Digressions&Impressions

On Eugenics, Armed Robots, and Sparta; (Asimov's Libertarian Utopia)

Now Sparta in its hey day consisted of a relatively small number of Spartiates, the only full citizens, plus a somewhat larger number of second class individuals, the Perioeci, and a really large number of outright slaves, the Helots. The Helots outnumbered the Spartiates a matter of twenty to one, and the Helots were men with human feelings and human failings. In order to make certain that a Helot rebellion could never be successful despite their overwhelming numbers, the Spartans became military specialists. Each lived the life of a military machine, and the society achieved its purpose. There was never a successful Helot revolt.

Now we human beings on Solaria are equivalent, in a way, to the Spartiates. We have our Helots, but our Helots aren’t men but machines. They cannot revolt and need not be feared even though they outnumber us a thousand times as badly as the Spartans’ human Helots outnumbered them. So we have the advantage of Spartiate exclusiveness without any need to sacrifice ourselves to rigid mastery. We can, instead, model ourselves on the artistic and cultural way of life of the Athenians, who were contemporaries of the Spartans...

“Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex. For instance, even the most poorly off humans on Aurora are better off than Earth’s aristocrats, but they are dispossessed with respect to Aurora’s aristocrats, and it is with the masters of their own world that they compare themselves.

“So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

“Now here on Solaria, for the first time, the apex of the pyramid stands alone. In the place of the dispossessed are the robots. We have the first new society, the first really new one, the first great social invention since the farmers of Sumeria and Egypt invented cities.”--Isaac Asimov (1957) The Naked Sun

The passage is quoted from a speech Quemot, a sociologist sought by the main protagonist, Elijah Bailey, a detective from (future, post-Nuclear apocalypse) Earth invited to investigate a murder on Solaria.* Solaria is a very wealthy society in which robots vastly outnumber humans and in which eugenics has been perfected.

In an interesting and potentially far-seeing twist, in this society people avoid nearly all direct (they call it seeing) contact with each other, and if they must interact at all, they do so entirely through remote devices (viewing). [This is also true for married couples, which meet at scheduled moments to do the deed if they have clearance to have children.] In fact, from a young age kids are socialized not just to experience the world through viewing, but to feel intense disgust being around each other in person (there is no such disgust when viewing such that they completely lack a taboo on nudity).  

As an aside, there is an unintentional irony in noticing that a novel set in the future treats sociology as the queen of the human sciences. Bailey seeks out Quemot because on his home planet, the sociologists are the leading experts to government -- no surprise because it must keep a huge human population, which is literally holed up underground quiet --, and he thinks it useful to get some useful background to Solarian society. On Bailey's Earth, sociology is a sophisticated mathematical science, but in his militarily and economically advanced society, Quemot shows little interest in it.

Solaria approaches the character of a community of wise people because there is very little in the way of organized government, yet it flourishes. (I say approaches because philosophy is clearly absent.) There is no need for government due to the lack of 'friction.' I call it a 'libertarian utopia' (somewhat jokingly) because initially uninhabited, Solaria was founded without original sin violence by very wealthy individuals who appropriated the land and turned this planet of holiday villas into a self-supporting, exclusive gated community. There is no exploitation on Solaria because the robots do nearly all the work. (From the perspective of a robot-ethicist the previous sentence may require considerable modification.)

One may correctly quibble in calling Solaria 'libertarian' because of the existence of three important constraints: (i) estates are not allowed to be divided or sold; (ii) estates are not inherited (and on the whole parents do not know who their kids are); (iii) the population of Solaria is held constant (at relatively small number of 20,000). Once an estate-holder dies (after many centuries), one of society's genetically optimized kids, who are reared communally at a planetary wide center, takes possession. So, while there is some inequality among the estates, this is wholly due to luck. One may suspect that these three constraints are a limitation on people's choices. But the narrative strongly implies that the constraints are fully consensual, agreed upon at the original founding and not disputed by any of the Solarians. Of course, a libertarian may well object to the collective brainwashing of kids even if their parents and society decide to do so.

The reason why these constraints are not disputed is because Solarians lack (what we may call) drive; they do not desire accumulation nor desire each other. They also lack competitive emulation. However, they do have pride in their genetic make-up (see here; and here), which is notable given that they possess this without any personal merit. 

It is notable that in a society full of robots, the Spartans are seen as machine-like. The implication is that each Spartan fulfilled a singular functional--that is, military hegemony over the more fully rounded human-Helots through self-mastery. Quemot does not stop to consider that his own people are machine-like in their singular devotion to disease-free, longevity without signs of aging.** 

Asimov's robots obey the three laws of robotics. These are meant to prevent the foreseeable, inductive risk of robots being deployed to harm humans. The Naked Sun relies on the distinction between reason and logic, and this distinction is exemplified by illustrations of how in virtue of robots's reliance on logic, they can be tricked into unknowingly harming humans. In a society in which humans are vastly outnumbered by robots the most dangerous taboo centers on weaponizing robots that can be knowingly and without effort be used to harm other humans without the robots realizing they do so. With the development of fully autonomous weapons systems, we can say that humans are crossing a disastrous threshold.

 

Hume and Machiavelli (Mercenaries and Taxes)

Historians inform us, that one of the chief causes of the destruction of the ROMAN state, was the alteration, which CONSTANTINE introduced into the finances, by substituting an universal poll-tax, in lieu of almost all the tithes, customs, and excises, which formerly composed the revenue of the empire. The people, in all the provinces, were so grinded and oppressed by the publicans, that they were glad to take refuge under the conquering arms of the barbarians; whose dominion, as they had fewer necessities and less art, was found preferable to the refined tyranny of the ROMANS.--David Hume "Of Taxes"*

If we look for the causes which first led to the overthrow of the Roman Empire, they will be found to have had their source in the employment of Gothic mercenaries, for from that hour the strength of the Romans began to wane and all the virtue which went from them passed to the Goths. --Machiavelli, The Prince (ch. 13)

It's clear that Hume had Machiavelli''s The Prince open at his desk while writing many of his essays--he does not shy away from explicitly praising and critically engaging with Machiavelli by name. Hume and Machiavelli agree, in fact, that the decline of the Roman Empire was a consequence of bad policy. But they disagree about its root cause: Machiavelli claims that fall was set in motion in virtue of employing foreign mercenaries--from that moment on the Roman rulers were not in control of their own destiny.

From our vantage point, Hume, who is writing in the age of the rising standing army, seems more modern with his focus on the consequences of disastrous tax policy. Constantine's willingness to change customary tax-policy (already a grave mistake in Hume's political understanding) in favor of an unjust tax-regime turns out to be disastrous.** (Margaret Thatcher also learned this the hard way,  ignoring the fact that Adam Smith called the poll-tax on freemen "altogether arbitrary or altogether unequal.") In Hume's account the roman rulers lost their authority because the heavily taxed citizens preferred the lighter taxes of the barbarous foreigners. In fact, in claiming this Hume agrees with Machiavelli's general point that a wise ruler should keep taxes low, and not mess with his citizens' property.