Right Reason

Where is the Dignified Parts of Government Today?

 

Two articles that I’ve read on the internet have reminded me of the notion of authority and the dignified part of government:

The first: “An Interview with the most hated man on the internet” by D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation:

But if you’re based on an agreement to a set of ideals, then surely immigration becomes different because you don’t object to people because they’re of different stock as long as they subscribe to your ideals.

No. You object to people because of values, which is why Trump’s values test was so popular a few weeks ago. That’s exactly what his voters want. They don’t care about skin color. They want somebody to come over and believe in America. They want the kind of immigrants that came two, three generations ago who came to participate in the American dream, not the kind of immigrants that are coming now to destroy it.

Do you think that’s really true? I’ve talked to Trump voters in Florida and South Carolina.

By the time you’re talking about policy positions, you’ve already lost the war. By the time you get down to elections, I lose interest. I like Trump because he’s a cultural candidate for president and because Trump represents an existential threat to political correctness. I will put up with almost anything that he does because of that.

Why are you so infuriated by political correctness? Why not just laugh it off?

Because it’s deadly.

 

The second: “Waiting for a young pope” by Matthew Schmitz at First Things:

Upon his election, the young pope takes the name Pius XIII to signal a return to the past. When he addresses his cardinals, he lays out his anti-modern program: “Tolerance doesn’t live here anymore. It’s been evicted. It vacated the house for the new tenant, who has diametrically opposite tastes in decorating.” Diametrically opposite, and much improved. “The liturgy will no longer be a social engagement,” he declares. I confess that when I heard him say, “The Vatican must immediately buy back the papal tiara,” I let out a whoop.

Paolo Sorrentino, who wrote and directed the series, does not seem to be a traditional Catholic. As with most recent treatments of faith, a little more religious literacy would have gone a long way. Nonetheless, The Young Pope reveals the exhaustion of attempts to make the Church attractive by conforming it to the world. Reveling in supposedly old-fashioned garments like the papal red shoes and wide-brimmed saturno, it shows how attractive an unapologetically traditional Catholicism can be.

…

As a filmmaker, Sorrentino is particularly alert to the power of images. “In the 60s,” says Pius, “the young people that protested in the streets spouted all kinds of heresies. All except one: power to the imagination. In that, they were correct.” He vows that his first public appearance will be a great visual event, a “dazzling image, so dazzling it blinds people.” For Sorrentino, the Church is most eloquent in its pomp and dumbshow.

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.

Race: There's Nothing To Blur

 

Although I address race in this post, I’m not going to write about the recent act of terrorism in Charleston. To discuss it would require discussing it at length and I don’t have that length in this post. I can only hope readers can understand that my chosen task here is something different entirely. With that aside, in “Blurred Lines” at Democracy in America, Will Wilkinson yesterday commented on the recent scandal (I don’t really know if the word fits but I’ll use it anyways) that after Rachel Dolezal was exposed for identifying as black. In doing so, Mr. Wilkinson draws a direct parallel between with Ms. Dolezal’s identification as black with Bruce Jenner’s identification as a woman:

It seems to me that Smith's brand-new willingness to accept transgendered students is a measure of progress in the struggle for gender equality. It tells us that the gap between the lived experience of women and men has narrowed enough that today's students at women's colleges do not see the experience of someone who is biologically male, and who was once culturally identified as male, as so different that she cannot be accepted as a woman among women. Likewise, the breadth and intensity of resistance to the idea of whites identifying as blacks is a measure of how far we still have to go in the struggle for real racial equality. The gap between the lived experience of black and white Americans remains so wide, and so unjust, that the attempt of whites to cross the racial divide, and to live as blacks do, seems impossible. It is offensive for a white American to represent herself as black, for now, because it diminishes the enormity of that gap by implying that it has, in fact, been crossed.

Rachel Dolezal knew she needed to lie to be accepted as black. That's not something we ought to be happy about. When the day comes that future Rachel Dolezals can tell the truth about their European ancestry and find themselves nevertheless embraced as black by the black community, it will mean that the experience of being black in America has changed immensely, for the better, and that America has finally begun to make good on a promise of equality which, from its inception up to today, has never yet been kept.

Mr. Wilkinson’s parallel between Bruce Jenner and Rachel Dolezal is troubling. There was an actual border for Bruce Jenner to cross over.  That border is certainly not a strict bifurcation, even in a biological sense, and there is certainly a strong cultural component to the particular border that Mr. Jenner crossed over. Where that border will exactly fall will be different for different people across different cultures. However, our nature as a mammalian species does mean that there will be a border to cross over and that it will require a good amount of resources and medical, both pharmaceutical and surgical, knowledge to cross over. 

With race, there are no boundaries to cross over. At least no lines that exist outside of man's imagination. The pigmentation of human skin isn't discrete, but already blurred across a spectrum. What is already blurred can’t be blurred. Speaking about race as something to be crossed over is to breath life in the antiquated notion that races are discrete entities. Unlike the notion of sex, race is biologically bunk, so if Ms. Dolezal was crossing over anything, it wasn’t racial boundaries in the sense that Mr. Jenner crossed over the boundaries of sex. 

 

How not to think about race.

 

The boundaries that Ms. Dolezal crossed over had to do with culture alone. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that culture is artificial and therefore plastic to human desires. Cultural identities do matter and there is a tangible reality to them. Much like the boundaries of sex, it can be costly to cross over cultural identities, which corroborates the existence of such boundaries. Someone identifying as culturally French without living at length in France and learning to speak French fluently is mockable. Similarly, if one is to identify as culturally black in the United States comes having to deal and generally have first-hand experience with racism. Cultural borders exist. Race does not. The problem that Mr. Wilkinson addresses is, therefore, not a problem with Ms. Dolezal changing her race, but changing her culture.   

It’s a very similar problem as someone changing her accent. Learning that someone is faking their accent does often feel like the person is lying about their identity, yet learning an accent can be part of becoming part of a cultural group, as many Britons of old, like Margaret Thatcher, can attest to with their learned posh accents. Are they lying about who they are by using a learned accent? No, at least if they actually live out the cultural identify associated with that accent. Whether Ms. Dolezal crossed over to the cultural group that she led others to believe she was apart of isn’t something either I nor Mr. Wilkinson know. All we know is that there is a cultural boundary between black America and the rest of the country.  

 

For instance, an expression of that the boundary is the question: Is Juneteenth for everyone? Can everyone really celebrate with real joy the end of slavery in the United States? I’m not so sure. Myself, I shall wish those who celebrate today with joy the best jubilee, but I will admit that the day doesn’t touch my soul as it would touch the soul of somebody who day-in, day-out deals with the lingering effects of slavery. My knowledge of racism is, really, pure book-learning. I wouldn’t want to cheapen an anniversary as surely important as Juneteenth is to many people by pretending that I’m overjoyed to see ‘June 19’ on the calendar today. 

For many, the sense that we don’t all share the same holidays is perturbing. Instead, I think that’s something that we should understand as part of living in an open society: Not all cultures will have the same cultural focal points. For some, Juneteenth will be an anniversary of something that touches their lives, for others it won’t. 

Peace in the Middle East?

 

O tempora! O mores!

-Cicero, In Catilinam

  

In the past three days both Barack Obama and John Kerry have published op/eds about their foreign policy in the Middle East under the guise of writing about violent extremism, as if it’s the violent extremism of, say, Green parties that’s the problem . As can be expected from op/eds from people in their positions, they said little and meant even less. 

  

If I were an optimist, I would praise the international division of labor as being a civilizing force that unites all of mankind into peaceful cooperation, but I’m not and so I won’t. Doing so, anyways would be, as Arnold Kling points out at AskBlog, giving into wishful libertarian thinking. 

When I think of peace in the middle east Edmund Burke’s line from Letters on a Regicide Peace that "men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites" quickly comes to mind. Like Mr. Kling, I tend to favor the conservative civilization versus barbarism lens when it comes to the institutions of the Middle East. I don’t know how valid institutional analysis will be to regions like Syria in prescribing good institutions because I don’t know if those institutions would even have legitimacy. 

Herein lie the problem about Mssrs. Kerry and Obama singing the praise of communities organizing around peace in their op/eds: Communities in Syria and Iraq aren’t necessarily going to be pulling together towards peace. Many will be pulling together to help support the Islamic State assert its territorial claims in the region. It really all comes down to culture and whether local cultures can even support civilly liberal societies. Those who put faith in Arab Spring underestimated how much good institutions are contingent on culture if they are to emerge.

A passage from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is well worth quoting on this point: "Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."

 

 

If I were to give advice to a Middle Easterner wanting prosperity, I would recommend that he, but especially she, look elsewhere. Maybe Europe, but most likely the United States. In a sense, I write off the entire region as a failed state. ISIL has grown to the point where peace-loving Middle Easterners have to take up arms against it. Patriotic duty summons Kurds and the Shia population in Iraq to arms.  

That’s not to say that Middle Easterners are evil and vicious people. I think that they may be just as virtuous as Westerners. Plus, I think that a century of horrendous foreign policy from Paris, London, Washington DC and Moscow have all ensured that at least this generation of Middle Eastern states will be eventually sorted into the ‘having failed category.’ That Iraq, for instance, would eventually collapse to sectarian violence was a matter of time. Nevertheless, I think that their culture lacks the regard for liberalism and bourgeois dignity necessary to really give 

 

The country I’d be most optimistic about (not counting Israel, since it really isn’t culturally apart of the Middle East) would probably be Iran. Persia has had a thriving secular culture for centuries before the 1979 revolution, evidenced by the fact that wine continued to have been produced until the Ayatollahs put a stop to it. Wine continues to be sold in volume on the black market there today. Even women's hairstyles of the last one hundred years reflected a growth of Western culture in Iran that was suddenly put to a halt with the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the same could be said of the same thing throughout the Muslim world at the period. Unfortunately, the foreign policy of Western countries are doing their best to isolate the nation. In doing so, however much Western nations may be talking the fight against Islamic terrorism, they push opinion there ever more behind the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Republic. 

Are Imagined Communities Real?

 

In the aftermath of Scotland's decision to remain in the United Kingdom, Daniel Hannan defends British nationalism as a source of harmony in the debates over Scottish independence in in "The positive case for nationalism". He argues that that nationalism led to the best in human nature revealing itself in people's acquiescence to the outcome of the election.

At the end of the post he takes aim at the view that nations are simply made up lines on a map:

Most ordinary people – that is, people who are not literati or politicians – take feelings of national belonging for granted, and see patriotism as an unalloyed virtue, like honesty or courage. Yet the prevailing intellectual fashion is that patriotism is artificial. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn popularised the idea that nations depend on “invented traditions”.  A.C. Grayling held that they were synthetic creations, “their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars”.

What was once Marxist critique is now academic orthodoxy. Virtually every political science postgraduate who passes through my office has been taught the same bilge about nations being “imagined communities”. And so, technically, they are, in the sense that they exist largely in people’s minds. But this is true of lots of perfectly real things. Why is a £20 note worth £20? Because we agree that it should be. Why is David Cameron prime minister? Because we agree to treat him as such.

Those who disparage or detest nationhood are guilty of an old Marxist conceit: the notion that people can be reconstructed, purged of the “wrong” ideas, cured of “false consciousness”.

As usual when talking about the nature of nations, Mr. Hannan is right, and very much so - even if the cosmopolitan sentiments within us may wish otherwise.

The idea that nations are simply imagined communities, and therefore may be discarded by an Enlightened era isn't a sound argument. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. Nations may be imagined communities, but that doesn't imply that they are unreal. Here a metaphysical point needs emphasis: Mental objects exist just as extended ones do. (All of you who think that metaphysics isn't necessary take heed. We actually need to know a thing or two about what kinds of substances exist to talk coherently about the world.) Nor are those mental objects necessarily arbitrary.

It's the peccadillo of an adolescent to think that simply because something, such as tradition, exists only in the minds of its adherents that it is therefore made up and arbitrary. As David Sloan Wilson has shown in Darwin's Cathedral, the human mind can develop such objects because such objects have helped our far-off ancestors in their struggle for existence. Imagined communities and other mental objects have biologically evolved because they are useful adaptations.

Adaptations, in turn, have some form that reflects the problems they help solve. One can go as far as to speak of them as embodied knowledge. That embodied knowledge must in some sense be complex and in being complex. Culture's reality as a set of mental object is betrayed by the complexity of those adaptive structures no less than the tactile properties of some sand in one's hands would prove the reality of that sand. If imagined communities and other traditions were simply made up, they would be random in their form. Instead, though, they are adaptive. Britannia, Rule the Waves! tells us something about the problems which have faced British society in the past just as a polar bear's lush fur would tell someone about the environment it inhabited. 

There is also an underlying biological explanation of of patriotism that Mr. Hannan doesn't touch on when he writes:  "Patriotism, as this blog never ceases to argue, is what makes us behave unselfishly." That explanation is that, as a cooperative species, Homo sapiens has evolved an innate desire to belong to a band. Nature has left Homo sapiens a distinctly cooperative species, and that propensity to cooperate is reflected in a desire to belong to a community because without such a sense of belonging cooperation to a human degree would be impossible. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that traits such as "sympathy, fidelity, and courage" evolved to such a degree in human beings because "selfish and contentious people will not cohere" (Darwin 1989[1877]: 134-135[129-130]).

Even though human society has greatly changed since the conditions of our band-ancestors, human instincts have remained comparatively constant, and so the same instincts that would lead someone to desire the solidarity of a band compel them to find a first-person plural in the nation. In a sense, patriotism is atavistic because it reflects our desire to belong to bands even though patriotism's object is a much wider civilization. There shall always be a human desire to belong impelling people's patriotism, what matters is how culture directs that emotional impetus. 

 

Laws Are the Products of Convention

 

From Antiphon’s On Truth as quoted in the introduction of Thucydides’ The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (edited by Jeremy Myrott):

Justice, therefore, consists in not violating the customary laws of the city in which one is a citizen. So a person takes most advantage for himself from ‘justice’ if he respects the important of the laws when witnesses are present, but follows nature in their absence. For the requirements of the law are discretionary but the requirements of nature are necessary; and the requirements of the law are by agreement and not natural, whereas the requirements of nature are natural and not by agreement. 

 

From Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much suppose its existence? Rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?

 

The greatest political superstition of the modern era is the belief that laws are the creations of reason rather than of, as G.K. Chesterton called it, the democracy of the dead. Just as the creationist needs to postulate the existence of a creator transcendent to the world in order to make sense of its creative processes, so too does the modernist need to postulate the existence of minds transcendent to society in order to explain law. Both are happy stories about how the world isn’t run by chance or folly, but by intelligent beings able to think through what they’ve created, and both are wrong superstitions. 

 

Just as species are the haphazard creations of natural selection, so too are laws the product of selective forces operating beyond the understanding of the human mind. Furthermore, just like species, laws lack any special τέλος. It is very easy to think that a law against murder as existing to prevent people from murdering one another, but that’s like saying that a large ground finch has a robust beak for cracking nuts. 

It’s a statement which assumes the existence of a teleological goal which isn’t really there. Both statements don’t do much harm at the superficial level; however, as one examines the phenomena closer in depth, the assumption of teleology will be misleading. Just like the large ground finch’s beak, laws against killing have come about because they provide selective benefits to the societies that harbor those laws, which brings us to a very important point about law: that it’s focal.

 

Edmund Burke recognizes that when he talks about the conventional nature of society. The conventions are the focal standards of behavior which people observe, and their observation of those conventions creates a specific type of society depending on the constitution of that given convention. Laws are then the most sacred of those conventions which have worked their way into the very fabric of a society through generations facing the particular problems they are faced with, hence the democracy of the dead part. There is a democracy to tradition; unlike voting for representatives, though, tradition’s democracy demands much more of its voters than simply arriving to the booths, it demands people to vote for traditions by adopting ways of life. 

Those ways of life eventually become focal for people coordinating their behavior with one another. In essence, laws are nothing but long-standing customs. They are not, as the moderns would have us believe, the product of a spiritual force - reason, little more than a ghost in the machine - otherwise unconnected to the particular historical circumstances each society is faced with. 

 

Institutional Design: The Coevolution of Institutions and Preferences

 

 

From “The Good-Luck Charm That Solved a Public-Health Problem” by Eleanor Smith:

In 2008, Christopher Charles was living in Cambodia and researching anemia… 

Charles, a Canadian epidemiologist, knew that iron-rich foods and supplements were too expensive for most rural Cambodians. Even cast-iron pots, which safely transmit iron to food as it cooks, were out of reach. But he wondered whether a small piece of iron placed in a standard aluminum pot would have a similar iron-releasing effect. To test his hypothesis, Charles distributed blocks of iron to local women, telling them to place the blocks in their cooking pots before making soup or boiling drinking water. The women promptly put them to use as doorstops.

After talking with village elders, Charles learned of a fish known as try kantrop, which the locals ate frequently and considered a symbol of good luck. When he handed out smiling iron replicas of this fish, women started cooking with them. “People associated it with luck, health, and happiness,” he says. Within 12 months, Charles reports, anemia in villages where the fish was distributed virtually disappeared.

The genius of the Lucky Iron Fish is that it does not have to be shaped like a fish. “If we were to go to sub-Saharan Africa,” says Charles, “or a dry area where fish is not an important part of the diet, we could very easily change it to a different symbol of luck.”

 

Preferences matter, and that is displayed in Christopher Charles’ interventions in Cambodian cooking culture, and his design for better ways of cooking. Charles’ actions in Cambodia are certainly a top-down intervention with an epidemiologist using his technical knowledge in order to change the institutions of a society in this case the rules of the game of cooking. His iron bars are institutional design, seeking to enhance human flourishing, but they failed at first because Charles’ failed to take the preferences of those he was trying to help. 

When Charles tried his first intervention, his attempts to change the way that Cambodians cooked their food were unsuccessful because they did not mesh with the Cambodians’ culture and habits, all of which are subsumed under the concept of preferences. The reaction that the women had to the iron, either in block of piscine form, would be categorized as preferences by economists, and those reactions determined whether the women would either use the iron as a doorstop or as a complement to their diet. When Charles’ intervention did not elicit the desired response from the Cambodian women, it was because his intervention did not work along with their preferences, and elicit the right response. However, once Charles’ intervention worked with their preferences, and elicited the desired response, then it worked, and the Cambodian women used the iron supplements in their cooking. 

 

 

For better and for worse, economics identifies all of the reasons for behavior that motivate people in their lives under the category of preferences. For better because preferences enables economics a simple category to think about human action in a teleological manner. What made Jim go to the grocery store? His preferences! They are, after all, his reasons for action. For worse because preferences blind economists to the fact that human beings general act in a program-like, and habitual manner compared to the lighten-rod calculator comprised of preferences. Nevertheless, the concept of preferences does its job well because economics is more concerned with the conscious action than with the psychological intricacies of all of human nature.  

Economists are naturally interested in how institutions form human behaviors. From David Hume wondering about what institutions would form the best outcomes even if all men were knaves to Elinor Ostrom writing about how informal institutions are able to maintain human cooperation despite the lack of formal institutions, the question of what kinds of institutions enable human flourishing has been one of the most important research programs running through the mainline of economic thought. Putting preferences into a black box hurts this research program because it conceals the way that individuals and institutions have evolved through history.

Institutions do not exist within a vacuum; rather, they have evolved through time changed by the different circumstances they have faced, and by the people within them. In addition, endogenous preferences, the replication of preferences across a shared institutional context, are common across the world. In that light, preferences can be looked at like accents. Human beings can consciously try to attain certain preferences, but for the most part - especially if we live an life unreflected on - we are unconscious to the manner we have come to attain our preferences, and so many of them we have simply acquired from our environment. Since the preferences of a population have exerted a crucial influence upon the evolution of their institutions, we need to understand the preferences of a population if we are to understand the success, or failure of its institutions. More tersely, culture matters. 

 

Overall, the failure of Christopher Charles’ first attempt to improve the iron within Cambodians’ diet is an illustration of the importance of preferences to the study of human society, and to the success of institutions. Institutional design is of interest to any student of human institutions because it can shed light onto the functioning of institutions within a complex world. For Charles’ design, it sheds light upon the necessity for institutions to work alongside preferences if they are to lead to desired outcomes. 

 

 

The State of 24-Hour News

 

 

 

No commentary necessary.

Of Progress and Kleptocracy

 

As society progresses, there is the need for land and stocks of capital to produce make possible the opulence of life which defines the bourgeois world. Within a hunting-gathering band, people can get by just with what they are able to secure for themselves with labor alone. Tools like axes and bows in wide use, but fitting the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, these tools are personal items which can be kept on the person of their owners, and there is very little accumulation of tools actually going on.

With accumulation and the ownership of land comes the opportunity for kleptocracy in those societies. The necessity of there being lands and stocks of capital goods for which people are the residual claimants of opens human society to the exploitation of those claims for ill. Such manipulation can come in the form of the idle landowners being able to secure power for themselves within Parliament through the manipulation of rotten boroughs or the mafia extorting protection money from trifling shop owners. Both result in people who are contributing little to others being able to secure power and resources for their own benefit, and both would be impossible in a hunting-gathering society. The progress of society from the conditions of the hunting-gathering band therefore create the conditions in which corruption and kleptocracy can flourish largely because of the existence of settled lands, and valuable stocks of capital goods.

 

However, we should not proceed from that conclusion to a longing for the egalitarian hunting-gathering band. Kleptocratic elements are inevitable in any human society with any material advancement. As such, they should often be accepted simply as part of the  costs of opulence and prosperity rather than as a plague which must be exterminated at any costs. Sometimes it is even refreshing when corruption is clearly corruption rather than as passed for something more pure. Take the Federal government, so many of its employees go on to work for private companies that are able to use the tacit knowledge those new employees have of the Federal government for their own profit. It’s corruption on a massive scale, and it is even more blameworthy because those responsible simply won’t be honest about what they’re doing, but continue to masquerade as benevolent officials. 

Liberty and the Anglosphere: Reflections on Hannan's _Inventing Liberty_

 

 

The nations, not so blest as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

 

In his recent book, Inventing Liberty: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, MEP Daniel Hannan discusses how the ideas of a liberal society emerged within the British isles over a course of hundreds of years, and how their proliferation across the world happened within a distinctly English-speaking context. Hannan argues that it has been the ascendency of the Anglosphere in the past three hundred years, including nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia, which has made possible the similar ascendency of liberal values over that same time period. Hannan argues that it was the culture of common law, of Magna Carta, and of representative government, not intellectual arguments, which made the free and open society possible. As intellectuals discussed (and eventually en masse rejected) the values which cultivated such a society, they were transported to and flowered in British colonies the world over,  even amongst the prisoners shipped to Australia.  

 

The main question, at least for me, which Inventing Liberty brings up is the question of how culture has made liberalism possible. A constant problem facing any order at the level of society at large is: How do people participate within them? As every angsty teenager has recognized, sometimes society can be an impersonal machine in which people can be but cogs, used as means rather than as ends in and of themselves. As Shakespeare wrote: All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players. What guides those players, and forms their collective patterns of behavior into what we know as as society are the institutions and norms of the societies which people find themselves surrounded by. The way that people participate in the social orders they live in is thus often merely a product of the culture they are surrounded by. 

Of course, we all know (and for the most part appreciate) that institutions matter. But there is something quite different between the argument which Hannan is making, and the arguments which many institution-matter theorists make is that Hannan argues, implicitly though, that we cannot simply replicate the institutions of the Anglosphere to non-Anglosphere countries. The necessary jump between Hannan’s main point in Inventing Liberty and an institutions-matter theorist like James Buchanan’s throughout his corpus is that Hannan’s vision is very much historically fatalistic whereas Buchahan looks at the problem from the point of view of social contract theory. For Buchahan, the question what can be done is a very real one, though in Hannan, what can be done is largely just a matter of preserving what is already there. In Hannan's history, institutions are determined by culture, and if a nation does not have the culture to support good institutions, then it is by and large doomed to go without them.

The British character of liberalism and of the commercial society it animates is corroborated by common language. When people are speaking about the core tenet of a liberal market, competition, people, especially in Continental Europe, often speak of “Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” The view that it is that British variety which encourages “dog-eat-dog” competition whereas their more “cooperative” approach cultivated more moral outcomes. The use of such language is so wide that it has gotten its own page of Wikipedia: “The Anglo-Saxon Model.” The culturally English-speaking nature of the modern commercial society is thereby displayed by its identification with a certain cultural group, that of Great Britiain.

 

The question which I am naturally lead to is then: Why Britain? Why did the English-speaking population become the cradle of liberal ideas rather than, say the populations of Holland or Italy? The Dutch certainly went a long way towards the development of liberal ideas, and during the Dutch Golden Age, Amsterdam was a shining light in the world. There, the first modern stock market was established there by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Levels of religious toleration were high compared to the rest of Europe, especially towards the Jews (though the Catholics suffered due to perceived political loyalties to the Habsburg empire that the Dutch Republic had succeeded from). Daniel Hannan even celebrates Dutch society in “I realised why I like the Dutch so much,” and claims that what he loves about Dutch society is found in the bourgeois values that the Dutch and British both share: “Only recently, though, was I able to put my finger on what I liked so much. It’s this: for centuries, the Dutch made the honest pursuit of self-betterment a supreme virtue.” The bourgeois virtues which Deirdre McCloskey celebrates in her aptly named book, The Bourgeois Virtues, were quickly coming to fruition within Amsterdam, and the Dutch Republic could therefore have seemed to be a viable candidate to be the cradle of liberalism for the Western world. 

That was not to be, though. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch Republic did not have Great Britain’s fortunate geography. Unlike Great Britain, which is an island separated from the Continent, the Netherlands is a low-lying plain, much of it reclaimed from the sea, close to the center of Europe. As such, the influenced of the bourgeois virtues in the Netherlands was vulnerable of being snuffed out by conquest, and that is one of the events which happened following the Dutch Golden Age. Whereas the British were able to survive and compete against the Continental powers by outdoing them on the seas, the Dutch Republic never had such an option, and like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was unable to assert its independence forever against the encroachments of illberal states very adept at waging war. Unlike those two, Great Britain was in the fateful position of being separated by the sea from the many wars which were waged on the Continent in the early modern period, and was thereby separated from the need of winning those wars, at the cost of its liberal values, in order to ensure its survival.

 

In the end, liberalism wasn’t discovered by the great powers of human reason; rather, it was cultivated in culture until finally being recognized by the mind. It is not a necessary outcome of progress. Rather, it is a historical accident. The ascendency of liberalism is thus not a matter, as it often is depicted to be, of the triumph of human reason over bigotry and superstition. Instead, the ascendency of liberalism is a matter of a historically contingent sequence of unique events in unique places; of infectous habits rather than explicit ideas. The lesson to be appreciated from Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Liberty is that the free and open society is a consequence not of human ideas, but of human history.