Digressions&Impressions

From Bolivian Mines to 'East Texas' Values : Why Houston Floods, Part II [guest post by Daniel Hogendoorn]

[This is an invited, two-part guest post by Daniel Hogendoorn,* a Dutch postdoc at UCL in whose research includes Houston's flood-management. This post is based on research that  will be a chapter in his dissertation, "The experience of difficulty in governing Explored through urban, flood and climate cases of evidence-making."--ES]

'Let us suppose that every political philosophy in a given time implies a technology or set of technologies to a particular pattern for its realization. And let us recognize that every technology of significance to us implies a set of political commitments that can be identified if one looks closely enough. What appear to be merely instrumental choices are better seen as choices about the form of social and political life a society builds, choices about the kinds of people we want to become.' (Winner 1984 p. 52)

• The historical persistence of Tropical Storms

In 1527, an expedition of six hundred Conquistadors set out to conquer ‘Florida’, as the Spanish called the land around the Gulf of Mexico. Fortune did not bless their journey. First, a hurricane sank two of the Spanish ships. Then, the commander foolishly sent part of his crew to march on land and the remaining men to sail the coast. The sailors vanished. The other men on land perished from disease, starvation, infighting, drowning and fighting with natives. Out of the original six hundred, only eight survived. These eight had escaped from the coast in a barge. But yet another storm wave stranded them onto an Island they christened the ‘Isla Malhado’, the Island of Doom: 

‘As we drifted into shore, a wave caught us and heaved the barge a horseshoe throw out of the water. The jolt when it hit brought the dead looking men to. Seeing land at hand, they crawled through the surf to some rocks.’ (De Vaca 1542/1990, p.55)

The men resorted to eating their dead comrades and the natives took pity on them. Today, we can locate his Island of Doom at the barrier islands Galveston and Bolivar, where the Houston Metropolis meets the Gulf of Mexico. Among these surviving castaways was Cabeza de Vaca, a humanist and man of letters, possessed of great practical wit. For eight years De Vaca lived among the natives, as slave, as trader, and possessing some knowledge of medicine, as Shaman. Eventually, he escaped to Mexico City. Back in Spain, he documented his experiences of future Texas, in the first ethnographic account of the Americas. The customs and myths of the natives, the diet of 'prickly pears', the horrid climate and weather. Terrible heat and massive storms.

Fast forward to September 7 1900, when Houston was of little significance, started as an investment by two New York real estate men in 1836. Galveston however, on that Isle of Doom, was the main economic harbor of the United States. In New York, Ellis Island took the immigrants; Galveston took the goods, which paid for the mansions we also find in New Orleans. But Galveston and Houston were about to trade places. On September 8th the United States deadliest natural disaster wiped away the city and harbor of Galveston. More than 6000 people died from the surge and strong winds of the hurricane. The survivors abandoned Galveston, moved across the Bay to Houston at the confluence of the Buffalo and White Oak Bayous. A year after the Hurricane, in 1901, the lucky Texans struck oil at Spindletop. Houston became the U.S.'s economic powerhouse. The 'energy metropolis', 'the monster that ate Texas' had begun its sprawling rise.

The Hurricane of 1900 resulted in the Galveston Seawall. And when Federal winds were favorable, a handful of other preventative projects were realized. In yesterday's post, I argued Greater Houston exhibits a revealed preference against preventive policies; it is, in fact, an extreme case of distinct, stable, and prominent political values shaping technocratic policies.

By contrast, most discussions in flood management, however, are technical in nature. They concern, for example, sophisticated methods in evaluating empirical evidence (e.g., wind flows in Galveston Bay). Most deliberation by flood experts focus on technical merits of a plan. Discussions of how political values shape (and perhaps ought to shape) technocratic choices rarely occur. When I spent time with Dutch hydraulic engineers on Galveston, political values were shrugged off as a job for politicians instead of taken ex ante as a real design constraint.

Preventive policies tend to misfit with 'East Texas' values. Large scale preventive policies signal to citizens that an increase in government bureaucracy and taxation is possible: that such measures need land, and property-rights might be infringed; that there is no such thing as full control without externalizes, such as displaced flood waters or a false sense of security;  that measures will obscure vistas and lower some property values. Elected officials ignore discussing would-be-preventative-policies at public events, for fear of losing elections, which occur for a great variety of public jobs, and which depend on the donations (and open bribing) by powerful backers.[1] Hence no preventive control policies happen, despite a long history of the same disastrous weather. In this post, I want to describe the almost pristine historical settlement of political values in Greater Houston, stable – up until today – over time.[2]

• The Generation and Stability of 'East Texas' Values

For the settlement of 'East Texas' values, we have to revisit the history between where we left De Vaca in 1527 and the 1900 hurricane. In the sixteenth century, Texas became part of Mexico in the Spanish Empire. And when Mexico became an independent empire in 1821, it struggled with its Texan part. Texas was empty, with natives decimated and nomadic because of the harsh climate. When the French in Louisiana started to arm the natives against the Mexicans, the territory became a policy headache. In a historical irony, the Mexicans invited settlers from the former colonies, and gave them rights to bring more settlers. And in they came from Georgia and the Carolinas. This did not go unnoticed to  Tocqueville, who remarks in Democracy in America:

‘I have previously spoken of events in Texas. The inhabitants of the United States are day by day gradually infiltrating into Texas where they acquire land and, although obeying the laws of the country, establish the dominion of their language and their way of life. The province of Texas is still under Mexican rule; but soon you will not find any more Mexicans there’ (Tocqueville 1840/2003, p. 481)

With few opposing powers, when the Anglo-Saxon settlers had virtually no competing political views to confront; they could impose public expectations. These families brought with them a host of expectations on governing, on how to manage private organizations without a sovereign, and on how to maximize profits.

Where did these expectations originate before they traveled to the Lone Star state?

According to Woodard (2012), these political ideas arose on the Caribbean Island of Barbados.

On Barbados, the English had settled a notorious slave economy on rum, cotton and plantations. At first, these 'Barbados Brits' used the Scottish and Irish prisoners of war as slaves that Oliver Cromwell, with whom they kept warm religious affinities, captured in Britain’s turmoil of the 17th century. But as these prisoners of war ran out, African slaves proved a cheap replacement. These were imported at terrifying frequency. The Draconian, Barbados Brits, had cast their eyes to the encomienda system by which the Spanish worked the peoples of Peru and Bolivia to death. These rules were as lenient on owners as they were horrible and strictly imposed on slaves.  The owners,

1. developed racial theories to rationalize their profit from unfair treatment

And they formed two deeply settled expectations:

1. they were themselves ungoverned within these virgin colonies
2. they could expect continuous high profits

Barbados, in fact, enjoyed the highest profits of the Western Hemisphere. The plantation owners, however, eventually ran out of land. Outside the eldest born, the male offspring of the wealthy English landowners, could not enjoy the same prospects on the island. In 1670, these landed in what is now South Carolina, and then Georgia, and set up similar plantations. Just like their Barbados relatives, their management style led to the highest per capita income among white males in the budding United States. From here, they were lured by the favorable policies of the Mexicans. The political economic order of Barbados traveled with these families into Texas, which was still not part of those States. The high profits provided little incentive for the groups of slave-owners to change their ways.

Stephen Austin, now remembered as the 'Father of Texas' had inherited the title of 'empresario' (entrepreneur), from his father, which gave him the right to settle land on the condition he recruited more settlers. And he did. Austin brought in ‘the old 300’, the almost mythical set of settlers. Austin pushed for full independence and lobbied the U.S. Congress for help. [Austin framed his efforts as the vanguard of civilization, the 'Anglo American race' against, in the words of Austin, 'the mongrel Spanish Indian and Negro race'.] Texas became an independent Nation from 1836 until 1846, and then Texas joined the United States. Now, the settlers got a grant for statehood as a slave state. It thereby secured the persistence of their Barbados practices. Only the Civil War ended slavery.

Yet expectations about the role and extent of governing persisted, reproduced by practices anchored in the Texas Constitution of 1876. This Constitution is a curious beast, designed for robustness, as a security against change, with limited options for amendment (Texas Politics, 2014). As a result, it has not changed in significant ways since, even though the State has. One way to see this is that Texas has an economy and population larger than many nation states, yet it's houses of parliament only meet once every two years, a measure originating in a period when Senators traveled the enormous and sparsely populated state on horseback. The Texas legislature and Constitution persist more or less as it did 150 years ago. It has endured longer than other U.S. Constitutions (Texas Politics 2014; Chapter 7). As a result, instead of rules adjusting to demographics, the demographics adjusts in their public expectation to a settled constitution. The Texas Constitution imposes rules for a weak Governor and complicates the raising and spending of public money.

To be sure, Texans do not refuse free money from the Federal government (and has benefited from the U.S. Army Corps prominence during the New Deal), but such attention from Washington has been waning since the 1960’s and was not adequate at its height. Disasters since have not spurred much effort.

Most of the Texas State income comes from sales tax, so that the State has an incentive to stimulate consumption. With almost every public office up for election, officials must take care to fit their policy proposals in light of existing interests and mutually held expectations. Elections are expensive, and corporate donations to political campaigns are, when made public, legal. The labor force has few protections. And corporations, including Exxon and Shell, enjoy high profits and moral hazard. These expectations have remained invariant stripped from all the historical change.

Even though the historical causes have disappeared, and despite an increasingly demographically diverse population who differ in their political opinions, institutionalized and normative expectations on the role and extent of government persist in the public space. As such, these public expectations have acted both as a barrier to the development of systemic, preventive flood management policies as well as an enabler for the many innovative, idiosyncratic approaches that can be found in East Texas (as I showed yesterday). A management system with roots in the forced labor mines of Bolivia leaves the coast of Texas exposed, unprepared, and experimenting.

 

References:

Cabeza de Vaca (1542/1990) Adventures in the unknown interior of America. Zia Books.

Tocqueville, A. de (1840/2003) Democracy in America. Penguin Classics.

Winner, L. (1984) The Whale and the Reactor. A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. University of Chicago Press.

Woodard, C. (2012) A history of the eleven regional cultures of North America. London: Penguin

'Flood Damages are acts of Man:' Why Houston Floods, Part I [guest post by Daniel Hogendoorn]

[This is an invited, two-part guest post by Daniel Hogendoorn,* a Dutch postdoc at UCL in whose research includes Houston's flood-management. This post is based on research that  will be a chapter in his dissertation, "The experience of difficulty in governing Explored through urban, flood and climate cases of evidence-making."--ES]

‘Floods are acts of God, but flood damages are acts of Man’--(1945) Gilbert White. (White is the founder of modern flood management in the U.S.)

In 2017, Greater Houston has over 7 million residents, the fourth largest metropolitan region in the United States. As I write this post, Hurricane Harvey is wrecking destruction on Houston with record breaking torrential rain, and we should expect many cascading effects, including tragic victims and massive economic harms.

The proximate causes of these harms are not at all mysterious. On the physical side, the Gulf of Mexico is an incubator for storms, with episodic disasters from torrential rainfall or surge waves. Great storms are a persisting regularity since the beginning of measurement. Over 43 major storms have been measured in Greater Houston since 1880. Allison (2001), Rita (2005), Ike (2008), and now Harvey the most disastrous one to date. Even annually, rainfall of 5-6 inches of water in 8 hours is normal. People sometimes drown when their cars get stuck in traffic during those downpours. Since Houston is a flat plain, with a high water table and sandy soil, it absorbs little of the rain. Moreover, it's a natural drainage area for the surrounding region, it's bayous carrying water down to the Gulf. As for storm surges, the Gulf of Mexico is a micro-tidal system with a tidal range around 30cm and near Houston, the Gulf has an average wave height of one meter. Yet during tropical storms and hurricanes, surge waves over seven meters occur. Surge waves destroy everything in their path, as Greater Houston experienced most recently during Tropical storm Ike (2008). Luckily, Harvey spared Houston's satellite cities its surge.

On the side of sheer physical force then, Nature just continues to play the game it has played since time immemorial. Even the record-breaking Harvey, the storm, like New York’s Sandy, that stayed put in a single place, is record breaking only on a short time span of measurement. Perhaps man made climate change will turn out to have an effect on storm frequency or intensity or precipitation in a warming Gulf. Perhaps sea levels will rise there. And even if these remain a series of ‘perhapses’, prudent governance dictates not to dismiss the concern because of the flaws of models, but, to the contrary, be extra careful. But in the case of Houston, the flood problems have nothing to do with the climate, not even the regular one. Gilbert White, in his quote that serves as motto in this post, already noted that people tend to make their own mess when it comes to flooding. He was thinking of the specific choices we make, as people living together, in living with water. And to be sure, Houston is full of such unfortunate choices.

In Greater Houston's vast geographical spread, the damages are certainly ma-nmade. Once Texans struck oil, Houston's fast and unregulated growth began. It resulted in paving over the natural drainage capacity of the Bayou system increased run off flooding. Unfettered development entered the flood plains. A subsidized flood insurance by the National Flood Insurance Program ensures people are undeterred. Such subsidized rates are however often buried in people's mortgages; people are often unaware of their flood exposure. Groundwater pumping subsided the land. Infamously, Houston has no zoning laws, and is a sprawling suburbia as a result. If there's hard rules, it seems that they amount to this: your McMansion should keep its distance from your neighbor and parking space must be available for guests.

Finally, while some version of 'once bitten, twice shy' is a maxim the world over, in Greater Houston collective memories don't seem to stick around very well. The region attracts people to make money, but many leave again once they have made it, settling for more child friendly, or aesthetically pleasing areas in the U.S. Within the city too, the rental contracts are short (and can be terminated to kick people out), and people move house frequently. Intriguing only recently conservation of existing buildings has become fashionable. The standard practice was to demolish a building once it lost its first economic function. As a result, a native Houston adult driving through her childhood neighborhood often receives no material cues to prompt a memory, including of any floods.

Let me turn to some of the existing man-made risks untouched so far Harvey. We could talk about the laboratory for biological warfare developed in Galveston's floodplain by George W. Bush after 9/11, or the locations of poorly protected nuclear waste on the coast. But perhaps the most troublesome source of concern comes from the petrochemical industry. Houston's harbor on the Ship Channel is the U.S. main industrial harbor, and makes Houston a global city. The port offers jobs to over a million people, creating 150 billion dollars of economic activity. When Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, a petrochemical tank 'popped' from its foundations and drifted into a neighborhood, spilling its contents. In the Ship Channel, we find about 3400 petrochemical tanks exposed over an industrial corridor of 866 parcels over 60 km (Burleson et al. 2015). The main players here are Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, and they cause an enormous moral hazard on the city. Because of the lack of zoning, the port and petrochemical complexes weave into (often poor) residential areas, and the vulnerable fishing estuaries and ecological zones of the Galveston Bay. Oil spills are already a weekly event, with episodic disasters, but a surge disaster would be utter horror.

Curiously, no one really governs the Ship Channel. It's jurisdictions are carved up in such a way that the big corporations are not constrained. Regulations are lenient and compliance hardly monitored. Corporations are supposed to prepare and control for a 100-year flood. Apart from such storms not happening once in a 100-years but much more often (and as such the term is misleading), it is often forgotten that this is a planning fiction with no basis in reality. Floods are wild in their distribution, and we really don't know the right probability distributions. From model runs, if even a 'moderate' Tropical storm like Ike (2008) had hit Houston 30 miles to the West, it's right arm would have pushed the surge into the Ship Channel. It would have been a nightmare the U.S. has never seen before.

The curious flood management policies of Greater Houston

For a scholar like me, who views policies like David Attenborough views tropical species, the Greater Houston metropolitan region is a feast. Apart from having no zoning laws, Greater Houston has no income tax. This drives down the capacity of government to take on large-scale infrastructural preventive measures. But it pushes many small governments to be inventive. What all these policies have in common, however, is that they do not aim to control nature. They are not preventive.

The Greater Houston region abounds in a great diversity of policies to manage the harms from floods. One could sort them, as I have with Nikki Brand,** into policies that inform, modify exposure, help recover, limit degrees of freedom, or prevent via control. I offer a number of examples, each of interest in itself, but here mentioned to give a sense of the diversity. We are impressed by the use of apps, for example, to target up-to-date information to specific zip codes and groups at risk to stimulate self-coordination. Equally impressive (from the  perspective of the exercise of state-power) are the plans for the possibility of forced evacuation on highways, with all highways converted to 'contraflow', limiting the degrees of freedom of motorists; this is, as it were, a big semiotic show backed up by military force, legitimated by the 'state of exception' produced by the storm. Here, a massive coordination effort with the ship channel other cities has to take place. Such coordination is only seen when there is a Super Bowl in town.

Other striking local policies are the modification of the exposure of homes, including individual homeowners putting their houses on stilts, and the Texas Medical Center constructing a rhizome of tunnels with submarine doors to move its patients back and forth. There exist policies that target the buy-out of flooded homes from local citizens, as they will be in a psychological window where parting from their property to government is emotionally acceptable and can be done voluntarily. There exist frame-works for setting up contracts for 'shadow-networks', that is, secret arrangements with private contractors, to help clear the debris or offer space to the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Red Cross at a set rate (to prevent exploitation during times of crisis). By contrast, there are also  the residents of Bolivar Island, who wish to weather the storm 'hunkering down' between the debris right in the line of fire, wanting no part of government; or the makeshift improvisations of coastal communities of illegal immigrants who, deprived of basic infrastructure, who similarly want no government attention for different, obvious reasons.

And there's the curious innovation of the Levee Improvement District, in the equally curious phenomenon of the Municipality Utility District. In the Greater Houston region, you can set up your own government. You ask for a permit at the Texas State, and then compete for residents and shops (for the sales tax) to whom you offer services, including police, and fire brigade, against an attractive rate. Such MUD's also maintain levees and have their own flood-policies. The list of idiosyncratic policies is much longer. But what we don’t find is policies aiming to control Nature, and prevent the distressing event.

For someone from the Netherlands, this diversity of approaches is almost disorienting. The Dutch feel they must avoid ruin via prevention and control (even if under a long time cost-benefit analysis migration to higher parts would make most sense), and we do so by a governance system that to my mind comes very close to Vincent Ostrom's polycentric governance, with decentralized Waterschappen (water boards) for the small stuff and the centralized Rijkswaterstaat for the heavy lifting. But Houston is a close contender for one of the top spots when it comes to experienced and possible harms. Yet, you can count the number of preventive policies on one hand. There's the Texas City Levee System, constructed after a hurricane in the 1960’s to protect petrochemical industry. There's the Galveston Seawall, constructed after the 1900 Hurricane by the U.S. Army Henry Martyn Roberts (who distilled managerial rules from such projects – and earlier military infrastructural ones displacing natives - into a manual for U.S. parliamentary procedure). There's also the Addick's and Barker's reservoirs and dams in Houston that are, I am sad to say, among the worst maintained in the U.S. (and a risk factor in the aftermath of Harvey). There's a levee which is not a levee but a means to keep a harbor free from sedimentation. And there are many small levees built by small scale levee improvement districts. In particular, the risk of surge flooding would be greatly decreased by some type of flood defense or system of different measures. And the drainage capacity of the city could be greatly improved by a concerted effort. Yet, there's no comprehensive protection. Why not?

You could blame the U.S. Federal level, but I'll sidestep that topic here. A report by the U.S. Army Corps from an attempt to make plans in the 1970's, contains a statement still typical for the local attitude:

‘Studies [...] were terminated because of the lack of local support and the lack of interest shown by potential sponsoring agencies.’ (USACE, 1974 p.120)

What explains this attitude? Lack of public budget is no real explanation, or only a proximate one. After all, the region is rich, the harms high and the officials elected. The extreme harms from flooding have already cost Texans (and U.S. citizens generally) many billions of dollars in harms. And they can expect much more in the future. The tax rate could be changed to cope with floods. Even Hayek thought government was the proper manager of floods. The same holds for the limits on regulation on private development and moral hazard of petrochemical industry. In revealed preference, Greater Houstonians, it appears, do not want to prevent disaster. It seems irrational. And yet, flooding has up until this point not even been a serious political discussion. Political candidates will not mention the topic of prevention, as they expect it will be 'political suicide', as one Mayoral candidate told me. The Texas Senate, which only meets every two years, similarly prefers to speak about prohibiting Marijuana and closing abortion clinics. Even its special sessions never mention storm flooding.

Why do Texans stick to their proverbial guns? Why, even in an ethnically and politically diverse population, are these discussions on prevention and control taboo? This I explore in Part II.

 

References

U.S. Army Engineer District, Galveston (1974) Texas coast hurricane study. Galveston Bay Study Segment; feasibility report.

White, G. (1945) Human Adjustment to Floods. Department of Geography Research Paper no. 29. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Against (Political) Lotteries

Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure – a one-round referendum based on a simple majority. Never before has the fate of a country – of an entire continent, in fact – been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens.

...

Fifty years ago, we lived in a world of greater political apathy and yet greater trust in politics. Now there is both passion and distrust. These are turbulent times, as the events of the past week demonstrate all too clearly. And yet, for all this turbulence, there has been little reflection on the tools that our democracies use. It is still a heresy to ask whether elections, in their current form, are a badly outmoded technology for converting the collective will of the people into governments and policies.

We discuss and debate the outcome of a referendum without discussing its principles. This should be surprising. In a referendum, we ask people directly what they think when they have not been obliged to think – although they have certainly been bombarded by every conceivable form of manipulation in the months leading up to the vote. But the problem is not confined to referendums: in an election, you may cast your vote, but you are also casting it away for the next few years. This system of delegation to an elected representative may have been necessary in the past – when communication was slow and information was limited – but it is completely out of touch with the way citizens interact with each other today.

...

But democratic fatigue syndrome is not so much caused by the people, the politicians or the parties – it is caused by the procedure. Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem. Where is the reasoned voice of the people in all this? Where do citizens get the chance to obtain the best possible information, engage with each other and decide collectively upon their future? Where do citizens get a chance to shape the fate of their communities? Not in the voting booth, for sure.

...

People care deeply about their communities and want to be heard. But a much better way to let the people speak than through a referendum is to return to the central principle of Athenian democracy: drafting by lot, or sortition as it is presently called. In ancient Athens, the large majority of public functions were assigned by lot. Renaissance states such as Venice and Florence worked on the same basis and experienced centuries of political stability. With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision. A cross-section of society that is informed can act more coherently than an entire society that is uninformed.

...

The most common argument against sortition is the supposed incompetence of the those who have not been elected. A body of elected representatives undoubtedly has more technical competencies than a body chosen by lot. But what is the use of a parliament full of highly educated lawyers if few of them know the price of bread?

Besides, the elected do not know everything. They need staff and researchers to fill the gaps in their expertise. In much the same way, a representative body chosen by lot would not stand alone. It could invite experts, rely on professionals to moderate debates and put questions to citizens. Legislation could arise from the interaction between it and an elected chamber.

The arguments put forward against sortition are often identical to the reasons once put forward for not allowing peasants, workers or women to vote. Then, too, opponents claimed it would mark the end of democracy.--David Van Reybrouck "Why elections are bad for democracy," The Guardian.

The first quoted paragraph above is the first paragraph of Van Reybrouck's essay. It's astounding hyperbole and nonsense.  Consider, for example, the implications of The Sykes–Picot Agreement and the subsequent drawing of artificial boundaries through the Middle East (which generated a century of warfare and turbulence); the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia (1914) that produced nearly forty years of war; and, given Van Reybrouck's argument, today's favorite, the Athenian's assembly decision to forge ahead with the Sicilian Expedition that ended up destroying Athenian power.  (Fill in your favorite examples--undoubtedly George W. Bush's attack on Iraq can figure in that.)  Van Reybrouck's grasp of history is shaky in other respects: "fifty years ago" we "lived in a world of greater political apathy and yet greater trust in politics" than now; yet he forgets it was the height of the Vietnam war (and Stateside the Civil Right's movement)--a period of political assassinations, massive protests and street riots, etc.

This is not to deny that the outcome of the British referendum will have serious consequences (even if you think Leave was a swell idea), but as I have been arguing this past week it was the effect of both (unnecessary) institutional innovation -- something Van Reybrouck fails to note -- and the peculiar transformations of British political-economy. It's also too early to tell how things will play out.

Van Reybrouck misrepresents the utility and justification of a "system of delegation to an elected representative." He claims it was due to slow communication and limited circulation information. Even if we leave aside subtle matters of legitimacy and representation or the mundane issues concerning defense of interests, it's quite clear that the very idea of delegation is, in part, based on the intellectual division of labor -- the representative is freed up to devote her attention to policy matters --, and this kind of specialization is just as necessary, even more necessary, when there is abundant information and massive communication. And, indeed, in the division of labor voters 'cast away' their vote in some sense. But, of course, they can stay massively involved in interest groups, participation in various campaigns, etc. That is to say, Van Reybrouck misrepresents modern democracy as much as he fails to acknowledge all those folk that have been reflecting on the "tools" that democracies use.*

But my central complain about Van Reybrouck's article is two-fold. First, he fails to acknowledge that his version of rule by lot is really a version of epistemocracy. For, in his approach it is experts that guide the randomly chosen folk. But rather than owning up to the fact that he is an epistemocrat, he pretends his main innovation is the lot. Yet, notice how the experts are necessary yet invisible in his account: "you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision." Who and how does one "make sure"? Of course, via experts or some other privileged group (civil servants?) left off-stage in the proposal. [He does discuss the role of experts in providing advice.] And who controls these experts? We are not told. On principle, if forced to choose, I prefer the lot over experts; but if I have to choose between a disguised epistemocracy and the real thing (say Plato, Al-Farabi, or Brennan), then I'll opt for rule by known experts.

Second, while Van Reybrouck claims to be discussing known criticisms of rule by lot, he fails to acknowledge the most devastating one. It is quite evident that if the legislature is inexperienced, then either civil servants, experts, or some other group (the rich who can easily bribe) will become the dominant force behind the scene--the history of Athens offers ample evidence of this.  When term-limits are introduced (and on his proposal the lot generates very restrictive term limits), then the balance of power shifts to those who have an information or temporal advantage. The point is not that ordinary citizens are incapable of ruling -- they manifestly are --, but they end up at the mercy of the folk who 'make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter' (and who help define what is or what is not sensible.).

There is a more fundamental issue lurking here. It's a methodological point that Jason Brennan tends  to emphasize (and so this allows me to say something nice about him).  Van Reybrouck systematically fails to consider non-ideal circumstances of his preferred approach, and so compares his small-scale pilots with the real world of fallible electoral politics we're familiar with. I do not deny that there are many limitations to contemporary electoral politics -- and Van Retbrouck's comments on the misguided way it can get imposed on others is well taken --, but with friends like this 'democracy' does not need enemies. 

 

 

On the Implosion of the British Political System

For the Revolution Settlement of 1689 was not the triumph of a party, but an agreement of the chief parties to live and let live. The balance of Whig and Tory, each jealous of the other and both jealous of the Crown, served to protect the liberties of the individual Englishmen from the onslaughts of power.---George Macaulay Trevelyan (1938) The English Revolution, 1688-1689, 173-4.

 

No one seems capable of stepping forward and offering reassurance. The Leavers, who disagreed on what Brexit should look like, do not think it is their responsibility to set out a path. They reckon that falls to Number 10 (where they have appeared in public, it has mostly been to discard the very pledges on which they won the referendum). Number 10, however, seems to have done little planning for this eventuality. It seems transfixed by the unfolding chaos; reluctant to formulate answers to the Brexiteers’ unanswered questions. As Mr Cameron reportedly told aides on June 24th when explaining his decision to resign: “Why should I do all the hard shit?”--The Economist (June 26, 2016)

It's often said that whatever the real evils of a sovereign, first-past-the-post-parliament, it at least ensures stability and leadership as opposed to the kind of designed, perennial gridlock one sees Stateside and the purported instability and indecisiveness of coalition governments chosen by single-constituency, proportional parliaments. From that vantage point the past week in British politics has been quite astonishing (maybe unprecedented, but I leave that to experts).

For, the two major parties are imploding at the same time without any clear alternative waiting in the wings; the referendum has generated acute political and market uncertainty, and, despite the existence of a care-taker government, nobody can be found to trigger article 50. While it's not impossible that things will stabilize before long, the specter of an impotent care-taker government haunts British political life (at least until September when the Conservatives are supposed to replace Cameron).* This is especially so because if they could get away with it, the political and economic elites would like to find a way to nullify the referendum. While the Belgians recently managed to function just fine during "a total of 541 days of negotiations and 589 days without an elected government," and, in fact, thereby avoiding the damaging austerity politics popular in surrounding countries [it's a perfect, so-called natural experiment], the Belgians were familiar with lengthy coalition talks--it's part of their political mores.

The aftermath of the Brexit vote has really been quite extraordinary: it's peace-time, without hyperinflation, and, while many people have suffered during the last decade, there has been no general economic implosion prior to last week's referendum. The Labour party's problems may be attributed to the recent change in the way its leader is selected: it used to be a vote among its representatives in the Commons and has become a kind of primary among its (purported) membership. In effect, the Labour party's parliamentary party has used the occasion to try to undo its membership's choice. That is to say, by aiming to make the Labour party more democratic, the party has created a permanent tension between the interests and strategy of the parliamentary party and the membership's views. (While the situation is different Stateside, one may say that the Democrats' so called, super-delegates are designed to prevent exactly such an outcome. Currently the Republicans lack some such mechanism.) The Labour party's problems are, in some sense, irrelevant because they are not in power, although their internal division makes a national unity government unlikely.

The Conservatives' problems are of their own making. By this I do not just mean their long-standing internal tensions 'over Europe' that precipitated this referendum. Rather, because parliament is sovereign in the British system (and has been so since 1688-9), a referendum fits uneasily in the British system. There have been only three (national) British referenda (there have been more at the various local levels, including Scotland's recent one)--two of which involved the EU. And, as we are now learning, the British system is not well designed to handle a referendum that goes against the government. In fact, European experience could have taught the British that in countries where referenda are rare, they also become a referendum on the government or on wider cultural issues. Here the experience of the Scottish referendum is non-trivial: its campaign unleashed nationalism not just in Scotland, but also a reactive (and previously latent) narrow nationalism in England (which helped influence if not decide the last election for the House of Commons because Labour was viewed as too close to if not reliant on Scottish nationalism).

There are two underlying morals here. First, due to the increasing role for direct democracy, the old (more republican) British system in which parliamentary parties were rather powerful, is coming under strain. As a consequence, Britain is becoming more like the rest of Europe in which the 20-30% of the electorate that is nationalist-welfarist-authoritarian will be increasingly assertive and can expect to be represented more aggressively at the national level. If the United Kingdom falls apart, it is increasingly likely that given first-past-the-post, this segment of the electorate can reasonably hope to win national English elections until there is an effective coalition of more cosmopolitan and liberal elements to oppose it. 

Second, it's time to recognize, anew (see the quote from Macaulay Trevelyan) that it was not exclusively the rules/institutions and incentives that ensured the functioning of the previous system. But that shared mores and an underlying mutual trust -- at least among those in politics -- that there was a fundamental commitment to minimal unity played a central role. So, while the current care-taker Cameron government has the form that belongs to authority and can undoubtedly pass laws and handle day-to-day operations (etc.), it lacks the matter that allows genuine authority. My suspicion is that until Article 50 is triggered, this authority will be uncertain.

 

 

On "Brexit, Democracy, and Epistocracy"

This brings us to the central injustice of democracy, and why holding a referendum was a bad idea. Imagine, as an analogy, that you are sick. You go to a doctor. But suppose your “doctor” doesn’t study the facts, doesn’t know any medicine, and makes her decisions about how to treat you on a whim, on the basis of prejudice or wishful thinking. Imagine the doctor not only prescribes you a course of treatment, but literally forces you, at gunpoint, to accept the treatment.

We’d find this behavior intolerable. Your doctor owes you a duty of care. She owes it to you to deliver an expert opinion on the basis of good information, a strong background knowledge of medicine, and only after considering the facts in a rational and scientific way. To force you to follow the decisions incompetent and bad faith doctor is unjust.

But this is roughly what happens in democracy. Most voters are ignorant of both basic political facts and the background social scientific theories needed to evaluate the facts. They process what little information they have in highly biased and irrational ways. They decided largely on whim. And, worse, we’re each stuck having to put up with the group’s decision. Unless you’re one of the lucky few who has the right and means to emigrate, you’re forced to accept your democracy’s poorly chosen decisions.--Jason Brennan "Brexit, Democracy, and Epistocracy"

Jason Brennan can be trusted to never let a good crisis go to waste; he is using Brexit to peddle his anti-democratic sentiments and to offer up his medicine, the rule by experts (or epistocracy). Never mind that referenda are (thankfully) not the norm in liberal democracies, and that the particular referendum that occasioned his remarks was intended by the credentialed and smart (former) prime-minister David Cameron to settle an intra-parliamentary debate within the Conservative party rather than be used as a guide to policy. (Cameron never seriously contemplated losing the referendum which is clear from the fact that he deliberately avoided doing the one thing he promised to do if he lost: to invoke article 5o.) I offer three critical comments on his analysis.

First, regardless if one reflects on direct democracy (i.e., a referendum) or indirect democracy (voting for representatives) Brennan's analogy between going to a doctor and respecting the outcome of a vote is a false one. When one visits a physician the goal is not up for debate: the telos is given; it's health or restoring ordinary functioning as much as possible. Of course, there are exceptions to this (especially in cosmetic surgery and other forms of enhancement). There is a lot of room for nuance and ethical distinctions (not to mention important cases where there is no hope for restoring much of anything), but you don't go to a physician to have a good time or as leisure activity (etc.). By contrast, in democratic life, most of the ends and norms are up for debate and this debate is, in part, one of the aims of the exercise.

That is to say, we don't go to a physician in order to find out how to live and what the proper ends of one's life are. The claim in the previous sentence may be an error of modernity (although Plato's Symposium suggests it was already a problem in Ancient Athens)--maybe we should develop and train our physicians to become wise, too.The dis-analogy makes a huge difference. When ends are given, experts can guide in light of facts and constraints (means-ends rationality: "good information, a strong background knowledge of medicine, and only after considering the facts in a rational and scientific way.") When ends and the rules of the game are up for debate, the experts tend to give very partial advice. When economists tell us what is rational, they tend to assume that growth or full employment is good and they tend to ignore distributional effects, and they do not discuss all kinds of other quality of life issues and other important ends that other experts (e.g., sociologists, psychologists, ecologists, and criminologists (etc.) may focus on.

A striking fact of the British 'leave' vote is that it is concentrated in areas that benefit directly from EU spending, that is, poorer, older, and less educated areas (Cornwall, an area dependent also on tourism, has been used as an exemplar in this discussion). A lot of folk used this as evidence that leave voters are irrational (and ignorant). But that's only true if they understand themselves as aiming to increase their share of European handouts--what self-respecting voter would want that?

In his writings, Brennan simply takes it for granted that the rationality of a decision is based on an evaluation of its social "effects" and that there is agreement about the evaluation of these effects. And that such social consequences needs to be evaluated with "social scientific knowledge." Now, I am all for professional philosophers giving increased respect and hearing to social sciences (I work in a political science department). But we cannot assume that there is agreement over the desirability of effects. Lots of folk who voted 'remain' want open-borders in Europe (let's leave aside the issue of external borders). Let's stipulate that's great for the economy; it's also part of a certain life-style in which Europe's youth explore each other's countries and cultures (in part by working and studying abroad). The Cosmopolitan elites will easily slide into treating their preferences as constituting rationality. But that is not obvious. The 'leave' voters (let's stipulate) want no cross-border traffic (and no immigrants), and, let's stipulate they are harmed economically by their vote. Yet, if one introduces environmental considerations into one's analysis, then harming and reducing traffic is quite rational. (Before the Brexit campaign turned nasty there were quite a few environmentalists on the 'leave' side.)

Second, Brennan loves cherry-picking the facts on voter ignorance. Let me offer one of his favorite Memes:

Political scientists have been studying voter knowledge for the past 60 years. The results are uniformly depressing. Most voters in most countries are systematically ignorant of even the most basic political facts, let alone more the social scientific theories needed to make sense of these facts.

This is not a true state of the art in political science. In his work Brennan systematically ignores criticisms of the research he is relying on (see, e.g., Arthur Lupia) and he relies on the snobbishness of his readers (who themselves are fed a steady stream of ignorant voter stories by the press). In fact, Brennan and his readers are good at passing tests (in which one is quizzed on the "facts"). But voting is not such a test. In a representative democracy it is about selecting representatives and leaders, who are evaluated to echo Manin's Madisonian point along whatever dimension (a majority/plurality of) the electorate deems relevant. The Brexit campaign was very clearly a(n intemperate) debate about an image of Britain not primarily a debate about the facts. It is also a debate about sense-making, but not in the way Brennan uses it, but rather in a wider, diffuse sense. Whatever else 'leave' was about it was a rejection of forms of life and values that have become dominant in educated culture. And this gets me to the final, most important point.

Third, Brennan often pretends that epistocracy is somehow not existing and would be a "new system" worth trying. But many properly political decisions are farmed out to experts already: most obviously monetary and banking policy, which is run by independent central bankers and regulators--look how well that turned out. Brennan shows no interest in epistocratic failures (not to mention the evils of eugenics, etc.).

More important, across the western world, government today is the province of the educated. Long ago are the days when governments were job centers for the (well connected) uneducated. Colleges and universities are credentialing mills for bureaucracies and semi-government bureaucracies. While France may be on the extreme end in entrusting rule largely to a cadre of graduates of De École nationale d'administration (ENA), all liberal democracies are already run, in practice, by (to echo JFK) the brightest and best. These epistemocratic elites have created a two-tier polity: the credentialed are protected by the state and have lots of economic and judicial privileges; the uneducated are, well, left to fend for themselves harassed by law enforcement and technocracy.* Brennan notes that "all across the West, we’re seeing the rise of rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters." What he fails to recognize is that these are the effects of a political culture and institutions that are already highly epistocratic. Why prescribe a double dosage of a medicine that has nearly killed the patient?

 

 

Trump Panic; On "the Breakdown of Trust between Elites and Base..."

One thing is certain: If the Republican party had the same rules in 2015 as it did in 1915, Donald Trump would not be a problem. His entire candidacy is premised upon the breakdown of the relationship between the elites and the base, whose mutual accord has been central to the effectiveness of the postreform rules. For all its defects, the old nomination process, which placed power exclusively in the hands of the state and local organizations, would have dispatched Trump's candidacy with ruthless efficiency...

After this cycle, the Republican party desperately needs to reform its rules. This does not mean tinkering at the margins, playing with delegate allocation formulas and debate schedules, as the Republican National Committee did after 2012. The 1970s reforms allocated power within the party based on a premise of mutual trust and respect between the voters and the establishment. Without that foundation, the rules are a liability and need to be substantially redrafted. The real danger is not that a clownish demagogue like Trump will win the nomination this cycle, but that a demagogue who is not so much a clown eventually will.---Jay Cost, The Weekly Standard,

The mixture of democracy and free markets (and free movement of people) is unstable. This is due to the fact that markets are inherently disruptive, given that they aggregate the the constantly bombarded preferences of (thereby?) fickle consumers,  and that (democratically established and/or enforced) existing rules skew the outcomes toward those with political clout. As I noted before this instability can become toxic if, in the context of heterogenous populations, the status quo generates reasonable expectations that get violated--as they must given the way markets generate uncertain outcomes. In times of stagnation, increasing inequality, and huge gains for well-protected (rent-seeking) insiders, it is to be expected that populist appeals can be mapped onto some us/them distinction that allows some us to be the authentic, united people -- even a moral community -- that excludes elites and would be (inauthentic -- e.g., immigrants, wrong religions, 'inferior' ethnicities, etc. --) members of the people.* The electoral and political success of populism, and (more important) accompanying polarization and destabilization of the familiar status quo, in turn makes some of the elites mistrustful of democracy.

One such mistrust, familiar from libertarian circles (recall) with mistrust of redistribution and rent-seeking, sees in democracy a potent moral danger in which in the polling booth the uneducated, whom cannot grasp complex phenomena, make bad decisions in the voting booth that turn out to have immoral consequences. Such libertarians prefer either markets or experts (or both, but with preference for markets) over democracy (sometimes they prefer lots as a species of democracy). Of course, it is not just libertarians that may prefer expert rule--as I have noted the European Union is a technocratic enterprise in which, thanks to the fate of Weimar and the instability of Third Republic, democratic 'input' is kept to a minimum.

There is also a longstanding conservative mistrust of democratic, popular sovereignty (going back to Burke). The impact of the Donald Trump is re-activating this trope the Republican party. What makes Jay Cost's analysis noteworthy is not that he is openly calling for an end to the accessible, primary system of picking the party-standard bearer, but rather his analysis that what makes intra-party democracy possible is a kind of tacit social compact involving  mutual trust and respect between (party) 'base' and (party) 'elite.' This trust facilitates a structure in which "The [Republican] party voters possess the formal power to decide, but there is a vast infrastructure of donors, strategists, and insiders—an elite establishment—whose job is to control informally the people's decision." The intra-party success of populism (which is directed against the elite(s)) undermines that trust and respect (etc.).

As an aside, Goldwater-Reagan style conservativism was, itself, a successful, popular and (in its race-baiting moments, populist) revolt against moneyed, East coast elites (and the 'culture' of welfare/hand-outs, etc.).  This conservative movement fizzled out, after forty to fifty years of success, in the second term of G.W. Bush (Iraq, Wall Street, etc.). (Trump is clearly a very different kind of populist.)

Cost, who calls for a return to a more heavy handed (formal) elite-managed selection procedure to maintain the integrity and longevity of the institution, does not reflect on the causes of the breakdown of trust between base and elite (which has been manifested, in part, by successful electoral challenges to (powerful) Republican incumbents). In fact, Cost is merely expressing the elite side of the breakdown of the trust. One important way in which trust breaks down if (tacitly) agreed upon expectations are systematically violated. (This is why there is a close connection between justice, trust, and stability.) The conservative movement has always been a coalition between cultural and Christian conservatives with (a much smaller group of) libertarians (who tended to represent, sometimes uneasily, business interests). While this is not always and everywhere a natural coalition, it is not entirely strange: markets and open borders generate permanent disruptions, and, for all the benefits these may bring, the subsequent dislocation feeds a desire for cultural and social stability (and slowing down of change).

Cost names a real danger: that a demagogue who is not so much a clown (but still a bit!) eventually will win the nomination and, thus, have a shot at the Presidency. He does not name the other danger (exhibited by his piece, but prevalent in Europe, too): that the "vast infrastructure of donors, strategists, and insiders" -- the rich, the highly educated, and the technocrats -- will give up on  democracy as an end, and only see it as as a, dispensable, tool.

A Further note On the Trigger Warnings Controversy

[T]hey bewitch our souls...so that I myself, Menexenus, when thus praised by them feel mightily ennobled, and every time I listen fascinated I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome. And as I am generally accompanied by some strangers, who listen along with me, I become in their eyes also all at once more majestic; for they also manifestly share in my feelings with regard both to me and to the rest of our City, believing it to be more marvellous than before, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker. And this majestic feeling remains with me for over three days: so persistently does the speech and voice of the orator ring in my ears that it is scarcely on the fourth or fifth day that I recover myself and remember that I really am here on earth, whereas till then I almost imagined myself to be living in the Islands of the Blessed,—so expert are our orators.--Plato, Menexenus, 235a-c*

It is odd to read about the scorn ('new infantilism') heaped by self-described friends of a humanistic or classical education -- professors and commentators alike -- on the request for trigger warnings by college students encountering poetic and graphic scenes of rape in their required courses (recall this post to which the current one is a footnote). For in their ridicule, these cosmopolitan, mature types suggest that they do not really believe the once common rhetoric of the transformative potential of literature and the other arts. From their public utterances we may  infer that these false shepherds of culture appear to practice a detached, ironic stance toward the texts and material they teach and study; they seem literally unable to imagine to be swept away by poetry and rhetoric, to be un-moored from one's own identity by film,  and to be captivated by another's train of thought in a work of fiction. They understand themselves as stewards of traditional learning, but they reveal that they read with detached minds and closed hearts who are unable, it seems, to learn from their students' searching questioning.   

That works of art, including many thought canonical, can be dangerous to their readers and the society that permits them is an un-cool thought--one that gets suppressed by the banality that pases for a literary education. For, too many of our teachers assume that by branding a work 'fiction' we have created a convention by which it is treated as harmless speech a mere diversion without anything at stake (recall my exchange with the Dutch novelist Grunberg). But dictators and censorious religions (not to mention Plato) know better--imaginative works can inflame the soul and worse--some of them known to incite killing (cf. Charlie Hebdo).

One belittles our civic religion, which embraces a hard-won freedom of speech protected by law and people's hearts, by failing to recognize what is at stake in it: it is not just intended to protect "the language and imagery" of beautiful and harm-free speech. We do not get the (for lack of a more lovely term) freedom-enhancing effects of texts without risking incurring some of the dangerous effects; this is both why free speech is nowhere absolute and the limits of it are constantly contested as well as why the nature of responsible speech is of recurring significance in philosophy and the arts. A true educator recognizes the fragility of the experiment in living that occurs when student and teacher are receptive to (well) the demonic.

The above is not meant to deny the legitimate concern over the spread of trigger warnings if, as is likely, these become yet another instrument of the rent-seeking technocrats that run the modern university by which they curtail and intimidate professors and instructors (see here).** But if one treats the Liberal Arts as merely about lovely language and escapist fantasy, one should not be surprised if the rest of society decides one is dispensable.

 

Five Comments on Jonathan Wolff's List of Five Books

The eminent political philosopher Jonathan Wolff is interviewed here. [HT Jacob Levy; Jason Stanley.] After an autobiographical introduction he is invited to discuss five books "by thinkers who have shaped the field." Wolff mentions Hobbes's Leviathan, Marx's Early Writings, Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and Cohen's If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? The interview is a lovely mixture of autobiography, biography (especially of Cohen), and enthusiasm for the issues. I thought it was especially good on what makes Nozick's Anarchy so memorable. Even so, I offer critical observations because Wolff's comments reveal non-trivial systematic problems with political philosophy (as practiced by some of the very best in the field).

1. In discussing Leviathan, Wolff exhibits an absurd pride in not having really read parts 3-4. This is connected to a remarkable oversight: the lack of mention of religion (and political theology) as a key/central issue for Hobbes's project. (Leviathan is oddly relevant!) I am not picking on his lack of scholarly literacy or his lack of shame -- so common among certain kind of analytical philosophers of his generation, including the silly idea that Hobbes "is an analytical philosopher," [it's silly because Hobbes takes rhetoric very seriously whereas analytical philosophers, a few noble ones excepted, tend not to]* -- in not having read fully a book he discusses at length (not exactly the model of virtue in a Dean of Humanities)! Rather, it reveals how narrow his conception of political philosophy really is and almost certainly reveals a tacit commitment, once popular, to the idea that religion is a thing of the past. I am not saying that one should only focus on religion within political philosophy, but the more modern books mentioned (by Rawls, Nozick, Cohen) that 'shaped' the field are not very profound on the challenges and opportunities posed by religion to political philosophy.  This lacuna -- and it is a considerable given the events of, say, the last thirty years --, suggests something has gone very wrong in the field. [This is not to deny that "Rawls took religion very seriously," but in Wolff's hands Rawls's significance is explicitly not on political theology.]
2. Wolff is reported as saying (while commenting on Leviathan's famous cover) "I can’t think of another political philosopher who’s chosen an illustration themselves for their position." I found this an odd lapse in his memory because several of JJ Rousseau's books have (complex) illustrutations/engravings  as book covers that comment or even guide the reader's interpretations and are mentioned in the text (see here [see also this paper on the Emile [HT Michael Kochin]).
3. Wolff writes about Marx: "Marx finds, in the Wealth of Nations, a whole range of criticisms of capitalism that sound just like Marx. So, for example, Adam Smith argues that the natural rate of wages is the minimum wage — what it costs to keep the worker and his family alive for the day." I think Wolff misremembers his Marx here (and confuses some key concepts in Smith). To be clear it's true that Smith anticipates much of Marx's criticisms of capitalism (see this excellent book by Spencer Pack). But it is not true that for Smith the natural rate is (generally) the minimum wage nor does Marx say this (I am not a Marx expert, so maybe he says it somewhere); rather for Smith wages will only fall to subsistence wages if there is little economic/production growth alongside population growth--something that Marx recognizes (but Wolff not). By contrast, the natural rate is the counterfactual price of a good absent barriers to trade in factors--something that Marx recognizes (and Wolff not). For Smith this price is not a subsistence wage, but rather one that prevails when there is no famine. Marx understands this about Smith, but disagrees; he argues that within an extensive division of labor the worker lacks the bargaining power to (a) benefit from when the market prices are above the natural price (something extremely common) because (b) the capitalist can redirect capital far more easily than the worker can. (Both (a-b) are compatible with Smith's analysis, by the way.) Moreover, Marx thinks that (c) wages are very sticky. (This is not really Smith's position.) Where Marx and Smith differ in Marx's analysis is (to simplify) that Smith thinks wages can be kept above subsistence rates during times of economic growth whereas Marx thinks this is rarely the case (and even if it can be done only at the expensive of the worker relative to capital interests).
4. On reading Rawls Theory of Justice. "You can read a page and not think very much of it and then ten years later come back to it, having thought about the issue yourself, and see Rawls has completely understood the issue, set out all the possibilities, and shown why only one of them is right." I think this is almost right, but it also misses a key feature of Rawls. For, Rawls does not explicitly set out all the possibilities, although he has undoubtedly discerned all of them. He sets out important possibilities and these turn out to have set the agenda for subsequent readers. But to recognize that he is aware he does not set out all the possibities you have to read Rawls's footnotes. For a notable example, see p. 314 n 16 of TJ. In the note Rawls cites both Arrow and Knight, focusing on their (limited) agreement and ignoring the deeper disagreement. As Rawls adds (in his own footnote): “in both cases see the footnotes!” That is to say, Rawls knows the possibility space is broader than he presents and he allows the diligent reader to recover that. (I leave aside here what purpose this may serve.)
5. Finally, It is striking that Wolff mentions no women, no non-white person, and no pre-early modern person. Perhaps, he is right sociologically that "the three leading political philosophers of the contemporary era are Rawls, Nozick, and Cohen," but that is really an artifact of the cold war. I love Hobbes and Rawls, but if we think of issues that ought to dominate political philosophy (religion, gender equality, global and racial injustices, mass human extinction, toleration, technology, military-prison industrial complex, ideology, etc.), I can think of more important political philosophers (in the contemporary era, say, MacKinnon, Fanon, Arendt, Foucault),+ not the least of which are Plato (and Aristotle) or Al-Farabi.

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

What words, images, and principles are you willing to die for?

That's the question (hereafter 'The Question') after last week's assassination of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists posed to those of us -- e.g., journalists, academics, cartoonists, publicists, politicians, artists, etc. -- that live by peddling words and images to various audiences. It's not a new question; earlier in the week I called attention to the fate of Socrates, and it has been revived even in the relatively law-abiding, gun-poor environments of Northwestern Europe with the assasinations of politicians (e.g., Olof Palme; Pim Fortuyn), aspiring politicians (Utøya island massacre), and political commentators (Theo Van Gogh).* Such targets -- the victims of let's call them, 'politicized crimes' -- have in common with more ordinary terror attacks that they are 'soft,' that is, that they are relatively unprotected and that the moment of attack is relatively unexpected. But unlike ordinary victims of terror, the victims of politicized crimes draw attention to themselves by their active construction of the public sphere.+ The Question has become ever more acute with the rise of suicide bombers and other politicized killers that are very evidently willing to die for their principles.

The whole idea of legally protected freedom of expression is designed to diffuse The Question. If only the very brave or foolish participate in the public sphere then it is likely that all kinds of insights and positions never get articulated with the care and expertise required to guide the life of and constitute the polity. But this open public sphere requires not just a government to live by its own rules, but also capability and willingness to protect its own public sphere by having a monopoly on violence (and arms). While undoubtedly more can be done to secure safe participation in a public sphere, there is in governments a tendency for policing and security-measures overreach, which, paradoxically undermines an open public sphere and, indirectly, Liberal society.

An exclusive focus on security does not address the reasons why people may wish to kill (and die) for their beliefs. Political terrorists are not random natural facts; they are (if we leave aside the children among them) agents that are animated by a whole host of commitments, feelings, aspirations, and ideologies. That is to say, while undoubtedly there are many security-driven ways of preventing political attacks, these do nothing to undermine and may, perhaps, reinforce the experienced intentional world(s)** of would-be-politicized-killers.

This last point is especially important because many of the politicized killers are not strange, undercover invaders from foreign places. Rather they are home-grown; they have turned militant despite (perhaps because of) being quite familiar with the norms, aspirations, and even rewards of an arms-free public sphere. I leave it to the social scientists to help explain various social sources of militancy among a subset of those born in the European West. But part of the issue is also ideology. The nub of the matter is that evidently our Western normative and social commitments are  displaced at the level of individual psychology among part(s) of the population.

It's at this point of the analysis that nearly all commentators focus on the varieties of militant Islam, which quite evidently generates motivational power to some people to kill and die for its principles. As I noted a few days ago, Justin Smith, an eminent philosophical scholar who lives and works in Paris, has been among the most intelligent and interesting philosophical commentators on the assassination of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. He puts his point as follows:

it's a great shame that political Islamism today perceives an equivalence between the symbolic and the real that make an act of vengeance of this scale seem like a fair trade. I recall that one horrible, amateur film ridiculing Mohammed a few years ago; they interviewed some kid in Egypt whose reaction was: 'Well, how would you feel if we made a movie making fun of, say, Abraham Lincoln?' He sincerely didn't understand that no one would care.

Today when the assassins were fleeing toward their getaway car, they shouted: On a vengé le prophète Mohammed. On a tué Charlie Hebdo.++ One cannot help but think: there is a double confusion here. Not just one but two fictional characters have been mistaken for real people. And twelve real people have been killed as a result.--Justin Smith.

Now unlike most commentators, in his blog posts Smith is clear that Charlie Hebdo offered not just a willingness to die (Stéphane Charbonnier has been quite explicit about this), but as Smith explains (here, here, here), an alternative, life-affirming even joyous and raunchy set of commitments that challenged many forms of powers and ideology (including Islamic ones) at the level of affect as much as reason.

Even so, the passage quoted from Smith contains some missteps. Smith's "political Islam" fails to do justice to the Islamic political movements (inside and outside of Europe) that do not promote or condone (even tacitly) the killing of  folk in the European public sphere. Given that there are political movements in Europe that are extremely intolerant/hostile toward all of Islam (and Smith is clearly no fan of these movements), Smith's wording is unfortunate.

More important, there is, in fact, no opposition between the "symbolic and the real." (There is an opposition between the real and the illusory.) In particular, when we are dealing with social reality, the symbolic and the real can coincide, but need not. This connects to another, more serious misstep in Smith's analysis. Muḥammad is not a fictional character. He was a historical figure who (among other social scripts (recall)) played political and religious role(s) in his own life and thereafter. The symbolic is constituted (albeit non-exhaustively) by such roles. (It is not impossible that a fictional Muhammad could also play such symbolic roles, but that's not my concern.) The symbolic matters here because it's what animates or gives meaning to the experienced intentional world of individuals, including the would-be-killers and those that sympathize with them.

So Smith is absolutely right that the "Egyptian kid" in his example fails to understand the symbolic organization and commitments of contemporary Americans. Having said that, plenty of Americans get very upset about flag-burning; so Smith's Egyptian kid could have found a better example for his case.  The point here is not that every society has symbols it is touchy about (although it is not irrelevant); rather it misses the point to say about such a symbol, 'oh well, it's just fictional.'

Furthermore, Smith is right to note (and we can nod to Nietzsche's analysis of Lex Talionis) that in revenge-killing there is an element of trade that restores a balance within a community. Despite the fact that the killers of Charlie Hebdo's editorial staff and cartoonists do not conform to and violently transgress the laws of the land, their words, if accurately quoted, suggests that they, too, recognize, perhaps implicitly, that they belong to a community in which their victims play a symbolic (even sacrificial) role.

Much to my surprise Smith insists that contemporary Jihadists "are entirely unable to interpret the Charlie Hebdo cartoons." (His ire is also directed at professors at American universities, but I will ignore them here.) This strikes me as confused  about the nature of the symbolic. Images play multiple roles and functions in different symbolic systems/organisations sometimes simultaneously--some philosophers, of course, cannot abide multiplicity of meaning, but if they allow such a possibility cartoons would be on the very short-list. There is no true interpretation of the symbolic. (To avoid confusion: there are symbolic systems, of course, that are governed by truth.) While we can allow that the Jihadists failed to understand all the intended complexities of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, they discerned in some of these images satire (and worse) of their commitments.+++

Finally, it's possible, of course, that one can die because of a mistaken interpretation of one's words, images, and principles. That's the stuff (with a nod to Oedipus) of tragedy. If one participates in the public sphere with highly affective images and words that mistake is probably not unexpected. It is also possible -- I think this happened to Stéphane Charbonnier -- that one dies both for a principle one embraces and for a hostile interpretation of one's work that is offered from a vantage point one does not share.

(here, here, here), including satire.) a genuine alternative, life-affirming joyous even raunchy set of of commitments one that was as challenging to Islam as it was to many other ideologies and political powers.

Hume's blemishes and silences

Yesterday I noted that in his treatment in the Agricola of the Roman conquest of Britain, Tacitus gives pride of place to the speech by Galgacus ahead of the decisive battle. It's an eloquent statement of the argument against empire. It is especially noteworthy that the speech goes well beyond the desire of propertied freedom, and is also an argument in favor of national (or terriotorial) self-determination. Galgacus is reported as fighting for British liberty.

By contrast, Hume, treats the episode very differently:

This great commander [Agricola--ES] formed a regular plan for subduing Britain, and rendering the acquisition useful to the conquerors. He carried his victorious arms northwards, defeated the Britons in every encounter, pierced into the inaccessible forests and mountains of Caledonia, reduced every state to subjection in the southern parts of the island, and chaced before him all the men of fiercer and more intractable spirits, who deemed war and death itself less intolerable than servitude under the victors. He even defeated them in a decisive action, which they sought under Galgacus, their leader; and having fixed a chain of garrisons, between the friths of Clyde and Forth, he thereby cut off the ruder and more barren parts of the island, and secured the Roman province from the incursions of the barbarous inhabitants.

During these military enterprizes, he neglected not the arts of peace. He introduced laws and civility among the Britons, taught them to desire and raise all the conveniencies of life, reconciled them to the Roman language and manners, instructed them in letters and science, and employed every expedient to render those chains, which he had forged, both easy and agreeable to them. The inhabitants, having experienced how unequal their own force was to resist that of the Romans, acquiesced in the dominion of their masters, and were gradually incorporated as a part of that mighty empire--David Hume, History of England.

Before we simply assume that Tacitus's treatment was simply irrelevant to Hume's account in the History of England, it is worth reminding ourselves that Hume quotes Tacitus in the epigraph on the title-page of the Treatise. (Paul Russell has done creative work with this.) And, elsewhere, as Jacky Taylor first pointed out to me, Hume insists that Tacitus is the favorite author of those (at age 50) that prefer "wise, philosophical reflections concerning the conduct of life and moderation of the passions."

In looking at the quoted passage of Hume's History, one might wonder if Hume is even familiar with the Agricola. After all, elsewhere Hume explicitly notes Tacitus's treatment (in the Germania) of the Germans's "fierce and bold liberty" (drawn by the masterly pencil of Tacitus"--explicit and tacit references to this feature of the Germania are sprinkled through Hume's oeuvre). So, Hume does not always overlook this feature of Tacitus's analysis. However, Hume is familiar with the Agricola; he refers to it explicitly in the History of England (here), including in the notes to the passage just quoted where it is his main (only?) source of evidence. 

That Hume omits Galgacus's speech, which evidently does not fit the political narrative he wishes to tell, is less remarkable than the fact that he calls attention to the existence of Galgacus, who plays no further role in the overall argument, at all. So, what to make of this?

First, it is quite clear that Hume is a friend of empire (recall) when it extends (i) 'laws and civility' (even by the force of arms) as well as (ii) generates demand for commercial activity ('desire... the conveniencies of life'), and (iii) promotes 'arts and sciences.' Agricola is not just a successful military leader, but is in Hume's hands transformed primarily into (iv) a wise political legislator that is worth emulating. Strikingly -- especially if one recalls Rousseau --, Agricola's political wisdom consist in making a population feel at ease in its chains. Agricola follows his own "regular plan" (which is contrasted with Galgacus's rash decision to seek decisive battle), and shows that some order needs to be imposed (with the sword) before the fruits of civilization can be enjoyed. It would be unfair to Hume to claim that he only promotes this vision of political leadership (recall), but one should not overlook this strain in his thought either. While (i-iv) are not altogether absent in Tacitus's account, Agricola's subordinate position to the emperor leaves little room for treating him as a political legislator in the way that Hume does.

Second, in Hume's hands the opposition between civilization and barbarism is not understood in terms of empire and freedom. The benefits of empire are emphasized, and it's hard not to discern in this Hume's advocacy of British commercial empire and the Union (of Scotland with England). Rather it becomes a distinction between enjoyable chains and fierce (animal-like) un-tamedness. To put the point starker than Hume does, The 'uncivilized' or barbarous are interpreted as willingly choosing death and thereby marking themselves as worth killing. As we know, this is an enduring, dangerous trope that gets recycled even by my Zionist friends when faced, say, with Hamas's propaganda and suicide-killers.