In Soviet Russia, Internet invents you

This article on the history of Soviet efforts to build something like the internet is absolutely fascinating. They didn՚t manage to succeed of course, but it looks like the nerdy subculture that grew up around the effort was amazingly similar to the US equivalent.

My favorite part was this:

The forces that brought down OGAS resemble those that eventually undid the Soviet Union: the surprisingly informal forms of institutional misbehaviour. Subversive ministers, status quo-inclined bureaucrats, nervous factory managers, confused workers and even other economic reformers opposed the OGAS project because it was in their institutional self-interest to do so….

There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and institutional infighting among Soviet administrat. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists.

This hints at something I՚ve thought about for a long time but haven՚t really managed to articulate: that the human built-in propensities for both competition and cooperation, for self-aggrandizement and for doing genuine good for others, are more or less constant no matter what the formalized institutional system of society.

We live in an ostensibly capitalist system, but corporations sophisticated methodologies to make their inside feel like a socialist collective farm, with everybody pulling in unison for the team and acheive “alignment”, a little bit of Newspeak that Mao would feel right a home with. And contrariwise, it is certain that even in the deepest and most committed precincts of the communist world, people were quite adept at pursuing their own rational and individual self-interests, even if that could never be publicly acknowledged. This is what killed the Soviet internet and no doubt many other worthwhile initiatives.

It may even be the case that actual cooperation is inversely correlated to how much it is part of official ideology.

First person plural

When I first read it, Daniel Klein's paper, The People's Romance: Why People Love Government as much as they do (PDF), it struck me as one of the more interesting things I've read to come out of a libertarian/marketeer perspective. I recently reread it and was less impressed. Klein manages to take one step out of his individualistic economist assumptions, but ultimately fails to take the next step, which is to realize that his entire program is broken.

Imagine if someone had spent 20 years devoting themselves to elucidating a model of humans as atomized individuals governed by rational self-interest. Suddenly, that person realizes that this is not a very good model, and seeks to explain why people deviate from this supposed ideal. And let's say this person is reasonably smart and honest, and is willing to at least look at and acknowledge certain facts that undercut their model -- that people crave community for instance. That they seek to belong to various social groupings that can provide a "higher purpose". That they enjoy subsuming themselves into a larger group, and a larger mission, than pursuit of their own individual goals. What could explain this?

Klein takes a trip through a constellation of related ideas, from the basic biological need and urge to coordinate, to the notion of Schelling points as natural foci for collective action, to the government's role as the ultimate such point. From there, it's a short trip to requiring that collectivities be totally encompassing, and from there to coercion.

He provides many examples of the kind of collectivism he deplores, for instance, the title of Richard Rorty's book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America; a quote from a census director praising his project because “every household that returns the form does strengthen the ties that bind us together as a civilized society”. From Klein's perspective, all this talk is simply wrong, dangerous, and an indicator of a style of thinking that needs to be combated. One suspects that Klein would distrust any use at all of the first person plural, as in "we want to end poverty", or "we believe in democracy"? What you mean "we", white man?

Klein can't really connect the two parts of his analysis. He observes, correctly, that people actively seek coordination and commonality. His economist principles make it hard to say that any human desires are wrong per se, but because these desires are inherently social rather than individual he can't bear to live with the consequences of these desires. The problem is, coordination and community are fundamental to human nature, they underlie our natures, our very being. They aren't a mere bolted-on superstructure to a framework of individual goal-seeking. We will never get rid of this, and thus we will always be faced with the problem of what happens when group goal-seeking gets out of control.

The first half of the 20th century saw the People's Romance swell to ridiculous and dangerous proportions, embodied in mass totalitarian movements. That age fortunately seems to have passed. The postmodern condition is just about defined by the absence of these large-scale romances -- there are no more large causes to bind oneself to. The neoconservative movement, in its current form, is essentially an attempt to rekindle the romance of the state by inflating global Islam to a threat big enough to inspire war and the strong attachment to the state produced by war. It's a lost cause, because their heart isn't in it and despite their best efforts to whip up war hysteria the people have not responded properly.

The Obama phenomenon may be seen in the light of the People's Romance -- the US population's love affair with their country has grown old, stale, cynical, and tired. Suddenly a young attractive persona appears who seems to be able to rekindle the lost spark of group identification, with an added twist of racial ambiguity to make things more exciting. Young people see a chance to fall in love with their country via his allegedly transformative persona.

Me, I'm too old and cynical, too much betrayed by my past romantic attachments to put a lot of faith in Obama, or any politician. And yet -- I do believe that people need to take collective action. While I am all for non-coercive emergent coordination networks taking care of business, I'm pretty sure we'll still need some sort of Official Government Institutions to handle the heavy lifting and dirty work. Given that, it is not necessarily a bad thing for people to have some positive feelings for their government. There's gotta be a happy medium between masochistic devotion and total alienation. I rather doubt Obama can deliver on the emotional payoff he is promising, but I hope he gets a chance, because the alternatives are not good.

Well, I was hoping this post would turn into a rigorous refutation of Klein's position, but I don't feel coherent enough to attempt it, so it's just a bunch of disjointed reactions. What I'd like to do is turn his analysis around and use it to try to think about how you design collectivities so they have just the right level of "romance" associated with them -- enough to work, to keep people involved and attached and functioning, but not so much that they lose themselves utterly and let the collectivity trample over individual rights and dignities, and otherwise get out of control the way institutions do. Well, something to think about for later.

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.

Solidarity and its opposite in New Orleans

One of my many amateur fascinations also happens to be a (perhaps the) fundamental question of sociology, political science, economics, and management: how do people organize themeselves into groups and coordinate their actions? There are enough approaches to this question to keep a real scholar busy for a career, so you won't find the answer here. Economists talk about Collective Action, management types talk about Coordination (and many of them are looking at the Open Source movement with a slavering grin, seeing as it represents a brand new and largely unstudied mode of coordination).

But today I am attracted to the old-fashioned and leftist-tinged term solidarity, which captures the psychological/emotional/spiritual side of the question. Nobody uses this term except hard leftists, Polish labor unions, and Richard Rorty. Being in solidarity means seeing other people's interests and very being as aligned with your own. The connotations of the term go beyond narrow economic calculations though. For example, if I am selling my house, the realtor and I have a common interest in getting the best price for it, but nobody would say we have solidarity. Teams who work on projects together develop solidarity, if the team is any good. The military has explicit techniques for building solidarity at the platoon level (they call it "unit cohesion"). If my community is working at all I have some solidarity with my neighbors and will trust them and help them out if necessary, and vice versa.

The open-source movement has solidarity (which is why they can call themselves a movement), in part driven by a collective dislike of Microsoft and proprietary software in general. Aligning against a common enemy is great way to build solidarity.
Solidarity is linked to one's sense of self. You can see yourself in an atomized, alienated way, or as sharing interests and existence with others.

Which brings me to what I wanted to point to in the first place, this report from New Orleans which is both heartening and heart-rendering, in that it illustrates both solidarity and its opposite. A bunch of random individuals thrown into survival mode is another great way to build solidarity. People do have this drive to take care of one another which is, amazingly, revealed in the most stressful circumstances

What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters.

So these people under conditions of extreme stress and danger manage to form some kind of makeshift community, and take care of one another. Solidarity. Perhaps it isn't so amazing -- people will do what they need to survive, and a functioning community is a hell of a lot more survivable than scattered individuals in a dangerous situation. As Ken Kesey said about love, solidarity isn't an emotion, it's just good sense.

On a larger scale, the citizenry display a high level of solidarity in terms of their concern, willingness to donate to charity and house refugees. This extends beyond the US to the world at large. We're used to this, but it's still rather amazing.

Contrast this with the second part of the story, though, when the makeshift community is trying to leave New Orleans on foot:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation...We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

When I first read this I was disgusted and ashamed of my country. How could people treat each other like that in the face of catastrophe? How could officials deliberately add to the burden these survivors have already born? Now I've calmed down and tried to think about it, and I realize that this is a pefect manifestion of the opposite of solidarity, a rift in the human commonality, a particular anti-solidarity that has infected this country since before it was born. I'm talking about racism of course.

Actually if you look at it more closely racism is a form of limited solidary or pseudo-solidarity. It's built on solidarity within a group and, in opposition, hatred of other groups. This is the dark side of solidarity. Imagine a Klan meeting in the woods -- these white racisists have solidarity, are building solidarity. Imagine prison gangs. I don't really want to apply the label solidarity to these phenomenoa, but they are undeniably a form of group identity, with people banding together to pursue their shared interests, seeing the common humanity of the ingroup (and denying the common humanity of the outgroup). Ingroup solidarity is at the root the various genocides and slaughters of the 20th century (and no doubt others). It's an essential element of war.

So let's say there are two separate and very different forms of solidarity. Ingroup solidarity promotes group bonding at the cost of hostility to outgroups. Unbounded or humanistic solidarity is solidarity based on a perceived shared humanity, period. The latter is the proper thing to aspire to, although the former is almost always easier to generate.

If you want to judge a political intellectual, see which form of solidarity they are promoting.