The Problem to Deal With

Society Edition

s

Recently I attended a conservative/libertarian academic conference¹ and while I had a great time I noticed something rather troubling. There was a great split between the younger attendees (undergrads) and the older cohort, in that the younger attendees didn’t seem to grasp the social problem that has to be dealt with when discussing political constitution. In all fairness, it wasn’t a gap that was unique to the young people there; I had seen similar tendencies years ago at the one Philadelphia Society meeting I had attended, and see it all over the internet. Which is unsurprising, given the absolute state that civics education is in² leaves most people with an interest to be educated by the internet. At any rate, here I am on the internet to improve upon that education.

So, what’s the issue at hand? Well, it sort of boils down to “What’s the point of the state?” or “What problem of human society does the state have to solve in order to function?” Honestly, even posing the question is difficult… I am sure some philosopher has done it well and pithily, but that’s the gist of it. What the hell is wrong with humans that decent people can’t just live together without problems and violence?³

The wrong answer, the one given implicitly (or disturbingly explicitly by one young man) is:

The problem is that people don’t understand the right way to live, and government needs to make them live the right way.

In other words, people chase all sorts of bad goals and behaviors, and that causes strife, so governments need to prevent people from doing that sort of stuff. Once we know what people should be doing, what is the proper higher order goal set to pursue, we just need to pass laws to make sure people don’t stray, and everything will be as good as it can be.

Think back a bit and I am sure you can remember a few times when someone has made basically this claim. If you can’t, well, turn on MSNBC or read some EconTwitter, or whatever leftist source you like; this is the foundation of their views, that some humans are bad/wrong/evil and just need to get with the proper beliefs and behaviors. There’s a social utility function and we just need to get everyone moving in the same direction to achieve it. Religious conservatives often make the same argument, from exactly the other side. The argument is over what is the proper set of beliefs and behaviors, not so much that the state should be enforcing them.⁴

However, the real problem isn’t that there is only one proper way to live, one proper understanding of the high to pursue, and we need to figure it out and make other people adhere to it.

The real problem is that everyone already knows what the proper understanding of the high is, but their answers don’t agree.

Maybe “knows” is a bit strong, but at the same time most people don’t recognize that their own sense of what is most important changes over time, and thus was different in the past and will be different in the future. At the same time most people are very sure that their current sense is of the proper way to live is the right one. If humility were the relevant approach to our sense of the proper priorities and goals we wouldn’t be willing to kill people for not following them. Instead certainty, vague, emotionally driven certainty rules the day.

Anyway, that’s the thing of it, we all have different conceptions of what is right and proper, and we are all pretty sure ours is the right way. Now, sure, there are many things we agree upon, like murder is bad, rape is bad, theft is bad. Those are pretty universally against the rules in any society, although the details about what technically counts as e.g. murder might differ at the edges. Other questions like “How many wives is too many?” or “How much interest on a loan is too much?” or even “Is it ok to eat pork?” all have very different answers for very important reasons, or at least important reasons for those who have specific answers in mind. If people whose answers are “Five/Any/Yes” live next to people who consider any answer other than “One/10%/Only if the pig is organic” to be an abomination, well, you are going to start having problems that society needs a way to deal with before things descend into violence. Different conceptions of what is good and moral, and thus what is bad and punishable, leads to trouble when they conflict.

We often underestimate the tendency of people to find things to bicker and fight over, but it is everywhere. I used to be very involved in table top wargaming, a niche hobby if ever there was one, yet arguments over the right way to play were rife. Tournament players ruined what should be a fun game for casual gamers whose mindless buying habits encourage game makers to shovel out crap rule sets just to sell models. The acrimony was impressive, not just directed at the other side, but at those who argue that both sides have a point.

Every strange, niche hobby I have been involved in has these splits, and I have been involved in quite a few. We all like the same stuff, but if you like it in the wrong way you are a heretic.

“Ok Hammer, but that’s just an example of a silly hobby. When it matters, when it really comes down to how we live our lives, we all know religion has the answers. If everyone would just adopt…” That’s the shape of the response I usually get from people I know. I would respond that, firstly, people take hobbies extremely seriously. Spend a bit of time looking for it and you will find people arguing that their hobbies demonstrate virtue, and those who don’t engage in the hobbies can’t be virtuous⁵. The world is full of people who think you should like what they like as much as they do.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, claiming that people don’t disagree on religion is just… well, massively disassociated from reality seems too weak... One fellow at the conference stated that he didn’t think liberty was important, but should be replaced by Christian values. What, precisely, were “Christian values” he was unable to define, although in his defense we didn’t have infinite time. However, anyone who has studied the history of religion ought to be well aware of the fact that intra-religious conflicts are every bit as common as inter-religious conflicts. No religion is without its schisms, heresies, and other sources of sectarian violence. The differences in what constitutes proper belief and worship might be smaller within a religion than between different religions, but the bloody history of say Protestant/Catholic differences or Shia/Sunni differences suggests that those smaller differences are plenty⁶.

The space between hobbies and religions is filled with all sorts of other problems. Even within the modern US the cultural differences of “What do we complain to the police about” are huge region to region, even block to block in some places. Where I grew up asking your neighbor if they got a permit to build that new shed is a joke; where I live now it is a veiled threat.

Historically there were two ways of dealing with the problem of how to live. The first way, and by far the most common throughout history, was simply to have very small societies by modern standards. Small populations in a relatively small area could be much more homogenous in their views of morality and proper behavior⁷, and it is relatively easy to push those who don’t agree to a different society. We often forget that the modern “nation state” is a very recent invention; Germany and Italy have only been united nation states for less than 160 years (both uniting in the 1860’s). This wasn’t an ideal solution of course, as violence against minorities was common, and smaller societies tended to get smacked around by larger ones now and again. Rulers or majorities adopting very bad ideas about proper behavior could still tank the society and changes could still cause unrest, but the scale of the problems was smaller and easier to deal with, or at least didn’t cause a ton of problems for the neighboring societies. Minimize the social heterogeneity problem by minimizing the number of people with differences within the society.

I think most of the modern “RETVRN” types or national conservatives⁸ at the extreme “we can’t have mixed ethnic societies” end have a return to this sort of society at least implicitly in mind as a goal, but improperly applied to large modern nation states.

Why improperly? Because modern nation states are by population and regional size much more akin to the historical empire than to the historical kingdom or tribal society⁹, and historical empires very much did not run by that model. The second historic method as practiced by successful empires dealing with the fundamental problem of disagreements on the proper way to live was largely “do what you will, but make sure you pay your taxes and serve as auxiliaries in our military.” They were comparatively hands off.

Most empires simply had neither the man power to displace and replace the native populations of the regions they conquered, nor the capacity to rule the conquered population as an appendage of their primary people. Instead the typical model was to set up a local ruler to run things in a way amenable to the local culture while paying tribute and fealty to the conquerors, or installing ones own governors to run the province in a fashion closer to the conquering nation’s culture but with a strong influence of the conquered. The Athenian Empire didn’t make other city states copies of Athens, but rather took their lunch money and demanded backup in various scraps, along with various trading rights and other minor things. Likewise the Persian Empire was notable for being made up of thousands of different peoples, not just a crap ton of Persians who happened to live all over the place.

The advantage of this second method is that by not getting involved in the minutia of day to day life the imperial authority doesn’t get itself involved in violence resulting from religious disputes or the proper pronunciation of vowels. It has the option to just say either “Run your Kingdom as you see fit, just make sure that it runs and our traders and tax men get their business taken care of,” or “We don’t care what god you serve so long as you serve us and don’t cause us problems.” The beauty there is that for the common person, the 90+ percent, their lives can go on as though the empire didn’t matter, as though power never changed hands, and thus are disinclined to start causing problems.

As my favorite ancient Chinese proverb says “Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away.”

Now, eventually the culture of the empire will start to homogenize, although what it homogenizes to is up for grabs. The Huns and Mongols tended to assimilate with the more settled cultures they conquered fairly quickly. The Romans on the other hand turned basically everyone in the European part of the empire a flavor of Roman early on, then became a lot more Greek after they brought them into the fold, then became Christian much later despite their tiny initial population. This can happen slowly as in the Roman/Christianity case, or very quickly as in the case of Alexander the Great adopting very Persian tendencies as he was conquering them.

However, it should be noted that the speed of change is directly proportional to the amount of violence. If you want to change a culture quickly it requires a lot of violence, whereas it will happen slowly but with little unrest on its own.

So back to our original problem: how do we keep otherwise good people from murdering each other in the streets as they fight over disagreements about what is the right way to live?

In my opinion¹⁰ we need to take the best of both historical approaches, which is roughly a form of federalism with very limited government. Anyone reading here before won’t be surprised by that. For you new folks, the general point is that when we create government power to force people to live as we see fit available the inevitable result is that people will fight over that power, and then will fight over the implementation of that power. The government goes to war against its own people. The only answer is to simply not have that power on the table in the first place. When there is such power necessary it should be limited to the smallest level of government possible to allow for those differences in regional culture, as well as making leaving a government that is misbehaving in your eyes far cheaper.

You might disagree with me. That’s fine, but if you do, you will need to answer how your preferred solution deals with the problem that humans will always disagree on what the proper way to live is. No matter how homogenous the society they will find points to argue about, splitting into ever finer and finer groups, and within a large society those groups will be big enough to cause ruptures. Even if everyone agrees now those notions will change over time and between generations. If a polity can’t deal with that problem, it can’t be a polity anymore.

1. Yes a conference, not “dinner party”… there were 20 people there! A whole day of articles and discussions, followed by… ok a dinner party.

2. The state being one of complete absence…

3. Close readers will note that I specify “decent people” here. That excludes basic criminals that commit crimes that pretty much every human views as crimes: those who commit murder, rape, theft etc. against members of their own polity. I will touch on that later.

4. Not all, mind you, but the sheer number of religious conservatives that argue e.g. that we should ban divorce or [vice of choice] on religious grounds because only through following God’s word can the country be saved is distressing. It reminds me that many people do not want freedom for all, they simply want to be the one holding the whip.

5. Find some online people who really love working out, especially weight lifting, for an example.

6. Humans are by nature a bunch of sects maniacs.

7. At this point I should really note that English doesn’t have a great word for this sort of concept. C.S. Lewis used “Tao” as I recall, but it seems strange to include ideas of the proper interest rate range in there. I am going to kind of bounce around between “morality”, “the high” (to use Dan Klein’s formulation), or “priorities”, things like that. Proper behavior is sort of the really high level word for it, but that doesn’t seem to quite grasp the depths of what we are talking about, which makes Tao seem more appealing… feel free to suggest better formulations in the comments!

8. Or whatever those folks are calling themselves this week. I can’t keep up with internet policy family labels.

9. See A Model of Empire and The USA as Accidental Empire for more details on this point.

10. Opinions are like assholes: everyone has one, and mine is superior in all respects.