Dominic Flandry decries Psychotechnocracy:
"'When will the intellectuals learn that scientific government is a contradiction in terms? Since people don't fit into this perfect scheme - and the scheme being perfect by definition, this must be the fault of the people - Biocontrol never did find an occassion to give up its power. After a few generations, it evolved into an old-fashioned oligarchy. Such governments always do.'" (V, pp. 39-40)
When did any scientist as scientist say that his scheme was perfect and not only that but also that the scheme was perfect not by demonstration but by definition? Flandry seems to be referring to fanatics whose ideology was scientistic instead of theological. A scientist's job is to find out about people, not to decree that they are at fault because they do not fit into some perfect scheme.
Sciences differ as their subject matters differ. A social project is not an experiment in physics and experiments are impossible in astronomy! A science of society would have to acknowledge the distinctive features of societies and also to accept the limits to our understanding of them. But surely it is possible to formulate some propositions that are empirically observed and realistic rather than utopian or perfectionist?
I suggest:
(i) Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis: "Times change and we change with them." What one generation regards as insane another accepts as commonplace. Great change is possible, either for good or for bad. Do not think that change is impossible. (An important principle in sf.)
(ii) People do not fight when there is no reason to. For example, we do not fight for the air that we breathe - although we might start to fight if we were trapped inside a space station with a diminishing supply of oxygen cylinders.
(iii) Any competitive economy has a built-in boom-slump cycle. I think that this is generally accepted by economists across the board? As long as we live and work in such an economy, then we have to accept that it cannot have a permanent boom.
(iv) If a social group has both a common interest and the ability to act collectively, then it is not utopian but realistic to encourage that group to act collectively.
Needless to say, the Biocontrol approach of blackmailing government by threatening to end antitoxin production is not the way to a perfect social system.
Addendum: A concrete example of (iv). Slavery in Haiti was ended by slave rebellions, not by Parliamentary legislation. Populations can become active instead of passive.
35 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And like Flandrdy, I don't believe in any so called "science of society." Many times in the works of Anderson we see characters expressing a similar disbelief in things like "psychotechnocracy" or "Avantism." One example being this bit from "The High Ones," Section 7: "They [the Zolotoyans] were great once. But they ended with a totalitarian government. A place for everyone and everyone in his place. The holy society whose very stasis was holy. Specialized breeds for the different jobs. Some crude attempts at it have been made on Earth. Egypt didn't change for thousands of years after the pyramids had been built. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, made every occupation hereditary. The Hindus had their caste system. China, Korea, Japan tried to cut themselves off from the outside world, from any challenge and alteration. And isn't communism supposed, by definition, to be perfect, so that new ideas must be heretical?"
Biocontrol BEGAN as an institution staffed by genuine scientists and technicians. But that necessarily changed after it seized power on Unan Besar. A scientistic ideology was cooked up to justify Biocontrol's increasingly oppressive and corrupt rule.
Political theories or philosophies cannot and will not ever have the precision found in physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, etc. At most the work of men like John Hord might have some rough approximation to what was observed in real life.
I agree with point (i), great changes for either the good or bad is possible.
Point (ii), agree, people will fight for reasons they consider important, whether or not we agree with them.
Your point (iii), if you want a creative, dynamic society, then you HAVE to accept the possibility of slumps coming after booms. That includes accepting competitiveness. And I do accept that.
I don't understand your point (iv), what do you mean by a social group which has a common interest and acts collectively? Do you mean commercial companies selling goods and services like food, drink, clothing, books, shoes, and so on? If you mean some kind of non coercive, non bureaucratic form of socialism, then I argue there has never been any such thing after mankind passed beyond hunting/gathering.
The only places where non coercive socialism has ever worked has been in monasteries. And they were small groups of people who agree to live together by certain rules to attain certain goals. And monasteries never tried to take over the surrounding society, because that would contradict their own reasons for existing.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I thought that (iv) needed an example so I added an addendum.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But a weak and unsatisfactory example. All that we have seen from post-independence Haiti has been an endless succession of weak, corrupt, or tyrannical gov'ts. Haiti today is one of the most miserable countries in the world. A successful slave revolt is not necessarily likely to be followed by a successful society and state.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
No indeed but the end of slavery is a start.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
A pity the Haitians have had so much trouble getting beyond that start.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed. But look at the state of the whole world. Either we make some progress or we go under.
I am having a fried breakfast, rereading Stieg Larsson yet again and about to go on a long walk so no more blogging till later.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I am just about to go to bed at long last!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I should have added that if we want real progress, only free enterprise economics, limited gov't, and a true science modest about what it can hope to achieve will do that.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
And what I meant by that "modest" is that REAL scientists don't claim they know best how to run a society and state.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
They do not. At most, they advise governments.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Correct, and they should never be allowed to take over any governments.
Ad astra! Sean
Markets are a feedback mechanism, like those little whirling ball-and-rod things you see on steam engines. Like any feedback control system, they have a tendency to ‘hunt’ around their sweet spot, hence business cycles. The mechanism works better the bigger it is, because it’s also a form of collective decision-making.
Millions of people buy or don’t buy, move or don’t move, and when all that is added up to “market pricing signals”. The more people involved, the better; the faster and more high-volume the flow of information, the better.
The great virtue of such a system is that millions of people are smarter than any individual or small group. Nobody can predict the future, but market pricing comes closest. It’s the economic equivalent of a representative political system. Individuals may be stupid, biased and/or malicious; add enough together and you get a ‘wisdom of crowds’ effect.
Market economies are inherently unstable because the mechanism overcorrects, but that’s the price you pay for flexibility and innovation; it’s a way to deal with unknowability by trying everything. Some guess right, some (more) wrong, and the system rewards cunning and luck - creative destruction, as the saying goes.
Conversely, command systems are a bit more stable, but only by sticking to the known.
Market systems maximize efficiency and innovation at the cost of continuous “churn” and uncertainty - you can never relax if you want to keep up.
Command systems give certainty, but have an inherent tendency to stagnate. Pharaonic Egypt would be an example.
When you try to command the same sort of results the market-choice system results, things get wierd, and often disaster ensues. NIt con work for a while, or appear to, because you can copy successful innovations. But this runs into a law of diminishing returns because of the lack of the feedback mechanism.
Eg., the Soviet economy grew faster than the American for nearly half a century... but it didn’t end well. The hidden indicator showing why way the low growth in TFP — total factor productivity. That measures not just growth in output, but growth in output if you equalize the growth in inputs (capital, labor and materials). TFP is.a -qualitative- measurement of how much you get per -unit- of input.
You can grow gross output by “brute force” methods - investing more, moving peasants into factories, copying technologies. This is what the Soviets did, and to a large degree what China has done. Over time ypu get less and less for each worker or machine or parcel of raw materials, so you have to add more and more to get less and less, until eventually stagnation sets in. If you keep pushing by those methods, the Aral Sea dries up or the pollution meter on top of the American embassy in Beijing breaks. When you get to that point, only -qualitative- growth is possible, but that simply can’t be done with command methods.
That’s because of the ‘unknowability’ problem; the planner, at that point. cannot know -what to command-. And that is an unsolvable problem.
Or to sum up, in the long run planning doesn’t work because you cannot know the consequences of your decisions ahead of time when dealing with the non-routine.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you. A fascinating analysis.
Paul.
Nb: note that the result of the successful slave revolt in Haiti was an utter disaster for the population. First genocide/ethnic cleansing of the whites, removing 99% of the educated class, then generations of civil and foreign war, tyrannies like Christophe and Dessalines and on down to Papa Doc and his Tonton Macoutes(*), economic collapse, regression to a subsistence system, isolation and misery.
The territories that remained French colonies saw slavery abolished later, but Martinique and Guadeloupe are paradise on earth compared to Haiti.
As the saying goes, consider the alternatives, and better the devil you know.
(*) Tonton Macoute means roughly ‘bogeymen’ or ‘evil night spirits’.
Mr Stirling,
Thanks again. But it cannot be right that slavery should have been retained? That had to be resisted - without leading to genocide, obviously.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You explained very well why market/free enterprise economics works so much better than the coercive systems so often supported by anticapitalists.
Ditto, what you said about Haiti, one of the most miserable and unluckiest countries in the world. Far better to have remained under French rule and have slavery abolished by legislation.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: slavery was going to be abolished.
The question was, how and when?
Obviously sooner was better in and of itself, but this is not the -summum bonum-.
The net loss of felicity in Haiti is pretty unquestionably much greater than in the colonies that remained French. Ask a random selection of Haitians whether they'd rather live in Haiti or Guadeloupe, and I think the vote will be pretty emphatic.
As is usually the case, gradualism and putting your toe in the water first and being very cautious about unintended and unforeseeable consequences is the better course.
What has to be kept in mind is that we do not know ourselves(*), and in particular we do not know how our social organizations, themselves the produce of the blind interaction of uncounted millions of individual decisions, work.
The causal chains are infinitely complex, twisty and unpredictable.
So fixing them by root-and-branch radical action is like trying to "fix" a mechanical watch by drinking a bottle of rum, closing your eyes, and hitting it vigorously with a hammer.
The French Revolution is analogous.
France got taken over by people who thought they could rationally plan a utopian system -- the result was terrorism by mass slaughter, a dictatorship worse than any Bourbon monarch, even Louis XIV, 30 years of war that left a million and a half Frenchmen dead all the way from Cadiz to Moscow (and uncounted millions of non-French along the way), a vast increase in poverty, and inextinguishable hatred and fear that poisoned French politics right down to the 1940's.
At that, they were lucky; the poor damned Russians are still suffering the consequences of their leap in the dark... the main effect of which so far has been to make Russians and other East Slavs a hell of a lot less numerous, to the tune of a demographic gap of about 150,000,000 or so from what a continuation of pre-1917 trends would indicate.
Since we -cannot- know the future or accurately predict the consequences of our actions, a mixture of caution and incremental pragmatism is almost always best since there are so many more ways to bugger things up than to make them better.
If you don't know why X is in place, the default assumption should be that it's doing something essential even if you can't figure out what.
So go right on wearing wigs in court -- can't hurt, might help.
Which is not to say that nothing should ever be changed, just that "if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it" is a good maxim; if a system functions at all, chances are you'll muck things up by trying to uproot it.
Nudge one thing, wait and see how it works, then nudge another a long time afterwards. Above all, humility rather than hubris. Do not delude yourself that you "know" things that are unknowable.
(*) as the saying goes, if our minds were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be too simple to understand them.
NB: the American Revolution was one of the very few that didn't make things much, much worse... largely because it was a conservative revolt -against- change (the post=7=Years-War attempt to tighten up the British Empire), and lead by mostly the same people who'd run things before under the loose, chaotic but workable system of "benign neglect" that had characterized British policy up until the 1760's.
That had worked because it didn't try to be systematic or logical.
As Lord Salisbury said a century later, the best policy was to float gently downs-stream, occasionally putting out a pole to gently fend off from a revealed obstacle.
And at that, the American Revolution probably -delayed- the abolition of slavery in the US, and made it much more expensive and destructive when it did happen.
The British Empire abolished slavery in the 1830's, gradually so as to minimize economic disruption, and with a massive pay-off to the slaveowners to mute their resistance.
The US had to kill 800,000 people (out of a population of 31-odd million, equivalent to 8,000,000 million dead today) and burn aa third of the country to the ground, condemning it to 70 years of backwardness and poverty.
I agree with some of this. I certainly acknowledge that I know very little about how society works and nothing about what will happen in the future.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I greatly enjoy these mini essays that you take so much time and trouble to give us. Many thanks!
The hatred and fury engendered by the hideous French Revolution lingered in France longer than even the 1940's. If I'm recalling correctly, I read an article a few years ago discussing how hatred of the Revolution continues to exist in western France, such as the Vendee region. I read of how people there continue to refuse to celebrate Bastille Day, defiantly keeping businesses and offices open on July 14.
Yes, the Russian Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist seizure of power there was an utter catastrophe for Russia. Yes, the massacres, purges, gulags, plus the callous incompetence of the Soviets causing millions of casualties in WW II, is coming close to wiping out the Russian people.
I agree the US handled the issue of slavery so badly that it took a bloody civil war to be rid of it--but at the cost of that coming with a poisonous legacy of bitterness and resentment in the defeated southern states. The British Empire was wiser and more fortunate.
Paul: Would it be all right to ask what were some of the points Stirling made that you disagreed with?
Ad astra! Sean
I share Sean's appreciation of these mini-essays by a historically informed sf writer.
Sean,
Nothing specific. I lack knowledge of Haiti as of much else. More generally, if a group of slaves were able and willing to fight, then I would be very unlikely to advise them to continue to accept their lot and to wait until a Parliament worked its torturous way around to legislating their emancipation. Parliaments and Executives move much more quickly when they see action on the ground. A government would definitely defend slave owners either by trying, not necessarily successfully, to suppress a rebellion or alternatively, as we know, by ending the institution while massively compensating slave owners but offering no help to former slaves.
Paul.
Ironically, the British legislation that freed the slaves also compensated the slave owners and thus confirmed for the first time in law that the slaves had indeed had the legal status of property. The legislation did not declare that it had always been wrong to enslave human beings. If it had done that, then maybe it could have been added that the freed slaves deserved compensation both for their long period of wrongful confinement and also for all their unpaid labor?
Paul: the problem with that is that it would have grossly increased resistance to emancipation, and so delayed it and made violent counter-attack more likely.
As the sayings go, “politics is the art of the possible”, and “the best is the enemy of good enough”.
The growth of anti slavery sentiment in the English-speaking countries (it was much weaker elsewhere and nonexistent outside the West) was a historically unique phenomenon as it was.
Those societies then agitated, hectored, bullied and outright forced everyone else to follow suit. Without their global power and influence it wouldn’t have happened at all.
Kaor, Paul!
Mr. Stirling has ably responded to the comments you made here. I would only add that, what ever many slave owners thought of slavery (I know some did not like it!), their personal fortunes/livelihoods were bound up in it. Amy attempt at peaceful abolition which did not include compensation would have provoked desperate, even violent resistance. As Stirling said, if "good enough" will do the job while the "best" would not, go for the former!
Ad astra! Seam
One thing that I have learned is that everything is far more complicated than I used to think.
Kaor, Paul!
And that is the beginning of wisdom. Real reform has to be cautious, prudent, modest, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I would not entirely agree with your statement that anti slavery sentiment was that weak outside the English speaking countries. Here I have in mind the people who criticized Tsarist Russia's version of slavery, serfdom. From at least the reign of Catherine II onwards, there was increasing criticism of serfdom.
Finally, when Alexander II (reigned 1855-81), was no longer entangled by the Crimean War, he turned to matters of internal reform, including finding some means of getting rid of serfdom. But, he did not make the mistake of simply decreeing the abolition of serfdom--because that would have provoked furious, desperate resistance from the serf owners, with totally unpredictable consequences (almost certainly bad). Rather, he maneuvered and zig zagged, setting up commissions (which included serf owners) to study the problem, used persuasion, and offered compensation and trade offs, etc. So, after six years, he was able to promulgate the Ukase abolishing serfdom in 1862.
In many ways, the 1862 abolition was a compromise. Neither ex-serf owners or former serfs were wholly satisfied. And it included flaws which had to be corrected years later by the reforms of Peter Stolypin. But it was good enough to get the job done with no one feeling forced to take extreme measures.
AND, unlike the US in 1862, Russia did not have to fight a brutal civil war to be rid of serfdom.
Ad astra! Sean
I made a mistake in my comments immediately above. Alexander II's Emancipation Ukase was promulgated in 1861, not 1862. I was checking what I wrote from memory!
Ad astra! Sean
Russia found it easier to reform precisely because it was an autocracy. Note also that the Russian aristocracy was a ‘service’ class; ‘we are the Tsar’s dogs’ as Ivan the Terrible’s henchmen used to say. Their own privileges and positions were closely bound to the Autocrat’s power. Russia had a long tradition of revolts by peasants, but not by the aristocracy - in vivid contrast to the rest of Europe.'
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
As always, you make interesting points, esp. the bit about the peculiar status of the Russian "service" aristocracy. In fact, strictly, I think that down to 1762 Russian aristocrats were kinda serfs of the Tsars themselves, at least technically.
But even Tsarist Russia had vested interests and pressure groups whose wishes and views the wiser Tsars took into account when governing the empire. Hence the fives years Alexander II spent building up support and bargaining before issuing the Emancipation Ukase.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, all!
This discussion of slavery and emancipation reminded me of something Henry George said; as an American addressing a British audience, he noted that the British Empire had compensated its slaveowners, and said, “We do not thank you for that.” In his view, the compensation encouraged American slaveowners to think that if the federal government ever did abolish slavery, they would be compensated, too, which helped keep up the price of slaves. If the price of slaves had been lower, the slaveowners’ willingness to resist the prospective Republican administration might have been less. He said this, by the way, in the context of arguing for a single tax on the value of land, which would largely expropriate the value of land, although not expropriate the land de jure; he was opposed to compensating the landowners.
The British government did end up more or less buying out the Irish landowners, and giving *some* of the Irish peasantry land titles, for which I think they had to pay. Henry George and those of the Irish Nationalists who followed him, or had arrived at a similar position independently, proposed abolishing taxes on labor and capital, taxing away the land rents from the landowners, and using the resulting revenue for the public benefit. Then land titles would have been sold cheaply to whoever could best use the land, and every Irishman, earl, tenant farmer, or landless laborer, would have become an equal shareholder in his country’s soil. I still think it was a good idea.
Henry George saw compensating the slaveowners for human chattel to which they had no moral right to be contrary to justice, and I agree. There remains the question of how much justice was attainable under what circumstances, and what might have resulted from attempting to free the slaves in Britain’s Caribbean possessions without compensation. Henry George (who had not gone off to fight in the American Civil War himself, being in California, and also a very short man) took the position that fighting the Civil War had been preferable to buying the slaves at market value, although the latter would have cost less money and avoided the loss of seven hundred thousand lives; he argued that paying people money to which they had no right would have partially enslaved taxpayers, and would have made the American people look timid, which would have led to evil consequences in the future.
He may have been right, or it may be that politics is the art of the possible, and paying off the slaveowners would have avoided much death and destruction without major harm in other ways. We cannot know, although authors of alternate history may have fun and earn royalties speculating.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
This has become a very long thread.
Kaor, Nicholas!
Many thanks for your interesting comments, even tho I disagree with Geourgist economics. And I also disagree with Henry George's views on how best to abolish slavery/serfdom. In my view, as a matter of practical politics, it does NOT matter if compensating slave owners for the loss of their human property was right or wrong. What matters is how best statesmen trying to govern their countries could bring emancipation about if that was the desired end. And preferably by peaceful means.
I will not agree that the roads chosen by the British Empire and Tsarist Russia, persuasion, compromise, and compensation were the wrong ways to end slavery. Not if the alternatives were either violent, desperate opposition by the slave owners (including civil wars), or the utterly miserable results of a "successful" revolt against slave owners a la Haiti.
As for the US, it should be kept in mind that the pro-slavery extremists in the southern states REFUSED to give Lincoln and the new Republican Congress a chance to show how they would govern after the 1860 elections. They ignored or rejected Lincoln's promises that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed. If I recall correctly, Lincoln's preference would have been gradual, compensated emancipation. And I still say that would have been vastly better than secession followed by a bloody civil war.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment