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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
“Reality Be Damned, Just Don’t Disturb My Fantasies!”
Fran here. If you're a regular reader of Eternity Road, you've probably noticed that the theme of wishful thinking triumphant over reason and evidence has become more frequent in the essays here. Needless to say, that's because it's been much on my mind. What's put it there is the general tenor of the political dialogue and its accelerating severance from the actual course of national and world events. On some topics, the disjunction has become so wide that what was once wishful thinking predicated on an unlikely but still technically possible hope has descended into the realm of fantasy.
Mind you, there've been times that I've surrendered to the tendency to think with my desires. No doubt we all have. When your desires are strong and the actual state of reality displeases you, it can be a hard thing to resist. But reality trumps fantasy, always has, and always will -- and it is our insistence on steering by our fantasies that creates the most trouble in our lives and the lives of those affected by our decisions.
Of course, to him who's fully committed to his fantasies -- I almost said "for" his fantasies, but caught myself in time -- that last part doesn't matter all that much.
It wasn't until I plunged into the study of economics that I began to grasp just how far from the actual workings of the universe wishful thinking can take us. Indeed, economics is largely the study of what happens, in a world of scarce resources, when you try to wish away the natural laws that govern the behavior of men.
Economics is widely thought to be tied to things that can be measured in monetary terms. Once upon a time, that would not have been too inaccurate a notion, but the field has advanced a long way this century past. Thinkers have extended the incentives / costs / constraints model that underpins all economic reasoning to cover seemingly non-mensurable sorts of decision making, including about learning, travel, romance, demographics, familial relations, political affiliation, electoral behavior, international dealings, and warfare. The great surprise from this development is how seldom the economic model fails to suit the analysis undertaken.
The late, great Herman Kahn, inarguably one of the master intellects of the Twentieth Century, founded his entire approach to strategic analysis and planning on an economic model, which he co-developed with Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling and RAND Corporation luminaries Albert and Rebecca Wohlstetter. Kahn, whose doctorate was in physics, came early to the realization that strategic analysis wasn't about the physics of nuclear reactions but about the desires, fears, convictions and commitments of persons with varying degrees of knowledge, intellect, propensity for risk, and decision making power.
Baldly, Kahn and his colleagues worked from the thesis that incentives, costs, and constraints govern all human decisions, including decisions about whether to push the Big Red Button. No divergent school of strategic analysis has risen to challenge them over the last fifty years.
One of the fantasies being widely entertained at this time is that of a peaceful resolution of our nuclear standoff with the theocracy that rules Iran. Every syllable that drops from the mouths of Supreme Leader Ali Khameini or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expresses an unalterable commitment to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and their use in the destruction of Israel. Western fantasists determined to find some path other than a prompt invasion and the decapitation of the Iranian regime have little to say on the matter except that "nothing could be worse than war" and "it's just bluster, they don't really mean it."
"Nothing could be worse than war" -- ? Nothing? Not even the nuclear annihilation of Manhattan? That maxim might need a little re-engineering before its deployment on the East Coast. As for "they don't really mean it," where's the evidence? The Iranian regime is so brutally, Islamically totalitarian that it executes homosexuals and women accused of adultery by strangling. The leaders of that regime are convinced of the imminent arrival of the "twelfth Imam" and the Armageddon that will bring the triumph of Islam over all things. A past president of the regime, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, has openly said that even were the consequences to include the complete destruction of Iran, a nuclear assault on Israel would still be right and necessary, because the Islamic world could absorb the damage, but Israeli "colonialism" would be ended forever.
When a potential aggressor has no concern for his own survival or the survival of anything he claims to love, and is convinced that his agenda is mandatory for religious reasons, he cannot be bargained with and he cannot be deterred. His world is all incentives: no costs, and no constraints. To imagine him reachable by anything but annihilation -- actual, not threatened -- is to trade in fantasy.
A remarkable number of non-engineers are afflicted with an "engineering mentality" with regard to society, economics, and general human relations. That mentality, which had its heyday in the Nineteenth Century among the Marxians, the Fabians, the Benthamites, and the Social Gospellers, held that the world can be remade to any desired degree, provided only that one starts from the right place and takes the right measures. Its manifestation in our political order was nicely skewered by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman in his introduction to William E. Simon's book A Time For Truth:
The view that if there is a problem, if there is something wrong, the way to deal with it is to pass a law, set up a governmental agency (staffed, of course, by the intellectuals urging this solution), and use the police power of the state to correct it is, as Mr. Simon demonstrates so well, a superficially appealing view. It is simple, as well as simpleminded, and appeals to our natural impulse to take personal credit for the good things that happen and blame a "devil" for the bad things.
Taken to its ultimate, this attitude would suggest that Washington could halve or quarter the prices of oil and gas products by decree, abolish crimes of violence by banning the possession of weapons, regulate away employers' preferences for English-speaking employees without facial piercings or felony convictions, and make everyone in the country wealthy by raising the minimum wage to $100 per hour. It's just a matter of passing the right laws and then enforcing them strenuously enough. Of course, passing and enforcing laws is all a government can do, so that had better be sufficient to support the fantasies of those who think Utopia can be brought about by political action.
This view of human nature as infinitely malleable and conformable to any envisioned shape for society is indistinguishable from that of the engineer striving to build a machine from a collection of parts. The engineer never imagines that the parts might rebel; pieces of metal, plastic and glass just don't do that. If by chance the machine doesn't work as he'd planned, he takes the thing to pieces, finds and discards the unsuitable parts, replaces them with better ones and tries again.
The late Don LaVoie noted how ironic it is that persons who hold such a conception of Mankind and society should forever be dismissing those who argue against them as "old-fashioned" and "stuck in the Nineteenth Century." If we've learned anything this century past, it's that human nature resists imposed changes more fiercely than we'd ever dreamed. Each attempt to construct a fantasist's paradise by political action, whether communist, fascist, theocratic, majoritarian, or otherwise, has produced, in Harold Stassen's phrase, "a dictator's hellhole."
Clearly, there's a persistent, powerful dynamic at work: a law of human nature that refuses to bend to the fantasists' whims. Equally clearly, the inevitable rise to power of the worst men in the world suggests that the erection of a totalitarian state creates incentives more favorable to the rise of a Stalin or a Hitler than to that of a George Washington or a Konrad Adenauer. But such things must not be permitted to spoil so lovely a dream.
If the mentality of the social re-engineers is amusingly absurd, nevertheless it creates no small amount of disorder, at great cost and for no perceptible gain. But the mentality of the coercive moralists, who believe law can make men virtuous according to their standards, is downright horrifying. Its consequences when implemented range from merely reinforcing squalor to the creation of conditions for war.
Many a reader would immediately think, "Oh, he must be talking about religious conservatives." Not necessarily; only as regards those aspects of human behavior which involve only informed, consenting adults, but which they'd like to ban by law. In point of fact, religious conservatives have had far less success at enacting their preferences into law than secular liberal prigs. The difference in their approach accounts for nearly all of that. Most religious conservatives will readily admit that their revulsions arise from their faith, which most Americans regard as an insufficient basis for legislation. By contrast, though the secular liberal argues for his position as a moral imperative, he eschews faith and invokes egalitarian social justice:
- It's unjust that women earn less cash income than men.
- It's unjust that the executives of Fortune 1000 companies are preponderantly white and male.
- It's unjust that homosexuals aren't allowed to marry.
- It's unjust that illegal immigrants should be treated as, well, illegal immigrants.
- It's unjust that well-to-do people can afford to live in suburbs with relatively safe streets and school systems.
- It's unjust that poor women should have to pay for their own abortions.
- It's unjust that Rush Limbaugh should have twenty times as many listeners as the whole of Air America.
- It's unjust that that nut case Tom Cruise should get to sleep with Mimi Rogers, and Nicole Kidman, and Penelope Cruz, and Katie Holmes, and...well, you get the idea.
Each of the above situations results from innumerable private, voluntary choices of mature...well, biologically mature, at least...adults. To interfere with any one of them by force of law would send ripples through American society and its markets that could never be bounded. Coercive moralists have tried to interfere in all of them:
- With regulations and lawsuits that attempt to enforce "gender pay equity" upon employers;
- With race- and sex-discrimination lawsuits targeting the boards of directors of major corporations;
- With lawsuits challenging the definition of marriage as a heterosexual arrangement;
- With mass movements that attempt to subvert the immigration laws of the United States;
- With racial quotas, "affordable housing," and "busing;"
- With federal and state funding to abortion providers, and in some states and municipalities, direct defraying of the cost of abortions for indigent women;
- With "equal time" regulations and rulings such as the "Fairness Doctrine."
The sole exception to their pattern of interferences, successful and otherwise, is Tom Cruise's love life, which might be the only case where they'd get an adequate concurrence. In each case, American society, including the nominal beneficiary group, has found itself worse off after the intervention than before it.
People don't change their behavior because of a law, or because of any particular degree of enforcement power put behind it. They change their behavior when they sense that the incentives, costs, and constraints that pertain to what they've been doing, or not doing, have shifted sufficiently to justify or necessitate a change. That cannot be effectuated by law unless at least 98% of the citizenry is willing to back that law, and its enforcement, to the hilt.
The War on Drugs is only the most dramatic example. Here's a set of laws that would appear to have massive public support -- polls on the subject indicate a degree of popular approval around 88% -- but that are impossible to enforce anyway. The consequences of the most stringent attempts at enforcement have been the worst: huge gang wars over "turf;" massive degrees of police corruption; the transformation of many lower-income areas into virtual free-fire zones; the alienation of large numbers of potentially salvageable souls from the body politic. These gargantuan costs have had no verifiable effect upon the consumption of illegal drugs. Clearly, something is wrong with this picture. It turns out to be something wrong with virtually every attempt to enforce a majority's standards upon a substantial, determined, and agile minority.
But ineffectuality has never troubled the coercive moralists. It's much more important that they "send a message" to us grubby ones about the purity of their hearts and the benevolence of their intentions...and that they maintain their fantasies about how the world "ought to work," of course.
I can't let this essay close without backhanding a fourth group: the one with which I'm most closely ideologically aligned.
Time was, philosophers cherished a notion that they could deduce all of reality and all of its laws from their own contemplations, without needing to expose themselves to the hurly-burly of society and world events. This sort of "ivory tower" thinking has given rise to some charming but ludicrous conceptions, including Plato's notion of categories as prior to their elements, Rousseau's dicta about child-rearing, Marx's ideas on economics, and John Kerry's conceptions of how to run a country or a war. Now and then, a thinker of this sort would achieve political power, and would attempt to impose his uncontaminated-by-reality concept upon his nation through the law. Chaos has always followed.
One such concept is the doctrine of pure libertarianism.
Please don't mistake me; I call myself a libertarian for a reason. Nearly all libertarian policy prescriptions are good things, to the extent the people would accept them. But people will resist being remade by libertarian theory quite as stoutly as they have by socialist doctrine:
- When a sufficient majority concurs that some practice is too revolting to be tolerated, then even if it would appear to infringe on no man's rights, affects only informed, consenting adults, and cannot be practically eradicated, that practice will be banned.
- When a sufficient majority concurs that a subvention to some "disadvantaged" or "deserving" group would serve the greater good, then even though the minority would never agree to surrender its equal rights or fund it voluntarily, the State will compel it to do so.
- When a sufficient majority concurs that the national interest is threatened by events in some faraway place, or that the national conscience cannot rest until some distant injustice or tragedy has been rectified, the army will march, or the State will extend tax-funded succor, or some other politically powered deed unjustifiable by libertarian standards will be performed.
The word that springs to mind, distasteful as it may be, is "inevitable." Majorities of sufficient size can and will lose their historical perspective, can and will forget or discard the proper constraints on State power, can and will march on emotion untainted by logic. Should they be thwarted by a judge, a jury, or an executive with pure Constitutional allegiances, they can turn violent. Indeed, they can upend the whole structure of a nation.
For the foreseeable future:
- There will always be laws against some practices -- some forms of intoxication; some forms of prostitution; some forms of gambling -- that, strictly speaking, can only harm those who voluntarily involve themselves.
- There will always be some form of public support for "the poor," public "services" that duplicate what the market could easily provide, subsidies to certain favored organizations and industries, and regulations that purport to protect "the consumer" from "exploitation" by "greedy" businesses.
- When the popular conscience is pricked, there will be government-organized, government-funded expeditions to relieve the suffering of others to whom nothing was ever promised. When the popular rage is elicited, there will be war.
To argue against such things from the natural-rights-based perspective will far more often than not be a good and desirable thing...as long as one doesn't expect to win. But libertarian activists in the United States have largely worked themselves into a state of utter delusion about the degree of political change that would be possible in any thinkable amount of time. Given the scant reward their efforts have achieved to this point, it's understandable that so many have removed themselves from policy discourse and cloistered themselves in esoteric libertarians-only discussion salons. It's more comfortable to confer and confute with those who share one's fantasy than to labor unrewarded in the fields of practical politics.
The question one must ask about these self-immersions in fantasy is, of course, why:
- Why do some fantasists insist on ignoring the evidence before them?
- Why do some fantasists refuse to confront logical objections to their schemes?
- Why do some fantasists maintain that being right, by whatever standard, is more important than making measurable progress?
There is no blanket answer, except perhaps this one: He who finds his fantasy world preferable to unbending reality, and who finds a way to maintain a residence in it, has achieved high personal satisfaction, which outweighs more nebulous gains such as the good of the country, the defense of freedom, or the survival of the human race. It's not too dissimilar to the laissez les bon temps roulez attitude of the Orleanos during the years when it was entirely clear to anyone who looked at them critically that the city's defenses against Mother Nature had become inadequate. It takes an unusually low degree of time preference to turn away from pleasure and comfort definitely available in the here and now to cope with a possible calamity that (one still has hope) might never come to pass.
Perhaps the gods had some of this in mind when they buried Hope at the bottom of Pandora's box, under all those ravening demons.
Eternity Road will be on hiatus for Thursday and Friday, as the C.S.O. and I are heading upstate tomorrow to enjoy the annual Dutchess County Fair. New material will be posted Saturday at the earliest.
Comments
Enjoy the salute to agriculture.
Posted by Akaky on 08/23/2006 at 07:45 PMOne can usually tell what’s coming next when the media reports on some ‘egregious’ violation committed against their Leftist (but not always, sometimes it’s the ‘Evangelicals’) sentiments. It is at these times that my husband and I just beat them to the punch and begin to chant at home, in unison: “make a law, make a law”.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/24/2006 at 11:55 AMThis is quite likely the best piece I’ve read on Eternity Road. It really sums up the truth about the Left. It’s no wonder, then, that the Fantasists become so angry when you attempt to attack their carefully constructed utopian vision with cold, hard reality.
Posted by Xealot on 08/24/2006 at 12:51 PMA chilling metaphor in Arthur Koestler’s 1950 novel The Age of Longing does a good job of encapsulating pathologically-wishful thinking:
The action of the book takes place in France, where a massive Soviet invasion is clearly impending—but denial of this obvious reality abounds, especially among the intellectuals. Jules Commanche, a Resistance hero and a senior French security officer, explains this phenomenon to a young American woman:
“No, Mademoiselle, don’t be misled by appearances. France and what else is left of Europe may look like a huge dormitory to you, but I assure you nobody in it is really asleep. Have you ever spent a night in a mental ward? During the Occupation, a doctor who belonged to our group got me into one when the police were after me. It was a ward of more or less hopeless cases, most of whom were marked down for drastic neurosurgical operations. When the male nurse made his round, I thought everybody was asleep. Later I found out that they were only pretending, and that everybody was busy, behind closed eyes, trying to cope after his own fashion with what was coming to him. Some were pursuing their delusions with a happy smile, like our famous Pontieux (a philosopher modelled on Sartre—ed). Others were working on their pathetic plans of escape, naively hoping that with a little dissimulation, or bribery, or self-abasement, they could get around the tough male nurses, the locked doors, the operating table. Others were busy explaining to themselves that it wouldn’t hurt, and that to have holes drilled into one’s skull and parts of one’s brain taken out was the nicest thing that could happen to one. And still, others, the quiet schizos who were the majority, almost succeede in making themselves believe that nothing would happen, that it was all a matter of exaggerated rumours, and that tomorrow would be like yesterday. These looked as if they were really asleep. Only an occasional nervous twitch of their lips or eyes betrayed the strain of disbelieving what they knew to be inevitable…No, Mademoiselle nobody was really asleep.”
Posted by david foster on 08/27/2006 at 03:56 PM
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