Larvatus Prodeo’s staffwriters (the post is not attributed) have produced a brief statement on their election year blogging. As in a
newspaper, Mark takes responsibility for editorial comment, but it’s clear that getting the lot of them to line up and cheer for their ‘team’ - just like trying to do the same here - would be like herding cats. During the course of some otherwise lighthearted banter, Pavlov’s Cat made the following thoughtful comment about what blogging does for her in an electoral context:
The role that the LP collective and commenters, as well as some of the people at Troppo and at Catallaxy, will have for me is to provide a huge range of facts, opinions and analysis, a smorgasbord which is laid on by everyone from clever well-informed insiders to über-whacky nerds with Aspergers but from which, overall, I can nonetheless easily tease out what is probably true and what is probably accurate or likely, if only by a process of elimination.
This has become crucially important to me in an era when I can no longer rely at all on any MSM source, not even the ABC, for detailed and non-distorted coverage of what’s going on.
That got me navel-gazing, and since it’s the weekend and we’re all a bit more relaxed (I hope), I thought I’d reference Orwell’s great essay on the creative impulse. Written while he was laying the foundations for Nineteen Eighty Four - and still basking in the warm afterglow of Animal Farm’s critical and commercial success - Why I Write surveys Orwell’s writing career. He considers both his hack journalism and great novels (Animal Farm is the greatest allegory in English after Piers Plowman), and besides pinning what makes writers write like an entomologist pins a bug, he makes the following comment:
In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
There is something of the pamphleteer in the best blogging, although it also admits of considerable time for reflection and thought. Why do you write? What brings people here, to write about politics and other things? Last night’s little stoush on the merits (or otherwise) of journalism seems to indicate that writing can be unpleasant, even bitter, but we keep coming back to it. I know I do. With that in mind, Orwell’s concluding comments on the intersection between politics and literature - and on what writing a book involves (something of which I’m acutely aware, being well-progressed through a second novel) - are particularly apposite.
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
And while we’re on bloggy goodies, Darlene Taylor’s Missing Link is up over at Club Troppo.
114 Comments
I suppose Orwell had an overwhelming sense of responsibility to do whatever one person with a typewriter could do to right (not just write) the wrongs of the world. Consequently a para written without a purpose to do some kind of political good deed was a para wasted. But in a perverse way that contributed to the problem that Benda identified, the politicisation of everything.
But maybe for Orwell that ethos applied to books and not articles, he wrote wonderful pieces on the common toad and similar topics, celebrating the natural world and ways of life that he admired without a shred of politics about them.
On cat herding, it is not impossible, there is a TV documentary that clearly demonstrates how it is a challenging and rewarding if little appreciated way of life.
Orwell felt discomforted by the political turn in his writing, in part because he did have strong instincts to write about the natural world. In Why I Write he made this comment:
Why write?
“Becoming a writer is not a “career decision†like becoming a doctor or policeman. You don’t choose it as much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your daysâ€
Paul Auster
The Art of Hunger
The writerly virtues (lack thereof):
“…like every writer he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measured him by what he planned someday to do.â€
Jorge Luis Borges
The Secret Miracle
My ‘writerly flaw’ is cannibalizing my life experience (and that of people I know) into my novels/stories/features whatever. I do make sure I let them know, however - Christina Stead was notorious for putting family members pretty much straight into her books without telling them. At the moment there’s a local solicitor up here who’s so interesting I’ve built a character around him in Our House. I made sure to tell him, though, and we’ve set time aside to chat.
I think Orwell’s inference that were it not for the political wars of his day he would’ve produced mediocre work is probably right. Because of a mixture of social conscience, old-fashioned English gentlemanly virtue and sheer non-conformist bloody-mindedness he was the right guy at the right time and his capacity to dissect bullshit seems to be becoming more relevant and vital with time.
His first publishing contract was with a fellow name of Gollancz who was a typical upper-crust Marxist impressed with Down and Out in Paris and London. The relationship deteriorated after Orwell went to Spain.
While there fighting for the “Trotskyite” POUM he almost got arrested when pro-Soviet forces attempted a clampdown on Anarchist and non-Communist socialists in the war. Essentially the anti-monarchist/fascist front deteriorated into serious in-fighting orchestrated by the Stalinists for their own reasons.
Anyone familiar with left-wing politics (and who is honest, independently minded and critical) will recognize this typical sort of farnarkling as satirised in Monty Python’s Life of Brian sketch re. “We’re the Judean People’s Front and the only thing we hate more than the Romans are the People’s Front of Judea.”
The meltdown in Catalonia and more especially the capitulation of the (especially left-wing) British press to Communist propaganda turned Orwell fully renegade, although earlier works like The Road To Wigan Pier had displayed an anti-orthodox tendency in Orwell.
Gollancz refused to publish Catalonia, The New Statesman refused to publish Orwell’s pieces on the war all because he criticized the government and illustrated the extent to which it resembled Fascism. In March of ‘38 Orwell wrote to his fellow novellist and Etonian Cyril Connolly:
The willingness of otherwise intelligent people to groupthink and exclude unpleasant facts for political expediency startled Orwell. It inspired him to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Lots of people these days want to claim him for their slice of the ideological spectrum. Neo-conservatives, famously claim him as one of their own although he remained a democratic socialist to his last. The DSP also claim him thus (because he was supposedly Trotskyite) but fail to heed any of his lessons re. ‘democratic’ centralism or changing history to suit one’s self.
I think this approach misses the point. If you believe in democracy, regardless of your ideological disposition, then Orwell is a template of virtue. This is not because he was an …ist of this or that sort but because he was dedicated to facing facts no matter how unpleasant, no matter how it compromised the party line. He didn’t change history or language to suit his political agenda he fought against his political compadres when and where they did this.
This attribute in democratic citizenry is still rare. Possibly inevitably, but without doubt sadly.
Political culture is still pretty much pre-democratic, that is: tribal. You do anything to kick your enemies as you’d do anything to help your friends. The ‘democracy’ bit is that we’ve agreed to submit to the rule of law and’ve replaced civil war with elections. Unfortunately when a person says: “I disagree with what you say but defend your right to say it”; what they really mean is: “I disagree with what you say but if you get your say I get mine too.” The difference is subtle and many fail to see its import but it is important.
Actually that’s a very good point, and goes hand in hand with the idea that if someone abandons a stoush (for whatever reason - taking the kids to school, going to bed, whatevs), those they’re arguing with perceive that they’ve ‘won’. It’s pretty lame, but very common.
“I disagree with what you say but defend your right to say itâ€.
But not on the ABC.
No, not on the ABC unfortunately. The last vestiges of PC on the national broadcaster come (largely) in the form of riffs on the line ‘but you can’t say that’.
Sad, really.
I agree with Adrienswords that it has become common to adhere to the letter of democracy but ignore its spirit. And not only in political debate but also in electoral process. It is now OK to impeach or recall an elected official not because they have done something really grave that warrants such action, but simply because you have the numbers. It is also OK to redraw electoral boundaries to your political adavntage.
The only recourse to this is public opinion. This is why an attempt to impeach Clinton backfired. This means that in a subtle way the public does care about the spirit of democracy and fair play. The rise of Clinton’s popularity at the time can to a large extent be attributed to this healthy attitude and not to any sympathy towards Clinton or approval of his behaviour. Similar with electoral boundaries.
I reckon that teaching ‘1984′ in school is dangerous and irresponsible.
It presents a view of the mechanics of power that only the most capable intellectuals can understand is not inevitable, and therefore likely to produce even more neo-conservatives and/or lawyers.
Am I wrong?
Could you elaborate a bit further Invig? I’m not sure I get what you mean and I don’t want to jump in and misinterpret what you’re trying to say. Ta.
Well…
1984 creates the impression that it is possible for a small minority to preserve power over a majority regardless of a) historical fact b) living conditions or even c) their own conscience (by ‘breaking’ their political opponents)
The manifesto that is apparently written by the resistance leader is never finished and the reader is not given an insight into how a different reality can be made possible.
I say this encourages children to become lawyer (and in the extreme case, neo-cons) because the law is used (abused) by those in power in fending off threats by the ‘proletariat’. This is made possible because the law becomes more complex over time as legislation and case history accumulates, and therefore less an instrument of justice and more an elaborate and spectacular denial of justice.
Any bright school kid can see this, and when they read 1984 they think to themselves ‘well if it’s hopeless anyway, and power will always preserve itself (especially in the context of high technology), then I may as well scrape out a safe place for myself inside the mechanics of that system.’
Thanks Invig.
Despite popular perception, the common law (derived from case precedents) is relatively simple and works efficiently. I’d recommend Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World on just this point. Much legislation, however, is captive to political short-termism and does create unnecessary complexity and all the bureaucratic capture that goes with complexity. This is Hayek’s central insight in Law, Legislation and Liberty, and is something I’ve written about in more detail here.
On the wider point of literature’s capacity to ‘influence’ young people, I suspect that’s overrated. Most people take their schooldays with a pinch of salt, and are far more likely to be influenced by family, peers etc. In my teaching days - before I became a lawyer - staff would regularly comment that we had kids for 6 hours a day, and their families had them for 18. Yet we were expected to do vast amounts of ‘values inculcating’. It never worked, of course, but that doesn’t stop the pollies from trying it on!
“I reckon that teaching ‘1984′ in school is dangerous and irresponsible.”
I’ve come across this attitude before. Often when one scratches the surface of it you can find a totalitarian core with a thin veneer of irony. Not to cast such aspertions on Invig however…
According to Invig:
This is the world as portrayed by Orwell certainly enough. He describes the mechanisms by which such a system could occur. It’s not the book’s purpose to be a manual for instituting a totalitarian superstate but to show that various modern techniques and modes of thought make this theoretically feasible. It also implies how to avoid this ‘inevitability’.
How this is dangerous is beyond me.
Invig says that it’s because it encourages “children to become lawyers (and in the extreme case, neo-cons) because the law is used (abused) by those in power in fending off threats by the ‘proletariat’. “. In this s/he misses the point of the book.
At the beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston starts a diary:
My emphasis.
In Oceania there is no longer any law. Habeas Corpus and the seperation of powers which inscribe limitations on state power into the mechanics of modern society do not exist. The rules are unspoken, inexplicit and ruthlessly enforced by unseen persons over whom one has no control and against whom there is no appeal.
There is no law. There is no threat from the proles because they have no access to any understanding that they are oppressed. Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t tell you you can’t fight the power it describes a fictional world where it’s no longer possible.
What is missing in Oceania is the freedom (we take for granted) to keep one’s own counsel regarding the truth of various matters. Or at the very least to select for ourselves who is to do our thinking for us.
Invig misunderstands the philosophy of power described by Orwell. In Oceania there is no abuse of power. To call it that is to apply liberal values to a (fictional) world which doesn’t recognize them. As O’Brien tells Winston:
As for Invig’s statement that “the reader is not given an insight into how a different reality can be made possible.” This is silly; all a kid has to do is look around. One understands a different reality is possible because reality is actually different.
I discovered the book in a boarding school library and in that context became alert to the use and abuse of power. In a similar but much milder way a Catholic boarding school imposes comparable control over one and utilizes many techniques similar to that of the Oceanic Party.
At the time, anyhow, it seemed so to me.
After Nineteen Eighty-Four I discovered the other two great 20th century dystopias: Huxley’s Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We. Each portrays the terrifying potential of modern technology to cancel liberty out via an omniscient state apparatus.
These books teach lessons we moderns who wish to remain free need to learn. For that reason teaching them in school is the very opposite of dangerous and irresponsible. As for encouraging bright kids to become neo-con lawyers? Well it inspired me to write not litigate and I’ve never been a conservative, neo or otherwise.
Thanks Adrien. I thought I’d leave the literary questions to our resident Orwell specialist, while I focussed on the law.
Mind you, there have been great contributions from everyone on this thread - really thoughtful.
I must admit the best dystopian literature is superb - My first encounter with the genre was Lord of the Flies, and moved on from there. If anything, it gave me a lifelong concern with excessive power.
These books teach lessons we moderns who wish to remain free need to learn.
I agree with this - I found the world in 1984 to be shocking - a world in which one could have no private life at the risk of being discovered and potentially mentally broken (as happened to Winston).
For some reason, 1984 has stuck in my mind more than Brave New World.
For sci-fi fans, there was an overally transparent use of the plot of the end of 1984 in a Star Trek Next Gen epsiode, where Capt. Picard is tortured and refuses to be brainwashed: from memory, he keeps on saying that he can see 4 fingers (4 fingers are being held up but they want him to say 5 fingers), although when safe back on board his ship, he confesses to the doctor that he could see 5 fingers (or however many it was). It was a shame that the use of the plot from 1984 was so obvious.
Adrienswords,
Thankyou for your comments, my response:
I don’t believe it does. At least I wasn’t left with that impression. Would you mind enlightening me?
So you’re satisfied with how governments are responding to crises and creating policy? Do you think when kids watch the news they can be satisfied that the world is in good hands?
How do you think the present reality would correlate with reading 1984? Would a high school student perhaps feel a sense of inevitability of Orwell’s dystopia?
Skepticlawyer,
Thanks also for your comment, and I enjoyed your piece on Native Title Law.
When you say, however;
I would agree the mechanism by which common law generates itself is simple, as are the underlying precepts, but when there are thousands of cases to be called upon - possibly dating back to the middle ages - how does that not advantage a party able to spend more money on legal research? Or a better barrister to convince the jury or judge over an obscure point of law?
Also, but what do you mean efficiency? How many days it takes to deal with the average case? How often the guilty party is found?
For the conviction rate for rape cases is around 10% - and only 10% actually go to trial anyway - which makes an ‘efficiency’ of 1% (assuming all are guilty, which is probably not far from the truth given the french system convicts 90%)
How do you think the present reality would correlate with reading 1984? Would a high school student perhaps feel a sense of inevitability of Orwell’s dystopia?
I’d guess that they wouldn’t. Do you think they might?
Obscurity doesn’t win legal arguments. Simplicity, economy and good reasoning do. Bear in mind that there are seldom juries in civil cases (they do sometimes appear in defamation cases, however), and that low rape conviction rates are a function of evidence, not inefficiency.
The French system (which is inquisitorial) throws the great majority of cases out after preliminary investigation by a special judicial officer. The evidentiary bar is much higher than that used here (in our adversarial system), where all that must be satisfied is a prima facie case at the committal stage. If you controlled for the French approach to evidence, I have no doubt that the ratio of convictions to complaints would be similar.
Yes, there are ongoing problems with access to justice in Australia (mainly through our silly opposition to contingency fees and the structure of costs awards), which I’ve blogged about in the past. That, however, is a separate issue from the one discussed here - which involves Orwell’s interpretive legacy.
WRT to ‘inevitable dystopias’, I suspect any student well-read enough (who bothered to think about these things, most don’t) would be more inclined to view something akin to Brave New World as inevitable. That dystopia turns on mass consumption and an atrophied notion of ‘the Good Life’.
I think it is obvious that our society has given people a good standard of living and many material comforts (absent in 1984). There is, however, room for disagreement about its spiritual resources and arguments about over-consumption.
Well, I did when I read it. I struggled to identify any systemic reason why power would not continue to centralise. Taken in the context of the American political system (or Australia, which is 10 years behind in all things it would seem) I would hold grave fears that there is any hope?
I mean, how can we improve our systems of government to stop Australia becoming more like America (in terms of corporate/media influence in politics)?
But the point I am trying to make here is more about giving kids the tools to think with rather than versions of reality. Because if we continue to convince ourselves that the status quo is ‘good enough’ then how can we expect the next generations to have the capacity to think beyond current strictures?
So, by tools, I mean teaching them to think, showing them what underlies rational thought, not giving them a conclusion, which is what I would call 1984.
I don’t see that Orwell believed there was any solution, but telling kids that is like making them believe in an evil-santa claus, rather than saying ‘here’s how you might discover the nature of santa claus, but we aren’t going to tell you whether he is good, bad or indifferent’.
Thanks for enlightening me on the French system - I am no expert but it certainly sounds better than what we have - but back to Orwell
This comes back to my previous point - giving kids the ability for independent thought. To become a lawyer, you must accept an entire ‘world’ of rules and regulations. To become a rich lawyer, you then find holes in those self-same rules and regulations.
This is inherently a constricted, conservative thought process that disregards and devalues the ‘constructive’, first-principles, thinking skills required for the creation of new realities - only abuse of existing ones.
I think that the preemince of such thought (based on their background as lawyers) in politicians is a large reason behind their inability to conceive of new systems to deal with oncoming problems.
I’m a lawyer, and I’m quite happy to wear a few insults (they’re generally richly deserved - viz - Q: what do you call 50 lawyers chained together at the bottom of Sydney Harbour? A: a good start), but even so criticism of a whole profession needs some substance to it. I’m not needling you - I’d like to know where your particular irritation with lawyers comes from. I’ll freely admit that lawyers irritate me plenty too - and I am one!
I’m hoping it’s not because a lawyer ran over your cat or something
“So you’re satisfied with how governments are responding to crises and creating policy? ”
No, not entirely. Far from it. There is a huge room for improvement. But I do not think this has much to do with the essence of 1984.
‘Do you think when kids watch the news they can be satisfied that the world is in good hands?’
No, not entirely. Far from it. There is a huge room for improvement. But I do not think this has much to do with the essence of 1984.
‘How do you think the present reality would correlate with reading 1984? ‘
Assuming kids indeed are influenced by it at all (which is unlikely for reasons spelled out by SL), I do not think they will see much correlation with the present. If anything they would probably think of how to preserve democracy as imperfect as it may be. They may become a lawyer (which I think is a good thing, I encouraged my daughter to do this, and we shall see). A human rights lawyer perhaps.
“Would a high school student perhaps feel a sense of inevitability of Orwell’s dystopia? ”
Well I can only reflect on my own experience. I read 1984 in USSR in the early 1980s, when it was no longer possible to get a jail term for it, but derail an entire career and therefore life - yes (or so we thought). It struck me as an indictment of a totalitarian system, and specifically communist system. The analogies were so precise that I couldn’t believe it was written by someone who never visited USSR - not once. I didn’t think this related to evolution of power as such. Evolution of groupthink - that’s more like it. But then again such thoughts came later. At the time it was a very precise portrait of Stalin’s Russia - not even much of an exaggeration. And the work of a genius, no doubt.
My daughter read both 1984 and Animal Farm at school. I will ask her what she thinks.
Thanks for such an insightful comment, Boris. With any sort of luck Invig will be back tomorrow with some input - and maybe Pavlov’s Cat (who I quoted) too. She knows a lot about literature & has probably taught Orwell in all sorts of different places.
“Obscurity doesn’t win legal arguments. Simplicity, economy and good reasoning do.”
I see you can’t have been a lawyer for too long, SL
I have been using obfuscation to beat the ATO for years. They always fall for it, if one lays it on thick enough.
Or you haven’t appeared before my judge!
ok, just dealing with the easy one first (i have a job interview in a few minutes)
a) anecdotal evidence (stories of the way lawyers have acted to rip off people, like a cleaner whose Italian husband was going for compo and the lawyer colluded with the Insurance company, or the story of the lawyer at work who made contracts deliberately vague so he could get work for himself sorting them out later, or the story of the scrag who used lawyers to get at an idiot academic’s money when he was unwilling to accept he’d been screwed)
b) watching how our politicians think, or aren’t able to think, to be more precise.
c) hearing media reports on injustices, especially child abuse and rape
d) being an engineer myself and wishing that people could see engineering as a strong ‘base’ degree rather than the law - it enables rather than restricts thought
e) watching the law courts become a surrogate for proper social planning
f) my own theories about how democracy needs to evolve
I think that’s all…
Or maybe I don’t have an interview (they were sposed to call…)
Ok, thought game:
If you are a politician in a democratic country, on what basis can you push for change?
Public pressure?
Individual power?
The former requires the populace to be informed, the latter requires you to trade (in other words, sacrifice) your own power to get something done. E.g., liberal preselection being controlled by christian groups means some issues become ‘hot button’
Any leader will only ever have a limited amount of the latter, and thus the former becomes more important.
But, there is an incentive to change public opinion towards that which corresponds to the interests of your power base.
And that is where 1984 is instructive for western democracy - not in the way that ‘Big Brother’ watches - but how the ‘proles’ are fed misinformation, and kept quiescent through ‘lotto’ results, and brainwashed into not questioning…that is my concern.
We need to teach kids to think independently, but the danger of 1984 is they are duped into believing that modern democracy/western-style legal systems are IT!!! (partly because 1984 paints such a bad picture)
and they are not IT - they are a human creation that evolved through the vagaries of history, and they reflect nothing more than what worked at the time.
As my previous post suggests, by perceiving current structures of governance and justice as optimal, we are accepting so much that is bad. But by teaching our kids (and 1984 is a salient example) that nothing else is possible, then we are robbing them of the ability to rethink these systems.
Systems that are merely human artifice, not a reflection of fundamental and inescapable reality.
(partly because 1984 paints such a bad picture of the alternative)
Invig, they’re not a particular persuasive collection of reasons. I could easily say (and I do this with my tongue firmly in my cheek) that this is a bit rich coming from a profession whose approach to uncertainty is simply to use more concrete.
Invig, one minute you say 1984 teaches that the current system inevitably evolves into totalitarian system, while the next you say it teaches that the current system is perfect by contrasting it with the evil totalitarian system. I am lost.
In my view Orwell says neither of these things. He does not idealise real democracy (and knowing Orwell’s biography one can’t possibly suspect he does). Nor he suggests inevitability; rather the dangers.
But I will ask my daughter.
My first attempt to use tags. Bloody hell.
Why I Write is one of those books that I keep re-reading and getting more from each time I read it.
Orwell is commonly viewed as of the Left, but this book is one of the most devastating critiques of the Left you will ever find, and so much more powerful given his previous writings.
Nick Cohen’s ‘What’s Left’ is a modern day version.
ok, sorry for the confusion.
i’m saying that 1984 does both. My original point is it does not offer a systemic reason why power can avoid being centralised.
And this is the point, democracy is limited by the awareness of voters, and if this can be controlled then centralisation of power proceeds.
So, by 1984 providing implicit support for democracy, but at the same time, not identifying how democracy could overcome it’s inherent flaws (ignorance of voters, as Plato? suggested) then those reading this book are given permission to participate in our democracy in the full knowledge that there is nothing better (and in fact a lot worse), and there is no point dwelling on (thinking about) the fact.
And what is the optimum way to achieve individual power and wealth in a modern democracy? What career should school kids therefore choose, and their parent encourage them towards?
Law.
I suspect the reason for that is my inability to express them…
Using more concrete is different however to allowing a body of law to accumulate ad infinitum.
Concrete has a definite and once-only cost/benefit relationship, people don’t have to keep paying the price of extra concrete every time they cross the bridge.
Law and engineering are definitely two very differently focussed occupations, but I think - beyond stereotypes (engineers don’t have sex, they only sing about it while drunk etc), both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Various people have tried to come up with alternatives to the adversarial common law (the English system, used in the anglophone world), or the inquisitorial civil law (the Roman system, used in much of Europe). They’ve always failed, often in particularly bloody and destructive ways (Marxist law, Islamic law, law based on distributive justice etc).
The civilian system starts at a very different place from the common law, but arrives at almost the same destination. That said, much of the dislike for lawyers stems from what is perceived to be ‘insider’ knowledge - something that can also be thrown at scientists. I do agree that too many clever people become lawyers, to the detriment of other occupations (I probably fall into this category), but we are getting very far away from the topic of this thread, which started as a discussion of George Orwell, and - in an ancilliary fashion - why people blog.
I think the problem is much more subtle than that.
I think that the legal system is being asked to do a job that for which it is ill-equipped.
Of course, we need a legal system to settle disputes in law.
But our legal system also fulfills other functions, such as guiding social development, all on the basis of a judge’s personal bias and the evidence he or she hears.
This is no way to forecast and guide the path of our nation!
And neither are politicans on short-term electoral cycles likewise equipped.
I think there needs to be an independent modelling body that educates voters and politicians alike, allowing our society to move forward in a considered way with all possible information.
This would allow the body of law to remain static, or perhaps even for it to be made fairer and easier to implement over time - for it no longer has the responsibility of building it’s own doctrine in order to direct the future of our society.
“I think there needs to be an independent modelling body that educates voters and politicians alike, allowing our society to move forward in a considered way with all possible information.”
It’s called the market. It has feedback effects and it has redundancy i.e. it allows people to try different ideas and as long they’re risking their own property, there is no problem. some ideas will succeed and others will fail. I thought people were over this Big Plan thinking. The problem with Big Plans is that there is no redundancy - if it fails, we all fail with it. I thought as an engineer you’d have a more considered thinking about such issues. Redundancy and fool-proofng, feedback effects, learning by doing and transmission and emulation of the better plans, selection towards global optima - this is what the market is for. This is why it shouldn’t be left to any political body and there should be no One Plan for the nation.
I must admit that I didn’t have you pegged as someone who’d advocate an overarching extra-political and extra-judicial body, Invig. It’d be like adding a fourth ‘pillar’ to Montesquieu’s legislative, executive and judicial arms, and it would need to be staffed by saints.
“But our legal system also fulfills other functions, such as guiding social development, all on the basis of a judge’s personal bias and the evidence he or she hears.”
That’s no function for the legal system at all. Purpose independence is a virtue, not a minus. Ideally the purpose of law and government is simply to set the ‘traffic rules’ and not to get involved with the pattern of the traffic flow. That’s the libertarian ideal anyway. In practice this may break down and the govenrment sometimes needs to dictate the pattern of traffic (to continue my analogy) in order to for the traffic rules to be set appropriately - this is where externalities come into play. But that doesn’t invalidate the ideal.
Not saints, but close - engineers
Or at least a very special subgroup of those equipped for social engineering, which may come from a variety of disciplines (sociology, demography etc.)
Adding that the models you build are transparent and simulative, which builds in the ability to ‘check’ assumptions against historical data. while not perfect, I think would gradually improve, especially with the interaction of people ‘on the coal face’ as they question the model.
Invig, excuse me if I can’t share your enthusiasm for your grand proposal to shake up everything.
Because what you are proposing sounds to me like the Soviet Union.
What about those of us who would just as soon NOT be socially engineered?
The idea is that the body would have no power. None at all. it’s only power ascribes from it’s ability to add insight to the public discourse and policy creation process.
Interestingly, this is the function that blogs overall are performing, and the fact that it’s evolved this way indicates the inherent need for such a mechanism of indirect power and policy foresight.
IÂ reject your assertion that the market performs this function. it is a useful way of distributing resources efficiently, but only within a given set of constraints, which the government sets.
‘the market makes an excellent servant but a poor master’Â I believe is how someone once put it.
i see it as the best of both worlds. you have a Lenin or Marx (or Adams or Keynes) putting forward theories, but you still have a democratic government making actual decisions.
The thing is, you also use the power of the internet and personal computing, along with diagrammatic modelling techniques, to enable everyone to understand the theory - not just well-read intellectuals.
But we are all being ’socially engineered’ - society is changing whether we like it or not.
but if one of those of those secure ‘administrative classes’ you are permitted the luxury of remaining blissfully unaware of the fact - until urban crime forces you to move into a gated community that is.
Invig, the distinction between distributing *given* resources efficiently and your broader concept of dynamic efficiency (i.e. ensuring that over time resources are chanelled into uses that track changes in user preferences, resource scarcity and technological developments) is a completely artificial one. They are one and the same - static modelling is simply easier to convey. What the market can do in a static modelling context it does also on an intertemporal basis. In fact there is no such thing as a*given* resources or goods and services since preferences, technology, scarcity are in flux all the time. These are simply convenient modelling assumptions.
Society is changing, but as individuals, we are still able to make our own choices.
I am hardly a secure ‘administrative class’ person, and I live in a not very well-off part of Adelaide. And urban crime is confined to dope-smoking and little monsters doing burnouts at the intersection at 2am.
If we’re undergoing social collapse that requires massive state intervention to put things right, it’s taking its time falling apart.
You’re welcome to go on making your elaborate ’social models’ but I’m somehow confident that you’ll have a hard time selling it to the voters.
# 38 “I think there needs to be an independent modelling body that educates voters and politicians alike, allowing our society to move forward in a considered way with all possible information.”
Wow! The 20th century went right over this guy’s head!
jason,
i’m not sure if we’re on the same page, although i do acknowledge the limitations of representing the complexity of a modern industrial economy/society.
suffice to say that the current governance arrangements of guiding the future of that economy/society do not seem optimal, or even viable, to me.
this comes back to the problem of centralisation of power due to ability to control information.
In the case of the market, consumers might have some information, but I think you are mistaken if you think that voters only need to compare the price and quality of consumer items.
it would be great if politics functioned like the market, but it doesn’t. the ‘product’ is who we vote for, and assessing ‘quality and price’ of a politicians and/or his policies is greatly more complex than for a fridge or lawnmower.
Notwithstanding, it can even be complex for ‘consumer products’, which is why we had ‘Choice’ magazine - perhaps look at my proposal as a kind of ‘Choice’ magazine for policy options…
If lawyers are notorious regulators, then engineers are chronic tinkerers. That’s fine if you’re trying to max the output from a motorcycle engine (nice & discreet), but not much good for anything else.
Your independent modelling body would experience regulatory capture within months, if not sooner.
Scott,
I agree i’d have a hard time selling it to voters, which is why i’m talking to the fine readers of this blog
You are to be mine prophets
(but seriously, there’s a reason why tradespeople listen to Alan Jones…)
I accept the validity of the threat, but believe there are ways and means…
Nevertheless, history will prove the case. If I am right, you will hear more over the coming years. If I am wrong, you will not.
My sincere thanks for the stimulating discussion.
*bows*
Invig -
“I don’t believe it does. At least I wasn’t left with that impression. Would you mind enlightening me?”
Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1948. Orwell was a socialist rebel. At the time there was a tendency to centralised and authoritarian thought. Not just on the left but throughout the political spectrum. In his review of Hayek’s Road To Serfdom he remarked that it was valuable because “the views it puts forward are less fashionable at the moment”. The review ran in tandem with a review of a left-leaning tome (I gather, haven’t read it) The Mirror of the Past; it concluded with a preçis of Orwell’s views as to the state of things at that minute:
Nineteenth Eighty-Four was written as a satire not just about the totalitarian regimes in the Russia and Germany but also about ways of thinking that could be found in Western democracies especially during times of war.
In the book he describes precisely how these ways of thinking function. He outlines their conceptual foundations by constructing an imagined totalitarian society in which the necessity to bullshit not longer applies. Hence there’s no longer any need to talk about ‘brotherhood’, ‘democracy’, ‘progress’, or the ‘Volk’; whatever kitsch supposedly provides the basic stuff of paradise. Oceania practises totalitarian suppression ruthlessly without recourse to higher motives.
There is, for example, doublethink. Doublethink is the simultaneous adherance to two contradictory thoughts at the same time. In boarding school the Catholics practised doublethink as a matter of course. They’d tell you how to think independently and then punish you if you did. They’d extol the virtues of Catholic education’s egalitarian motives (the education of destitute urchins by Brother Rice for example) and then within seconds talk about a higher standard of screening for prospective students to ensure “we only get the cream”.
This is to be expected. At the heart of Orwell’s satire is the observation that these futurist Utopians (Nazis and Communists) are nothing more than high-tech medieval Inquisitors.
Orwell was a socialist who simply faced the inconvenient facts of ’socialist’ reality in the USSR. In his essay “What Is Socialism” he asks:
It is probably surprising to people, given the anti-Stalinist savagry of Animal Farm in addition to Nineteenth Eighty-Four that Orwell was still a socialist and idealist.
However he was aware of various critiques of his position. In his series of articles “The Intellectual Revolt” he cites F.A. Voigt’s argument that:
Elsewhere in the article he again refers to Hayek outlining his argument that:
It is important to note that Orwell did not support Hayek’s argument for a return to laissez-faire capitalism calling it, (somewhat prematurely):
These comments were written in the year before he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. I believe that these works in addition to Orwell’s negative experiences in Spain and amongst the British left intelligensia were forcing him to consider the problems inherent in a broad slab of leftist (and non-leftist) thought. He wasn’t suggesting as you say that one should be “satisfied with how governments are responding to crises and creating policy?” He was outlining techniques of power: manipulation, coercion, repression etc.
This isn’t restricted to the left or to Communist states or whatever. If you want to see a really good Ministry of Truth’s worker I suggest reading Andrew Bolt’s columns re. the Iraq war over the last few years.
You say “We need to teach kids to think independently, but the danger of 1984 is they are duped into believing that modern democracy/western-style legal systems are IT!!! ” By doing so you are buying into certain neo-conservative arguments about the book that said totlitarianism sucks therefore our system’s the only one that works. And not only does it work but, to quote Voltaire, “it’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
The book instructs you how to avoid a robotic, totalitarian existence. To do so you avoid the habits of thought as described in the book and you attack such habits where you find them. The fact is that now that the Soviet Union is gone the book’s capacity to teach lessons regarding certain authoritarian habits of thought and techniques are amplified. It’s no longer simply about the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or wherever else. It’s about how stupidity, fear and hatred can be used in the technology of power. If you understand that, you recognize it when it’s being deployed against you. Reading the book for the first time I understood how the Church was attempting its own brand of mind control.
It didn’t stifle my capacity to independent thought, it cultivated it.
Adrien, wow. That’s among our best ever comments. You should work that into a post for your own site. Seriously.
SL
You have doubtlessly read Anthony Powell’s “At Lady Molly’s” It appears that the character of the socialist peer, Erridge, was at least partially based upon Orwell.
Powell was not so crass as to draw a straight portrait of his fellow novellist. However, I think that he has caught some of Orwell’s chief characteristics well. This is demonstrated by the little touches, like the fact that the old Etonian Erridge spends time studying the life of tramps, has a passion for Boys’ papers and is clearly at odds with everyone else on the left.
In the last few years of his life, Orwell became very close to his fellow old Etonian Tony Powell, which us quite rremarkable considering Powell was a trenchant Tory, in as far as he cared about politics at all. One can imagine, Orwell, like another close friend, Malcolm Muggeridge, turning slowly from a lefty into a Conservative. This is of course the journey that the superior writer, Powell did not have to make.
And that is probably why I prefer Powell’s writing to Orwell’s. The latter’s novels are great, but they are in primary colours, the sort of stuff that you must read as an undergraduate, but can never really enjoy as an adult. Powell’s books are far more subtle and far more revealing of the human condition. The same is true in journalism as in the novels of the two men. Powell’s articles are restricted mainly to literature. Yet for me there is more to be learned indirectly through the study of literature than through the concentration on politics. It is like putting economics above history in trying to understand life: the Marxist?liberatarian error.
“Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war.”
What a shame that Orwell was economically illiterate and never had a clue about the way that free markets operate. Never mind about perfection, just get the major impediments under control! Like the worldwide tariffs of the 1920s and 1930s and the vandalism of the miitant trade unions.
The statement I questioned was:
I think your answer is encapsulated by:
Ok, I accept that. And I also accept this:
But imagine if 1984 did open your eyes somewhat (and I think it would, it is a very powerful book) you feel empowered by what you read in it’s pages, but also somewhat beholden to it.
Kind of like a cult leader opening the eyes of his follower and enabling him to ‘question authority’ - but the cult leader himself remains inviolate.
The risk is that 1984 is seen to hold absolute truths, simply because it combated some of the misconceptions that were commonplace at the time.
I don’t argue that is not important. It is. But the danger is that it is therefore taken as some kind of ‘bible’ of truth rather than a parody that exposes untruth - which is valuable but still a different thing.
For in that parody, no solution to the ‘centralisation of power via information control’ paradox was put forward. You say, ‘everyone needs to think for themselves’? That is not a systemic solution…not everyone has the time or capacity. How about the average carpenter or bricklayer? As I mentioned, they listen to Alan Jones for a reason.
Also, by becoming a ‘bible’ of sorts - and i acknowledge it is one that says ‘think for yourself’ - but how???
By what means do I evaluate complex information? What tools does it give me? What practice do I get in school forming opinion from complex data in an objective way? Reading 1984 gives you the whole package, data and conclusion together - except for the solution to the power-information paradox - but that is not mentioned…
This is why I think more people should do engineering over law - it teaches you from the basis of proven, fundamental laws, but apart from that you have to design stuff for yourself. This is in stark contrast to law where you merely absorb information.
Funny isn’t that so many lawyers here seem to like 1984 but have undertaken a profession that (at least to some extent) brainwashes them?
Invig:
“it is therefore taken as some kind of ‘bible’ of truth rather than a parody that exposes untruth - which is valuable but still a different thing.”
I think to treat Orwell’s books (or any others) as a Bible is to make one of the errors that lead to the Robot’s life. There is a tendency amongst humans to create cults out of those admired. I remember this happening around Foucault at university even tho’ those teaching him discouraged this. As an anti-humanist Foucault himself would probably not have approved.
You’re correct, the book doesn’t cite any solution. It infers a solution in that the life that Winston and Julia lead, their grusome punishment for the simple and human act of being lovers is powerful conviction that such State mechanics as portrayed in Nineteenth Eighty-Four are undesirable.
How does one avoid this? By vigourously defending democratic institutions wherever they’re attacked. These days this seems not to be happening.
The air is filled with people extolling the virtues of democracy and freedom whilst chomping at the bit for the demise of David Hicks. Hicks may or may not be an enemy of his own people. But he’s entitled to due process and he hasn’t received it. That so many ‘pro-democracy’ types seem to have no problem with the suspension of the presumption of innocence and habeas corpus is to me a worry. You might retort with a catalogue of the problems of democracy but as long as there is democracy these problems can be declared and addressed. Remove it and it’s follow-the-leader time.
The second thing I’d suggest is to improve political, ethical and economic education. At high school I had two teachers. One was a fan of old Bjokey-Petersen and reprimanded anyone who asked difficult questions. She was a shallow, vindictive and joyless person who travelled to the Soviet Union during her long service leave with the express purchase of buying stuff so she could come back and show everyone how shitty things were. After six months of lectures about the command system there were students who seriously wanted to move to Russia. If she hates it, went the reasoning there’s gotta be something good about it.
She was my model of bad education.
The other teacher was a greenie type although he was very professional and his personal stance on things couldn’t be dragged out of him. He wasn’t into teaching people what to think. He had us act out various economic models: command, market, mixed. As our Joh-approved text books featured four sentences on Marx and six pages of E.R. Rostow he also took it upon himself to elaborate on Marx and get us to ask why Marx whose influence massively overshadowed Rostow would be so marginalised.
He didn’t tell us, he got us to answer that question. I remember the answer was: “Cause Joh would have a fit!”
That said he wasn’t advocating Marx either. In fact he showed us videos of underground Rock concerts in Moscow attracting tens of thousands of people and contrasted that with the dull official culture of the state. He showed us docos on the bad food they ate and the greywash shops they lined up for hours to get into. He finally underpinned the undesirability of the command economy by a simple statement: They would love that school uniform.
Meaning that their clothes were so shithouse and ugly that our (much detested) uniform would look cool to them.
That is a good teacher.
You look for systematic solutions. There are none. People have been looking for blueprints to Utopia at least since Plato. They only work on paper. You want improvement, cool.
Be aware it happens piecemeal. A little at a time.
Skeptic - Thanks for that. I might take you up on it.
Rafe - I dunno enough about the economics of the Slump to get into the argument about what caused it so I won’t. But one should remember that the period from the first world war to 1950 was very dark. Orwell’s whole adult life was spent in this period.
It would’ve been interesting, had he lived another 20 years, to see what his reaction to events precipitated by the post-War boom. In particular the cultural revolution in England which swept away the man-in-the-grey-shapeless-suit culture of Imperial Britain and brought in a new cultural aristocracy of working and lower-middle class youth as epitomised by persons like Mick Jagger, John Lennon and David Bailey.
RL might be right, he might’ve turned conservative (tho’ I doubt this) but lucky for the conservatives he did not. If he had I don’t think he would have changed his cantankerous nonconformism. He would’ve been more of a pain to them than he was to the Sovs.
Would he’ve been pro or anti counter-culture???? Dunno. If he’d a been in favour he might’ve given Bowie permission to adapt Nineteen Eighty-Four and we’d have a half-baked musical instead of the classic rock album Diamond Dogs.
I like your definition of a good teacher,
and, i agree that systemic solutions are implemented piecemeal (in so far as it takes time to build up support, and that extreme change can be dangerous in and of itself).
but that doesn’t mean the end point can not be known, and if it is known, that it can’t be explained to others.
my regards.
Totally by chance, I stumbled across this just then.
It would be interesting to see whether their ideas were very similar to mine…though it does mention:
[my highlighting]
ok, you may now return to your regularly scheduled programs
Invig
Your political system is known as saint-simonism.
See here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Henri_de_Rouvroy%2C_comte_de_Saint-Simon
Read the future, can you?
Sorry to be rude, but I’ve been reading this thread all day, and I have to say that Invig’s got too many tickets on his/her own intellect.
We’d all like to know the answers but we can’t.
Jason, thanks for the link. He doesn’t sound like such a bad guy…
Scott, s***w you champ, I’m just putting forward my ideas. That’s it. Maybe I need a few tickets on myself to think I can challenge the majority. How about you address the ideas rather than the way they’re presented.
Play nice, everyone. This has been a great thread and I’d like to keep it going. Some of the comments I’ve seen have been among the best I’ve ever read.
Scott-
I think Invig’s comments have been intelligent, courteous and stimulating. What more can we ask? If s/he’s intellectually conceited I don’t see that as something s/he can be singled out for. A lot of people here are bright and don’t they know it. Some of us ain’t so bright and are just as oblivious.
It’s why it’s so much fun.
I think there needs to be an independent modelling body that educates voters and politicians alike, allowing our society to move forward in a considered way with all possible information.
A moment’s thought shows that this is impossible. How does one obtain, even in theory, all possible information ?
Even if one had all possible information, how would one analyse or process it knowing that one was processing it in the right way? Even if you knew what the right way to process it was, how would you know that the outcomes weren’t chaotic and thus not computable to any degree of accuracy for all time?
As I think people have alluded to, this is the theoretical problem (disregarding all the obvious real-life problems!) with command economies.
Invig, your ideas strike me as totalitarian and overly-theoretical about the way people work.
Furthermore, your enthusiasm for Saint-Simon points this way.
You are welcome to put forward your ideas, but you have to expect them to be challenged.
One of Hayek’s main ideas in a nutshell, Sacha. The idea that any one person - or group of people - could access all information and then process it accurately he described as ‘the synoptic delusion’.
Scott,
They are theoretical to some extent, although there are numerous cases of modelling being applied to real-world scenarios very fruitfully - companies are beginning to use it more.
They are not totalitarian any more than Howard introducing the GST is totalitarian - and in fact they are much better because they could be used to explain how the GST worked rather than seeing a whole bunch of stupid TV adds.
Also, and as I said, the models should not have direct power, only that which derives from people believing them - which means they have to have some kind of resonance with their experiences of the real world.
All possible information.
That’s the rub. Because information comes in different forms and qualities and is valued differently by different people. To see this just consider Invig and SL’s words re. lawyers vs engineers above.
Being the son of a very successful engineer I have some familiarity with the mind.My mind is in some ways very similar to my father’s but in terms of interest totally opposite. I was a graphic designer for a little while and I found it impossible to explain to him what that meant.
I said: Well y’know Time magazine right?
Dad: Yes.
Me: Well y’know how the the word ‘Time’ is always ‘written’ the same way?
Dad: No.
Me: Alright. Y’know your car? (A Mitsubishi) Y’know how there’s those three diamonds on the hood ornament?
Dad: No.
He simply never noticed these things. When pointed out to him they struck him unimportant.
The trouble with systems is that they’re conceived by someone and that someone will have limitations. No matter how brilliant they are, they will always fail to see something.
My father was a genius engineer but moronic in other ways. Everyone is like this to a certain extent. Hence the desire to fix the world up wholesale is always likely to fail because whereas you may get this or that right, you’re gonna to mess the other things right up. That’s why I think that improvement is better attempted piecemeal.
Don’t try to create a brilliant education system, try to create a better way of teaching history, etc.
Sacha,
You come to the nub of the problem.
How does one represent reality in a way that makes sense (simple enough) and is also accurate.
I do not know for sure how this can be done, but I am trying to do it with my thesis.
However, I hope that through tight interaction with people ‘on the coal face’ any representation can be gradually improved over time.
This may be combined with running simulations with data sets within specific industries/instances such as, for instance, hospitals or housing.
The idea is they are improved over time. However, getting to ‘first base’ (I theorise) requires the modeller to make use of their subconscious. Computers can’t handle the information because it is so contextual and qualitative, so the mind of one person is needed to generate the first model in each case.
The process I am working on is interesting, and involved transitioning from listening to conversations, mapping those conversations, building an initial model on memory only, then going back to the specific maps for validation.
Apart from this process, I do not know if it can be done for systems that matter - the human systems
Adrienswords,
You may be right (and I sympathise with your story of your father - but I am not that kind of engineer:)
It may be a centralised approach is impossible, and the best bet are blogs (seriously!)
the problem is one of security (also penetration, but lets assume the media take it seriously)
Lets say we have one blog (or even blogger) who ‘has all the answers’, that site (or individual) is a tempting target for any government because, as it accumulates credibility within a growing readership, it is at the same time ’stealing’ power from elsewhere.
‘Elsewhere’ generally implies money, police, employers…and the little blog find themselves very exposed all of a sudden.
NOTE: thinktanks ‘might’ fill this role, but they are generally conflicted from the start and their policies are crueled therefore