Right Reason

A Short Meditation on Yesterday's Inauguration

 

One of the interesting aspects about the inauguration yesterday is that the United States has now elected two presidents in a row because of their ability to communicate, experience for the office notwithstanding. These are also two communicators who have employed entirely different styles, have entirely different intended audiences, but have yet been similarly elected because of their persuasive prowess.

Γνῶθι σαυτόν: I think people who have voted for either can do themselves a great service by understanding why the rhetorical technique of one has succeeded on oneself and why the technique of the other worked on another person.

Real-World Competency and the Pretense of Knowledge

 

Tyler Cowen has recently authored an article considering the implications of William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he would rather be governed by the first two-thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two-thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University. In that article, “Sometimes the people need to call the experts”, Mr. Cowen argues that there are some aspects of government in which we should prefer the first two-thousand people in a phone-book and other aspects in which we should prefer Harvard University.

Sola dosis facit venenum, only the dose makes the poison. Mr Cowen is right in arguing that technocracy and popular politics aren’t all-or-nothing affairs, but aspects of politics that must be matched to the problem at hand. However, Mr. Cowen’s framing of the issue obfuscates many of what I believe to be the most salient aspects of the problem at hand. The world is shaking from a populist insurgency and I don’t think a good way of framing the issues involved is a thought-experiment of fine-tuning government between some happy medium between the binary of technocracy and populism.

I found the most incisive part of the article was when Mr. Cowen argued:

when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governance, typically I would prefer to be ruled by the Harvard faculty, even recognizing the biases of experts. They understand the importance of applying expertise to complex problems, and they realize many issues do not respond well to common-sense fixes. The citizenry usually cannot make good decisions, or for that matter expert appointments, when technocracy is required.

 

To begin with, there is the real-world competency angle. For any expertise that is traded for money on the free market, there is a feedback mechanism that ensures that consumers actually value the expertise being offered. That feedback mechanism is the market process. An exert, say a dentist or a mechanic, can only maintain his business if he proves that his expertise maps to real-world competency. No real-world competency, no customers. Profit and loss provides a feedback mechanism that, by and large, ensure that the expertise being offered on a market maps to competency at doing the tasks.

Mr. Cowen seems to trust in an invisible hand working in academia to select the best experts. I am not nearly so trusting Academia certainly does select for very smart people who are able to frame problems as clever models and who are then able to solve those models. (This mode of thinking has even infected philosophy with all of its trolley-cart thought-experiments.) However, what is the guarantee that such talent will map onto real-world competencies? Does being able to solve for a general equilibrium model necessarily bring one enlightenment about the nature of the economy? Probably to some degree, but how much is that degree? I am very doubtful of the mapping of academic success onto real-world competency.

 

To begin with, there is the real-world competency angle. For any expertise that is traded for money on the free market, there is a feedback mechanism that ensures that consumers actually value the expertise being offered. That feedback mechanism is the market process. An exert, say a dentist or a mechanic, can only maintain his business if he proves that his expertise maps to real-world competency. No real-world competency, no customers. Profit and loss provides a feedback mechanism that, by and large, ensure that the expertise being offered on a market maps to competency at doing the tasks.

Mr. Cowen seems to trust in an invisible hand working in academia to select the best experts. I am not nearly so trusting Academia certainly does select for very smart people who are able to frame problems as clever models and who are then able to solve those models. (This mode of thinking has even infected philosophy with all of its trolley-cart thought-experiments.) However, what is the guarantee that such talent will map onto real-world competencies? Does being able to solve for a general equilibrium model necessarily bring one enlightenment about the nature of the economy? Probably to some degree, but how much is that degree? I am very doubtful of the mapping of academic success onto real-world competency.

 

However, the problem is not just that I’m doubtful. I might be wrong, after all. The problem is that there are no impartial feedback mechanisms for selecting out the best expertise, or to even ensure that the so-called ‘expertise’ is competent at its real-world task. The praise of other Harvard PhDs does not strike me as an impartial feedback mechanism.

Along these lines, I think that Mr. Cowen articulates his argument through the old-fashioned lens of “who should rules?” Instead, I think that we should articulate our thoughts about populism and technocracy in institutional terms that pays attention to the fragility of the system in question to bad rulers. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper notably argue along these lines when he wrote that we should “replace the question: Who should rule? By the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” (p.121) In “Of the independency of Parliament,” David Hume suggested a maxim when considering political questions: “ that, in contriving any system or government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave.”

Popper and Hume wanted us to think about the robustness of institutions to their rulers and therefore to their experts. I’d like to go further: I’d like to consider whether institutions can be antifragile to bad experts, that is can the variation introduced by bad experts actually improve a society? I do think that is a possibility. What we need is a more decentralized system that allows for more experiments in technocracy and allows for unsuccessful experiments to actually fail. That way, the real-world competency of technocrats can be proven in the field, so to speak, in a way that provides social evolution with the chance to select for the best experts.

So yes, I do agree with Mr. Cowen that maybe we need to call the experts. However, I think that the institutions surrounding technical expertise in government today have fragilized society. Experiments in government requires a more antifragile system, a system that is benefited, not harmed, by variation.

 

President Donald Trump’s administration will certainly be a brave experiment in government. The tragedy will be that the United States is so centralized that if President Trump fails, so too will the entire nation. The nation is too sensitive to variation in those that rule it. What is needed is a nation in which President Trump’s administration can fail without being the apocalypse predicted. That requires more freedom, more subsidiarity, and, ultimately, a more antifragile society. ‘Freedom’ here doesn’t merely mean the freedom to succeed. It also means the freedom to fail, and for your ideas to go extinct with your failure.

Framing the issue as one of technocracy versus populism attracts attention away from the institutional question we should be asking: How do the institutions select the experts? No one should reasonably be denying that expertise is necessary in running a successful administration. However, we should be doubting whether the experts we currently have have enough real-world competence to actually do so. And we should also be thinking about whether the institutions those experts inhabit are too fragile.

 

Sola dosis facit venenum. Maybe the populist insurgence’s insistence on real-world competency might make our institutions less fragile. 

MLK and Natural Law

 

Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is one of the natural-law classics of our time. If you have not read the letter, I highly suggest that you do so. Bombastic in style, the letter asserts one of the principal theses of natural-law thought: That an unjust law is no law at all. Natural law argues that there is a higher law than those of human nations and that, ultimately, our conduct should be evaluated by that standard. King’s life is a witness to how powerful that idea can be.

From a natural-law perspective, one of the more noteworthy aspects of King’s “Letter” is his reference to St. Thomas Aquinas:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distort the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I-it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

 

The part of Aquinas’ philosophy that King argues from can be found in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae I.II.96.4 ad 3:

This argument is true of a law that inflicts unjust hurt on its subjects. The power that man holds from God does not extend to this: wherefore neither in such matters is man bound to obey the law, provided he avoid giving scandal or inflicting a more grievous hurt.

In Review: Eye in the Sky

 

War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.

-Carl von Clausewitz, On War

 

This weekend, I finally watched Eye in the Sky. I was quite impressed with it and so would like to tell the world, that is my humble audience of readers, about it. To provide a sentence-long synopsis for those who know nothing about the movie, Eye in the Sky deals with the questions about rules of engagement posed up by a British drone operation when a high-value civilian becomes possible collateral damage.

All media, whether a textbook or a movie, have two fundamental purposes: To educate and to entertain. Eye in the Sky successfully does both by posing a question about drone-warfare and then exploring how the characters react to that question and to the reactions of other characters. The plot unfolds in the cascade of events that follow and how the characters react to those cascading. There are no stunts, little quipping and very few explosions. Instead, Eye in the Sky’s plot is driven forwards by dialogue and, thanks to a very tight script, conversation is enough to ratchet the tension up scene by scene. The leads, Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman, were both great in their roles, with both actors providing a sympathetic light to a program that many, such as myself, are very willing to condemn as immoral. Aaron Paul is also quite good and he also provides quite a sympathetic look at the role he plays within the drone program.

Then again, I am also intrigued by dialogues that bring dense issues to light. The dense issues that this movie brings to light are those involving rules of engagement. Indeed, Eye in the Sky can be seen more as a dialogue about the rules of engagement in an undeclared war than as a movie about drone-warfare per se. For those who like this kind of movie, I also recommend Conspiracy, a movie about the Wannsee Conference.

This concern brings me to my complaint about the movie: It has surprisingly little to do with the drone-warfare that is going on in the world around us. Perhaps the reason is that the movie is from a British point of view, but at least from an American point of view, many of the questions brought up in the movie have been become daily occurrences. One needn’t go farther than Jeremy Scahill’s Assassination Complex to know that American drone-warfare tactics have gone far beyond the questions about the rules of engagement Eye in the Sky inquires into.

Moreover, the movie does not deal with one of the most salient aspects of drone-warfare: That drones are used to prosecute undeclared wars. They can strike anywhere without warning, and therein lie their novelty to the rules of engagement. That novelty certainly offers advantages to the nations who use drones, but the ability to readily attain violent ends without having to go through proper diplomatic protocol is a powerful drug that can, and has, become addictive to those who use it.

There is a reason that just-war theory insists on a declaration of war. Even when that declaration is merely ceremonial, it still provides civilians with the knowledge that war is upon them. Even when they cannot vacate the place of hostilities, that declaration still allows them to inform their decisions with the knowledge that they can be killed straying into dangerous areas. Sometimes mere rituals can serve a valuable role in communicating intentions across society. This aspect of war is central to Eye in the Sky and yet never it is addressed.

Despite those qualms, I do hope that everyone decides to watch Eye in the Sky, even if it provides too romantic a view of drone-warfare, because it still brings up one of the most salient issues that governments must cope with, and one does hope resolve to constrain. Because it is undeclared and because it produces very few casualties for the nation using the drones, the costs of this secretive warfare can easily be buried in the headlines. Last October, an American destroyer launched a missile that killed over a hundred people—and yet all people could talk about that week was whether Donald Trump grabbed a secretary’s genitals. With the war distant and out of voters’ minds, the American military wields an uncomfortably vast amount of power in that region. It can kill both innocent civilians and American citizens alike without having to ever be accountable for those decisions.

It has been said that the first casualty in war is the truth. Certainly the second must be due process.

The Eternal Political Question

Parag Khanna has a new book coming out: Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State. I have not read the book yet. I am looking forwards to doing so in the upcoming months. However, I liked his previous book, Connectography, quite a bit actually. One of my principal complaints about Connectography was that the ideas in the book could have been communicated in a much shorter amount of words. Alas, such is life, most books should be articles and most articles tweets.

Mr. Khanna is a thinker who deals in big ideas. Those big ideas must be confronted because our opinions about many smaller matters will depend on how we react to those big ideas. The themes of Connectography brought out the significance of different types of unseen geography to the prosperity of the international division of labor and how it’s those de-facto connections, rather than the de-jure ones we are more familiar with, will determine the fate of our species for generations to come. I await to see what themes he offers in his new book.

However, there is a sneak-peak. With the new release, Mr. Khanna has quite the interesting interview with The Washington Post, in which he discusses many of the significant themes of Technocracy in America.

One of the themes that concerns me is the fact that Mr. Khanna seems to believe that there are clear and defined rules by which we should evaluate the success of policies when he discusses technocracy. He defines ‘a technocrat’ as being: “a meritocratic, utilitarian civil service personnel.”

The definition rings too praising for me. Mr. Khanna is already stacking the deck in technocracy’s favor based on merely how he defines the word ‘technocrat’. It doesn’t seem that there is much space in that definition for a technocrat to err and, in his hubris, to become a man of the system. There also doesn’t seem to be much space in that definition for technocrats to be illegitimate. What is one then to make of Mario Monti, who was Prime Minister of Italy from 2011-13. He ruled in an explicitly technocratic fashion, yet did not rise to his office by any meritocratic process, but was instead invited to form a government by Italy’s president.

Later in the interview, Mr. Khanna doubles-down on his definition of a technocrat as a road forwards:

This new technocracy has to be meritocratic, and it has to be utilitarian. Maybe there’s no more important word that needs to be reintroduced into the American political conversation than utilitarianism. It’s a quantitative measure of how fair and decent leaders are.

From my own reading, it seems Mr. Khanna seems to be arguing that we can simply collect the facts, put them into a utilitarian algorithm and be able to calculate how well technocrats are performing.

Alas, I don’t think that is possible. One of the problems afflicting democracy in America today is that there is no such agreement about such an algorithm. All facts exist in a shared perspective of the world. Without that shared perspective, those hard facts themselves dissolve into much softer theory-laden discussions. Hence an honest attempt to imitate successful methods in the hard sciences merely glosses over the more philosophical and humane nature of the problems at hand. Even generations after they die, historians shall debate over “how fair and decent” our leaders have been.

Mr. Khanna’s proposal would have its best chance of working in a nation in which people have basic agreement about the perspective politics should face. I am dubious that Americans live in such a nation today.

 

However, Mr. Khanna clearly has in mind something more of a constitutional moment than a piecemeal reform when elucidating his ideas. One constitutional reform that he certainly has in mind is the idea that the government should matter less and that technocrats should, by and large, go unnoticed, apart of the national furniture, so to speak:

I’m a technocrat in my heart of hearts. I’m much more interested in institutions and policies than in specific people. I just don’t care who is president. I really don’t. I just want to see a better structure. There’s this line we use in other fields: Bad process, bad outcome. When you have a bad process, surprise, surprise, you get a bad outcome. So I want to see a better process, as I have in all these other countries.

I do agree with the overall sentiment that Mr. Khanna expresses here. To quote John Adams, the object of constitutional design should be a government of laws, not of men. However, it is difficult to imagine personalities not mattering during a constitutional moment. America, for instance, was quite fortunate to have the statesmen it had during its own Revolution. For example, the United States could have evolved to be a vastly different nation if George Washington decided that he wanted to be king.

 

One enthusiasm that I share with Mr. Khanna is a fascination with Singapore and the belief that Singapore has mutated quite the efficient government. The creation of more Singapores would be a great victory for the prosperity of the human species.

Allowing people to create and to immigrate to cities that experiment with different legal régimes might be a means of lifting millions out of poverty and of discovering the best means of generating prosperity in foreign lands. Achieving prosperity is not a problem of getting to Denmark, as if the laws of political development are clearly defined.

Instead, achieving prosperity is a matter of discovering a means of becoming the best India, China, Kenya, or Indonesia. It is more a process of experimental evolution and less a process of rule-following ontogeny. More city-states would allow for more laboratories for technocrats to experiment with different ideas for how to achieve prosperity. Unlike centralized nation-states, dispersed city-states provide humanity with optionality; we can select the best and have people imitate and immigrate to them.

However, it is important to remember that Singapore is an accident of history. It is former British colony that retained Common Law post-independence that has retained its independence from surrounding nation. Hong Kong is another example of such a city-state. Moreover, both aren’t just accidents of history, they’re relics of a colonial past. The only reason that they exist is because a foreign people were able to claim both islands for themselves and impose their own law on those lands. I don’t think there is a similar path for city-state creation in the world we live in today and such thoughts can bring us frighteningly close to an imperialistic mindset.

The technocratic institutions that Mr. Khanna lauds all need to be created. Unfortunately, in their creation, it quite matters who the architect is and here is one of the central ironies of the belief that the state needs to matter less: For the state to matter less, it needs to make itself matter less—and it needs to be strong enough to make itself matter less. 

The problem is, as it has been for millennia: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

 

Meryl Streep's Casual Racism

‘Tis the season for Hollywood awards, which means ‘tis the season for celebrities saying silly things about politics. Today, it is Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes getting the buzz. Mollie Hemingway has a pretty good article at The Federalist critiquing Ms. Streep’s speech. I link to it because it covers areas that I don’t feel necessary to write about.

I do agree that many Hollywood celebrities are “out of touch” and that so many of them wield their influence ham-fistedly when talking about politics. (For example, Leonardo DiCaprio would have been well-advised to not star himself, despite his own passion for the subject, in his documentary with The National Geographic on climate change.) However, I do think that it is a good thing that people who have the opportunities and resources to do so speak out about the things they hold dear. There is something admirable when people do so well and there is something nevertheless human when they do so poorly.

Civil society won’t be improved by removing that fallible human element, so I don't see how ranting about out-of-touch celebrities will do much good. We’re all out of touch in our own ways. That Hollywood celebrities are also should remind us of that and should make us question in what ways we fail to sympathize with our adversaries.

What I found genuinely grievous about Ms. Streep’s speech was the casual racism she displayed:

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

Unfortunately, racism is always obvious. Especially in the modern world we live in, racism tends to be a subtle bias. It seeps into our lives when we think quickly and most significantly when we bifurcate ‘those people’ from who we are.

In the United States, racism is when we shrug at yet another police-shooting in an inner-city slums because that’s where those violent people live or when we want to keep poor children out of select schools lest the children of those people bring down our school’s standards. Ms. Streep commits that tragic error when she bifurcates football and mixed martial arts from the rest of the population.

Rather than sympathizing with ‘those people’ and giving them the respect they deserve, Ms. Streep relies on silly stereotypes. Those sterotypes are also not true. A good fraction of the fighters, say, in the UFC are non-white foreigners. José Aldo, Yoel Romaro, Ronaldo Souza, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Fabricio Werdum, Doo Ho Choi, Edson Barboza, Lyoto Machida, Rafael dos Anjos, Beneil Dariush, Kyoji Horiguchi, Anderson Silva, Amanda Nunes, and Francis Ngannou are all élite non-white foreigners. If we are to consider white foreigners, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Conor McGregor, Michael Bisping, Alexander Gustaffson, and Demian Maia are also among the élite. Turning to non-white Americans, Jon Jones, Demetrius Johnson, Daniel Cormier, Rory MacDonald, Cain Velasquez, Georges St-Pierre and Tyron Woodley also contribute to the amazing diversity mixed martial arts displays.

Whenever the UFC rolls into town, one can expect a show exhibiting the full rainbow, both cultural and genetic, of the human experience.

Maybe if she actually didn't rely on stereotypes, Ms. Streep would understand how martial arts has been enriched over the past generation because of the fact that America does not have a monopoly on martial-arts talent. Instead, she simply casts that duty to sympathize aside and treats of the people involved in terms of stereotypes. She fails to give mixed martial art’s foreign talent the credit they deserve and instead relegates them back-stage, as one would expect in a racist society.

Mixed martial arts is actually a very cosmopolitan sport and a sport largely made possible by the disruptive innovations of non-white foreigners. The entire sport found its genesis in the Gracie clan coming to America and creating a forum to advertise their own discipline, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Without a bunch of brown, poor, Portuguese-speaking martial artists coming to America, mixed martial arts would not have emerged in the ‘90s. To this day, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is the martial art most identifiable with mixed martial arts and the UFC.

One of the beautiful things about mixed martial arts, and of martial arts in general, is that it can be viewed as a pursuit of human excellence, and therefore of virtue. Just last year, the #OscarssoWhite controversy brought criticism upon the Oscar Academy for its all-white set of nominees a second year running. (It seems pertinent to the subject of my ruminations here to point out that Creed and Michael B Johnson were both deserving of at least a nomination.) Those concerns are largely lacking in mixed martial arts. Race did nothing to prevent Tyron Woodley defending his belt against Stephen Thompson at UFC 205 or to prevent Amanda Nunes, who is the UFC’s first LGBT champion, from knocking out Ronda Rousey inside of a round at UFC 206.

 

As Ms. Streep wisely noted: “And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” Hollywood is a place for the arts and, through the arts, Hollywood’s celebrities can enrich our civilization. However, when one of Hollywood’s prima inter pares uses that position to disparage other cultural aspects of that civilization, she becomes, at best, a bully. Unfortunately, in her speech, Ms. Streep became something worse, a racist bully.