Do you have a group of 20 or more that would like to discuss with me The Three Languages of Politics? If so, leave a comment. I am trying to arrange a book tour.
By the way, now would be a good time to pre-order the third edition. Try to generate some early momentum.
Their new book, to be released July 30, is called Socialism Sucks, and it’s off-beat in a refreshing way. Its motif is a breezy alcohol-fueled travelogue. You follow Ben and Bob as they visit Sweden, Cuba, Georgia (not the state next to Florida, but the country next to Russia), and other places. One interesting chapter gives their impressions from a conference of American socialists, where participants seem to be operating without a clear definition of “socialism.” Another interesting chapter transcribes a conversation with Matt Kibbe on common populist appeals of libertarianism and socialism.
The basic question that a lot of us have is why capitalism is such a boo-word among young people and why socialism is such a yeah-word. Young people sympathetic to socialism seem determined to believe that when they observe things they don’t like, capitalism is at fault; when they observe things that they do like, socialism deserves the credit. Yet the book drives home the point that the truth is the opposite.
Overall, my reaction to Socialism Sucks resembles my reaction to Tyler Cowen’s Big Business. Both represent a clever, original approach to trying to persuade people to appreciate capitalism. I remain skeptical that either book will persuade (or even reach) people who do not already share its point of view.
I still have not read the book. But here is the most informative review I have seen. Brad Littlejohn writes,
Using the model of a family and a business as contrasting types, Hazony highlights the extent to which modern political philosophy has come to treat the relations of political order as fundamentally like those of a business: “governed primarily on the basis of the individual’s assessments as to what will enhance his physical welfare and protect and increase his property, and by his ongoing consent to the terms of an agreement with others for the joint attainment of these purposes” (83).
In fact, however, a closer look at both the historical foundations of most political orders, as well as the conditions that enable states to continue to flourish, reveals relations more like those of a family: bonds of mutual loyalty anchored, indeed, by an initial act of mutual consent, but sustained through thick and thin by a sense of mutual belonging, mutual indebtedness, and mutual duty to “pass on to another generation an inheritance that has been bequeathed to us by our parents and their ancestors” (85). Whereas the former model encourages us to ask at every moment whether the arrangement is serving our interests, and to cut loose if it ceases to, the latter model encourages us “to stand true in the face of adversity, to refuse the urge to start everything anew” (88).
Read the whole thing. I only picked this excerpt because it reminded me of the distinction between sub-Dunbar and super-Dunbar. Hazony is saying that a nation-state, which is super-Dunbar in terms of population size, holds together because people feel the sort of attachment to one another that they feel in a sub-Dunbar setting. There is an obvious tension here, and Littlejohn dwells on Hazony’s attempts to deal with it.
Much later, Littlejohn writes,
Should America become a majority-minority nation, or—more decisively—should it lose its confidence in the culture and traditions that have actually sustained our political order over two and a half centuries, our abstract ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy would quickly cease to have motivating force to maintain a viable political identity or set of mutual loyalties. Which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like a diagnosis of our present condition.
In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,
it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.
I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.
Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.
I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.
But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.
At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.
Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.
I reviewed Why Culture Matters Most, by David Rose.
According to David C. Rose, trust is essential for prosperity. A high-trust society is one in which almost everyone is trustworthy almost all of the time. . .
Rose’s thesis is interesting. But his focus is narrow in two respects. He boils culture down to a single variable, namely trustworthiness. And he boils trustworthiness down to an individual’s taste or inclinations.
I spell out these criticisms in the essay.
Perhaps I will have finished the book by the time this post goes up. Or I will have finished without making it to the end.
Early on, he writes,
Politics originates in nature, in the constancy of human nature, which impels people to associate in society to avoid violent death and other inconveniences, and then to gain other, positive advantages. If, however, there is no universal human nature, then there can be no universal principles of political organization and action. If what we call human nature is but the distillation of a particular people’s traditions and experiences, then nature, at bottom, has no bottom. It is merely the most durable aspect of something that is ultimately not durable–the sediment of history from transitory cultures.
Will sees the left-right divide in these terms. The right sees human nature as fixed, and we must arrange our institutions to best accommodate this fixed human nature. The left sees human nature as malleable, and we must arrange our institutions to improve human nature.
There is something to this. But I think that Will’s emphasis on human nature, which leads to an emphasis on natural rights, is more libertarian than conservative.
For me, conservatism means a belief that cultural change is better accomplished by evolution than by revolution. There is wisdom in traditions, and we do not grasp that wisdom sufficiently well for it to be safe to impose dramatic changes. I see markets (or decentralized innovation) as a more effective evolutionary mechanism than government. Hence, I come down on the side of libertarianism from that perspective.
This post is inspired by a lot of recent reading, too much to reference here. Some of it pertains to Sohrab Ahmari David French. But most of it pertains to Scott Alexander’s recent posts inspired by Joseph Henrich’s work. (Note that I also praised the Henrich book myself.)
In the latter post, Scott writes,
We are the heirs to a five-hundred-year-old tradition of questioning traditions and demanding rational justifications for things. Armed with this tradition, western civilization has conquered the world and landed on the moon. If there were ever any tradition that has received cultural evolution’s stamp of approval, it would be this one.
Sometimes, there is a conflict between the approach that you arrive at using your reasoning of the moment and the existing tradition. For example, Bryan Caplan argues that a reasoning libertarian should oppose immigration restrictions.
Under such circumstances, which should prevail: your momentary reason or tradition?
Conservatives argue for paying considerable respect to tradition. Your individual, momentary reason is not sufficient to overwhelm generations of experience. Henrich’s anthropology supports that (although Henrich does not define himself as a conservative). Always going with momentary reason would mean depriving ourselves of cultural intelligence.
But obviously, if you always go with tradition, you never evolve in a better direction. So you want some experimentation.
The Whig history is that our current society reflects retention of successful experiments. The dour conservative point of view is that it has all been downhill since. . .the radical Social Justice turn of the last five years. . .or the 1960s. . .or Rousseau. . .or John Locke. Take your pick.
A few hundred years ago, a lot of cultural transmission depended on the elderly. Old people knew more than young people, so it was hard for young people to question tradition.
Today, old people don’t know how to use smart phones as well as young people do. So why should young people think old people aren’t equally antiquated on issues of race relations, gender, or free speech?
I wish that old people and traditions had somewhat higher status than they do with young progressives, and I wish that momentary reason had somewhat lower status.
UPDATE: After I wrote this post but before it was scheduled to appear, Scott Alexander elaborated further. I will have another post on this tomorrow soon.
Range, by David Epstein. You can listen to a Russ Roberts podcast with him here. The book argues for the virtues of cultivating talents in multiple areas.
I find the main argument convincing. One of my rules for financial life is
When you have little left to learn on your job, it is time to move on.
2. But I don’t buy everything in the book. He has a chapter on problems that stumped specialized experts but were solved by outsiders. OK, but what makes those stories fun is that more often the reverse is true. Specialized experts solve problems that would stump outsiders. Don’t get carried way with this outsider problem-solving stuff.
3. He points to research suggesting that teachers improve when they change schools. Of course, any research that claims to measure teacher effectiveness and show significant differences is suspect. The Null Hypothesis does not concede defeat so easily.
4. But I can readily imagine that changing organizations would improve anyone’s performance. Your supervisors and colleagues provide you with cultural learning. When you go to a new organization, you get exposure to another set of cultural practices, and you can pick the best from both. Unless you are rigidly attached to the first organization’s approach, or the second organization doesn’t let you port over any good ideas from your first organization, you should get better.
5. Look at the guests that Tyler Cowen interviews for his conversations with Tyler. They are almost always generalists. A top-tier economist (or top-tier anything) with little or no experience or interests outside of his or her specialty would be really dull to interview.
6. One can argue that you need multiple cultural influences to be an interesting person and, in the modern world, to be an effective person. The small-town resident who has never traveled more than 50 miles, the professor who has never functioned outside of academia, the professional who has never had an adult friend or colleague who lacked a college degree–all of these people are stunted in their cultural growth.
I suggest that we should stop trying to talk about culture and institutions as if they were separate. Instead, I propose that we think of culture as having two components: informal culture, which we can call folkways; and formal culture, which we can call institutions. In this framework, institutions are subsumed under culture, as an aspect of culture, a subset of culture, or a manifestation of culture.
f many people walking between two particular places take the same route, their trampling will eventually mark a path. That is a folkway. If the town paves the path with a sidewalk, that is an institution.
Tribalism, Brooks argues, is appealing because it helps forge a type of community. But “it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe.” Americans everywhere are seeking relationship. But “weavers” do so by embodying the virtues of empathy, generosity, “radical hospitality,” and “deep mutuality.” In Brooks’s view, a powerful communitarian ethos is swelling across America, challenging the blights of isolation and polarization.
Brooks’ latest book, which touts the joy that one obtains by serving one’s community, is not making much of a splash, as far as I can tell. I think there is a lot of resentment of the fact that he has turned toward preaching after divorcing his wife and subsequently marrying a much younger research assistant. Granted, the second event came too late to have directly caused the first. But Brooks presents his divorce in terms of the suffering he experienced, as if he thinks it helps enhance his credibility as a moral teacher. He comes across as unaware that others might perceive matters differently.
If you actually look at what Brooks is advocating and doing, it has merit. He is suggesting that we get to know our neighbors and also acquaint ourselves with people who are outside of our comfort zone. Invest less in grand politics and more in personal connections. That approach seems to have considerable upside and minimal downside.
But I doubt that any one political culture is “swelling across America.” I think we are splintering. It is no accident that the 2016 Republican Presidential primary and the 2020 Democratic primary produced large numbers of candidates. If we had a proportional-representation electoral system, there would probably be a dozen parties.
V.S. Naipul’s A Million Mutinies Now captured the splintered state of culture in India. I have read a similar book on Israel. Was it Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, or was it something else? Anyway, I think we see something similar in Europe as well as in the U.S. Instead of the revolt of the public, we are seeing a million revolts.