Posts Tagged ‘government’
“The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell on James Scott and technology…
The political scientist James Scott died last week. I only knew him through email – an occasional and irregular correspondence, mostly involving unsuccessful attempts to organize discussion at political science conferences around his work. As he suggested in a biographical essay, “Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast,” which just came out a few months ago, he was semi-detached from his academic discipline.
I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me. I am honored even to be seen as a specialist, and probably as much to be embraced by anthropology and history.
The world was better for his iconoclasm. Scott wrote far more beautifully than political scientists are supposed to write and his ideas and work were too big to fit into any discipline. Although arguments were largely rooted in the past, his book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, has shaped how we think about technology.
Seeing Like a State is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result.
In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets “see” the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy.
Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well. There is a lot of social reality that is described poorly, or not at all, by categories or statistics. Even so, as governments and markets established their power, they not only saw the world in highly limited ways but shaped it so that it conformed better to their purblind understanding, ironing out the idiosyncrasies and apparent inefficiencies that got in the way of their vast projects. The state did not just ‘see’ its society through bureaucratic categories, but tried to remake this society so that it fit better with the government’s preconceptions.
So too for the abstractions and general categories that long distance markets depend on, as the historian William Cronon observed in his great book on nineteenth century Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis (Scott was a fan). As another scholar observed of Chicago’s late twentieth century markets, abstract seeming financial conceptions may be engines, not cameras, making the economy rather than merely reflecting them.
This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine.
So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for “abstract citizens” and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world.
Scott focuses on officials in developing countries, who were starry-eyed about “planning.” Many of their notions came second-hand from the most striking example of high modernism, the effort of Soviet bureaucrats to use production statistics and linear programming to make the planned economy work. This provides the most obvious connection between what Scott talks about and the algorithmic ambitions of Silicon Valley today. A distinct whiff of “Comrades, Let’s Optimize!” lingers on, for example, in the airy optimism of Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth’s infamous “We connect people. Period” memo.
Both the old ambitions and the new are bets on the universal power of a particular kind of engineering knowledge – what Scott calls techne, the kind of knowledge that can “be expressed precisely and comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules (not rules of thumb), principles, and propositions.” Scott describes the limits of techne in ways that resonate today. The grand failed projects of the mid-to-late twentieth century – vast rationalized cities like Brasilia laid out according to plans that seemed almost to be the squares of a chessboard; efforts to displace peasants and plan agriculture at scale – are close cousins to Facebook’s failed ambitions to build a world of shared connections on algorithmic foundations, and the resulting social media Brezhnevism of today.
Hence, 20th century state planning and 21st century social media evangelism are different flavors of what Scott called “high modernism … a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism was both a faith and a practice. It turned rich and diffuse social relations into something much thinner, which could be measured and observed.
Against this kind of knowledge, Scott suggested the value of metis – “the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” This is the kind of tacit knowledge that peasants come to build about their land and the weather, or that people in less regimented societies accumulate about how to live with others in tolerable peace. Scott – an anarchist – greatly preferred this latter kind of knowledge, and the societies that valued it more, to the kind of world we live in today.
Scott provides intellectual ammunition for those who want to understand what Silicon Valley has in common with past grand efforts to improve the human condition. It’s a fountain of useful comparisons…
[Farrell reviews elaborations on and critiques of Scott’s thought…]
… All this suggests that you could reframe my criticisms of Scott in more positive ways. His contribution is not to provide a systematic framework for getting ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, but to plant some of the seeds for a different intellectual ecology, in which others will take up his thoughts, use them to argue, also arguing with them and arguing with each other, and hence discover aspects of the world that they would never have seen otherwise. That would be as fine a legacy as any thinker could want…
Eminently worth reading in full: “High Modernism made our world,” from @mastodon.social@henryfarrell in his wonderful newsletter Programmable Mutter.
See also: “The Art of Pretending to Govern,” from @vgr.
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As we see like a state, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was actually signed (by all of the signatories except Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire, who inked it on November 4, 1776). After the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2, the final language of the document was approved on July 4– to wit our celebration of the date– and it was printed and distributed on July 4–5.
“In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture”*…
In 1959. C.P. Snow gave a now-famous series of lectures (quickly published): The Two Cultures, lamenting the cleaving of Western culture into spheres of science and humanities, neither of which could clearly understand, thus effectively communicate with the other. Jeroen Bouterse reminds us that Snow had a predecessor…
Several years before C.P. Snow gave his famous lecture on the two cultures, the American physicist I.I. Rabi wrote about the problem of the disunity between the sciences and the humanities. “How can we hope”, he asked, “to obtain wisdom, the wisdom which is meaningful in our own time? We certainly cannot attain it as long as the two great branches of human knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate and even warring disciplines.”
Rabi had been interested in science since his teenage years, and grown up to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist. He had also been an important player in the Allied technological effort during World War II, as associate director of the ‘Rad Lab’: the radiation laboratory at MIT that developed radar technology. The success of Rad Lab, Rabi later reflected, had not been a result of a great amount of theoretical knowledge, but of the energy, vitality, and self-confidence of its participants. In general, Rabi’s views on science and technology were somewhat Baconian: science should be open to the unexpected, rather than insisting on staying in the orbit of the familiar.
In Rabi’s accounts of his time leading Rad Lab, he would also emphasize the way in which he insisted on being let in on military information. “We are not your technicians”, he quoted himself, adding: “a military man who wants the help of scientists and tells them half a story is like a man who goes to a doctor and conceals half the symptoms.” Indeed, the key to understanding Rabi’s worries about the two cultures – he would go on to embrace Snow’s term – is his view of the role science ought to play in public life. Scientists should not just be external consultants, delivering inventions or discoveries on demand or listing the options available to the non-specialist. In some stronger sense, they should be involved in directing policy decisions.
Even more than Rabi’s positive experience with the military during the war, his views were informed by his frustration with the lack of agency scientific experts were able to exercise in the immediate aftermath. Already in 1946, he complained in a lecture that scientists had been used to create the atom bomb, but they had not been consulted about its use, and the fact that many of them had been opposed to it had made no difference. “To the politician, the scientist is like a trained monkey who goes up to the coconut tree to bring down choice coconuts.”
This feeling would increase with the decision to develop a hydrogen bomb. In 1949, Rabi was one of eight experts in the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in which capacity he co-signed a unanimous report arguing that the ‘Super’ should not be built. (Rabi, together with Fermi, signed a minority opinion to the effect that the US should first get the USSR to pledge that it would not seek to develop an H-bomb.)
Rather than signaling to the world that he sought to avoid an arms race, however, President Truman did the opposite: without knowing that it was even possible, he announced publicly that the US would “continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” Rabi would never forgive Truman…
… in the context of Rabi’s broader thinking about science in modern culture, as he came to develop and express it in the decades after the war [the] was not just that more technical expertise needed to be brought to the decision tables; the point was that scientists should make their moral views heard. In the atomic age, where science created so much power, science’s representatives should wield some of that power. From the perspective of the scientists, this was because the atom bomb had demonstrated beyond doubt that science was not a disinterested search for objective truth; it had consequences, and scientists should accept responsibility for those consequences. They should consider not just the means, but the goals…
…
It is a soft law in two cultures discourse that precisely those who most bewail the chasm between science and the humanities end up deepening it. In Rabi’s case, the reason is that he believed in the two cultures; he believed there was something special about the culture and tradition of modern natural science that was a source of wisdom and strength, and that in many ways the project of the humanities was its opposite. Understanding of nature was progressive and forward-looking, was a matter of hope and optimism, while understanding of the human world was old, had already been achieved in ancient societies, and was more a matter of transmission than of innovation. Historian of physics Michael Day notes that over time, Rabi talked less about merging the two traditions and more about putting science at the center of education…
In spite of this, I think Rabi saw correctly that picturing science and the humanities as opposing forces helped him to identify a real fault line in modern culture. The notion that science has to stay on one side of the fact-value-distinction, while the humanities are closer to the actual formation of values, was not a figment of his imagination, and it did stand in the way of his cultural ideals. While not quite the synthesis between the two sides that he sometimes claimed to aim for, the answer he gave – that neither science nor the humanities, nor committees ‘discover’ values, but that values are immanent in activities, in ways of life; that the age of science came with the scientific way of life, with its own values, and that these values were potentially culture-defining – was compelling…
… there remains something inspiring in Rabi’s vision of a common quest for knowledge and understanding, of people working together in activities that are both exciting and important, and of a society that takes those people and their projects not as resources to be exploited, but as models to be emulated.
“The atom bomb and the two cultures: I.I. Rabi on the sciences and the humanities,” from @jeroenbou in @3QD. Eminently worth reading in full.
(Image above: source)
* C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
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As we search for synthesis, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Walter Kohn; he was born on this date in 1923. A theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist, he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with John Pople); Kohn was honored for his development of density functional theory, which made it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving electronic density (rather than the much more complicated many-body wavefunction). This computational simplification led to more accurate calculations on complex systems and to many new insights, and became an essential tool for materials science, condensed-phase physics, and the chemical physics of atoms and molecules.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by downright moron.”*…
This is a year, Niccolo Conte demonstrates, in which that possibility is especially present around the world…
With almost half of the world’s population residing in countries holding executive or legislative elections in 2024, it’s set to be the busiest election year ever recorded…
Many people are already aware of the U.S. presidential and legislative elections set to be held on November 5th, especially due to American influence on the global political stage and media coverage.
But two governments affecting larger populations, India and the European Union, are also slated to have elections in 2024…
A few notable elections have already occurred. Taiwan held general elections on January 13th, with the more anti-China Democratic Progressive Party retaining the presidency but losing its majority in the legislature.
[And in February, Indonesia held general elections; while the results are still being tabulated, early indications are that it could make for some material changes in the world’s third-largest democracy.]
Pakistan also held elections on February 8th, with former Prime Minster Imran Khan’s party and affiliates winning a plurality of seats but losing power to a military-backed coalition.
Pakistan’s election results were cast into doubt by foreign observers and media, with Khan having been arrested and sentenced to prison on corruption charges. It is far from the only country holding controversial and potentially undemocratic elections in 2024.
Bangladesh’s landslide January 7th elections were boycotted by the opposition and voters, and Russia’s March 15th elections had three anti-war presidential candidates barred from competing, including Alexei Navalny before his controversial death in February…
The biggest global election year on record: “Mapped: 2024 Global Elections by Country,” from @Niccoloc in @VisualCap.
* H. L. Mencken
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As we peruse the polls, we might recall that it was on this date that it was on this date in 12 BCE that Caesar Augustus (AKA Octavian), the first Roman Emperor, was elected Pontifex maximus (the chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs [Collegium Pontificum] in ancient Rome)– adding stature as head of Rome’s state religion to his imperial credentials.
“The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people”*…
Bret Devereaux makes the case that fascists and fascist governments, despite their positioning, are generally bad at war…
I am using fascist fairly narrowly – I generally follow Umberto Eco’s definition (from “Ur Fascism” (1995)). Consequently, not all authoritarian or even right-authoritarian governments are fascist (but many are). Fascist has to mean something more specific than ‘people I disagree with’ to be a useful term (mostly, of course, useful as a warning).
First, I want to explain why I think this is a point worth making. For the most part, when we critique fascism (and other authoritarian ideologies), we focus on the inability of these ideologies to deliver on the things we – the (I hope) non-fascists – value, like liberty, prosperity, stability and peace. The problem is that the folks who might be beguiled by authoritarian ideologies are at risk precisely because they do not value those things – or at least, do not realize how much they value those things and won’t until they are gone. That is, of course, its own moral failing, but society as a whole benefits from having fewer fascists, so the exercise of deflating the appeal of fascism retains value for our sake, rather than for the sake of the would-be fascists (though they benefit as well, as it is, in fact, bad for you to be a fascist).
But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.”2 Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is.
Now how do we assess if a state is ‘good’ at war? The great temptation here is to look at inputs: who has the best equipment, the ‘best’ soldiers (good luck assessing that), the most ‘strategic geniuses’ and so on. But war is not a baseball game. No one cares about your RBI or On-Base percentage. If a country’s soldiers fight marvelously in a way that guarantees the destruction of their state and the total annihilation of their people, no one will sing their praises – indeed, no one will be left alive to do so.
Instead, war is an activity judged purely on outcomes, by which we mean strategic outcomes. Being ‘good at war’ means securing desired strategic outcomes or at least avoiding undesirable ones. There is, after all, something to be said for a country which manages to salvage a draw from a disadvantageous war (especially one it did not start) rather than total defeat, just as much as a country that conquers. Meanwhile, failure in wars of choice – that is, wars a state starts which it could have equally chosen not to start – are more damning than failures in wars of necessity. And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.
Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail…
[Devereaux enumerates examples…]
… This is, however, not an invitation to complacency for liberal democracies which – contrary to fascism – have tended to be quite good at war (though that hardly means they always win). One thing the Second World War clearly demonstrated was that as militarily incompetent as they tend to be, fascist governments can defeat liberal democracies if the liberal democracies are unprepared and politically divided. The War in Ukraine may yet demonstrate the same thing, for Ukraine was unprepared in 2022 and Ukraine’s friends are sadly politically divided now. Instead, it should be a reminder that fascist and near-fascist regimes have a habit of launching stupid wars and so any free country with such a neighbor must be on doubly on guard.
But it should also be a reminder that, although fascists and near-fascists promise to restore manly, masculine military might, they have never, ever actually succeeded in doing that, instead racking up an embarrassing record of military disappointments (and terrible, horrible crimes, lest we forget). Fascism – and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds – are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love – liberty, prosperity, stability and peace – but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.
These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren’t also dangerous. And they’re bad at war…
“On the Military Failures of Fascism,” from @BretDevereaux.
See also: “How Did the Nazis Really Lose World War II?” (source of the image above)
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As we penetrate posturing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940, in the early days of The Battle of the Atlantic during World War II, that British cruiser HMS York stopped the 3,359-ton German steamer Arucas 50 miles south of Iceland. Arucas’ crew of 42 Arucas scuttled the ship.
Arucas had sailed out of Vigo, Spain on 9 Feb in an attempt to break the Allied blockade.
“Planchet, my friend, said d’Artagnan, you reason like a cheese.”*…
An age-old fortune-telling practice uses cheese to predict everything from one’s future spouse to one’s next career move…
A few months ago, I told a chef in Vancouver that he would soon experience major growth in his career and take on much more responsibility, and that the letter B would somehow be involved. How did I know? Some cheese told me. He’d been standing next to a particularly veiny piece of blue cheese, and asked me to read his fortune from it. Predicting the future using cheese is something I do as a side business, and from what I can tell, there aren’t very many of us doing this anymore.
This isn’t some cheesy divination method I just made up. Tyromancy, or the practice of telling fortunes with cheese, was first officially mentioned in the second century in the writings of Greek historian and professional diviner Artemidorus of Daldis (also known as Artimedorus of Ephesus) on dream interpretation. He apparently didn’t think cheese was a great invention: he noted at the time that the food signifies “trickery and ambushes” and that tyromancers sullied the work of true diviners like sacrificers and liver examiners. Tyromancers, he argued, were more in league with those who practiced evil types of divination, including dice diviners and necromancers. It feels like a bit of a leap to go from cheese to death, but Artimedorus had some opinions, I guess.
Tyromancy reached peak popularity in England during the Middle Ages and early modern period (1500–1800). The country was primarily an agrarian society at the time, with most families having some sort of livestock that produced milk for cheese—and people loved to dabble in the paranormal. Christianity was ingrained in most people, so looking for insight into one’s predestined future, or trying to find a way to gain control over it, led to widespread interest in divination. One used whatever tools were on hand to achieve that, and at that particular point in history, that meant cheese. It was a much more convenient choice than previous divination methods, which included dumping a ladle of molten lead into a bucket of water to see what shapes it made.
People used cheese to divine all sorts of things: who committed a crime, whether the year would bring a fruitful harvest, and how a child’s life would turn out. Those who practiced it generally used farmer’s cheese, though some tried it with runnier options, like fondue.
Back then, a typical use for tyromancy was to determine who you would marry. You’d simply carve the names of all potential suitors into some pieces of cheese, then wait to see which one molded first. And there it was—your life partner! People also analyzed the number and size of holes in a block of cheese, the patterns of the mold and veins, and the shapes that curds made as they coagulated. The process is similar to that of reading tea leaves or coffee grounds—you tell a story through the shapes you see. A heart shape, for example, signifies love and happiness, while an odd number of holes predicts that something negative might happen…
“The Un-Brie-Lievable History of Tyromancy,” from @JenniferBillock in @SAVEURMAG.
* Alexandre Dumas
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As we foretell with fromage, we might send distributed birthday greetings to Oveta Culp Hobby; she was born on this date in 1905. A journalist, (self-described) businesswoman, and government official, she is best remembered as the first Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (a position she took in 1953 on appointment by Dwight Eisenhower). While her most notable achievement in that role was surely the approval and mass roll-out of the polio vaccine, she also worked with her counterpart in the Department of Agriculture to establish the program under which excess cheese production was bought by the government and distributed to public schools for use in their lunch programs.
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