Wokeness Dismantled, Part 2
Scale: the family is not the same as a society
In the previous article, I explained how wokeness conflates private virtue and public virtue:
I, as a person of virtue, feel compassion towards the homeless person on my street; therefore so should government. I feel compassion towards those undocumented immigrants; therefore so should government.
But your private morality towards people you know cannot be an abstract policy towards all the homeless (or the felons, the disabled, the immigrants, or any other “marginalized” people). Scale matters. This is a difficult thing for the woke to accept, intellectually, and yet people’s actions confirm it.
In the last article, I shined a light on the influential “veil of ignorance” thought experiment, which purports to prove that an abstract person, uncorrupted by society, would be a “progressive.” In this one, we’ll talk about scale: which people and how many of them are you affecting with those policies?
The Kantian Imperative
Immanuel Kant reformulated what most of us call The Golden Rule:
Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it will become a universal law.
Again, there’s that “empathy”thing: I, personally, wouldn’t want to be deported back to Venezuela no matter what the federal law says, therefore my city should be a sanctuary city. That’s about as far as the woke take it.
However, Kant is pretty abstract. In fact, it’s too abstract. When you try to go from the abstract Kantian imperatives to specific situations, it gets harder. As Taleb says:
Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice.
Why? As we will belabor ad nauseam in this book, we are local and practical animals, sensitive to scale. The small is not the large; the tangible is not the abstract; the emotional is not the logical. Just as we argued that micro works better than macro, it is best to avoid going to the very general when saying hello to your garage attendant. We should focus on our immediate environment; we need simple practical rules. Even worse: the general and the abstract tend to attract self-righteous psychopaths similar to the interventionistas of Part 1 of the Prologue. In other words, Kant did not get the notion of scaling—yet many of us are victims of Kant's universalism. (As we saw, modernity likes the abstract over the particular; social justice warriors have been accused of "treating people as categories, not individuals.")
What do we mean by “scale”? This has become almost a techie word, so I’ll try to explain it.
Scale and Abstraction
“Scale” as a verb means to change the size. In business and high-tech, it’s used this way constantly, but interestingly, this usage isn’t even in Merriam-Webster. Wiktionary has it, though:
scale (third-person singular simple present scales, present participle scaling, simple past and past participle scaled)
(transitive) To change the size of something whilst maintaining proportion; especially to change a process in order to produce much larger amounts of the final product.
We should scale that up by a factor of 10.
….
(intransitive, computing) To tolerate significant increases in throughput or other potentially limiting factors.
That architecture won't scale to real-world environments.
The Family: Small Scale
This is what that yard sign is yearning for: why can’t the whole world be just like a family?
Robert Frost said
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
The traditional family is not a free market. You don’t check out, but if you do, they don’t give you an itemized bill for the rent and breakfasts, with room tax and extra charges for the minibar (if they do, you may want to google “dysfunctional family”).
It’s more like communism. The parents would gladly sacrifice everything, even their lives if it came to that, for their kids. My Mom’s four siblings all dropped out of high school to work and support the family (she was allowed to graduate, though, being the youngest).
We often hear “the family of Man” as a slogan. Why can’t everything be like a family? Let’s forget about modern society and look at the thousands of villages which have evolved over millennia, blissfully uninfluenced by television and the Internet. Villages are one step up in scale.
As an amusing sidelight: I use two different search engines, DuckDuckGo and Google. When I search the former for “sharing within the family” I get this, this, and this at the top: all links for family bonds and mental health. On Google, it’s all like this: how to share your cable subscriptions and online accounts with your family.
Larger Scale: The Village
Villages are not a capitalist free market, either. Generally it’s mutual obligation-sharing with people you’re related to, at least distantly. A villager doesn’t pay his neighbor in money for services; it’s just assumed that helping your neighbor is what you do, and you’ll help him if he ever needs it. Brittanica tells us about various types of primitive villages:
Settled hunting and gathering societies
These are societies that are not agricultural because food is easy to find. Coastal Indians in the Pacific Northwest are examples. Food is usually plentiful without anyone needing to grow it. Most of the time there’s a chief who makes the decisions if no one else can.
Along with chiefly status went the socioeconomic institution of redistribution. Surplus products of family production were passed on to the chief, who in turn gave a large feast (or “potlatch”), during which he distributed gifts to those who needed them.
Horticultural societies
Anthropologists call this type of society “horticulture” rather than “agriculture” because it’s more like gardening than farming.
The Big Man in Melanesia is big because he has a following. He begins with his own family and near relatives and friends, who provide goods that he, on behalf of his group, gives away to other groups at a feast on some ceremonial occasion. He and his faction are feasted reciprocally by others at other times. His ability to redistribute on an increasingly lavish scale to larger groups expands his following.
Again, no money changes hands. If you fail to fulfill your obligations to the village, they don’t sue you, they do something worse: they shun you. If you steal from another villager, you have to give it back, rather than being sent to prison. And the “village” does not allow immigrants. Brittanica says about Latin American villages:
Although debt bondage no longer exists in Latin America, the tenant worker on the remaining large haciendas in some of the Andean areas seems as closely bound to the soil as peasants ever were. The Chilean tenant is legally free to move as he pleases, but he cannot, in fact, usually do so. He works his ancestral land, which he understands belongs to the hacienda, whose owner he has been conditioned all his life to regard as his master and protector. Were the worker and his family to leave, the other haciendas would not accept him. And since there is no vacant fertile land he could not become a squatter. [emphasis added]
Still Larger: Nations
Once you scale up to the size of a modern country, the old village rules don’t work as well. Taleb tells us (I’ll explain who “Ostrom” was below)
What Ostrom found empirically is that there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational. Such a commons cannot be too large. It is like a club. Groups behave differently at a different scale. This explains why the municipal is different from the national. It also explains how tribes operate: you are part of a specific group that is larger than the narrow you, but narrower than humanity in general. Critically, people share some things but not others within a specified group. And there is a protocol for dealing with the outside. Arab pastoral tribes have firm rules of hospitality toward nonhostile strangers who don't threaten their commons, but get violent when the stranger is a threat.
The skin-in-the-game definition of a commons: a space in which you are treated by others the way you treat them, where everyone exercises the Silver Rule.
The "public good" is something abstract, taken out of a textbook.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton titled her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child) in homage to an African proverb, not even realizing (or caring) that a huge country like the United States is not the same as a village. We don’t all know each other, and if we give someone the middle finger in traffic, it’s most likely no big deal. In the village, that other driver knows your car and where you live.
Similarly, in a tight-knit African village, the neighbors will watch your children while you’re in the hospital, or keep them out of the woods if there’s a lion nearby. “Why can’t we build a society like that?” asks Hillary, plaintively. Well, we can’t. We need different systems at that scale.
Garrett Hardin vs. Elinor Ostrom
I said I would tell you who “Ostrom” was. If you’ve ever read anything at all about ecology, or even been to a university, you’ve probably read about “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
Garrett Hardin
An example of the tragedy of the commons is: a “commons” might be a pasture with enough grass to feed 100 sheep, shared by 10 farmers who have 10 sheep each. Suppose one of the farmers cheats and brings in an 11th? He gets all the benefit of the 11th sheep while the other nine farmers share the burden. Eventually everyone realizes they can cheat like this, and the common becomes over-grazed.
Or suppose it’s the cod-fishing grounds in the North Atlantic. There are a large but finite number of cod every year. Why shouldn’t a fisherman take all he can, even if it’s not possible for everyone to take all they can? Eventually the cod become extinct, like passenger pigeons did.
“The Tragedy of the Common” first appeared as an essay in Science in 1968 and, as Hardin said 25 years later:
My first attempt at interdisciplinary analysis led to an essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Since it first appeared in Science 25 years ago, it has been included in anthologies on ecology, environmentalism, health care, economics, population studies, law, political science, philosophy, ethics, geography, psychology, and sociology. It became required reading for a generation of students and teachers seeking to meld multiple disciplines in order to come up with better ways to live in balance with the environment.
We get a hint of Hardin’s political bent with the subtitle of the original paper:
The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.
It’s all about morality for him and the generations of college students who’ve been weaned on his paper. For them, the entire Earth is a commons with finite carrying capacity, and humans must be coerced or else we’ll ruin it.
He says, “the way to avoid disaster in our global world is through a frank policy of ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.’ ” Individualism leads to disaster, capitalism leads to disaster, and our freedoms must be limited. Bureaucrats love that. The woke, especially, love it: you need to be controlled, and we’re the ones who will do the controlling.
The tragedy of the commons is mostly a theory with enormous appeal to college students, faculty, and people who hate capitalism. As Hardin says: “It became required reading for a generation of students and teachers.”
There’s a famous quote (two, actually) about the relationship of theory and practice and the way academics perceive them:
That works very well in practice, but how does it work out in theory? (background)
Academics care more about the elegance of a theory than how well it actually works.
The other quote (remember: I said there were two) was from Yogi Berra:
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Who was Elinor Ostrom?
There are certainly real-world tragedies of the commons, like the passenger pigeons. However, it’s a theory with intellectual appeal. How well does it work in practice? Fortunately, some scientists have tested that, and one of them, Elinor Ostrom, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work in 2009. She looked at real examples of groups voluntarily sharing a limited resource, and discovered that sometimes they can work things out without the government getting involved.
Ostrom was not exactly unknown; after all, they did give her a Nobel. Still, if we search on Google, we find:
Hardin: about 2,480,000 results
Ostrom: About 1,030,000 results
I found her story so fascinating that I’m going to devote next week’s entire post to it. For now: she proved that scale matters. Your virtue and largeness of spirit is fine for your family and maybe your village, but it doesn’t scale to an entire country (or even a large city).