Politics as Religion

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A commenter writes,

“Politics as religion” is such a lazy argument because nobody has a definition of religion. It’s classic case of defining the obscure in terms of the more obscure. By any reasonable definition, a religion needs a transcendent being. Where is the transcendent being of this “secular religion”? You can’t just say the passion level is so high that it has passed into religious territory. That’s not how it works; the beliefs have to actually be structured like a religion, whatever that would mean.

The term “religion” does indeed have too many connotations. So let us not start there.

Instead, let us speak of a subset of culture that defines a tribe at large scale. A broad set of norms, symbols, beliefs and practices constitutes culture. Narrow that down to a subset of norms, symbols, beliefs and practices that clearly define who is or is not a member of the tribe. Focus on that subset. For example, Jews eat gefilte fish, observe Yom Kippur, and don’t pray to Jesus. But only a subset of those (observing Yom Kippur and not praying to Jesus) are tribally definitive. The rabbis won’t question your Jewish identity if you turn down gefilte fish.

No tribe is perfectly defined by a precise list of cultural characteristics. But bear with me and think in terms of tribally defining cultural subsets.

A tribally defining cultural subset will (a) tend to empower adherents to obey, enforce, and regularly re-affirm tribal norms, and (b) lead its members to fear and despise people who are not members of the tribe.

Further comments:

1. Cosmopolitans (including progressives, libertarians, and conservative intellectuals) would say that, yes, historically, “fear and despise” was part of religion, but that is a bug, not a feature. Ironically, cosmopolitans start to look like a tribe that fears and despises people who espouse traditional religions. And yes, there does seem to be a fourth axis here: cosmopolitan vs. populist, or Bobo vs. anti-Bobo.

2. The role of a transcendent being is to help motivate members to obey tribal norms, for fear of being punished by the transcendent being (See Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods). However, belief in a transcendent being is not necessary to have a modern large-scale tribe. But it does seem necessary to have an out-group that you fear and despise.

3. Historically, major religions have usually fit my notion of a cultural subset that defines a large-scale tribe.

4. Usually, modern nation-states have fit this notion. There are those who say that nation-states were a better tribal bonding technology (so to speak) than belief in a transcendent being, and hence they made religion relatively unnecessary.

5. Finally, to the commenter’s point, I think that some political ideologies have come to fit my notion of a cultural subset that defines a large-scale tribe. The current progressive ideology seems to me to fit the notion particularly well. But the three-axis model suggests that conservatives and libertarians are tribal, also. Again, the emergence of the Bobo vs. anti-Bobo conflict has scrambled things quite a bit.

Think tanks and special interests

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Daniel Drezner writes,

New America is embroiled in a pay-for-play controversy of its own making. The New York Times reported that Slaughter had parted ways with Barry Lynn, an influential critic of the growing clout of U.S. tech companies. He ran Open Markets, an initiative “to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization,” and had been scathing in his assessments of Google, a firm that had donated more than $21 million to New America’s coffers. Slaughter has disputed some of the facts in the story and issued a statement asserting that Lynn’s “refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality” led to the rupture. Slaughter didn’t deny, however, that she had implored Lynn in emails, “We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,” nor that she had warned Lynn to “just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”

My thoughts:

1. For a long time, I thought that the New America Foundation was excessively focused on the “net neutrality” issue. Google has promoted the same definition of “net neutrality.” So if it is corrupt for New America to be aligned with Google, then New America has been corrupt for a long time. The issue with Barry Lynn is almost beside the point.

2. It does strike me as unseemly when a particular business interest provides funding for a researcher and gets research that aligns with its interests. I am bothered by the Stiglitz-Orszag work for Fannie Mae. You may recall that I accused the Brookings Institution and something called the Bipartisan Policy Center of doing the bidding of big banks.

3. It seems to me that the infamous Kochs tend to fund on the basis of ideology, which I regard as less unseemly than funding on the basis of corporate interest. Perhaps I am naive about that. Ironically, I think that their libertarian ideology, if it were to gain sway, would reduce the power of special interests by taking government out of the arenas in which special interests exert so much power.

4. I think that there are much worse forms of political heavy-handedness than funding research. The housing lobby and the teachers’ unions come to mind.

5. I do not think that there is an effective way to stop businesses from funding research that is in their interest. Economists write what they honestly believe (that includes Stiglitz, the Brookings researchers, and the New America folks). It is natural for corporations to find that research supporting their interests is credible and deserves support. Do not attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by confirmation bias.

6. Should you always trust government-funded research more than private-funded research? Suppose that the topic is the Fed’s conduct during the financial crisis. Suppose that the research is funded by the Fed.

7. It is often the case that there is research that supports either side of an issue. The problem is not so much that special interests are able to fund “their” side. The problem is when the other side cannot get funding at all, or cannot get its results disseminated and discussed. That would be a harder problem to spot. It is one thing to identify a source of funding. It is another thing to identify a source of non-funding.

Greg Ip Praises Economics

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He writes,

By stripping the emotions from pressing problems, economists can often illuminate the most practical ways to tackle them—but only if ordinary people and their representatives are prepared to listen.

There is a gulf between small-scale society and large-scale society. Use the Dunbar number as a breaking point, so small scale means less than 150 people and large scale means more than that. At small scale, coordination problems can be solved by intuition and mutual recognition. You do not need markets or centralized command. But at small scale you cannot have much specialization, and you cannot provide complex goods and services.

At large scale, the coordination problem becomes much more complex. Economists pay attention to this, and that makes them wiser than non-economists who do not.

But many economists are far too oriented toward the possibilities of centralized command (government regulation) as a coordinating mechanism. And they are too smug about what they can accomplish using math and statistics.

For my perspective on the topic of Ip’s essay, see How Effective is Economic Theory?

Cheerleading vs. Analysis

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Mike Rappaport writes,

While I found Kling’s idea quite interesting, I should say that in my own mind all three of these values (as well as others) are important. I am a consequentialist libertarian. I start with liberty as the basic building block of good consequences. But one of the features of liberty is that it allows a sophisticated civilization to grow that is of great value. And I also believe that liberty greatly helps to prevent oppression and to help the oppressed of the world. So I care about all of these values, but, as a libertarian, liberty is the basic building block.

I am starting to think that The Three Languages of Politics is the book that everybody understands but nobody gets. The aspect that nobody gets might be termed the difference between cheerleading and analysis.

If you are playing the role of a basketball analyst, you evaluate strategy. You might say, “The Cougars should use a zone. If they get too far behind, they should use a full-court press.”

If you are playing the role of a basketball cheerleader, you recite chants that exalt your team and disparage the opposing team. If you say, “Adam, Adam, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, Bobby can” you are not really talking about strategy for using Adam and Bobby.

The three-axis model is about how we do political cheerleading, not how we do political analysis. Of course, everyone is against oppression, barbarism, and coercion. But when we do political cheerleading, we prefer one axis over the others. And we disparage the other political teams by accusing them of being on the opposite side of our preferred axis.

From capitalism to financialism

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Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel write,

In 2013, natural persons owned only 40 percent of all issued public stock, down from 84 percent in the 1960s. And if we take all issued equity, the trend has been even more pronounced. In the 1950s only 6.1 percent of all issued equity was owned by institutions but, in 2009, institutions held more than 50 percent of all equity.

…the shift from capitalist ownership to institutional ownership has undermined the ethos of capitalism and has created a new class of companies without entrepreneurial and controlling owners. Contrary to some expectations, that has not created new space for free-wheeling and entrepreneurial managers to act on their own judgment instead of following the instructions of owners. Rather, managers are subject to a growing number of rules and guidelines designed for and by risk-averse owners with little knowledge about their investees.

I am not convinced that the current system is as dire as the authors make it out to be. Fifty years ago, it was difficult to keep a large firm from throwing capital at investments with poor returns. Today, reallocating away from firms with poor opportunities is easier.

G. Mark Towhey on Populism

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He writes,

Almost by mistake, this bloc of typical citizens—overstressed, under-informed, concerned more with pragmatic quality of life issues than idealistic social goals—has become a powerful political movement. And we didn’t see them coming. Conventional political leaders seem to completely misunderstand them, and even their own champions often appear to disrespect them. They do so at their peril.

Towhey sees these voters as concerned with practical solutions, not ideology. I hope that does not mean that they just want the trains to run on time.

Is cosmopolitan libertarianism practical?

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William Wilson writes,

[Jason] Kuznicki himself is a representative of a currently fashionable sort of cosmopolitan libertarianism that has never existed in governmental form, and which I suspect is the least likely form of government ever to exist. What if a practical politics that took account of human frailty implied a world formed from a combination of cosmopolitan but illiberal city-states, unified but homogeneous nation-states, and sprawling empires that vacillate between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies? In fact, this is the world that has existed for most of recorded history. Perhaps the real ideological blinders are those which tell us that we have transcended this condition and can replace it with something else.

Read the whole essay. I agree with much of it, but I am not sure about this paragraph. Today, where are the city-states, other than Singapore, and is Singapore less liberal than other states? The homogeneous nation-states would include Japan and Denmark. What is the dividing line between a homogeneous nation-state and a sprawling empire? Can I assume that China, Russia, and the U.S. are all sprawling empires? What about Canada? Switzerland?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The Original Internet Architecture

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Tyler Cowen writes,

It remains the case that the most significant voluntary censorship issues occur every day in mainstream non-internet society, including what gets on TV, which books are promoted by major publishers, who can rent out the best physical venues, and what gets taught at Harvard or for that matter in high school. In all of these areas, universal intellectual service was never a relevant ideal to begin with

The original Internet architecture was “smart ends, dumb network.” The smart ends are the computers where people compose and read messages. The “dumb network” is the collection of lines and routers that transmits the bits.

Suppose you create a message, such as an email, a blog post, or a video. When your computer sends the message, it gets broken into packets. Each packet is very small. It has a little bit of content and an address telling where it is going. The Internet’s routers read the address on the packet and forward it along. In Ed Krol’s metaphor, the Internet routers and communication lines act like the Pony Express, relaying the packet to its final destination, without opening it up to see what is inside. The dumb network transmits these packets without knowing anything about what is in them. It does not know whether the packet is an entire very short email or a tiny part of a video.

When your computer receives a message, it consists of one or more packets–usually more than one. The computer opens up the packets and figures out how to put them together to form the message. It then presents you with the email, the blog post, the video, or what have you.

A connection between one end and the other end stays open only long enough to send and receive each packet. To transmit any given message, I may receive many packets from you, but those packets could come over different paths of the network, and thus each packet uses a different end-to-end connection. Think of end-to-end connections as being intermittent rather than persistent.

Some consequences of this “smart ends, dumb network” architecture:

1. The network cannot identify spam. It does not even know that a packet is part of an email message–if it did, spam could be deterred by charging email senders a few cents for each email unless the recipient waives the charge.

2. The network does not know when it is sending packets that will be re-assembled into offensive content. Otherwise, it would be easier to implement censorship.

3. The network does not know the identity of the sender of the packets or the priority attached to them. In that sense, it is inherently “neutral.” The network does not know the difference between a life-or-death message and a cat video.

I get the sense that this original architectural model may no longer describe the current Internet.

–When content is cached on the network or stored in the “cloud,” it feels as if the network is no longer ignorant about content.

–Many features, such as predictive typing in a Google search, are designed to mimic a persistent connection between one end and the other.

–When I use Gmail, a lot of the software processing is done by Google’s computers. That blurs the distinction between the network and the endpoints. Google is performing some of each function. Other major platforms, such as Facebook, also appear to blur this distinction.

The new Internet has advantages in terms of speed and convenience for users. But there are some potential choke points that did not exist with the original architecture.

Ralph Peters sounds like David Halberstam

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Peters writes,

It really comes down to that blood test: What will men die for? The answer, were we willing to open our eyes, is that more Afghans will volunteer to die for the Taliban than for our dream of a “better” Afghanistan. Nor could the Taliban have survived without support among the population. This is Mao 101.

The entire column is in that vein. It sounds very similar to Halberstam’s diagnosis of the Vietnam tragedy.

Frederick W. Kagan makes the case for staying in Afghanistan. An excerpt:

to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He [President Trump] also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.

My guess is that the call that the President has to make concerning Afghanistan is a close one, but I am more inclined to agree with Peters. I have no military experience or any other basis for expertise, but for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my thoughts:

1. I am leery of blaming the problems of the Afghan government on corruption. In a limited-access order (borrowing the terminology of North, Weingast, and Wallis), what we call corruption is the only way for a government to remain in power. More generally, if victory depends on our capabilities for nation-building, then I have doubts about the mission.

2. If the Taliban took over, we might be able to convince them not to allow Al Qaeda a safe haven there. If deterrence works, then that would be cheaper than war.

David Brooks on what moderates believe

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He wrote,

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

I like the entire column, but especially this paragraph. I care more about my family and folk dancing than I do about politics. And I think that if everyone cared mostly about their relationships and their hobbies, the world would be a better place.

Note that I schedule my posts several days in advance. I think that this makes me write more moderately than I would if I were racing to give my immediate reaction to things.