Transitions to capitalism

The economic system we call capitalism was a kind of cultural discovery, and, in terms of its consequences, probably the greatest cultural discovery in human history. Like the advent of urban civilization thousands of years ago, capitalism opened up a whole new continent, a new world, for development, and we're still just in the process of exploring that space. It was, in other words, a huge and relatively quick success, despite introducing some new strains associated with alienation (as I sketched in the theme).

But in the transition to capitalism, other kinds of issues arise, associated with a period in which an old order is disintegrating even as a new one is still not fully formed. Before a stable establishment of capitalist legal and property relations,  in other words, not to mention some kind of democratic government, the rule of law rather than people, and the status equality of everyone, there is ample opportunity for abuse, which is usually realized. We see this both historically and currently, in the three major transitions to capitalism:

• The first, of course, occurred in the West, starting perhaps as early as the Renaissance, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and gave rise to issues surrounding the enclosure of formerly common land, among other problems.

• The next was the transition from non-Western traditional cultures to capitalist that occurred along with Western expansion and imperialism, starting from perhaps the mid-18th century and still continuing today, and this has had some severe problems associated just with the encounter between cultures.

• The third one was, and is, the transition from socialism to capitalism, starting at the end of the 80's of the last century, and still to come in the case of Cuba and North Korea. The worst case of abuse here has obviously been the rise of an oligarchic kleptocracy in the remnants of the Soviet Union, and it remains to be seen whether China's autocracy will be able to avoid that fate, or will be just another form of it.

These sorts of transitions, by their nature, can't be easy, and in some cases in the past -- thinking of tribal and aboriginal cultures in particular -- have been, or still are, tragic. But change happens, at all levels, and while we can do our best to mitigate its bad effects, I don't think we can realistically hope to eliminate them all. And certainly, though I'm by no means any sort of historical determinist, I do think that efforts to halt or reverse such overwhelmingly beneficial developments as arise in the wake of the emergent, modern individual -- emancipation, equality of status, democracy, rule of law, individual rights, freedom of trade, etc. -- would be a tragic error of vastly greater scope.

The China question

In a short piece in Foreign Policy, "Reinventing the Wheel", William Easterly talks about economic development, linking it to past levels of technology, going back as far as 1000 BCE. This is a result of both the way in which technology builds upon itself, as Easterly points out, and also of the geographical and cultural separation of societies before recent communication and transportation improvements (which I don't think Easterly makes enough of). But the idea of the cumulative, snowballing effect of early technological development runs into some objections:

The most important counterexample is China, which in 1500 had plow cultivation, printing, paper, books, firearms, the compass, iron, and steel, and yet failed to emulate Europe's Industrial Revolution in the centuries that followed. Scholars have argued that autocratic Chinese emperors killed off technological progress for domestic political reasons. For example, one Ming emperor banned long-distance oceanic exploration for fear of foreign influence threatening his power, after Chinese ships had already reached East Africa in 1422.

Which didn't happen in Europe largely because of Europe's political incoherence:

Fragmented Europe did not have any one autocrat who could kill off technological innovation, and the constant threats of living in a hostile neighborhood spurred the advancement of military technology. And because borders were relatively open around 1500, the reality that citizens could leave for more advanced places -- the forerunner of today's "brain drain" -- kept alive the spirit of innovation.

So what lessons can be drawn from this about current problems of development? What's interesting is that China pops again as an illustration that past failures needn't prevent playing catch-up: "As China's history has shown [meaning presumably recent, free-market history, though he doesn't say], when governments stop killing innovation, good things happen." Yet, as we all know, China's political system seems hardly less autocratic now than it was when it did kill innovation -- what is it that makes the difference?

The answer is likely to be that understated aspect of communication/transportation improvements, that have shrunk the world down to dimensions considerably smaller than 15th century Europe, and that put contemporary China in a position similar to that of an early modern European state. Note how, under these conditions, capitalism is the default evolutionary path. The question that China poses, then, is whether the other aspects of modernity will follow as well -- specifically, democracy, the rule of law, and individual rights? These features took a while to develop in the West, as the transition was made from feudalism to capitalism. So I think there's a reasonable expectation that we'll see them develop in China as well, since they seem to be very much of a single cultural piece or pattern -- the only real question is, how peacefully?

Cultural relativity of another kind

The idea that some cultures may be better or worse than others is enough of a taboo, at least within certain political groupings, that a friend of mine literally gasped when, not realizing just how much of a taboo it was, I said as much in a casual conversation. It was as though he were actually worried about being overheard by the Thought Police (this was in Canada).

So it was indeed a breath of fresh air when another friend referred me to this John McWhorter review of a book by Amy Wax, entitled Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century, in which it's argued that the primary current cause of poverty and dysfunction within black communities is the dysfunctional culture of those communities. Wax clearly recognizes that that culture especially is the result of great historic wrongs, but just as clearly asserts that the only possible remedy for those wrongs now rests within the black communities themselves. Here's the opening paragraph of McWhorter's review:

This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation—that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn’t true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.

I'd only add a generalization to this -- other examples of less functional or even malfunctional cultures in the context of the modern industrialized world might include many aboriginal or tribally-based Islamic communities; on the other hand, cultures that are currently flourishing in the same context might include many Asian or Jewish communities.

But the most important consideration in all this -- what should alleviate a little of McWhorter's depression -- is that, unlike race, culture is changeable, and dysfunctional cultures will evolve into more functional forms in time, as long as  they're not being being continually supported or enabled by the withholding of judgment or making excuses.

But here's Amy Wax herself, in dialogue with Adam Serwer:

The modern future: brain prostheses

See MIT's Technology Review: Brain Coprocessors.

Now, this has some disturbing aspects, I won't deny -- particularly if you couple it with some of the latest schemes coming out of DARPA. But the fact is that we're already well along the path toward the integration of organic and mechanical, as we learn to attach devices to nerve endings, provide paraplegics with exoskeletons, and so forth -- and so far, no Borg-like "assimilation" seems imminent.

What's intriguing about the idea of a brain prosthesis is just the way it refocuses what's been happening for some time now anyway, with the Internet in general, Google in particular -- something foreseen perhaps in the title of Vannevar Bush's famous and prescient essay 60 some years ago: "As We May Think". Consider, for example, how we do think now when we're trying to remember something -- we know we know it, we just don't have it, and we typically perform a kind of algorithmic search of our memory's contents by riffling through as many associations with "it" as we can think of, hoping that this will flush out other associations, one of which will be the "it" we're looking for. And now consider how quickly we -- or at least I -- resort to Google to do much the same process for us, whenever we're at a keyboard -- typing in some random associations with a term or concept we're looking for, and letting Google flush out the thing itself, which it so often does with an ease and accuracy that we can't match. We don't need brain-reading helmets, in other words, to experience this extension of memory into the cloud of the global network. And when you think, too, of how we're not only internalizing that cloud, we're also externalizing more and more of our selves -- our memories, thoughts, wants, dreams, activities, etc. -- in the burgeoning social networks of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., then it becomes apparent we're already engaged in a cultural process that is tending to blur the boundaries between self and environment, mental and physical, internal and external worlds.

It took a while for people to become reconciled to the idea that human beings were just another species of animal. But ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, at least, and from Metropolis to the Terminator flics, we've been culturally haunted by a fear of the machine vs. the human. Ironic if we're now being gradually forced to the conclusion that that distinction too is dissolving. This post on "explanatory models" has more.

Those not busy being born ...

... are busy dying, as B. Zimmerman said.

I wanted to expand on a quick remark in a previous post, where I said "... without growth, this is not a civilization that will simply stagnate (much less settle into some bucolic steady-state) -- it will tear itself apart in a zero-sum war of all against all." Why is that?

Primarily because people have aspirations, material aspirations -- for themselves, obviously, but perhaps even more strongly for their children. As long as the economic game in which they're engaged is positive sum -- i.e. as long as the economy, over the long haul, grows, the pie expands -- there is at least the potential for those aspirations to be realized for everyone, and this is widely understood. But once long-term growth comes to a halt, the only way any one player can realize his/her aspirations is to deprive another of theirs -- the zero-sum Hobbesian hell mentioned above.

It's true that historically some civilizations have existed in a more or less steady-state for relatively long periods (e.g., Egypt, China), but of course this culture is not like those. What makes this culture distinct is precisely the inverse of what allowed those and other pre-modern cultures to persist so long with so little structural change: the absence of a systemic, politically enforced hierarchy. Steady-state cultures, in other words, must rely on some notion of "place" and must make an ideology out of keeping to one's "place" in this world, putting off hope of satisfying one's aspirations to the next (see also The Theme). Little wonder that modern thoughts of a steady-state society are always so associated with the political left and its project of a state-enforced egalitarianism, since, in the absence of that obsolete ideology of "place", they have to hope that they can at least minimize evidence that anyone could ever do better.

Unfortunately -- not just for them but for all of us, if we can't find a way to sustain growth -- even such a leftist totalitarianism will not obliterate human aspiration.

Liberty, the knowledge problem, and social evolution

We've seen that Jim Manzi's distinction between liberty-as-goal and liberty-as-means libertarianisms runs into some immediate problems and false paradoxes. Better to contrast dogmatic libertarianism with a pragmatic version, that aims simply to increase liberty in an incremental, experimental manner. But there are deeper issues involved in the notion of liberty, both as goal and means, that Manzi also raises, though again in a somewhat tangled fashion.

The first of these is the famous "knowledge problem" (see, e.g., Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society"), which can take various forms, but can be expressed as the idea that the dispersion of decision-making power amongst the individuals affected by decisions takes maximum advantage of their knowledge of their own circumstances. In this sense, we might say that liberty -- that is, the dispersion of decision-making power -- is a means to the end of maximizing individual well-being, in whatever way individuals define it. But this, by its emphasis on the individual's definition of her own well-being, and by its very generality, comes quite close at least to being equivalent to simply making liberty a goal -- we might say that it helps explain why liberty is a goal.

Manzi may be alluding to something like this in his assertion that "We need liberty ... because we are so ignorant of what works in practical, material terms". But, in bypassing the individual emphasis, it misses a critical aspect of the issue, and leads him into the false paradox noted earlier, where liberty, and the ignorance it addresses, is apparently satisfied simply by dividing society into smaller units, each of which is "free" to be relatively repressive or anarchic.

But perhaps Manzi has in mind another kind of ignorance than the Hayekian notion of the dispersion of knowledge -- perhaps he's simply referring to the limits of human knowledge in general. Here, for example, are the sentences that preceded the quote above:

Liberty-as-means libertarianism sees the world in an evolutionary framework: societies evolve rules, norms, laws and so forth in order to adapt and survive in a complex and changing external environment. At a high level of abstraction, internal freedoms are necessary so that the society can learn (which requires trial-and-error learning because the external reality is believed to be too complex to be fully comprehended by any existing theory) and adapt (which is important because the external reality is changing).

 And here (finally) is a clear and important realization. Let's try to make its components even more explicit:

• First, social/cultural evolution is not something brought about by design -- by social engineers, policy-makers, or bureaucrats -- but rather by the same sort of random, trial-and-error processes that we see in the natural world; it's Darwinian, in other words, as opposed to Lamarckian. This isn't because human knowledge is futile but simply because it has limits, outside of which nature always waits and exerts her influence -- it's just that influence that appears as evolution, as distinct from, say, "improvement", "reform", "institutional design", "revolution", etc.
• But, second, such evolution isn't something distinct or apart from human agency, but rather consists of human decisions and actions, and of course of the consequences thereof. Manzi is right to point out, therefore, that the dispersal of decision-making power in the face of this sort of unavoidable ignorance confers a distinct evolutionary advantage on a society, in terms of the greater flexibility and adaptability it allows. There are, as he also points out, limits to this dispersal, or issues on which coercion is still an evolutionary advantage (e.g., obviously, laws against murder or theft, or, arguably, laws against prostitution), but everywhere the evolutionary logic is to disperse this power as far as possible, thereby extending the freedom of the individual agent.