Last week I pondered whether we should err on the side of missing out on progress or avoiding harm (Risk and reward: why we need to play with fire and pointed sticks). My conclusion was that we should be more open to chasing progress, and less to avoiding harm, than we are now. Here I look at the question as it applies to politics.
In 1790, Edmund Burke, a conservative British statesman, wrote a pamphlet entitled Reflections on the French Revolution. It essentially contrasts the Revolution to the unwritten British constitution. The British constitution embodied the evolved British traditions and common law, what Burke thought of as the ‘wisdom of the ages’.
The French Revolution however rejected French tradition and sought to carry out wholesale social engineering based on untested assumptions. Importantly British traditions were very liberal for the times. Burke himself stood for some of its more liberal elements, such as limiting the power of the monarch, tolerating Irish Catholics, supporting American independence and impeaching corrupt officials in British colonies.
Burke predicted a disastrous Revolution because it built upon abstractions divorced from considerations of human nature and the complexities of society. He believed that abstract rights were speculative and vulnerable to random changes. If so, they could too easily justify tyranny. In particular, he said the revolutionaries did not appreciate that there could be no rights and liberties without strict limits and corresponding duties.
He believed it senseless to talk about the right to food or medicine without thinking about who would provide it, and how. As he put it, “call on the aid of the farmer or doctor rather than the professor of metaphysics”. The rights of one person (to get food or healthcare) should not depend on the violation of the rights of others (enslaving the farmer or doctor).
Burke was also contemptuous of the Enlightenment intellectual’s capacity to understand the full complexity of the human condition. His prediction was prescient. The Revolution quickly produced ‘the Terror’, and, as a consequence, Napoleon.
In order to give everyone a stake in the social order Burke advocated gradual piecemeal reform. He thought we should be especially careful of tradition, adherence to values (regardless of their rational basis) and heritable private property.
Revolution is a ‘big bang’ phenomenon. When several little mishaps are correlated a catastrophic mishap is far more likely. That befell every communist society so far. It also happened to the genius hedge fund Long-term Capital Management and the capitalist shock treatment advocated to the former communist countries.
The risk of wholesale changes follows a power law. The size of the potential disaster increases exponentially with every addition of a small, correlated change.
Complete break
Thomas Paine, an influential part of the American Revolution, thought Burke was soft on the French monarchy. In line with the Enlightenment a priori abstract thinking Burke hated, Paine advocated a complete break with history. He claimed that the common sense of ordinary people (not just Enlightenment intellectuals) was sufficient to evaluate tradition.
He answered Burke’s Reflections with The Rights of Man. This was a progressive ideological work attacking monarchy and traditions as mere superstitions. It was highly influential in forming reform movements and Paine was the primary inspirer of the American aim to establish a new society from scratch.
In defiance of Burke’s views, the American Revolution was an impressive success. That success is perhaps an argument in favour of using reason and common sense to lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and take charge of our own destiny.
So, whose side does wisdom favour?
Sometimes a tradition seems senseless but turns out to embody some forgotten wisdom. For example, Western consultants noticed that rural Africans suffered a lot of respiratory ailments and tended to cook indoors in smoke-filled rooms. The Africans could not say why they did so, other than that it was traditional. The consultant recommended cooking outdoors. Very quickly rates of malaria skyrocketed, revealing the wisdom of the tradition.
Revolutionaries often hate the tradition of heritable private property. They simply cannot see what functions the institution performs. However, it clearly enhances the accumulation and variety of the means of production and therefore productivity.
Modern economics tries to explain it in terms of incentive structures but there is probably more to it than that. Economists like Frederich Hayek and Thomas Sowell emphasise that economic efficiency depends on using distributed actionable knowledge. They argue that centralised plans cannot take that knowledge into account and will therefore fail in a variety of ways, for example, through sudden shortages like famines. When these failures correlate, which they usually do, the economy grinds to a halt, as was true of North Korea, early revolutionary China and the Soviet Union.
Patently obvious
On the other hand, the condition of the French peasant or labourer was dire, and it was patently obvious that that pre-revolutionary regime either caused this or was not helping. The same applied to pre-revolutionary Russia and China. Sometimes the present is so bad that almost any change is unlikely to be worse and may well be better.
After some gruesome hiccoughs, the changes brought on by the French Revolution persisted and turned out to be a good thing. Switzerland’s very different, but also radical, change also turned out to be a blessing.
It is superstition to base faith in the wisdom of traditions on the assumption of hypothetical supernatural entities, since we simply would never know if we were right. It is scientific, and not anti-Enlightenment, to recognise some facts that align with tradition.
Humans are not blank slates; there is a limit to the complexity we can handle, and there are some forms of information that central planners cannot possibly gather. While tradition is often an unconscious concentration of wisdom, at other times it is the result of selfish rent-seeking behaviour imposed by force or a failure to think at all. Wisdom lies in trying to tell the difference through sound reasoning, or careful and modest empirical testing.
Today we have accumulated evidence and insight into the problems associated with radical political change, and the sort of thinking we apply to it. We are in a much better position to consider taking charge of our own destiny and trying some political innovation.
However, I agree with Karl Popper and Hayek that we should try relatively piecemeal social engineering, such as, for example, small-scale randomised control studies or federalism, before grand centralised systems.
Burke was a bit too anti-innovation. Virtually all human progress is based upon it and if it is possible to promote innovation in safety, we must.
[Image: by GoldenDayz]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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