I confess that I find modern politics confusing. However,
there are a few theories that I find helpful to explain political dynamics. I
find that whenever a liberal – which is basically a Democrat, or a progressive,
or a socialist – gets angry about a subject, I take that as an invitation to think
more seriously, deeply, and logically about the topic. So when Joshua Cohen –
the Martha Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University,
though when I knew him he was at MIT – took offense at my referring to his
philosophy of law class as “radical,”
Joshua’s anger presents an invitation for further inquiry in hopes of revealing
political insights.
The inquiry begins with a simple review of the definition of
the word “radical,” which means, “very new and different from what is
traditional or ordinary.” My working definition becomes, “seeking or favoring fundamental
change.” So the question then becomes, why might changing the political order be
fundamentally problematic? Or conversely, what value is there in social
arrangements that are ‘traditional’ or ‘ordinary’?
The observation that provides insight into this question
derives from complexity theory generally and software engineering specifically.
When I was a computer science student, I spent a summer creating 10,000 lines
of computer code – object-oriented C specifically. It was hard, and so it’s
worth considering how I treated that code. Did I “seek or favor fundamental
change,” or did I pursue a more conservative course of action? I pursued the
second course because, even though I created all 10,000 lines of code, and I
new that code better than anybody on the planet, I didn’t know was going to
happen when I changed that code. I changed the code with a plan about what I
thought was going to happen, but I was frequently surprised and needed to go
back. There were times that I would implement two or three changes together,
which would end up breaking what was already working, and then I would have
undo my changes and then test each one carefully and individually. Consequently,
I undertook changes to this system very carefully. This is actually a key
engineering lesson: build on what’s known because radical changes tend not to
work.
There is a lesson to be learned here for politics. That is,
if you treat social systems as complex systems, and there are good reasons for
doing so, then this argues against making fundamental changes. Why? Because
those implementing the changes DO NOT KNOW what is going to happen. People generally
are bad at predicting and confirming that promised changes actually occur. This
is why science – predicting what will happen, creating an experiment, and then
confirming the prediction – is so important and so hard. The fundamental
insight then is this: social systems are even more complex than the software I
built that summer, so these so-called experts have even less of an idea of what
will happen with their policy changes than I did changing my software because
they didn’t create the system, they have only studied it.
Logically then, it would make sense to study social system
significantly before attempting to change them. I have studied complex social
systems significantly in my monograph, Environmental Impacts of
Globalization and Trade, but most policies are not subject to that
level of rigor. In fact, I would say that most are not given the level of study
that they deserve. And why is that? It’s because these so-called experts are
not experts at social systems and their analysis, which would be logical, but
they’re expert at self-promotion and seeming like experts. Moreover, the
consideration of policy consequences is anathema. Finally, people who are
capable of actual analysis would be demonized because they are capable of
revealing the charlatanism of the pseudo-experts, who revel in the make-believe
world of the media. These charlatans are expert at crafting and selling compelling
stories, but the ultimate question is, “Do they work?” That is the value of
proven technologies and tradition: they have been proven to work. These stories
purveyed by the pseudo-experts? These innovations are designed to enrich the
charlatans, not to work as advertised.
This is a very old tension, which was explained in Plato’s Gorgias in his parable about the pilot. That
is, Plato says there is a big difference between somebody who knows how to
drive a ship and somebody who looks and talks like they know how to drive a
ship. To conclude, let me review the MIT Seal, where Joshua Cohen was a
professor and where I was a student. The seal features a both a scholar and
an engineer with the phrase “mens et manus,” which is Latin for, “head and hand.”
The way I interpret this is that there are lots of ideas from the head or “mens,”
but very few that are proven workable over the long-term by experience, the
hand, or “manus.” To conclude, there is a tension between our understanding and
reality – we may want to believe in the possibility and benefits of radical
change, but experience and reality show that most radical changes do not work
and that tradition is undervalued and traditional solutions underappreciated.
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