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Monday, January 29, 2007
On Preaching To The Choir: Second-Order Effects In Political Outreach
Your Curmudgeon has recently received observations that he's "preaching to the choir" -- that is, that Eternity Road readers are already in complete or near-to-complete agreement with him on the topics he addresses. That would imply that no new minds are being affected by the thoughts he expresses.
This is probably true...on the first order. Liberals tend to seek out liberal sites; conservatives tend to seek out conservative sites. Though Eternity Road does receive a substantial volume of hate mail, it's likely that your Curmudgeon's less agreeable correspondents never "come to scoff, but stay to pray;" they merely "scoff and run away."
We live in a contentious, trying, emotionally charged time. Policy positions whose holders once knew how to argue for them are put forth as unchallengeable premises tied to absolute evaluations of moral worth. Evidence is regarded as secondary to "good intentions," which are themselves determined according to what policies one favors. Ideological opponents are no longer collaborators in the investigation of rights, moral theory, and the limits of political power, but rather as "the enemy," to be silenced or destroyed by any means expedient.
But there are second-order effects to consider. Effects that are weakly, if at all, related to any direct attempt to alter the convictions of others. Some of those effects might be crucial to the survival of the Republic.
In economists' terms, a second-order effect is one that arises from the interaction of human motivations with a change in the politico-economic environment. One might also call it an incentive effect. Broadly, some change in the environment alters the incentives for persons subject to the change to behave in particular ways. Human nature being what it is, a significant change in incentives will bring about large-scale changes in behavior.
Politically, the change in the environment is almost always a new law or regulation. If not well designed for compatibility with human motivations, the changes in behavior the law will bring about will not be what its champions intended. Such a demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences is usually predicted beforehand, though drenched with scorn by the proponents of the law. Thomas Sowell provides a wealth of examples in his masterwork The Vision Of The Anointed.
The wholesomeness of the lawmakers' intentions is seldom a factor. No doubt those who favored the desegregation of American public schools never intended that children should be loaded en masse onto buses and driven thirty or forty miles one-way for the sake of "racial balance." No doubt those who championed the 1964 Civil Rights Act never intended that racial hiring quotas, along with a huge federal bureaucracy to enforce them, should become the de facto law of the land. No doubt those who championed the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act never intended that it should bring forth a new industry of lawyers who specialize in suing small businesses and demanding extortionate settlements. But intentions have no power to trump incentives.
A commentator's second-order effects in political outreach are effects upon the effectiveness and morale of those who agree with him. Though an opinion-oriented Website such as Eternity Road cannot alter anyone's convictions by the sheer brilliance of its logic and rhetoric, it can provide the already sympathetic with three valuable things:
- Comradeship: Reassurance that one is not alone in one's beliefs.
- Respite: A place to "hide" from the thunderings of the Left and its annex in the Old Media.
- Usable Arguments: He who argues in other fora can employ the logic and evidence he finds here.
All of these things help to sustain and power the pro-freedom community.
Time was, persons willing to call themselves libertarians or classical liberals were few in number and shy about saying so; we had little, if any, "voice." That's no longer the case, due to the World Wide Web and the evolution of American conservatism. National Review Online, possibly the most important opinion site on the Right, is an implicitly libertarian-conservative or classical-liberal site. So is Tech Central Station, another of the jewels of the Web. Of course, many of the most popular commentators in the Blogosphere, including Glenn Reynolds, Bill Quick, and Pamela Geller Oshry, are of our persuasion as well. These factors have converged to marshal surprising numbers to the pro-freedom community in American politics. And though numbers alone don't guarantee strength, the reassurance and mutual support they provide certainly do help one to stay staunch in his convictions.
We're not guaranteed to win, but merely by talking to one another, we're helping ourselves to stay in the game.
Of course, the Left is not pleased about it. As that Fran person demonstrated yesterday, they'll pour all the derision and venom they possess on anyone they think can be intimidated, or irritated, into quietism. (If they knew how ferocious he is when truly provoked, they'd never dare to tweak him in the least of ways. How do you think he wrested Sundays back from your Curmudgeon, hmmm?) But this is also to the advantage of the pro-freedom community, for the unaffiliated American is far less likely to gravitate toward viciousness than toward calm, well reasoned argument. Present trends continuing -- always a hazardous assumption, but one can make no other -- an accelerating stream of young Americans, eager to engage with the political process and as desirous of thinking well of themselves as we all are, will enter our ranks, to the dismay of the statists and authoritarians of the Left. They'll simply be more comfortable with us.
Preaching to the choir? Perhaps. But are you quite certain no one outside the choir will be affected?
Comments
I have the utmost respect for your patience. As a machinist and mechanic, I know when something cannot be saved, and must simply be broken off with a big hammer and thrown out. I have my big hammer at the ready. It’s a solution upon which I can get a firm grip.
Posted by og on 01/29/2007 at 10:13 PMFunny you should mention this today. Riding around with my sister yesterday, she told me her son, a senior in high school, was taking economics. They’d had a debate in class about the minimum wage and her son favored the increase.
She sat him down at the computer, had him read something I’d written about it, told him of her own experiences, and by the end of the coversation he’d changed his mind.
I don’t think anyone ever really knows who they effect in totality, but I’m convinced every good effort returns fruit. It just may not be fruit one sees.
Posted by Lana on 01/29/2007 at 11:13 PMYou’re quite right. My father told me that the problem with the world in the 1930s wasn’t that enough people weren’t listening, but rather that not enough people were speaking.
Posted by bernie on 01/29/2007 at 11:56 PMOff-topic, I do this thing every Tuesday where I pick the colors of a blog and make a mosaic. This week I picked [url="http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2007/01/ota_eternity_road.html"]Eternity Road
[/url].You don’t win anything, it’s just a pointless photographic meme that I enjoy doing; I hope you like it as well.
Posted by bernie on 01/30/2007 at 01:30 PMYes, you may be preaching to the choir but don’t underestimate (I’m sure you don’t) the value of the Comradeship, Respite, and Usable Arguments to those of us sometimes too frantically busy to come by those things in other ways. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Posted by on 01/30/2007 at 10:18 PM
