Right Reason

It's About Institutions, Not Rulers

 

Evonomics. Need I say more?

With its motto of "the next evolution in economics", Evonomics is proof that evolution need not always lead to improvements.  Each day there seems to be another snarky article on the website attacking one of the fundamental principles of our civilization: Liberty. There does not seem to be a floor to how base the discourse over there can be. This time it's: "Stop crying about the size of government. Start caring about who controls it."

 

The titles says it all. Since Evonomics is David Sloan Wilson's baby, I'm much less willing to believe that the title was slapped on by an editor with no contact with the author, as is so Keeping with the Evonomics' track record, the title is trolling par excellence. It is a glib attempt to sell superiority to Evonomics' readers than to actually try to understand the liberal critique of state-power on its own terms.

Ultimately, Wilson's entire attempt at 'updating' Hayek is, root and stem, an attempt to justify the policies he likes, principally his notion that his arbitrary design principles are the secret sauce for national prosperity. Despite his accomplishments in evolutionary biology, he is a demagogue who poses as a man of science.

 

Here, I can speak from personal experience. I was at the seminar at George Mason that Wilson referred to in the beginning of the article. During the Q&A of that seminar, when Wilson was addressed with the point that basic measures of property rights, à la the Frasier Index, are robustly correlated with a nation's prosperity, Wilson seemed dumbfounded. Yes, he had harped on about the need to get good 'design principles' for states, choosing for his example the curious example of the Nordic petrostate Norway, rather than, say, Sweden next-door (because as you certainly know Sweden is a rather liberal nation). However, that property rights could be that basic design principle was a queer idea to him. The thought seemed to have never crossed his mind!

To think, a man who clearly does not appreciate the clear and vivid link between liberty and prosperity thinks so highly of himself to lecture economists on his website. So much for "the next evolution of economics". 

Daron Acelmogu, who was interviewed in the article, helped to give material for the circus:

It is also the case, and this is something we emphasize a lot throughout Why Nations Fail, that most states throughout history and even today serve the interests of the political elite and are part of their economic problems, not their solution. But this is not because the state is unnecessary or evil, but because of who controls it and what capacities it has invested in and developed.

 

The question that political thinkers should consider is not who should rule but what laws should rule. As understood by David Hume and John Adams, a nation is only as good as its worst ruler. In "That politics may be reduced to a science", Hume wrote: "A constitution is only so far good, as it provides a remedy again mal-administration..." He goes on to assert that: "Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration." John Adams stated, and later help enshrine in the Massachusetts Constitution, that principle that a good government was a "government of law, not of man." 

Wilson's shtick is aimed against that sacred principle. The rule of law, after all, would not allow for a government to enact his beloved design principles. And so Wilson seeks to re-orientate the question of constitutional politics around who should rule. But that's a re-orientation that leads straight to tyranny. And that's not just my accusation. It is a microcosm for the salient thesis of Karl Popper's The Open Society and It's Enemies: 

But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any political problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question 'Who should rule?' is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato's admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently 'good' or 'wise' (we need not worry about the precise meanings of these terms), and that it is not all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problems of politics, for it forces us to 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? (Popper 1966: 120-121)

That's an approach to political questions that is embraced to the fullest at George Mason University and makes it one of the best economics department on earth. 

 

All too related to this topic is Tyler Cowen's "The criticism of Trump which few will utter":

It is sad to see so many people, including those on the Left or in the Democratic Party, criticize the idea of a Trump presidency without ever uttering the phrase: “No man or woman should have so much political power over others.”  I agree with many of the moral criticisms of Trump as a leader, but don’t let them distract you from this broader truth.

...

The good news, if that is what one should call it, is that the best criticisms of Trump involve the concept of individual liberty and freedom from arbitrary legal authority and pure presidential discretion.  The bad news is that so few intellectuals have the relevant ideological vocabulary in that regard.

 

What is the Open Society?

 

 

Ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

-Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity 

 

The ‘open society’ is a term much used, but tragically little understood. Like too many terms within political philosophy, it is simply used in an emotivistic fashion to signify the author’s approval of something. Originating with Henri Bergson’s writing in the 1930s, the term was make famous by Karl Popper’s two volume project, The Open Society and Its Enemies. The books were a sustained attack on both the political ideas of Plato as well as the historicism of Hegel and Marx, and a powerful argument for the advantages of liberal democracy. The ‘open society’ has thereafter become a banner for liberals and social democrats, but its widespread use has not been beneficial for its clear meaning as a term in conversation. Which leads to the question: What exactly is the ‘open society’?  

Even though Popper ( a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society) certainly had a favorable opinion of liberal democracy, we must remember that Karl Popper’s concept of an ‘open society’ was epistemological, not political. It is very easy to simply identify the open society with a certain political regime in which democracy flourishes, and people have certain guaranteed rights, but Popper’s point did not have anything directly to do with either of those two points. The open society is a society in which people can make their own opinions about norms and policies, and can act upon those opinions. When Popper quoted Pericles as being a proponent of the open society when he quotes him as saying: “Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it”, Popper was noting that Pericles’ notion of Athenian democracy enabled the Athenian to make his own decisions about political decision making, and that was the essential condition making Athens an open society.  

 

What differentiated an open society from a closed society is thereby that, within the open society, individuals would be able to make decisions to change cultural norms. Closed societies, on the other hand, are found in a lack of a distinction between the conventional laws of human society, and the physical laws of the universe. They are constituted by taboos, norms thought to be permanent features of the world just like gravity or the movement of the stars and moon above. Thought to be the creation of gods, of forces of history, or of demigod-like leaders, and the rigidity of these taboos ensures that the society is closed to change. Popper even argued that the existence of taboos within closed societies resulted in people within those societies not being faced with decisions that could be called moral:

There are few problems in this form of life, and nothing equivalent to moral problems. I do not mean to say that a member of a tribe does not sometimes need much heroism and endurance in order to act in accordance with the taboos. What I mean is that he will rarely find himself in the position of doubting how he ought to act. The right way is always determined, though difficulties must be overcome in following it. It is determined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can never become objects of critical consideration (Popper 1945, 172). 

Kierkegaard’s assertion that philosophy begins with doubt is quite germane here. Popper writes on what differentiates the open society from that of taboos:

Political decisions may lead to the alteration of taboos, and even of political laws which are no longer taboos. The great difference is the possibility of rational reflection of these matters… And in our own time, many of us make rational decisions concerning the desirability or otherwise of new legislation, and of other institutional changes; that is to say, decisions based upon an estimate of possible consequences, and upon a conscious preference for some of them. We recognize rational personal responsibility.

In what follows, the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society (Ibid, 173).

The open society comes to fruition when people can philosophize, in however a crude fashion, and come to make decisions which can have impact upon the conventions of society. Unlike the closed society, the open society can be changed by the opinions of those within it.

 

What defines the open society is therefore an answer to a question which Darwin never broached in On the Origin of Species: What types of systems can evolve? It’s important here to note that Charles Darwin never used the word ‘evolution.’ Instead, he used the phrase ‘descent with modification.’ At the beginning of the final chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin described his argument as being “the theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection.” Questions of evolution are best thought of in terms of ‘descent with modification’ because the term constantly reminds us what we should be thinking about when we think about evolution: The mutability of objects across time because of some source of variation.  

‘Evolution’ is a term used so often and so widely that it loses its ability to really address what we are thinking about when we talk about what it addresses. From being used to refer to the ”theory of descent with modification; through variation and Natural Selection” (e.g. “We should teach evolution, not creationism in schools”) to the notion that certain types of systems in the world which can adapt to change through time (e.g. “Societies evolve throughout history”), ‘evolution’ does little good to exactly specify what we are trying to talk about when we it. ‘Descent with modification’, on the other hand, focuses our attention on what matters: that there are certain systems which can change through succeeding iterations. 

 

 

The closed society is a closed system with no  source of change which can introduce variation into it. The way that societies change is with alterations to norms and institutions. If those norms and institutions are taboos, assumed as permanent features of the world and thereby insulated from criticism, then that society does not have a effective way of adapting to the changing demands of its populations. Within the closed society, there is therefore an identity between the taboos of the present generation with that of the previous generation. However, when people are left to make their own judgments of the desirability of norms and institutions, then there is a source of variation which can then change the society. With a variation in judgements about the desirability of norms and institutions, society can change over time, and descent with variation - that is, evolution - is therefore possible.

The open society is the a society which enables the accumulation of useful social variation which can encourage the flourishing of those within it. What a ‘useful’ variation is must be kept empty here. To think that the human mind can define what social variation is useful from the point of view of society as a whole is to fall victim of the fatal conceit. There is a knowledge problem in recognizing the useful from the harmful since only those who are familiar with the variation in question will by and large have any chance in properly making that call. Even then, many may still make mistakes. And so there must be feedback mechanisms in place whose soundness can be relied upon with no reference to the specific people involved with them. The project of the open society is thus, in short, about figuring out the legal institutions, the formal rules of the game for society at large, which enable the accumulation of useful social variation. 

 

 

 

That Popper harshly criticized the idea of national destiny within The Open Society and Its Enemies fits with all that I have said above. Societies do not follow predetermined courses through history, and the traits that they have at any moment in time cannot be attributed to destiny. Instead, those traits are a consequence of a historically continent series of events, and unique outcomes which resulted in certain variations manifesting themselves within society at large. The open society is simply no guarantee of optimal outcomes. Speaking technically, evolution can get stuck within local maxima within its fitness landscape, and those local maxima can prevent its fitness walk from finding the global maximum; evolution, does not necessarily yield the optimal outcome. Instead, all that the open society can  guarantee us is a fighting chance for that optimal outcome. 

Those institutions and habits which we identify with the optimal outcome cannot simply be assumed as an outcome of history -  along the great forward march of progress - but must be understood as perishable. I thus like to modify the term ‘open society’ with the adjective ‘free’ to identify that society, one protecting the dignity of the individual human person’s free will, as the optimal outcome. Not only is it open, but it is also free; to get there, we must not only insist on having an open society, a society which can accumulate useful variation, but also a society which conforms to classically liberal notions of political ethics. 

 

 

Bibliography

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

There Are No Such Things as Facts

The maximum extent of the ice sheets during the Pleistocene period.

 

In The Foundations of Scientific Inference and in other places throughout his writings, the philosopher of science, Wesley Salmon, provides a narrative about how scientific induction can make sense out of a varying amount of facts to explain the existence of ice sheets across much of North America. In this narrative, it is the scientific capability to make imaginative inferences from the facts to a theory about glaciers that made the human mind capable of coming to the knowledge about about them. jm

Salmon is wrong, though, in his narrative of why we know that glaciers once covered much of North America. As a defender of induction in science, Salmon gives a story about how we can see pieces of evidence that point to the events of the Ice Ages and that from those pieces of evidence, our confidence becomes greater that a continental ice sheet once extended as far as Illinois. This all fits within his probabilistic explanation of induction and within his thought, it certainly makes sense how more evidence of that event would increase the scientific robustness of a theory. However, that does not change that Salmon fundamentally got the process backwards.

 

Physical objects in the world did not explain themselves to us and people did not gather all of the evidence of the extent of the Laurentide ice sheet and then come to create a theory about Ice Ages from them. Instead, what happened is that the human idea that there was such a thing as Ice Ages came to guide scientists into finding more evidence to corroborate that theory. Facts did not lead to theory; rather theory led to facts.

There are simply no such things as physical entities independent of the ideas held by people that can be labeled “facts.” Indeed, the common-place notion that there are such entities in the world and that all someone has to do to discover the truth is to gather all of these “facts” completely misconstrues the process by which human knowledge grows. That human beings can even look at the world and say there are such things as facts is a product of them holding theories that allow them to categorize the world in such a way as to be able to point towards otherwise epistemologically inert objects and to say that they are “facts.” Thus facts occupy World Two of Karl Popper’s ontology: facts only exist where the mind interacts with the physical world and classifies it according to purely mental objects (i.e. theories) that exist independent of the physical world*.

 

Thus that we are able to see evidence everywhere we look that point towards the existence of the Laurentide ice sheet cannot be understood as simply facts guiding the mind towards adopting a theory. Rather, we are able to see all of that evidence because the human mind holds a certain theory and that theory makes possible the mind to see those physical objects as pointing towards the existence of primordial ice sheets tens of thousands of years ago. 

Facts independent of theory thus don’t exist. All that exist are physical objects that fit well into the classification schemes of theories and some theories that have classification schemes that can be seen as better capturing the real phenomena of the world. Some classification schemes prove to be very capable at predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have proved their mettle. And other schemes prove to be incapable of predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have been classified. As a result, science is not fitting theories to facts; rather it is the competition of many different systems of classification that bring along with them different understandings of the physical objects out in the world.

 

 

* “In this pluralistic philosophy consists of at least three ontological worlds: the first is the physical world or the world of physical states; the second is the mental world or the world of mental states; and the third is the world of intelligibles, or of ideas in the objective sense; it is the world of possible objects of thought: the world of theories in themselves, and their logical relations; of arguments in themselves and their logical relations; and of problem situations in themselves.” - Karl Popper in “On the Theory of Objective Mind” as published in Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pg. 154. 

Roundtable: What is Democracy?

From On the Laws by Cicero, I.41:

Now every people (which is the kind of large assemblage I have described), every state (which is the organization of the people), every commonwealth (which, is, as I said, the concern of the people) needs to be ruled by some sort of deliberation in order to be long lived. That deliberative function, moreover must always be connected to the original cause which engendered the state; and it must also be either assigned to one person or to selected individuals or be taken up by the entire population. And so, when the control of everything is in the hands of one person, we call that one person a kind and that type of commonwealth a monarchy. When it is in the control of chosen men, then a state is said to be ruled by the will of the aristocracy. And that which everything is in the hands of the people is a “popular” state – that is what we call it. And of these three types any one, even though it may not be perfect or in my opinion the best possible, still is tolerable as long as it holds to the bond which first bound men together in the association of the commonwealth; and any one may be better than another.

This is a rather classical view deriving from Aristotle's taxonomy of different types of poleis within the Hellenistic world. The emphasis on who within the population deliberates on the functions on the government, though, is an attribute of democracy that any sound notion of it must capture. T

he notion that democracy is the deliberation about laws among the entire population has been emphasized by contemporary theorists like Amartya Sen. In his own work, Sen has argued that the reasons that there has never been no major famine in a modern democracy is this deliberative aspect of democracy. Since everyone can have a say in the deliberation of policies within a democracy, few within government cannot hide the facts behind famines for long and the outcry for famine-relief cannot be long kept quiet.

 

Another aspect of democracy is highlighted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol I., pg. 124: 

(W)e may distinguish two main types of government. The first consists of governments which we can get rid (sic) without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of (sic) except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term “democracy” as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term “tyranny” or “dictatorship” for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage.

Popper's assertion that a democracy is a changable government brings to mind something that Edmund Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”No doubt, the authoritarian style of the Bourbon kings and the centralization of political power in the halls of Versailles created a political climate in which change could only be achieved via bloodshed and the great tragedy that was the French Revolution.

Ludwig von Mises also emphasizes that a democracy is a government that can change as to best suit the will of the governed. From Liberalism, pg. 21:

Democracy is the form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.

 

When speaking about what democracy is, it is also important to keep in mind what democracy is not and Friedrich Hayek writes about this in The Constitution of Liberty, pg. 103:

Equality before the law leads to the demand that all men should also have the same share in making the law. This is the point where where the traditional liberalism and the democratic movement meet. Liberalism (in the European nineteenth-century meaning of the word, to which we shall adhere throughout this chapter) is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive powers of all government, whether democratic or not, whereas the dogmatic democrat knows only one limit – current majority opinion. The difference between the two ideals stands out most clearly if we name their opposites: for democracy it is authoritarian government; for liberalism it is totalitarianism. Neither of the two systems necessarily excludes the opposite of the other: a democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act of liberal principles.

There can be both illiberal and liberal democracy. Of course, as both Popper and Mises have noted, the benefit to an illiberal democracy as opposed to, say, an illiberal monarchy is that an illiberal democracy can be changed if there are enough votes against it.

 

Finally, we have our last perspective in this roundtable from “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” by Immanuel Kant:

A republican constitution is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens). It is the only constitution that can be derived from the idea of original contract, upon which all rightful constitution of a people must be founded. Thus as far as right is concerned, republicanism is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution, and it only remains to ask whether it is the only constitution which can lead to a perpetual peace.

While Kant does not describe here his notion of what “Democracy” is, but our modern notion of democracy is so close to his notion of republicanism, just as it is close to what the American founders like Madison thought of as republican government, that he mind as well be talking about modern democracy. That modern theorists like John Rawls have tried to create normative standards for democracy around notions like Kant's original contract is even more evidence that Kant speaks here of what we call “Democracy” today. Then again, we need to keep in mind Hayek's lesson that we cannot equivocate Liberalism and democracy.

This is a typical Kantian attempt at trying to understand something as well. Like Aristotle, I often think of Kant's philosophical style of taxonomic: he tries to augment our understanding of philosophical objects by immediately creating categories and systems of classification. Indeed, one of the reasons the Critique of Pure Reason can be so intimidating is just how many new words Kant creates in order to classify reason in its many functions.

However, I am greatly skeptical of the entire philosophical project of trying to deduce the nature of government via a priori constructions like the original contract. I think that Burke succinctly summarized all the errors of this rational constructivist approach when he wrote in his Reflections: “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.

 

 

Bibliography:

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Commonwealth in One the Commonwealth and On the Laws ed. James E.G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hayek, Friedrich. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 2005.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.