You know who else was a conflict theorist?

In my last post I declared that in the meta-conflict between conflict-theory and mistake-theory, I found myself on the side of the former. I had plenty of justification, but I also tried to acknowledge the best arguments of the mistake-theorists (steelmanning their position, in the rationalist lexicon). I tried to credit not only their arguments, but their motivations. They seem well-intentioned, striving towards peacefulness, whereas the motives of the conflict-oriented seem inherently less pure.

But ultimately I think SSC is making a confusion between meta- and object-levels. Conflict itself is rightly regarded as something generally kind of bad, something that most well-intentioned people try to avoid. But conflict-theory doesn՚t necessarily inherit that moral valence. It is not about promoting conflict, it is merely acknowledging the omnipresent and necessary reality of conflict, and trying to come up with better ways to understand it and deal with it.

That being said – if I am being honest about my own motivations, the different levels are not so clearly separable. I am, after all, seeking out conflict, not merely theorizing about it. I՚m starting to wonder if it is, in fact, obnoxious. Spoiling for a fight is OK only if you are among fighters; if you try to pick a fight among those who would rather not, it՚s just being a jerk.

But maybe conflict theory is even worse than obnoxious. For instance, it appears to be a foundational component of the worst, most dangerous political ideas known to mankind. From the introduction to Timothy Snyder՚s Black Earth, a recent new history of the Holocaust:

Human races, Hitler was convinced, were like species…Races should behave like species, like mating with like and seeking to kill unlike. This for Hitler was a law, the law of racial struggle, as certain as the law of gravity. The struggle could never end, and it had no certain outcome. A race could triumph and flourish and could also be starved and extinguished. 

In Hitler’s world, the law of the jungle was the only law. People were to suppress any inclination to be merciful and be as rapacious as they could. Hitler thus broke with the traditions of political thought that presented human beings as distinct from nature in their capacity to imagine and create new forms of association. Beginning from that assumption, political thinkers tried to describe not only the possible but the most just forms of society. For Hitler, however, nature was the singular, brutal, and overwhelming truth, and the whole history of attempting to think otherwise was an illusion. Carl Schmitt, a leading Nazi legal theorist, explained that politics arose not from history or concepts but from our sense of enmity. Our racial enemies were chosen by nature, and our task was to struggle and kill and die.

Snyder presents a rather shockingly coherent portrait of Hitler՚s world view, making him seem quite different from the inexplicable charismatic madman we are used to. Hitler՚s views made a certain internal sense. This shouldn՚t be that surprising, in that any ideology has to have enough internal logic so that people can understand and adopt it.

And what is most disturbing about it is that it is not, as a theory, obviously wrong. It՚s not hard to imagine its appeal, especially if you aren՚t aware of the historical consequences. Conflict and racial enmity are pretty powerful forces, after all. Hitler theorized them up to 11, and created an ideology in which they were able to override the seemingly weaker values, such as humanity, universality, generosity, caring.

Snyder continues:

[Hitler՚s opponents] were constrained, whether they realized it or not, by attachments to custom and institution; mental habits that grew from social experience that hindered them from reaching the most radical of conclusions. They were ethically committed to goods such as economic growth or social justice, and found it appealing or convenient to imagine that natural competition would deliver these goods. Hitler entitled his book Mein Kampf — My Struggle . From those two words through two long volumes and two decades of political life, he was endlessly narcissistic, pitilessly consistent, and exuberantly nihilistic where others were not. The ceaseless strife of races was not an element of life, but its essence. …. Struggle was life, not a means to some other end. It was not justified by the prosperity (capitalism) or justice (socialism) that it supposedly brought. …. Struggle was not a metaphor or an analogy, but a tangible and total truth. The weak were to be dominated by the strong, since “the world is not there for the cowardly peoples.” And that was all that there was to be known and believed.

If this is what conflict theory is in the extreme, maybe we should be wary of it even in all forms. But I don՚t think all forms of conflict theory are equivalent.

For one thing: Hitler՚s notion of conflict was reductively brutal. His conflict was based on competition for the most basic things (reproduction, land, food) and necessarily fought through the most violent means, that is, war and mass murder.

I am against that sort of thing. The conflicts I՚m seeking are intellectual or political or moral in nature, things Hitler didn՚t really care about. And while my politics aren՚t terribly consistent these days, they are grounded in opposition to war, specifically opposition to the Vietnam War which is where I got my start. That was a conflict, but it was a conflict between a war machine that was killing both foreigners and Americans, and a generation of peaceniks who wanted to stop that.

For another: I don՚t think that races are necessarily the groups who are in conflict, or the most important dimension of conflict. This can be the case, of course, but groups can form around many other shared properties. The racist aspect of Nazism was obviously pretty fundamental to what it was doing, and reinforces its brutality.

In fact, didn՚t we have a war between the Hitler conflict theorists and his bitter enemies (the USSR and western powers) who were also most assuredly conflict theorists themselves? And to state the obvious: the good guys didn՚t win WWII by reasoning with Hitler, they won by pounding the shit out of him. Mistake theorists like Chamberlain didn՚t come out looking very good.

It՚s almost as if “conflict theorist” isn՚t a real thing or useful idea. It՚s an artificial category that includes everybody from Gandhi to Hitler in the same very large bucket – the bucket of people who believe conflict and struggle are fundamental.

While mistake theory includes, I don՚t know, a handful of seasteaders, technocrats, and rationalists? If 99.9% of the world is conflict theorists then I don՚t feel so bad about being in the same bucket as Hitler. On the other hand, maybe all believers in utilitarianism can be classed as mistake theorists, and there are a lot of those.

I am not sure what I am getting at with this post. Introducing Hitler into a discussion rarely helps clarify things. But it՚s the struggle against the really bad ideas he personified and that outlive him that gets me going. This blog doesn՚t exactly kill fascists, but it certainly is obsessed with them and figuring out how to fight them. If I՚m going to be in a conflict, I need enemies, and this stuff certainly fits the role.

The SSC crowd are not fascists, not in the slightest! But they also don՚t seem to see creeping fascism as very significant. They are much more concerned about the excesses of campus SJWs than, say, the rise of white supremacist groups. They are more concerned with overreaching charges of racism than the underlying racism. And they think political conflict is merely regrettable, not an absolutely basic and inevitable part of social life, something which everybody is involved with whether they like it or not. And to the extent that their ideas are wrong and distract from the actual struggle at hand, I՚m against them as well.

But have no special standing to preach political responsibility to anyone. I՚m not some exemplar of engagement and don՚t want to be; and I՚m certainly not a recruiter for the Resistance. I'm arguing here, not to convert or accuse anybody, but because SSC has found a new approach to some very basic issues that I care a lot about, and I can't resist engaging with them. And as a conflict guy, engagement tends to look like a fight. It's a different sort of fight, since as far as values go, I think we're basically on the same side.

Conflict Theory

[Warning: This very long post was inspired by a SlateStarCodex post, but from there goes rambling all over the place. I take more potshots at Scott Alexander than he deserves. For that I apologize, but I can only say that I find his writing extremely thought provoking, and I feel a need to provoke back.

I had to divide this into sections to make it even moderately navigable.] 

Blind spot

I՚ve been making various criticisms of Scott Alexander, mostly attacking his antipolitical stand,  accusing him and people of his general ilk of not only disliking the conflict inherent in politics, but of denying its importance and occasionally even its very existence:

Silicon Valley was supposed to be better than this. It was supposed to be the life of the mind… Now it’s degenerated into this giant hatefest of everybody writing long screeds calling everyone else Nazis and demanding violence against them…It doesn’t have to be this way. Nobody has any real policy disagreements. …

This quote seems to reveal an epic blindness – a dread of conflict so complete it has repressed the very possibility of disagreement. But like the good rationalist that he is, the author is both aware of his own biased tendencies, and pledged to fight against them.

The meta-conflict

His newer post, Conflict vs Mistake, seems like an effort to notice and correct for this epistemological blindness, to figure out a way to encompass conflict, to acknowledge its reality and power, and to theorize about its relationship to knowledge.

To this end, he sketches out a dichotomy between two separate forms of political theory, two opposing mindsets, two different kinds of people who prefer different kinds of explanations for social problems:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects. 

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

To reword it a bit: Mistake theorists treat politics as a technical problem and view political disagreements as being basically the same sort of thing as engineers disagreeing about a problem – that is, there may be better or worse solutions, but ultimately there is some objective notion of better and worse that everyone can agree to if they are smart enough.

Conflict theorists, on the other hand, treat politics as a struggle rather than an optimization problem. Individuals form coalitions to advance their own interests and these coalitions compete for resources, control. and dominance. Political conflicts are not about who is right and wrong, but about who has power and who doesn՚t. There՚s no possibility of a stable best solution because different factions have different goals, and no solution can satisfy all of them simultaneously.

First thing to note – does anybody really believe that politics and conflict don՚t enter into engineering or medical decisions? Certainly nobody with any actual experience in an organization.

Nevertheless it is true that engineering and medicine are grounded in a reality that is independent of human opinion or interest, a physical world that at minimum puts tight constraints around what is possible, what works and what doesn՚t. There is an objective ground truth, no matter how we slice it up or what values we want to impose on it. As a result, disagreements can at least in theory be settled by disinterested calculations.

Mistake theorists view social problems as being like that, or possibly they are people who want problems to be like that. Or perhaps feel that they should be like that. Or maybe they are afraid (not without reason) that if we don՚t approach social problems in a way that is a joint search for a best solution, then there is not even a possibility of peace. The world ends up being a hellscape of perpetual war, or maybe one side annihilates the other. This is such a horrifying and depressing prospect that they feel a visceral moral obligation to move towards a more mistake-theoretic worldview.

Conflict theorists, on the other hand, have evidence on their side. Whether or not conflict is bad, it is certainly a basic fixture of human reality, and inescapable if one is to do any remotely serious thinking about politics.

Taking a side against taking sides

Nevertheless, while the SSC post as a whole earnestly strives to present both sides on an equal footing, it doesn՚t take much subtextural analysis to get the impression that the author himself is solidly a mistake theorist who thinks the conflict theorists are basically jerks (sometimes far worse), and maybe not all that bright. Perhaps as a consequence, he can՚t quite imagine what it would be like to be a conflict theorist, and his portrayals of the conflict theory stance always sounds kind of weak.
For example, here he compares the two sides take on the specific issue of democracy:

When mistake theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it gives too much power to the average person – who isn’t very smart, and who tends to do things like vote against carbon taxes because they don’t believe in global warming. They fantasize about a technocracy in which informed experts can pursue policy insulated from the vagaries of the electorate. 

When conflict theorists criticize democracy, it’s because it doesn’t give enough power to the average person – special interests can buy elections, or convince representatives to betray campaign promises in exchange for cash. They fantasize about a Revolution in which their side rises up, destroys the power of the other side, and wins once and for all.

Unpacking this, there are at least two serious distortions here. For one thing, it equates “conflict theorist” with leftism or a pro-democracy stance, which oddly ignores the entire neoreactionary movement, which is very much a conflict theory with an anti-democratic stance ( SSC has written extensively about neoreaction in the past, so this is a kind of weird omission).

For the other thing, it also equates conflict theory with both millenarianist utopianism and manicheanism – a belief system of dreamers for whom politics is a utopian fantasy (“once and for all”) rather than an actual daily struggle. While I՚m sure there are people like that, it ignores 95% of the ordinarily politically active people, who are conflict theorists simply because it՚s a very ordinary aspect of life and a defining feature of political life.

So the attempt to describe conflict theory doesn՚t seem very convincing, even given the explicitly cartoonish aspect of what he՚s trying to do. You can really feel that an effort is being made to be generous to a foreign and distasteful worldview, and that the effort is not really that successful.

Wishing away conflict

He՚s perfectly aware that conflict is a real feature of political life, of course – you՚d have to be kind of idiotic to think otherwise. But, he also seems to think it can be magicked away somehow. Here՚s a quote from a follow-up post:

Politics is about having conflict. Mistake-theorists would love to become post-political, in the sense of circumventing all conflicts. Conflicts actually happening as conflicts is a failure, deadweight loss. This wouldn’t mean that nobody has different interests. It would mean that those different interests play out in some formalized way that doesn’t look conflict-y.

These ideas don’t deny the existence of conflict – they just represent a desire to avoid it rather than win it.

So mistake theorists do acknowledge conflicting interests, they just want those conflicts to be settled in “some formalized way that doesn՚t look conflict-y”. I am not sure what this means. We actually do have really existing formalized ways of dealing with conflict, such as the judicial system, but that is plenty “conflict-y”. To be sure, it՚s a better, less damaging kind of conflict than (eg) blood vendetta, but still fundamentally conflictual in its nature.

The idea of a non-conflict-y way of settling conflict doesn՚t actually make any conceptual sense, if you think about it for ten seconds. War, lawsuits, arguments, and coin tosses are all ways of settling conflict. Some are more civilized than others, but all are equally conflict-y, because a way of settling conflict sort of has to be.

What would a non-conflicty-y method even look like? The examples he gives are various libertarian utopian schemes where people who disagree simply sort and separate themselves geographically, so you end up with a bunch of different polities each coalesced around shared values. In other words it is a way of avoiding (as opposed to settling) a conflict, so I guess that is actually kind of non-confict-y (whether it realistic or desirable is another question).

Now, if the above quote was rephrased to say “different interests play out in some formalized way that is nonviolent or less violent”, then it would make far more sense. Lawsuits and war are both conflicts but one is far more violent and damaging than the other, and it would be good to try to get people to use the less harmful and costly methods. But I don՚t think Scott is making an argument for nonviolence, at least in the usual sense, given that the leading practitioners of nonviolence (Gandhi, King) were most assuredly not avoiding conflict, but actively engaging in it with nonviolent methods.

God must like conflict or he wouldn՚t have made so much of it

There are plenty of good reasons to have a distaste for political conflict. It can be kind of brain-numbing, it encourages sloganeering rather than deep thinking, and in our present environment relies on a rather toxic process of demonizing opponents (and a correspondingly moral self-regard which might be even more corrosive). It seems to be part of a world grounded on brute force which is anathema to the higher values of civilized society, including morality and justice. Certainly the world would be a better place if we could stop fighting and solve our collective problems through the application of reason. Of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (war, famine, disease, death), war is the only one that seems like it could be easily prevented by simply not doing it.

So yeah you can hate conflict for many different reasons – for the pain it causes, for the waste, for the ugliness of enmity when compared to the beauty of harmony, for its stupidity, for its privileging of strength over intelligence.

But, despite all that, conflict is not all bad, and in fact something to be sought out (I am seeking it right now, and don՚t really feel all that ashamed about it). Conflict is interesting, peace is boring. We love heroes, and you don՚t get them without battles for them to fight. If we feel we have been treated badly, we not only feel the right to fight for justice, we are almost compelled to do so.

So yeah I guess I am on the other side of the meta-conflict between conflict and mistake. It՚s not even that I like conflict so much, I just see it as an essential feature of reality, and for me, understanding the world requires integrating conflict at a fundamental level.

The metaphysics is probably for another post, but briefly: you can՚t understand the world without understanding purpose and teleology, and you can՚t have purpose and teleology without conflict. That՚s obviously how biology works; and despite our quite stunning cognitive abilities, we haven՚t leveraged ourselves that far from biology yet.

Why I fight

The cultural and political wars are very real, and I feel compelled to take part in them, even though they often get stupid and ugly, as war does.

Digging into the nature of that compulsion might be another future post, for now let՚s just say that those of us who have had political mass-murder directed at their families and communities are a little impatient with the why-can՚t-we-all-get-along stance. This isn՚t theoretical, there is something out there (well, it used to be out there, now it has in here, quite at home and public within the US) that actually wants to kill me. That gets my attention. There are no mistake theorists in foxholes.

Why is any of this interesting?

Scott seems to have reconceptualized a very fundamental and basic (and not all that new) philosophical issue – the relationship between knowledge and power. At one level, we are both roughly on the same side. We are knowledge people, or we wouldn՚t be reading and writing amateur philosophy; we՚d be out gaining power and making money – doing politics, not arguing meta-politics. And we are both trying to grapple with the reality of how to live as knowledge people in a world ruled by power.

But beyond that similarity, there is a big difference: Scott and the rationalism he exemplifies thinks that pure, disinterested knowledge can and should supplant power. I don՚t think that is possible and I don՚t even think it is particularly desirable – or to put it another way, I can՚t imagine a realistic world that works that way.

And I also have to admit that amateur nerds like Scott and myself are late to this party. The nature of relationship between power and knowledge has been the subject of investigation by serious thinkers, like Nietzsche, Foucault, Latour. Pretty much the whole field of critical theory is about just this. But that kind of stuff does not penetrate very far into the rationalist community, almost by definition. I՚ve been trying for a few decades now to absorb it myself, with only limited success.

But I persist because understanding this particular dichotomy seems absolutely critical, not only for politics but for the development of computational technology (my day job). Computation is also a theory of how knowledge and power are related. Computer programs are symbolic structures that also have the ability to act on the world. AI in its various forms is founded on the idea that computers and human minds are alike, and the core of the similarity is that both computations and minds have this weird dual nature of being both symbol manipulators and embodied causal systems. And in both cases, the relationship between representation and action is more complicated than it seems at first glance.

Politics may be seen as how this process works at a social level. Politics too involves beliefs (in values, in particular leaders, in justice) and collective action. In politics, it's very clear that representations don't stand alone but are only as strong as the energy they can enlist in their cause.

I'm grateful to Scott for bringing this question up in a new form, at a good level of abstraction, even if I don't much care for his specific takes. 

Horrified Fascination

Here is a very common visual cliche that oddly doesn՚t seem to have an actual name (the title is best I could come up with):

There are hundreds of stock photos and movie stills in which someone simultanously covers their eyes and peeks through the fingers. What kind of sights can provke such a strange reaction, and what could be its function or meaning? Some prospects simultaneously draw one՚s attention and repel it, giving rise to an internal conflict. You shield yourself from the thing (but not in any truly effective way) and then undermine your own act. Who is supposed to be fooled by this looking-while-not-looking? If it was just a matter of modulating a disturbing incoming visual signal, surely the eyelids would do as good a job as the fingers?

It seems to be a clear outward form of an inner conflct, and inner conflicts are always interesting because they reveal something of the structure of the mind (a jumping off point for Freud, Tinbergen, Minsky, and Ainslie, to name only the most influential).

The conflict between fascination and horror comes up in my thinking a lot these days. I detect it in my attitude to onrushing catastrophes like climate change, or the Trump ascendency, or the aftermath of various natural or manmade calamities. And in my otherwise inexplicable fascination with neoreaction and other wingnutty emanations on the internet, which is sort of like a slow-motion trainwreck of the intellect. Or doom in general, which was a founding theme of this blog. My mind is drawn irresistably to such topics, then forced to draw back.

There՚s something almost shameful and twisted about it, although I can՚t quite say why. At least I՚m not alone in having this perverted attraction towards the repulsive. The entire US media apparatus seems to be in this kind of relationship with Trump, both horrified and addicted to the spectacle.

In my defense, I don՚t think the alternative of pretending these looming horrors don՚t exist is any better. It seems almost impossible to face them squarely, so this kind of half-assed playful attitude is probably the best I can do.

Fictional borders

JEH Smith points out in a couple of excellent posts that ethnically speaking the Hispanics were here first so we have a bit of nerve asking them to produce papers to prove their "legality". I loved this because it took a view of the issue that is zoomed up a couple orders of magnitude from the stuff in the newspapers, and highlights the essential fictiousness of states and borders. And how the demographic and economic facts on the ground can trump such fictions, no matter how much effort is made to translate the fictions into walls of concrete, barbed wire, and guns.

Taking the god's-eye-view of situations that are hopelessly unresolvable on the ground is fun. Whee!

The problem...is that the American West was only able to appear as Anglo territory, for a spell, as a result of a relatively recent (late 19th century) and concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is astounding to me that people have to be reminded of the historical fact that in order for the American West to become white, other people had to be displaced.... the population of Mexico is somewhere between 60 and 80% Mestizo, and that for them the line drawn by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 reflects no natural or deep-seated historical boundary.
...
There is a cultural-geographical family there that cannot be made to fit with the arbitrary borders of states.... But the fact that it is proving difficult to maintain the Anglo identity of the borderlands needs to be understood in terms of geography, demography, and history, not as a testament to the scofflaw character of the 'illegals'.
...
The northern limit of Latin America in fact extends well to the north of the US-Mexican border, and the relatively recent efforts at Anglicization do not change this historical reality.

Ethnic conflict is no joke, even if it plays out slowly over a scale of centuries. The current dust-up in Arizona is minor league and hopefully not a harbinger of more intense forms of conflict. When ethnicities face each other across a porous, fictional, and unstable border, the alternatives are conflict ultimately resulting in extermination or expulsion on the one hand, or multiculturalism or hybridization on the other. It's clear which is the preferred path, but it's also clear what happens in the normal course of history:

Now I happen to think that ethnic cleansing simply is the default activity of the human species. This is something that is perfectly easy for archaeologists to acknowledge when attempting to explain why the pottery shards of one civilization are found at a certain depth in the ground, and those of another civilization at a lower depth. Let's not play stupid: it's because the lower guys were driven out or exterminated. Why? Because their land had stuff the higher guys wanted. That's human history in nuce, yet for some reason people prefer to pretend that the human present is governed by different rules than the past...

American Taliban

The existence of militant Christian Taliban groups is old news. Such a group with the technical savvy to make a website loaded with flash animations and a Google maps mashup showing all the satanic sites in Amarillo (including Buddhist temples and New Age gift shops) is a bit more interesting. A group like that whose leader has a day job as a security guard at Pantex, the place that assembles all of the US's nuclear weapons, is frankly terrifying.

Short of the Army of God snagging a nuke, which I have to admit seems unlikely, the Texas Observer article shows that this group has developed a more mundane tactical innovation -- they regularly publicize the names of people doing things they disapprove of, such as attending swingers events or going to a Unitarian Church, often resulting in actual harm such as job loss. They will surveil ungodly sites and take people's license plates, for example. Given how easy it is to find information about people these days, and to spread it far and wide, I'm guessing we'll see more of these tactics employed in cultural and political conflicts. Perhaps people will think twice before exposing their life on Facebook, unless they plan not to have any enemies.

Guard labor and open source

According to this paper by Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, an astonishing 26% of the US workforce in 2002 was engaged in non-productive "guard labor", meaning their work was not directed towards producing goods or services but was instead aimed at making sure that the wrong people did not help themselves to slices of economic pie that they were not supposed to have.

Compare this to 11% in contemporaneous Sweden, or 7% in the US in 1929.

I'd argue with some of the definitions and methodology in the paper, in both directions. For instance, supervisors are the largest category of guard labor, but it's hard to say that all of management is non-productive -- they aren't all PHBs, many make creating contributions other than merely riding herd on their employees (ie, they are thinking of someone like a low-level manager in a call center whose only job is to make sure employees don't stay too long on their bathroom breaks -- but there is also, say, Steve Jobs). On the other hand, there are entire industries that are effectively engaged in guard labor that are not counted in Bowles and Jayadev's measure, such as health insurance. And the finance industry is neither productive nor guard labor (I wonder what percentage of the economy is skimmers and con artists?).

Prisoners and the unemployed are also counted in the numbers for guard labor, because the concept depends on the idea of power and sanction, and prisoners and the unemployed are considered "necessary concomitants of the public and private sanctioning systems, respectively". This struck me as odd, but makes some sense when taking a macroeconomic point of view -- both the guards and the prisoners are people who are not doing actual economically productive work -- their labor is wasted as a direct result of the fact that the social system of power and property needs to be upheld.

Ideally we would also include those producing guns for private use, locks, security systems and the like, but we are not able to do so because of the lack of data.

The need for guard labor is related to the broader goal of understanding the role of institutions in the role of managing and reproducing the economic activity of society:

The insight we wish to develop is that securing conformity to institutions can be quite costly, and the cost differs among institutions and across time and space. Conformity achieved through the coordination of expectations or the internalization of norms, for example, may not be very costly, as in the case of driving on one side of the road or the other, or the voluntary compliance with tax laws in some countries. However, where conformity to a society'™s institutions is secured primarily through governmental coercion or privately deployed sanctions,the resource costs may be substantial. Examples include some authoritarian political systems, colonial regimes, and as we will see, highly unequal capitalist economies.

Intuitively, the more inequality in a society, the more guard labor it requires. There's a convincing scatterplot of GINI vs. guard labor fraction by US state included in this quite good profile of Bowles in a Santa Fe paper.

Prior to about 20 years ago, most economists thought that inequality just greased the wheels of progress. Overwhelmingly now, people who study it empirically think that it's sand in the wheels.

Here's the last paragraph of the paper:

Fourth, illegitimate inequalities are costly to sustain. While cultures often justify vast differences in power and access to valued resources, the mind is not a blank slate on which such ideas as the divine right of kings or the superiority of the "˜white race" can be etched at will. Two decades of behavioral experiments have provided convincing evidence that humans in dozens of cultures are inequality averse, and that violations of norms or reciprocity often lead to costly confl‚icts.

Of course the counterargument to the view that guard labor is mere friction is pretty easy to make -- that all this guarding is actually necessary to make producers productive, via incentives and structuring. The ticket-taker at the movie theater produces nothing, but without the efforts of him and others, the actual movie-makers could not get paid and could not raise capital to produce anything. It might be more efficient to have a different scheme, for instance having entrance to the movies be free and producers supported by the government via taxation. That may sound absurd or totalitarian but just such a change is happening in academic publishing via the Open Access movement and free-access journals like PLoS. Institutions that did nothing but provide proprietary guards over content (like my former employer Elsevier) are on their way out.

In fact, the whole free/open source movement in software and elsewhere may be seen as a response to the unpleasantness of guard labor. Proprietary software requires licensing schemes (ticket-takers) that cause new bugs, interfere with legitimate uses, and more generally cause friction. More broadly, locking software behind a pay wall reduces the amount of sharing and requires frequent reinvention of the wheel. It's inefficient, and this drives engineers crazy. Most of the time they don't get to vote, but the FOSS movement arose as a direct response to some of the unpleasantness surrounding proprietary software and has in its way been amazingly successful.

Guard labor is in its most purest and most apparently wasteful form when it is guarding digital content. The question is why then, if our economy is more involved in producing content than ever before, is the fraction of guard labor so high? I suppose it is also true that guarding digital content takes more effort than guarding physical objects -- how much of the fraction is RIAA lawyers, or the army of private detectives employed by Monsanto to sue small farmers who allegedly use their genetically modified seed without paying (genes are basically digital content -- and I just watched Food, Inc. which goes into this story). Monsanto, like DRM, is friction, but capitalists would argue that it such friction is necessary to spur production. But there can't be all that many people employed doing this kind of work.

I was around for the birth of the open source movement and efficiency really had nothing to do with it -- it was a moral struggle, based on the anguish of the excluded when a once open resource suddenly being subject to enclosure and guarding. But its ongoing success happened because of efficiency and the self-interest of software producers and companies. It is interesting to hear arguments for more general economic equality and openness, usually derived from a moral or emotional basis, being made on the basis of macro-scale efficiency.

[[edit: I was constructivly flaming Bowles' frequent collaborator Herbert Gintis on open-source here]]

Nonviolence entrepeneurs

Followup to The Organization of (Non)-Violence

Reader bhyde introduced me to the useful term "violence entrepreneurs" (originating with political scientist Charles Tilly, I believe). I'm somewhat pleased and somewhat annoyed (and not very surprised) to find that some ideas that I had come up with on my own were already somebody's longstanding research speciality. These violence entrepreneurs specialize in building boundaries, polarizing populations, and heightening conflict. A growth industry.

More-or-less coincidentally, I happened recently to see a film about some nonviolence entrepreneurs: the documentary Encounter Point, which is about a variety of Israeli and Palestinian activists who are trying to establish dialog, reduce the level of hatred and distrust, and generally promote the opposite of what a violence entrepreneur would do.

Encounter Point is an 85-minute feature documentary film that follows a former Israeli settler, a Palestinian ex-prisoner, a bereaved Israeli mother and a wounded Palestinian bereaved brother who risk their lives and public standing to promote a nonviolent end to the conflict. Their journeys lead them to the unlikeliest places to confront hatred within their communities. The film explores what drives them and thousands of other like-minded civilians to overcome anger and grief to work for grassroots solutions. It is a film about the everyday leaders in our midst.

Some of the people featured belong to a group called the Bereaved Families Forum. These are parents whose children have been killed in the course of the conflict, and somehow managed to get beyond the natural feelings of anger and hate and confront the larger problem. They seem to wield an awful moral authority, bought at the maximum price, and are deploying it as best they can.

The film left me somewhat unsatisfied. I wanted to be able to dive deeper: what sort of process did these people go through to arrive at their current mission? How did they manage to transcend the parochical emotions of hte conflict and approach it as a broken system? An 85-minute documentary can only give hints of answers to this question. I also wanted to see a broader picture: how are these peace efforts being met in the larger context of Israeli and Palestinian society? Is any headway being made? Are these isolated efforts of a few individuals, or is this potentially a broader movement? Again, not something a short documentary can answer. Efforts at peace and reconciliation are not new; and these aren't the only ones. The film's website includes a list of over 100 organizations working in some way for peace, justice, and human rights in the context of the conflict. So, with all this goodwill, what's the problem? Why haven't they won yet? Or, a better question, what would it take for these efforts to be stronger, to prevail over the forces that lead to violence and conflict?

One quote that leaped out at me was when one of the activists said something like "The politicians want to use our grief as an excuse for further violence, and we have to stop them". So there is a realization that prolonging the conflict is in some people's interests. But what does it take for everyone to realize that, to decide that the real enemy is not the other side, but the violence entrepreneurs on both sides?

The organization of (non)violence

Both Gandhi and the Palestinans have come up in conversation here recently, so I have to post this: The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank, by Gershom Gorenberg (who blogs at South Jerusalem, which is where I found this). It takes a look at the (fairly dim) prospects of Palestinians taking up the strategy of nonviolence that was successful in the hands of Gandhi and King. He finds a few figures in the Palestinian world who might have taken up that role, but for the most part any movements in that direction have been sabotaged, either by more violent Palestinian factions or by Israel. Saints are in short supply.

This fits into my own intermittent thinking on polarization and the dynamics of conflict. Peacemakers are a threat to those who proft from war on both sides. I previously noted that there are standard intra-group conflicts between warmakers and peacemakers. In this particular case, because of the control one side has over the others' affairs, warmakers in Israel were able to reach across the conflict and sabotage a potential peacemaker on the other side.

The mechanics and dynamics of group solidarity and group conflict seem endlessly fascinating, the kind of thing that raises interesting questions that most people can't even recognize as issues. It seems perfectly natural that Israel and Arabs should go to war, or France and Germany should go to war. But "Israel" and "the Arabs" are composed of individuals, who have or ought to have their own goals and agendas. What makes people ready to sacrifice themselves for a group? Suicide bombing is only an extreme case; every solider has been convinced (or coerced) to risk his life for the good of a larger whole. The extroardinary level of social cooperation in humans is matched in the animal kingdom only by the social insects. They too, spend a lot of their energy on war. But the level of cooperation in ants and bees has a genetic explanation. Human groupings, for war and more noble purposes, rely on something else, something that can make abstraction seem worth dying for.

Reflecting on my current sniping with Gagdad Bob and his minions. My mild efforts to tone down the conflict have been unsuccessful. We are bitterly insulting each other, the internet equivalent of war, and over what? Abstractions called "left" and "right", which can't even be defined consistently. Nonetheless they are terribly real in their effects. So is the abstraction called "God", another cause of many a war:



Which led me to this piece, which I remembered reading when I was 12 years old or so.

The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.

The years have not diminished its shocking clarity.

Word pair of the day

irenology (peace studies)
in contrast to:
polemology (conflict studies)

(thanks to Wikipedia).

Peace studies looks pretty fuzzy-minded at first glance, but on the other hand, these guys seem to come out of that area and are the only writings I've found that are close to my own view:

As conflict escalates, new, more militant leadership often develops. Leaders who fear that they will be replaced by challengers will not want to be seen as weak or submissive. As a result, they will often refuse to admit that any past actions were mistaken and are likely to grow in militancy and become more "hardline."[51] Furthermore, conflicts that already involve contentious activity are likely to fall into the hands of militants who have strong negative attitudes and tend to use extreme tactics.[52] In many instances, these leaders seek to ritualize the conflict and exhibit a complete lack of interest in resolution.[53] All of this contributes to conflict escalation.

Oh well, I knew this couldn't be a completely original idea...that's the problem with Google, it's always too easy to find prior art.

World War III 2.0

Ooh, goody, sabre-rattling with Russia! Grand alliances, evil empires forward siting of nuclear missles! If the 80s are coming back, maybe the Talking Heads will get back together. Actually the current situation seems to blend elements of WWs III and I, as we'll see.

I find it somewhat disturbing when I read a Pat Buchanan piece (esp. when it's at Lew Rockwell's site) and find myself nodding at his sagacity. But even better on the war in Georgia is Billmon, who has quietly returned to blogging after a long hiatus. Both writers point out how the US had a hand in stirring up this shit. Among the many nuggets in Billmon's piece is the revelation that Congress had passed something called the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act", which enables the US to treat Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name. Might this make the Russians a little antsy? Apparently so. Who could have known?

Hardnosed realists at Stratfor point out that this minor war simply serves as a signal of a shift in the balance of power that has already occured.

And of course Jim Kunstler jumps in with a word about how its going to bring our financial system crashing down. If he keeps on saying that eventually he'll be right.

Chris Floyd muses that the US deliberately encouraged Georgia to attack, essentially hoping for a Russian reaction that would enable more sabre-rattling at home, giving a boost to warriors in US politics, notably John McCain:

However, at this point, it is still unlikely that Butt-Thumper and the gang will actually take a pop at the Russians. But they don't have to, not right now. The racheting up of tensions, the resurrection of the mega-profitable Cold War tropes, and the convenient burial of the huge, fetid mountain of Bush Regime crime -- torture, aggression, corruption, tyranny -- by a juiced-up media with a new conflict to play with: all of these will serve the militarists very nicely, thank you.

I have no problems at all believing that the motivation and will to do something like this exists; but I have some doubts about whether the current administration is capable of being that strategically devious.

What's the other side saying? Here's Michael Gerson, a reliable gauge of offical neocon opinion (h/t IOZ):

The worst option would be to excuse Russia by blaming ourselves. NATO expansion did not cause Russian belligerence. The desire to be part of NATO in liberated Europe was fueled, in part, by a justified fear of Russian belligerence. ....
Georgia has been foolish. But Russia's crude overreach has had one good effect -- revealing the courage of others. Poland has quickly upgraded its relations with America, even under nuclear threat from Russia. Ukraine has been defiant, even though Russia still makes claims on Crimea. These nations have recent memories of Russian national "pride." And their courage should provoke our own.

Oh yeah. There's battle lines being drawn / And no one's right, if everybody's wrong.

More Gerson:

Again and again in European history, there has been a temptation to sacrifice the freedom of small countries to the interests of great powers. And it generally hasn't worked out very well, for them or for us.

Oh yes, and pulling small countries under the blanket of great power alliances in an atmosphere of saber-rattling has worked out so wonderfully in the past.

Well, this at least returns this post to one of the consistent themes of this blog, which is the dynamics of militarization and polarization. Militarists everywhere create the justifications for militarism everywhere else. We can see it happening here. McCain the militarist ought to be sending Saakashvili and Putin muffin baskets, at the very least.

The reality of this dynamic is perfectly obvious to me at this point, maybe because I've been obsessing about this idea for years. What's less obvious is how much the players in these games are aware of the dynamics versus how much they are simply being pushed around by them. Do militarists genuinely want war? I suppose they do. If it's what you are good at, it's what you want. Firemen would be bored and depressed without fires, and so they occasionally go and create some. Similarly warfighters must needs be warmakers, shit-stirrers, conflict-amplifiers. Like the fireman-arsonists, they probably don't mean for things to get out of hand, but they always do.

[[update: Jim Henley caught a Wall Street Journal article that highlights the financial aspect, which is of course a hugely important driver of all this:

Russia's attack on Georgia has become an unexpected source of support for big U.S. weapons programs, including flashy fighter jets and high-tech destroyers, that have had to battle for funding this year because they appear obsolete for today's conflicts with insurgent opponents...

Some Wall Street stock analysts early on saw the invasion as reason to make bullish calls on the defense sector. A report from JSA Research in Newport, R.I., earlier in the week called the invasion "a bell-ringer for defense stocks."...

Now, the Russian situation makes the debate over the equipping of the U.S. military a front-burner issue. "The threat always drives procurement," said a defense-industry official. "It doesn't matter what party is in office."

Ah, well. All my nattering about dynamics and I'm ignoring the most important driver of all, namely money.]]

The self-justifying dynamics of torture

Turns out June was torture awareness month. I'm behind the curve.

Christopher Hitchens gets himself waterboarded. Video here.

We're cribbing torture techniques from the 1950s version of Communist China. Some interesting speculation there on what the motives for this could have been, given that the purpose of these techniques is mainly to elicit false confessions. So why do it? Because we could. Radley Balko makes the further point that far from fighting terrorism, techniques like this perpetuate it by generating all sorts of false alarms.

He does not go on to point out that this could very well have been the purpose of the torture, consciously or unconsciously. War is the health of the state and the war on terror is the health, such as it is, of the Bush/Cheney administration. Wars and states want to perpetuate themselves; inflating the strength of your enemies is an important technique for accomplishing this.

And if you are a cog, big or little, in a torture machine, surely you must feel a need to excuse your appalling acts. Every confession elicited by torture lets you pretend that the torture was justified all along, and on into the future. And once this dynamic is in motion, the truth or falsity of confessions hardly matters at all.

War sucks

To be specific, war is a vortex of destruction that sucks in human beings, territory, and material, until it burns itself out. Or a paired set of mutally-reinforcing vortices.

Conflict is a pervasive part of human existence, but only some of the time does it rise to the level of armed conflict. Just as we always have weather, but only under certain conditions does it self-organize into immensely destructive hurricanes and tornadoes.

At a sufficient remove, war just seems like something that happens. Sure, human agency is involved -- we woudn't be in Iraq if not for Bush and his cabal; we wouldn't have had WWII without Hitler -- but pull back for a long view and the leaders don't seem to matter that much, most of the time. WWI just seemed to happen because there were armed states waiting for an excuse to fight; ethnic conflicts have their own inescapable dynamics.

I've had a long-standing interest in the dynamics of conflict, but I can't say I have had any great insights into it since this, other than realizing that there is a reasonably good term for the main phenonmenon that catches my attention: polarization. The way to get rid of war is to subvert the human tendency to form conflicting groups. Don't ask me how that's supposed to be accomplished, but people try.

Anyway, just taking a moment this Memorial Day to remember all of those who have been sucked in and chewed up by this process: military and civilian, aggressor and defender, guilty and innocent.

Führerprinzip

From the World's Stupidest Editorial Page comes this argument that we should all just shut up and line up behind Dear Leader:

But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."

They can because this isn't communist Romania, you pompous twit.

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook...Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community ... This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels.

No, it's regarded as fucking moronic.

For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies.

So -- in time of war, we aren't allowed to criticize the president who is the veritable incarnation of America's strength. To do so is tantamount to treason. We are at war against "terror", that is, we're in a war that can never end, so basically we aren't allowed any criticism of the president ever.

Mr. Pacepa should have stayed in Romania, he's obviously learned his lessons well there. "The communists got it right", indeed.

This is related, loosely, to the dynamics of conflict, forcing side-choosing, hardending of the boundaries. There is not a good term for this, which is a pity, since it seems to be at the root of war and many other social dynamics.

I recently had a long chat with Mencius Moldbug, an interestingly crazy libertarian whose goal is (roughly), to eliminate politics (because it leads to violence and war) and replace it with contracts, ownership, and law. I think this is largely misguided, but I'm partly sympathetic. Politics is unpleasant, it kills the mind, it forces people to conform to group norms so is hostile to the individual, it leads to violence. But I don't think you can get rid of it.

H-T, IOZ

Which side are you on?

A mailing list I'm on was having a conversation about the Catholic Church protecting child molesters which led to the subject of group formation and protection. I contributed this:

I vividly recall my experience when I first did extensive travel out of the US (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). This was during the Reagan years, and all of a sudden I, who had opposed Reagan and Republicans for all my life, was now being held responsible for him. A lot of my conversations with non English speakers went something like: "Oh, American! Ronald Reagan! Bang-bang!" Those were the friendly ones. Then there were those with more hostile European Marxists where I found myself in the unaccustomed position of defending the US. It was weird being a capitalist oppressor all of a sudden.

Remember Ward Churchill and his crack about the people in the WTC being "little Eichmanns"?

I just read this rather terrible book by David Mamet, _The Wicked Son_, The book is addressed to Jews who don't identify strongly with Judaism. The thesis is basically, everybody hates the Jews so you *better* strengthen your group identification. I heard a variant this growing up, roughly "you may not consider yourself Jewish, but
the Nazis will".

There's this awful dynamic of intergroup hostility leading to stronger group identification leading to collective blame of the other side leading to more intergroup hostility. A society of mixed, peaceful, weakly-identified groups can easily precipitate out into strong and hostile groups when conditions change. The former Yugoslavia may be the purest example, and then there's Iraq right now.

Then I saw the exact same issues come up at Abstract Nonsense, this time in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:

Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post writes a wonderful article that aims to delegitimize every Palestinian political group, no matter how prepared it is for peace. The standard is always the same: nothing short of total acceptance is okay, and nothing short of total obsequity is peaceful. I see it among pro-Palestinian extremists who portray Israelis as uniformly oppressive, and among pro-Israeli extremists who portrays Palestinians as uniformly pro-terror....An Israeli who doesn’t refuse a priori to talk to anyone who’s more pro-Palestinian than Peace Now is seen as a traitor; a Palestinian who doesn’t refuse a priori to talk to anyone who’s more pro-Israeli than Rachel Corrie is seen as a collaborator.

Years ago I had one of those dumb/smart insights -- the real conflict in life is not between the obvious sides (Israelis/Palestinians, Shia/Sunni, whatever) but between those who want conflict because they thrive on it and those who want peace so they can get on with their lives. The problem is is that the peaceniks are naturally less prone to fight (of course) and it is difficult for peaceniks on one of the ostensible sides to coordinate with those on the other. There are groups that promote negotiation on an informal level, and then there are the sort of people that Alon Levy is talking about, who try as hard as they can to prevent well-intentioned people on different sides from talking.

One more example, from which the post title is taken.

Which Side Are You On?
by Florence Reese

Come all of you good workers
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell

(Chorus)
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner
And I'm a miner's son
And I'll stick with the union
Till every battle's won

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

Unions have their own rather specific history of building solidarity and defining the enemy, but that's a post for another time.

Wading into the Middle East

Normally I avoid online discussions of issues relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict, since there's very little hope of productive discussion. But when I saw someone whose intelligence I respect utter complete nonsense, I had to reply in the comments.

I’m pretty sure that it is the first time in more than 1000 years that a non-governmental group of non-Jews has attacked a group of Jews and suffered in any way.

No matter what side you favor in this struggle (pro-Israel, pro-Arab, or pro-peace) this is just silly. Israel has been retaliating against Palestinian Arab groups since before it even existed. Remember last year's film Munich? Remember the last invasion of Lebanon? Remember Gaza, just a month ago?

In Israel's first military operation in Gaza since disengagement, being called Operation Summer Rain, thousands of troops, backed by warplanes and tanks, moved into the coastal strip overnight Tuesday. The army knocked out nearly 75 percent of Gaza's electricity supply, destroyed major highways and water supplies, and struck fields in northern and southern Gaza in a show of force meant to intimidate Palestinian militants. Artillery units also opened fire near Gaza City....

Israel's goal in Gaza is to make Palestinians uncomfortable enough to think twice about committing more kidnappings, or in the language floating around the camp here, to teach them a lesson.

How well did that work? So well that Hizbullah kidnapped more soldiers immediately afterwards.

The point is, retaliatory violence by Jews is hardly a fresh concept and it's ridiculous to base an analysis of the Lebanon situation around pretending it is. The larger point is that this particular act of retaliation, justified or not, has been a complete disaster for Israel -- they have failed to root out Hizbullah, whose stature has been raised immeasurably. The war destroyed any hope of a more liberal peaceful regime emerging in Lebanon. Israel's basically been fought to a standoff by a non-state actor -- that's a defeat in any reasonable definition of the term. I don't pretend to know what Israel should have done about the presence of Hizbullah on its Northern border -- but I'm pretty sure that what they did do has been a disaster. Americans relishing some fantasy image of the region based on completely false assumptions will not help matters.

My comment (which was not particularly rude, I thought) seems to have been rejected by the moderator, which is the only reason I'm bothering to post here. Interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it, etc. Maybe it will show up in a trackback.

Five minutes ahead of the curve again

I had been seeing this guy's name around in various things I'd been reading over the years, in a variety of interesting work on the origins of segregation, conflict and coordination, and more recently invoked as an explanation of why people love government. I even had some vague ideas on the back burner about using the same ideas in that last paper to explain gods and religion, which I was thinking of turning into a blog post.

Well, before I get around to helping increase the guy's fame, he goes ahead and wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. I sort of feel like I wish I had bought stock in him. Anyway, he's a very readable and interesting writer and apparently a very nice guy, so congratulations to Thomas Schelling.

Update: Good summary of Schelling's major contributions from one of his mentees at Marginal Revolution.