That’s my most recent writing for that site, in the polemical style standard for that domain, though still far short of the abrasiveness of In Mala Fide’s other writers. I think I’m just too bourgeois to be fully gung-ho.
Intro:
Recently, Yahoo! News alerted me to a UC Berkeley report relaying the dreaded fact that the much vaunted “digital democracy” yearned for by many a progressive has not yet come to pass. Bill Clinton’s hoped-for crossing of the digital divide has been a failure; or at least it has failed to rear its virtual head in the way he and other adherents to the expanding universe theory of egalitarianism would like it to.
June 16, 2011 at 10:16 am
This time I read the whole piece (I admit I only clicked over because I thought it was TGGP at first, and I was eager to rail at him for indulging yet again in libertarinism or paleoconservatism or some such lesser thing than bald good faith attempts at empirical analysis.)
I think your piece was modestly virtuous, in that the tendency of progressive elites to nontechnocratically project their self-image onto the masses often results in bad policy.
But I think progressive are closer to the truth on most of the huge issues of our day, which I think are less about free internet for all, damn the cost, and more about global administrative optimization for the purpose of reducing existential risk.
June 16, 2011 at 2:05 pm
H.A., explain just how the ridiculous pretense of egalitarianism serves “global administrative optimization for the purpose of reducing existential risk.”
The most penetrating of “good faith attempts at empirical analysis” of these issues, in my experience, is Pareto’s. To summarize: politics and other concerns of the chattering class are and always will be the province of competing elites, or elite factions, if you will. One faction or another may make appeals to some element among the sub-elite masses, but these are purely tactical measures. Ideology is mostly window-dressing.
The real matter at hand is the dispute over which faction shall prevail, and enjoy the spoils of victory. Self-proclaimed egalitarians never really want all people to be equal in condition. Egalitarianism is, rather, the political stratagem of a rising elite to advance its own social or economic status at the expense of an established elite. Rather than trying to advance themselves under the old conditions of whatever society they live in, members of the rising elite seek to substitute new conditions that will cast down the old elite that they envy and despise, and will exalt their own faction in its stead.
We have, since the early twentieth century, been in the midst of a conflict of a rising elite of bureaucrats, academics, and journalists with an older, established, elite that consists of owners of business capital. Naturally, the apologetics of the rising elite are full of appeals to egalitarianism. But what happens when they triumph completely, and the old elite is firmly displaced?
These conflicts are cyclical. The defeated establishment becomes consolidated with the residues of previous elites, and the victorious rising faction becomes comfortably established. It is then in its turn challenged by another rising faction. In the past five hundred years we have witnessed elite conflict of the old noblesse de l’épée with the rising noblesse de la robe; then of the established new nobility of courtiers and placemen with the rising bourgeoisie; and finally, between the bourgeois establishment and the rising intelligentsia. The real nature of this last conflict has been obscured by Marxist twaddle about the working class. Marxism, egalitarianism, and concerns about the fate of the proletariat are merely sticks with which the intelligentsia belabor the bourgeoisie. The fact is that the poor old bourgeoisie have been épatée almost to extinction, and the intelligentsia now rule the roost.
That the intelligentsia, which by now really amounts to a Western equivalent of the old Soviet nomenklatura, still resorts to egalitarian pieties, is merely an artifact of its history. If you want to see how comfortably they have become established, and with what horror they react to a real challenge to their ascendancy, witness the vitriol they spew at phenomena such as the “Tea Party.” It is denounced in with all the historic tropes of intelligentsia egalitarian rhetoric, but the underlying sensibility and tone resembles that of a high-society dowager of eighty years ago recoiling at the intrusion of a tramp into her parlour.
How it will end, I do not pretend to know, other than to say that eventually a new elite will arise to succeed the intelligentsia, and it will be neither more nor less favorable than any previous elite towards “global administrative optimization” or any other sort of globaloney.
June 16, 2011 at 3:06 pm
Michael,
To misuse the term in a popular way, you come off as a nihilist in your last paragraph.
I aspire to be an earthy survivalist -and as such “global administrative optimization” seems to me to be more than globaloney. In its simple form, building an asteroid shield contingent on cost benefit analysis ain’t a bad idea.
I’m a bit skeptical of the swarms of rival elites and their self-serving propagandas, just ,like you are.
I think progressives (or is it neoliberals) are more on the right track with their frequent focus on brainstorming how to use regulation (for example pigovian taxes) to internalize externalities so as to reduce our existential risk.
But I’m not any more of a progressive than you are (in fact, I may be less of a progressive).
Progressive seem more self-critically concerned about inadvertantly massively increasing existential risk, and in that area of concern I’m a fellow traveler with them.
June 16, 2011 at 4:33 pm
I do not know what is nihilist, in the vulgar fashion or any other, about observing that future elites are no more likely to serve the general good (which I assume is what is meant by “global administrative optimization”) than present or past ones. It is merely the lesson of history and experience. Such people have always talked the good talk, but to what practical end? Let us take their yammering about global warming as a current example. The validity of any of the climatologists’ claims is murky, and one may reasonably suspect that much of what the elites have done with them amounts to cloaking self-serving actions behind a smoke-screen of altruism (the actions of Al Gore, Jr. being a case in point).
At best, previous episodes of elite altruism have yielded derisory results rather than actively harmful ones. Consider the Kellogg-Briand Pact or the League of Nations, which signally failed to put an end to war; or the post-war successor to their idealistic designs, the United Nations, which has served mostly to create comfortable sinecures for third-world kleptocrats who have exhausted the limited possibilities of their own miserable countries.
The greatest global existential threat of the post-WWII period was thermonuclear warfare between the Soviet Union and the West. Great resources were devoted to fostering detente, nuclear test-ban treaties, SALT negotiations, START negotiations, and such-like. Entire forests were sacrificed to print the soporific journals about such subjects emanating from Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations, which now moulder unread in university libraries. Did any of this effort accomplish a thing to bring the threat to an end? No – it happened spontaneously, when the Soviet Union at last collapsed under the burdens of its centrally-planned economy. None of the intelligentsia anticipated that. We still, indeed, have Marxists on Western university faculties, whose touching adherence to their True Faith might well be compared to that of die-hard Millerites in the aftermath of the “Great Disappointment.”
Against what you describe as progressives’ being “self-critically concerned about inadvertently massively increasing existential risk” must be balanced the great possibility that their actions worsen, rather than ameliorate it – much as a quack doctor’s remedies often not only fail to cure the patient, but actively hasten him to the grave. We must hope that the world is able to survive in spite of the ministrations of its intelligentsia.
June 16, 2011 at 11:16 pm
I’ve mentioned before that nihilists seriously believed in something (the negation of the status quo and existing institutions), whereas I’m more indifferent. From H.A’s solipsistic perspective he concludes people are dedicated to destruction, but for what it’s worth I’m much more open to making deals about things I don’t care about than you would predict based on the assumption of nihilism.
Whose working on asteroid defense now? I think I remember Posner writing about it some years back.
June 19, 2011 at 8:41 am
I decided to restart misusing “nihilism” in the popular way after I noticed Yglesias doing it recently. Most people use “nihilism” to mean cynically act in a way that disregards preserving our existence, even if that’s not the proper definition. For example, liberals consider it nihilistic for some conservatives to disregard “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic global warming, but the aspersion could be cast in any political direction (white “racial realists” might call white who claim to be for open borders “nihilistic”, though I haven’t heard the term employed that way).
Your niggling reminds me of your confusion about me using “Faustian” to describe valuing understanding reality over everything else.
I hate Judge Posner and his blogging partner (I think he’s a noted Chicago economist? but I’m blanking on his name) -they almost always seem to get things wrong to me.
Also, what do you think of the thinkprogress revamp? Their casual destruction of the commenting system was a significant loss in my quality of life, but who really gives a fuck?
Hopefully Anonymous
June 20, 2011 at 8:19 pm
I also dislike the changed blogging system.
June 29, 2011 at 11:05 am
obviously Becker -just popped into my head- Posner’s economist blogging partner.
July 16, 2011 at 9:06 am
“We must hope that the world is able to survive in spite of the ministrations of its intelligentsia.”
The notion that some of us will be immortal in paradise if more powerful people just leave us alone is a fairy tale.
The notion that the smartest people can solve all our problems if we just give them infinite power is also a fairy tale.
I think the notion that we’re probably all doomed, but that we might as well go for the odds-of-the-gaps and attempt to build our immortality paradise isn’t a fairy tale, at least not yet. In that vulgar sense I think you’re a nihilist offering up your version of fairy tale as weak cover.
A note on the vulgar nihilist -I think they’re fatalists with a rent-seeking component to it (problem can’t be solved, so going for short term hedonistic pursuits that may contribute to the problem, but since taking the position that the problem can’t be solved anyways, absolving onseself of the rent-seeking). Sort of cynical fatalists.
July 16, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Makes sense to me. I think in terms of expected utility, and for you it’s immortality or nothing. I think concentrating on such a small (possibly non-existent) probability space inhibits the ability to compare the different spaces we will almost certainly end up.
July 16, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I think I take the position (first articulated by a Voltaire thought experiment?) that theatre of consciousness + earthy survivalist aspirations in the context of future nonexistence is absurd. In other words, that it’s an absurd local aesthetic to desire to survive to be 80 or 200 years old rather than to simply desire to avoid future nonexistence. After that rational strategy comes into play (odds of the gaps). Choosing the “ability to compare different spaces we will almost certainly end up” over “concentrating on such a small (possibly non-existent probability space” seems to me to be an archetypically vulgar faustian preference.
July 17, 2011 at 8:45 pm
I’m not familiar with Voltaire’s thought experiment.
I guess I tend to think in terms of econ-style QALYs. I don’t usually give much thought to why that and not some other criteria.