Hermes' excellence lies in his ability to steal Apollo's cattle and then charm him so that Apollo does not beat him up, where political authority - including the authority of Zeus - is at best the authority of mediators, not enforcers, where population densities are low and the natural world is intensely present; it's a world closer to the world of nomadic foragers than to the world of farmers and cities of later antiquity. (This is a very old piece of poetry, a survival in writing of an even older oral tradition; one can apparently learn much from Homer's epic poetry and the Homeric hymns about Bronze-age society). Hermes is praised as the prince of cattle-raiders, not condemned; he is excellent because his cleverness is beautiful, not because he is a good boy. (There is something in Nietzsche about this, I think - which I am probably misremembering). We quite enjoyed it, though I can see why Plato thought the Homer-heavy popular culture of his time was very corrupting; the poem reminds me a bit of Roald Dahl's tales.

Fun with visualizations 2: Growth and Democracy

William Easterly recently had a post on the "mystery of the benevolent autocrat" that illustrated the fact that non-democratic countries seem to have a higher variance in growth rates than democratic countries. Since I've been playing with visualization software, I thought I'd try to replicate his analysis and produce some pretty graphs that I could use in my dictatorships class. The results are here (make sure to click - the full-screen versions are much prettier than the embedded versions below, and the software has some nice features that make it easy to explore the data).

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The first view replicates Easterly's scatterplot, but using data from the Penn World Table from 1950-2007. (At least, I think it does. My econometric skills are obviously much worse than those of a former World Bank economist, so take that with a grain of salt). It adds, however, a color for the Polity2 score - greener is more democratic here - and the size of each dot is proportional to the number of years of data available for the comparison (some countries have only a few years of data available, others have more than 50). I use the same transformation of the Polity2 score that Easterly uses - Polity2/(11-Polity2). As you can see, countries that have been on average autocratic have a higher growth variance - some have had very large growth rates over the period in question, others have had very low rates. Democracies, however, seem to be clustered towards the average growth rate of the world economy - around 2.5% per year or so or so.

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The second view shows the same scatterplot, except using the average of the raw Polity2 score rather than Easterly's transformation. The greatest amount of variance seems to be found in the countries that have an average Polity2 score between 1 and -5 or so - the more autocratic "anocracies" (many of them "hybrid regimes") rather than the full "autocracies" of Polity's classification (though of course a scatterplot is not a statistical analysis).

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The last view shows the data on a map, where the size of the dot corresponds to the average (geometric mean) of the growth rate over the period in question, and the color corresponds to the average Polity2 score - green is more democratic (at least in the Polity2 scheme).

Why do non-democracies seem to have greater growth variance than democracies? I suspect the incentives of leaders in democracies prevent large policy changes (both good and bad), whereas more autocratic systems may have greater variance in the quality of leadership and in the incentives they provide to these leaders. (Maybe I will try a more fine-grained visualization using data on types of political regime to see what comes out - later).

Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that prevent us from understanding the consequences of institutional change, and the bigger the change, the more these limitations apply. All things considered, it is harder to predict the consequences of major institutional change than of minor institutional tinkering. Moreover, even when we are in error about the consequences of minor change, the potential damage to our social life from such errors is also likely to be minor and easily contained, whereas when we are in error about major changes, the damages may be devastating. Hence we should try to avoid wholesale change to our institutions.

The key idea is that ex ante we have a better idea of the risks of small changes than we do of the risks of large changes, and ex post we can contain the damage of small changes better than the damage of large changes. Given reasonable loss aversion in the face of genuine uncertainty, this implies that we should be more careful about larger than about smaller changes to our institutions. Note that the argument is not that major changes will have bad effects, but that we should be more uncertain about the effects of major changes than about the effects of minor changes, and that this asymmetric uncertainty should make us more cautious about undertaking these larger changes.

There is a whole question here about how to define “small” and “large,” but let’s let that slide for the moment, since there are clearly some cases where the argument seems to make sense. Something like it forms part of Burke’s case against revolution: there are many potential bad consequences from trying to completely change an entire form of life, but given our epistemic limitations we can hardly know which major changes will be on balance good and which will be on balance bad. And today we might see this argument deployed to justify less action than some economists might like on restarting the global economy, or less action on climate change than some environmentalists might like, though whether the argument works in these cases depends in part on our estimates of the costs of inaction, estimates that may also be subject to our epistemic limitations. (A full formal investigation of the problems here would presumably use Bayesian analysis. But here I reveal my on epistemic limitations – I do not know enough to use it).

This is a sort of “selection” argument for conservatism, though it does not look like one at first sight. In order for this argument to justify gradualism, however, rather than rigid immobility, we have to assume that small deleterious changes are either eliminated quickly or else that they cannot accumulate and interact in collectively very harmful ways. For example, a firm that produces bad products should go bankrupt without affecting the ability of other firms to operate too much, and small regulatory changes that do not work must be quickly identified and eliminated through some explicit mechanism (e.g., litigation, as in some defences of the common law). Whenever there is no selection mechanism to get rid of such minor but potentially harmful changes (and there may not be one, especially if the changes are only truly harmful in connection with many other changes), they can accumulate until they reach a kind of threshold (when they become really bad). The point is that if our epistemic limitations are binding with respect to the consequences of large “revolutionary” changes, they are also binding with respect to the consequences of collections of small changes that interact in complex ways with one another. Thus, in the absence of knowledge about the interactions of many small changes, the argument would seem to justify rigid immobility, not gradualism.

Indeed, an awareness of this problem seems to have led most classical political thinkers to a position that is in a sense the reverse of the Burkean “gradualist” position, i.e., willing to contemplate major changes to institutions under some limited circumstances (when the legislator has good knowledge) but extremely wary of small changes that might accumulate and interact in unexpected ways (since the presence of knowledgeable individuals capable of understanding their effects in the long run cannot be assumed). Plato, for example, while quite willing to recommend radical institutional innovation in cities (e.g., equal education for men and women, major censorship, new religious institutions, etc.) insisted that a city must be very careful about changing its “educational” laws, in part because the deleterious effects of any minor changes would not be visible until many years later, and they could easily accumulate in destructive ways. Similarly, Aristotle was not shy about recommending large institutional changes to political communities, but nevertheless urged cities to be vigilant about institutional drift, the minor changes that seem harmless individually but may collectively lead to the destruction of a politeia.

The point is not that they believed that major change was epistemically “safe” while gradual change was not; they thought both major and minor change was epistemically problematic. (Plato’s insistence on the need for knowledge in politics is grounded precisely on an extreme distrust of normal human epistemic capacities; we would only need philosopher kings if we were effectively incompetent in political matters). But they did not think gradual change was any less exempt from the problems caused by human epistemic limitations than revolutionary change, since they did not think that there were appropriate “selection mechanisms” able to weed out deleterious gradual institutional change under normal circumstances (other than “state death,” which is of course not especially ideal from the point of view of the state in question; as Josiah Ober has noted, whereas bankruptcy may be the consequence of “failure” in a market economy, “state death” in the classical world typically implied the death or enslavement of much of the population). From this point of view, major but planned institutional change had a slight “epistemic advantage” over unplanned, gradual change, at least so long as gradual changes could accumulate and interact in deleterious ways that could not be easily identified either at the time or in advance. 

Fun with visualizations 1

I've been playing around in the last few days with free visualization software, trying to think of ways to create interesting visualizations for my dictatorships and revolutions class next year. Some of it is quite impressive but few free packages seem to be able to do a temporally animated map (where color values for a country change year by year, for example, according to regime type), at least not in a way I can easily figure out. I eventually found this free alternative (openheatmap) that is easy to use and renders fast, though it has few options.

Here's a map of authoritarian regime types, 1946-2002, using data from Jennifer Gandhi's book "Political Institutions Under Dictatorship" (thanks to Prof. Gandhi for kindly sharing her dataset):



(Click here for a larger version. Yellow means "civilian dictatorship," red means "military dictatorship" and blue means "monarchy.")

The map isn't perfect: you need to code the Soviet Union as Russia and East Germany as Germany, for example. I suppose with professional GIS software and a good set of shapefiles you could have the borders move as well, but hey, this is free and fast.

Now, what I would really like to see is a map of regime types that displays a little picture of the dictator as it plays and a little flash (accompanied by a sound of guns, perhaps?) when there is a coup.

Any suggestions for free visualization software able to do animated maps?

Epistemic Deference and Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism I

A couple of months ago, there was a very interesting debate between Jim Manzi and others on the question of whether social science knowledge was sufficiently well established to warrant radical policy innovations. Manzi argued in a widely blogged article that the methodological limitations of the social sciences – in particular, the impossibility of appropriately measuring the counterfactuals of policy interventions through, for example, randomized experiments – implied that the findings of social science should normally not “outweigh settled practice and even common sense” when we are thinking about changing existing practices or institutions. His critics argued, among other things, that social science can provide evidence that overturns such settled practices, since, after all, the status quo is typically the result of power struggles, not rational discussion; why should we give it more credence than the findings of social science, which emerge from a process that at least approximates rational debate?

We might put the general point thus: Manzi thinks that, where the complexity of social reality makes full scientific knowledge all but impossible, it makes better sense to give “epistemic deference” to settled practice; his critics think that the practices of “social science” as a whole (not necessarily a single random study) often have more “epistemic authority” than settled practice. This sort of division about the locus of epistemic authority also maps into a political division between “conservative” and “non-conservative” positions, with the “conservatives” granting some settled practices or institutions the bulk of epistemic authority, while the “non-conservative” position insists that some other person or institution, usually of more recent vintage, should be given greater epistemic deference than settled practice. Is there any way of adjudicating under what conditions are these positions likely to be right?

The conservative position is typically defended by arguments about the “limits of reason.” The classic statement is in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

As Burke puts it, the comparison makes sense; individual reason (or, for that matter, the individual social science study) is highly limited in its epistemic power in comparison to settled social practice. There is typically some reasonable basis for even highly perplexing social practices; and individual reason is likely to be highly misleading in many circumstances. Individually, we suffer from so many cognitive biases and defects that it is a wonder we get up in the morning; and even highly trained experts are often wrong, even in their own fields. (I read somewhere that most peer-reviewed research is eventually overturned). 


But as an argument the comparison is flawed; the relevant comparison should not be that between settled practice and individual reason, but between settled practice and some alternative social practice (e.g., the social practice of science, with its various self-correction mechanisms), or between settled practice and some other collective judgment (e.g., the collective judgment of an assembly or a market). Moreover, the “general bank and capital of ages” is often a “depreciating asset,” as Adrian Vermeule puts it, especially insofar as later people make no contributions to it. From this point of view, Burkean concerns about the limits of individual reason cut much less deeply; the question is about the relative “epistemic power” of different social practices, institutions, or processes. 

Yet I think there is often something to these “epistemic” arguments for conservatism. In later posts, I want to try to investigate under what conditions epistemic arguments for conservatism make sense. (This blog is mostly my scratch research notes, so read at your own risk). As a starting point, I think we might divide these arguments into three kinds: selection arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the operation of a selection filter that is not found in alternative social practices), computational arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the way in which they organize expertise and information), and resilience arguments (where settled social practices are found to be preferable to alternatives because they are adapted to a wide variety of circumstances, even if not optimal for any particular one of them). (Resilience arguments are really a subtype of selection arguments, but I want to think about them separately). More on each of these later.


[update 2:35: edited a few words for clarity].

Footnotes on things I've been reading: Adrian Vermeule's "Law and The Limits of Reason"

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason (2009).

I read this book for somewhat hazy reasons; perhaps I found the title in a footnote of some paper and it seemed interesting, perhaps I ran across it by doing a search in our library catalog for something else and remembered that someone had once recommended  to me another one of Vermeule’s books. But at any rate, I’m glad I did read it, even though the main topic of the book is something that would normally not interest me very much.

The book is basically an attack on the “constitutional” common law, written primarily for (USA) legal scholars. As I reconstruct it, the basic problem is as follows. 200 and some years ago a few very smart people wrote a constitution for a country. (We’ll leave the name of the country blank, since the problem is pretty general; and I want to move away from any particularities of the American situation). Conditions at the time were very different from conditions today, however; so the problem arises as to whether, and how, to adapt the constitution to current circumstances. Should we change the constitution, and if so, who should change it?

At one extreme we can find the pure originalist position: the constitution should never be changed by anyone. This position is not as crazy as it may look at first glance. Assume that the constitution has survived intact for 200 years (and it has not been ignored during this period). It may then be that the very fact that the constitution has enabled the country to survive for 200 years implies that current constitutional rules are “resilient” – that is, they are broadly adapted to all kinds of circumstances, even if not optimal for any of them. They have been tested by time, with its varied challenges, and come out relatively well. Though different constitutional rules might have produced better outcomes at some points during those 200 years, no other set of rules we could design today would have plausibly produced a better outcome overall. We could perhaps temporarily achieve better outcomes (however defined) by adjusting the rules today, but then we could not be sure that the new rules would be optimal for other, as yet unforeseen circumstances, and we would have to adjust them again and again. And given some assumptions about the likelihood and costs of error, the relative wisdom of the framers versus our current wisdom, and our estimates of the rate of environmental change, it might be that it would never be worth our while to try to change these constitutional rules. We can think of this argument in terms of a trade-off between the benefits of adaptation to current circumstances and the benefits of resilience in changing conditions, given the limits of reason. If our estimates of the benefits of adaptation are low enough, of the resilience of current rules high enough, and of the uncertainty involved in formulating “perfect” rules for current circumstances high enough, perfect conservatism is entirely reasonable. (The earliest version of this argument I know of goes back to Plato’s Statesman, which I discuss extensively here. We also see something like this trade-off in nature: an organism can be too well adapted to its environment to survive drastic changes there. “Generalists” may thrive in changing circumstances, while “specialists” die since they cannot adapt quickly enough to these changes).

But suppose that we do not agree with the pure originalist position. (Few people do). The framers may have been very wise, but they did not foresee everything; and we may have a clearly good idea about how to improve existing constitutional rules (e.g., emancipating the slaves). But the problem still remains, since not every potential change is good: when should constitutional rules be changed, and by whom? The constitutional common lawyers argue that the constitution should (normally) not be changed by legislative assemblies or the “explicit” amendment mechanisms indicated in the constitution itself; instead, it should be changed gradually via the decisions of judges, just as proponents of the “regular” common law argue more generally that law should be changed not via legislative codification but rather through the gradual decisions of judges. Common-law constitutionalism thus tends to be associated with arguments for robust forms of judicial review and a general conservatism on matters of constitutional change, the key assumption being that the limits of reason are less binding on judges than on legislatures or the public, though still quite important.

Vermeule subjects this position to withering (though sometimes repetitive) scrutiny, arguing instead for a position that might be called “Benthamite” or “Thayerian” (as he labels it). On this view, legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than courts in deciding to adapt constitutional rules to current circumstances, and hence courts should in general defer to them. (Note that this argument does not say much about incentives: it may be that legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than judges in constitutional matters, but have worse incentives, and it is not clear which constraints would be “binding” in that situation). I am less interested in his ultimate conclusions, however, which are a bit too US-centric (including a plea for including at least one non-lawyer in the Supreme Court for interesting reasons having to do with the virtues of diversity in deliberative groups), than on his general approach to the problem of the limits of reason in politics and law, which is all about trying to figure out how "collective" mechanisms affect those limits.

Vermeule identifies two basic “epistemic” arguments for the constitutional common law position. On one view, the constitutional common law is better than the constitutional law created by legislatures or other explicit mechanisms because it combines the judgments of many judges over time to produce a judgment that is somehow better than the judgments of any individual judge (for reasons having to do with the Condorcet jury theorem, for example, though other mechanisms might be imagined). We can call this the “aggregation” argument. On the second view, which is associated with Hayek and his followers, the constitutional common law is better than the “explicit” constitutional law of legislatures because the process through which it is produced includes a selection “filter” that weeds out bad rules (the litigation and appeals process, for example) in ways that are not possible for explicitly created constitutional rules. We can call this the “selection” argument.

I am not going to discuss in detail all the considerations Vermeule deploys against these arguments. At any rate, it seems to me that the book is written very much like a lawyer’s brief: the constitutional common-law position is attacked from every possible perspective, some of which are less convincing than others. But a couple of points he makes are quite interesting. First, he argues that the “aggregation” arguments tend to suffer from a “nirvana” fallacy, where the benefits of aggregation are assumed to apply only to judge-made law. But in fact laws that are made by legislatures with many people should also benefit from considerations about aggregation (at least assuming equal incentives for information acquisition and sincere voting, which Vermeule discusses in some detail, though not always satisfactorily). And the kind of aggregation over time postulated by common-law constitutionalists may also suffer from informational cascades and epistemic “free-riding”: judges that defer to past decisions at a later time do not add any new information to the law, leaving the first few judges as the real legislators, for example. (“Epistemic free-riding” may also be a problem in legislatures, especially if the legislature is large, since then incentives for information acquisition are smaller. But this is more or less balanced – under some conditions, at least – by the greater epistemic diversity of legislatures, which should improve the quality of their decisions). Second, drawing on some interesting-looking work by Andrei Schleifer, he suggests that there is no plausible “selection” mechanism for the constitutional common law (though he is agnostic on the regular common law) that ensures bad rules get weeded out. Taken together, he is basically arguing that the limits of reason bind judges at least as much, if not more than, as they bind legislators; there are no special advantages to common-law constitutionalism over other forms of constitutionalism, and many apparent disadvantages.

Anyway, this is probably not a work for everyone (even if it is not particularly difficult to read); but I’m rather interested in “epistemic” arguments for conservatism, and this book offered a good overview of how Burkean arguments about the “wisdom of the past” and Hayekian arguments about the wisdom inherent in decentralized systems can be used or misused.