Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
—Bertrand Russell1
Thus far, we have noted some of the consequences and tactics of those with the prevailing vision, but we have not yet come to grips with the specific underlying assumptions of that vision. What kind of world exists inside the minds of the contemporary anointed, and what kind of individual and social causation activates that world? The question here is not about what kind of world they wish to create, but what kind of world they think exists already.
The vision of the anointed may stand out in sharper relief when it is contrasted with the opposing vision, a vision whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition. By tragedy here is not meant simply unhappiness, but tragedy in the ancient Greek sense, inescapable fate inherent in the nature of things, rather than unhappiness due simply to villainy or callousness. The two visions differ in their respective conceptions of the nature of man, the nature of the world, and the nature of causation, knowledge, power, and justice.
These differences can be presented schematically, as below:
Human capability
THE TRAGIC VISION: severely and inherently limited for all
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: vast for the anointed
Social possibilities
THE TRAGIC VISION: trade-offs that leave many “unmet needs”
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: solutions to problems
Social causation
THE TRAGIC VISION: systemic
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: deliberate
Freedom
THE TRAGIC VISION: exemption from the power of others
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: ability to achieve goals
Justice
THE TRAGIC VISION: process rules with just characteristics
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: just (equalized) chances or results
Knowledge
THE TRAGIC VISION: consists largely of the unarticulated experiences of the many
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: consists largely of the articulated intelligence of the more educated few
Specialization
THE TRAGIC VISION: highly desirable
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: highly questionable
Motivation
THE TRAGIC VISION: incentives
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: dispositions
Process costs
THE TRAGIC VISION: crucial
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: incidental
Decision-making mechanism preferred
THE TRAGIC VISION: systemic processes that convey the experiences and revealed preferences of the many
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: deliberate plans that utilize the special talents and more advanced views of the few
Kinds of decisions preferred
THE TRAGIC VISION: incremental
THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED: categorical
These differences are not random happenstances. They are systematic differences that follow logically from fundamental differences in underlying assumptions, beginning with assumptions about the nature of human beings and the range of possibilities open to them. All these particular differences between the two visions turn ultimately on differences about human limitations and their corollaries. The more ambitious definitions of freedom and of justice, for example, in the vision of the anointed are consistent with the expansive sweep of human capabilities they assume. By the same token, the emphasis on specialization by those with the tragic vision reflects their sense of the inherent limitations of the human mind and the corresponding dangers in attempting to bite off more than anyone can chew. It is not merely that the engineer cannot perform surgery, the judge in his decisions cannot venture very far beyond his narrow expertise in the law without precipitating disasters when he attempts to become a social philosopher who can make law the instrument of some grander vision of the world.
The conflicts between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed are virtually inevitable. Clearly, those who assume a larger set of options are unlikely to be satisfied with results deriving from a smaller set of options. Thus, those with the vision of the anointed, who assume an expansive range of choices, repeatedly find themselves in conflict with those who have the tragic vision and who consequently assume a much smaller set of choices. While these conflicts pervade contemporary ideological politics, they are not peculiar to our times. Both visions have a long history, encompassing many individuals of historic stature. Those with the vision of the anointed are particularly prone to think of their own philosophy as new, and therefore as adapted to contemporary society, but their framework of assumptions goes back at least two centuries—as does the framework of those with the tragic vision.
Both visions also have internal coherence. Those who follow the assumptions of a particular vision as regards law tend also to follow that vision as regards economics. Thus Judge David L. Bazelon, whose role and philosophy as regards expanding criminals’ rights have already been noted in Chapter 2, believed in the socioeconomic sphere that “inequality of riches in our affluent society” was one of “a host of inequities,”2 that government should provide people’s “basic needs as rights,” that income, education, and medical care should be “matters of right, not of grace.”3 Conversely, Adam Smith not only had opposite views from Judge Bazelon on government’s role in the economy, but also on the application of the criminal law. For Smith, “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”4 A similar coherence of vision is found across many other issues, with environmentalists and their opponents often taking opposite positions on military defense as well, for example. As a contemporary writer has noted:
Liberalism in America and worldwide has great faith in modifying human behavior by adjusting “underlying social conditions” to make people desire the right thing instead of the wrong thing. In its clearest form, this is the response to crime control by liberals, who are not much interested in tougher sentences, improved security devices, better-armed and equipped police, more escape-proof prisons—they seek to change society or the malefactors, so that people will not want to commit crime. This is also the form of the liberal solution to most foreign policy problems—we should behave in a better manner and reorder the world so that the urge to war will be reduced, and mankind will live in better harmony.5
Police, prisons, etc., represent only trade-offs, while creating a society in which crime is prevented from arising in the first place is a solution. Hence the former approach is consistent with the tragic vision and the latter approach is in keeping with the vision of the anointed. Not only today, but for more than two centuries, both crime and war have been seen, by those with the vision of the anointed, as things to be deterred by changing people’s dispositions rather than by confronting them with retaliatory capabilities that provide incentives against crime or war. William Godwin’s 1793 treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, remains one of the most systematic elaborations of the vision of the anointed and in it crime and war are approached in precisely the same way as among 1960s liberals and their later followers. Dispositions and understanding are seen by the anointed as the key to crime control, for example: “It is impossible that a man would perpetrate a crime, in the moment when he sees it in all its enormity,”6 according to Godwin, just as Ramsey Clark was to say in the twentieth century, “healthy, rational people will not injure others.”7 In both cases, it is the failure of “society” that causes crime, with the criminal being the victim of circumstances. Much the same story can be found in other eighteenth-century figures such as Condorcet and Holbach.
Similarly with war. The way for a country to avoid war, according to Godwin, is to behave with “inoffensiveness and neutrality” toward other countries and to avoid the kind of “misunderstanding” that leads to war.8 Nearly a century and a half later, this same theory was being expounded and put into practice by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who repeatedly blamed such subjective factors as fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings for war,9 and who therefore put great weight on “personal contacts”10 between himself and other nations’ leaders as a way of dissipating such negative subjective factors. Just as Godwin thought neutrality a source of peace, so Chamberlain espoused a policy of “impartiality,”11 and practiced it by trying to “keep the balance even between the two sides”12 in the Spanish civil war while Hitler and Mussolini helped Franco’s insurgents, by referring to Japan’s invasion of China as “this unhappy conflict”13 and similarly referring to “the unhappy Sudetenland”14 where local Nazis were carrying out Hitler’s orchestrated campaign of subversion and where Chamberlain condemned only “extremists on both sides.”15
The important point here is that these were not simply isolated misjudgments on Chamberlain’s part. They were logical corollaries of a particular set of assumptions about the world, a vision with a coherence and a pedigree, as well as with intellectual progeny who would later repeat many of the same beliefs and even phrases during the long history of the “cold war.” Many latter-day adherents to the vision of the anointed urged neutrality in the face of Soviet-backed insurgencies around the world, practiced moral equivalence, resisted defense buildups, and were euphoric over “personal contacts” that were now called “summit meetings.” Half a century after Chamberlain, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker attributed Soviet-American conflicts to the fact that “both sides” had a “dangerous hostility” toward one another in the 1950s.16
The tragic vision, in which incentives matter more than dispositions, has looked on foreign policy and war in a wholly different way. No document represents the tragic vision of man more starkly than The Federalist Papers, where John Jay said, “nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.”17 Within the context of this vision, it was not preventing “misunderstandings” but maintaining military deterrence that was crucial. In both the 1930s and the 1980s, those with this tragic vision of the world in general—Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan being the most prominent examples—espoused foreign policies that were likewise radically different from the policies espoused by those with the vision of the anointed. We now know from history that the foreign policies based on the tragic vision were different both in their assumptions and in their ultimate outcomes.
One of the most important questions about any proposed course of action is whether we know how to do it. Policy A may be better than policy B, but that does not matter if we simply do not know how to do policy A. Perhaps it would be better to rehabilitate criminals, rather than punish them, if we knew how to do it. Rewarding merit might be better than rewarding results if we knew how to do it. But one of the crucial differences between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed is in what they respectively assume that we know how to do. Those with the vision of the anointed are seldom deterred by any question as to whether anyone has the knowledge required to do what they are attempting. As we have already seen, when President Lyndon Johnson spoke of addressing the conditions that breed urban violence, he said:
All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.18
Similarly, when the New York Times editorially expressed dismay at statistics on high infant mortality rates in the United States, it declared: “America already knows how to make the rate drop again.”19 With these and innumerable other issues, the question for the anointed is not knowledge but compassion, commitment, and other such subjective factors which supposedly differentiate themselves from other people. The refrain of the anointed is we already know the answers, there’s no need for more studies, and the kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing progress. “Solutions” are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. Intractable problems with painful trade-offs are simply not part of the vision of the anointed. Problems exist only because other people are not as wise or as caring, or not as imaginative and bold, as the anointed. If there was one defining moment of the 1960s, it might well have been at the judicial conference in 1965 when Justices Brennan and Warren roared with laughter as a law professor poured scorn and ridicule on the concerns of a former police commissioner about the effects of recent judicial rulings on law enforcement and public safety.20 It was the anointed in their classic role of disdaining the benighted—and dismissing the very possibility that the unintended ramifications of morally inspired decisions might make matters worse on net balance.
Far more important than particular reckless policies, even those with such deadly consequences as weakening the criminal law, is a whole mind-set in which omnicompetence is implicitly assumed and unhappy social phenomena are presumed to be unjustified morally and remediable intellectually and politically. Inherent constraints of circumstances or people are brushed aside, as are alternative policy approaches which offer no special role for the anointed. The burden of proof is not put on their vision, but on existing institutions.
The notion that “society” must justify itself before the bar of “reason” presupposes that there is some individual or group capable of such encyclopedic knowledge and such mastery of the structured principles of so many disciplines as to make such judgments across a broad spectrum and at a speed that would fit all these judgments into one lifetime. Those with sweeping schemes for “reconstructing society” seldom pause to ask about the sufficiency of anyone’s knowledge for such a task. Karl Menninger, for example, said:
The immediate task of our time seems to be to think out our economic organization in dynamic terms and according to a strategy which will so co-ordinate the now prevailing tendencies that they will no longer conflict. The political problem, therefore, is to organize human impulses in such a way that they will direct their energy to the right strategic points, and steer the total process of development in the desired direction.21
In other words, the only problem is political mobilization and social imagination, so as to result in a solution in which current tendencies “will no longer conflict,” rather than a mere trade-off in which their continuing conflicts will be dealt with as best one can. Nor was any time wasted worrying about the presumption of some people in preempting the decisions of others, these others’ decisions being treated as mere “impulses” for the anointed to “organize” and direct toward what the anointed define as “the right strategic points.” Indeed, the whole process was analogized to engineering problems, with the designing of another type of human being included in this engineering for, as Menninger noted: “No economic order can be brought into existence as long as the corresponding human type does not emerge.”22 In short, not only is the external world to be redesigned, so are the people who are to inhabit it. Were this merely the fantasy of one man, it would not be worth nothing. But it is in fact part of the vision of the anointed as it has existed for centuries. The idea of creating the kind of people needed for a new society goes at least as far back as William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793, where he spoke of “men as they may hereafter be made” through a process of “the improvement of mankind” which he thought would be “in the utmost degree simple.”23 Two centuries later, the task appears less simple and such expressions as “brain-washing” and “reeducation” camps have chilling overtones in the light of history, though that has not stopped indoctrination efforts in American schools and colleges, led by those who still have the vision of the anointed today.
By contrast, those with the tragic vision have long questioned whether anyone—themselves included—knows enough to engage in sweeping social and political experiments. “We cannot change the Nature of things and of men,” Edmund Burke said, “but must act upon them the best we can.”24 Adam Smith took a very similar position, while seeing the more general issue as a conflict of visions between the doctrinaire with an “ideal plan of government” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board” and the more modest reformer who will adjust his policies to “the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people” and who, when he “cannot establish the right,” will “not disdain to ameliorate the wrong.”25 Those with the tragic vision might share the desire for social betterment without sharing the assumptions as to how much knowledge and control of social ramifications exist. A succinct summary of the tragic vision was given by historians Will and Ariel Durant:
Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.26
Severe limitations on the effectiveness of well-intentioned notions were likewise seen by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, “to improve conditions of life and the race is the main thing—but how the devil can I tell whether I am not pulling it down more in some other place?”27 Doing good on some problem right under one’s nose is not enough in a world of constrained options and systemic interactions, where the overlooked costs of immediate benevolence take their toll elsewhere. Holmes exemplified the tragic vision of life, based on a tragic vision of human limitations. He spoke disdainfully of “the vain attempt to love one’s neighbor as one’s self,”28 of “our legislation to make other people better,”29 and of attempts to “legislate bliss.”30
In the tragic vision, individual sufferings and social evils are inherent in the innate deficiencies of all human beings, whether these deficiencies are in knowledge, wisdom, morality, or courage. Moreover, the available resources are always inadequate to fulfill all the desires of all the people. Thus there are no “solutions” in the tragic vision, but only trade-offs that still leave many desires unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world. What is needed in this vision is a prudent sense of how to make the best trade-offs from the limited options available, and a realization that “unmet needs” will necessarily remain—that attempting to fully meet these needs seriatim only deprives other people of other things, so that a society pursuing such a policy is like a dog chasing its tail. Given this vision, particular solutions to particular problems are far less important than having and maintaining the right processes for making trade-offs and correcting inevitable mistakes. To those with the tragic vision, the integrity of processes is crucial—much more so than particular causes. As Jean-François Revel put it, in a free society “there is no single just cause, only just methods.”31
The vision of the anointed begins with entirely different premises. Here it is not the innate limitations of human beings, or the inherent limitations of resources, which create unhappiness but the fact that social institutions and social policies are not as wisely crafted as the anointed would have crafted them. As John Stuart Mill put it, the “present wretched education, and wretched social arrangements, are the only real hindrance” to happiness being widespread.32 Mill’s view in many ways epitomized the vision of the anointed.33 When he spoke of “the best and wisest,”34 it was with none of the sense of irony that the phrase “the brightest and the best” has acquired in our time. Great things could be achieved, Mill said, “if the superior spirits would but join with each other” for social betterment.35 He called upon the universities to “send forth into society a succession of minds, not the creatures of their age, but capable of being its improvers and regenerators.”36
A democracy can rise above mediocrity, according to Mill, only where “the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”37 It is on these latter—the “thinking minds,”38 “the most cultivated intellects in the country,”39 “those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling”40—that social well-being and progress depend. In short, it was not the case in this vision that all human beings were incapable of leading society to substantially higher levels of understanding, behavior, and well-being. The “best and wisest”—the anointed—were not only capable of it but had a duty to do it. Where they lacked the political power to do so, then their duty was that of “keeping alive the sacred fire in a few minds when we are unable to do more,” as Mill wrote to a friend.41
The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge—and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient.
In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear through social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group. Moreover, the existing generation’s traditions and values distill the experiences of other millions in times past. Yet the anointed seem to conceive the issue as one of the syllogistic reasoning of the past versus the syllogistic reasoning of the present, preferring to believe that improvements in knowledge and reason permit the former to be dismissed.
Much more candidly than the anointed of our times, Mill sought differential toleration for intellectual elites. “Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters,” he said in On Liberty.42 Most of the “men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world” are only “starved specimens of what nature can and will produce” in later and better times.43 According to Mill, “exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass.”44 As he said in On Liberty:
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportioned to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained.45
Mill’s On Liberty has often been seen—mistakenly—as a plea for greater freedom of all from government, when it was in fact a plea for differential exemption of the anointed from social criticism. That is, the anointed should judge and influence the benighted, but not vice-versa. Mill saw government in the England of his day as no longer a major threat to freedom.46 It was the social “tyranny of the majority”47 and “the despotism of Custom”48 that he opposed in On Liberty. What he considered to be desirable was that individuals be free to do as they like “without detriment to their estimation” in the eyes of others.49 Today, that is called being “nonjudgmental”—and, very often in practice, it too is a principle applied selectively as between the anointed and the benighted.
Echoes of Mill’s notion of one-way nonjudgmentalism and one-way moral surrogacy are found today in, for example, Ronald Dworkin’s assertion that “a more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality.”50 The anointed will define for these citizens what is better. Moreover, the exalted vision of themselves by the anointed is often matched by sweeping assumptions about the irrationality or immorality of ordinary people. Without either a speck of evidence or a moment’s hesitation, the anointed speak of Americans’ “love affair with the automobile,” when in fact there are many quite rational reasons for preferring cars to the alternative modes of mass transportation incessantly being urged or imposed by elite opinion.51 The issue here is not how the net advantages of alternative modes of transportation work out. The issue is precisely that there is no issue as far as the anointed are concerned, that mass irrationality may simply be assumed. What the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind” is not part of the vision of the anointed, which depends crucially on differential wisdom and virtue.
Given this perspective, systemic processes which depend upon the direct experiences and revealed preferences of millions of human beings, whether expressed in prices in the marketplace or through social self-selection of various sorts, are all treated as mere nuisances to be swept aside by public policy when these systemic processes impede the carrying out of the vision of the anointed. Even formalized and solemnized commitments, such as the Constitution of the United States, are treated as mere obstacles to be circumvented by flexible interpretation. Other people’s decisions, through whatever processes those decisions have been made, are to be preempted by the decisions of the anointed.
Although followers of this tradition often advocate more egalitarian economic and social results, they necessarily seek to achieve those results through highly unequal influence and power, and—especially in the twentieth century—through an increased concentration of power in the central government, which is thereby enabled to redistribute economic resources more equally. While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses (“there is no free lunch”) and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitious social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.
Human limitations are moral, as well as intellectual, in the tragic vision—and these limitations too extend across the spectrum. As Alexander Hamilton put it:
Look through the rich and poor of the community; the learned and the ignorant. Where does virtue predominate? The difference indeed consists, not in the quantity but kind of vices which are incident to the various classes.…52
To those whose reasoning begins with the tragedy of the human condition, evil is diffused throughout humanity, while those with the vision of the anointed tend to see evils more localized in particular “oppressors” of one sort or another, as expressed in “white racism,” “male domination,” or “capitalist exploitation,” for example. This second set of evils, however severe, is more remediable than the kind of evil implied in the remark: “We have met the enemy and it is us.” The logic of the two visions almost inevitably puts them at odds as to how much improvement can be expected from the political process. At the extreme, a revolutionary cannot believe in the tragic vision, for that would imply that all the sacrifices and sufferings incident to a revolution could easily result in largely cosmetic changes in personnel and style—or might even bring to power a worse despot. Conversely, it would be unconscionable to be conservative if that meant passively accepting unnecessary evils and simultaneously preventable sufferings.
To those with the tragic vision, institutions, traditions, laws, and policies are to be judged by how well they cope with the intellectual and moral inadequacies of human beings, so as to limit the damage they do, and to coordinate the society in such a way as to maximize the use of its scattered fragments of knowledge, as well as to correct inevitable mistakes as quickly as possible. But to those with the less constrained vision of the anointed, the goal is the liberation of human beings from unnecessary social inhibitions, so as to allow repressed creativity to emerge and the vast knowledge and talent already available to be applied to existing problems.
For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before. Moreover, the applicability of past experience is further discounted in the vision of the anointed, because of the great changes that have taken place since “earlier and simpler times.” Here the two visions clash again, for those with the tragic vision see no great changes in the fundamental intellectual or moral capacities of human beings, however much the material world may have changed or various institutions and customs may have developed through trial and error.
Justice Holmes saw modern man as being very much like his barbarian ancestors,53 with the different conditions of life today being due to economic and social developments based on the very institutions, traditions, and laws which those with the vision of the anointed are anxious to supersede with untested theories. As Edmund Burke put it, we “should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father,” with “awe and trembling solicitude”54—not as an “exciting” opportunity for experimentation. Beginning, like Holmes, with a vision of human nature little changing in its basic essentials, Burke expected no great benefit from speculative theories as a basis for public policy:
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty.…55
To those with the tragic vision, barbarism is not some distant stage of evolution, but an ever-present threat when the civilizing institutions are weakened or undermined:
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.56
A similar sense of the fragility of civilization led Edmund Burke to regard the promotion of social experimentation and atomistic reason as a dangerous playing with fire:
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.57
Neither Burke nor others in the tradition of the tragic vision were opposed to change, per se, and many of them in fact advocated major changes in their own day. The authors of The Federalist Papers were, after all, not only establishing a new government after overthrowing the old, but were also establishing a radically new kind of government, in a world ruled by monarchs. What made them different from those who led the French revolution was that their vision of human beings was radically different. The French revolution operated on assumptions much closer to those of the vision of the anointed.
Where the American revolution deliberately created a government of elaborate checks and balances, to constrain the evils inherent in human beings, the French revolution concentrated vast powers in its leadership, so as to allow those who were presumably wise and benevolent to effect sweeping changes with little hindrance. Condorcet, as an intellectual supporter of the French revolution, could see no reason for the American system of checks and balances, in which society was to be “jostled between opposing powers” or to be held back by the “inertia” of its constitution.58 Indeed, even after the revolutionaries turned against him and threw him into prison, Condorcet still seemed not to understand the reason for limitations on government power.
For those with the vision of the anointed, it is not sufficient to discredit or denigrate proponents of the tragic vision. The general public must also be discredited, as well as the social processes through which the public’s desires are expressed, individually or collectively, such as a market economy or social traditions. In short, all alternatives to the vision of the anointed must be put out of court, by one means or another. Nowhere is evidence considered so unnecessary as in making sweeping denigrations of the public. Mass psychoanalysis of “society” is a common pattern, exemplified by psychiatrist Karl Menninger’s view of crime:
Society secretly wants crime, needs crime and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy, and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.59
Not only psychiatrists, but journalists as well, engage in mass psychoanalysis of the public. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, for example, said that “Americans want to believe” that their president “is somehow immune to life’s wounds.” Those who questioned the introduction of controversial material on homosexuality into the public school curriculum were depicted by New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen as people who want children to grow up with “contempt and fear” of people unlike themselves.60 Neither evidence nor even an awareness of a need for evidence accompanied this sweeping denigration of those who disagreed as not merely mistaken but malign. A headline on the cover of U.S. News and World Report proclaimed: “The War Against Women” and added: “Women are falling further behind in country after country—and their men like it that way.”61 No evidence was offered that men in general wished women ill, much less that “their men” wished the women connected with them ill—presumably their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters. During the Vietnam war, celebrated journalist William L. Shirer declared that the American people “don’t give a damn” about the bombing of Hanoi, because they were following football.62 Yet people who attend the ballet or go to art galleries during a war or other national crisis are seldom, if ever, accused of being calloused brutes. But anything that paints the public as benighted requires neither consistency nor logic nor evidence. Back in 1960, Vance Packard wrote that “Americans have thus far chosen to suppress awareness” of a “dangerous decline in the United States of its supply of essential resources.”63 In other words, only a psychological state of “denial” could explain why the public did not exhibit the same hysteria that was so fashionable among the intelligentsia—and which would prove to be so false when actually put to the test, as Paul Ehrlich and others discovered.
President Jimmy Carter echoed a theme among the anointed when he said that there was “a longing for meaning” in the country.64 Again, evidence was neither asked nor given. It is widely taken as axiomatic that ordinary people’s lives lack meaning, which must be brought to them by the anointed via various political crusades or social activism. Later, this notion would be puffed up as “the politics of meaning” by Hillary Clinton.65 Hopelessly naive beliefs on various subjects were also attributed to the public by Jimmy Carter—that “our armies were always invincible,” that “our nation’s resources were limitless,” and so on.66
One of the high priorities of the anointed is to destroy the myths and illusions which they presume to abound among the public. Patriotism is a prime target. Anna Quindlen referred to patriotism during the Gulf War of 1991 as “Amerimania.”67 An internal memorandum of the Smithsonian Institution warned that an exhibit being put together on a leading American fighter plane of World War II should “avoid an overly heroic/cheer-leading/patriotic tone (the same goes for the music).”68 Those who objected to various other examples of the trashing of American achievements were dismissed by another Smithsonian official as people who don’t like exhibits which “undermine their fantasies” and who don’t want to be “educated,” but prefer instead a museum where they can be “distracted for a moment from the dailiness, the tedium, the fear of their lives.”69 The Smithsonian’s own view of its mission was that it should “tell visitors immediately what we are about and how we’d like them to change.”70 In other words, the purpose of a taxpayer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.
Contemporary denigrations of the masses echo a centuries-old tradition among the anointed, despite much rhetoric on the political left about “the people.” Rousseau likened the masses of the people to “a stupid pusillanimous invalid,”71 and Condorcet said that “the human race still revolts the philosopher who contemplates its history.”72 To eighteenth-century British radical writer William Godwin, the peasant had “the contemptible insensitivity of an oyster.”73 Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw considered the working class to be “detestable” people who “have no right to live.”74 Edmund Wilson, despite his many left-wing causes—or perhaps because of them—exhibited only contempt toward ordinary people. While serving in the military during World War I, he wrote to a friend lamenting “the cruelty of ineptitude and waste” that he saw in the conduct of the war, but added, “I should be insincere to make it appear that the deaths of this ‘poor white trash’ of the South and the rest made me feel half so bitter as the mere conscription or enlistment of any of my friends.”75 Nor was this due to the racism of Southern whites, for Wilson himself referred to how distasteful Chattanooga was to him because of “the niggers and the mills.”76
The benighted masses are also important as guinea pigs for particular social experiments, including the remaking of these masses themselves to be the kind of people that the anointed wish them to be. When William Godwin wrote, two centuries ago, of “men as they hereafter may be made,”77 he was echoing a theme already sounded by Helvetius and Holbach, among others, and one that would still be apparent in such twentieth-century phenomena as “reeducation” camps and “brainwashing” programs in Communist countries, as well as in various counterparts within democratic countries of the massive propaganda apparatus of totalitarianism.
What is seldom part of the vision of the anointed is a concept of ordinary people as autonomous decision makers free to reject any vision and to seek their own well-being through whatever social processes they choose. Thus, when those with the prevailing vision speak of the family—if only to defuse their adversaries’ emphasis on family values—they tend to conceive of the family as a recipient institution for government largess or guidance, rather than as a decision-making institution determining for itself how children shall be raised and with what values.
To those with the vision of the anointed, the public serves not only as a general object of disdain, but as a baseline from which to measure their own lofty heights, whether in art, politics, or other fields. Systemic processes which offer channels of expression of the public’s views and values are to be circumscribed and circumvented. Art, music, and ballet are to be financed by compulsory exactions from the public, while ignoring or disdaining what the public itself wants or does not want. Similarly, so-called “public television”—taxpayer-subsidized television—is in fact the least responsive to the public’s desires and most reflective of the vision of the anointed. Shamelessly one-sided propaganda for the environmentalist movement, for example, has become a staple of so-called “nature” programs on “public television” for years.
Failure to use tax money to finance things not liked by the taxpaying public is routinely called “censorship.” If such terminology were used consistently, virtually all of life would be just one long, unending censorship, as individuals choose whether to buy apples rather than oranges, vacations rather than violins, furniture rather than mutual funds. But of course no such consistency is intended. This strained usage of the word “censorship” appears only selectively, to describe public choices and values at variance with the choices and values of the anointed. If a public library declines to buy some avant-garde book approved by the anointed, because either the librarian or the taxpaying public does not like it, that is called “censorship”—even though the book remains freely available to all who wish to buy it and no library can possibly purchase even a tenth of all the books published, so that discretionary preferences are inevitable and the First Amendment does not guarantee either an audience or money.
The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of the anointed in the twentieth century—regardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been “overpopulation,” Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of the anointed must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The anointed do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others.
Those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed not only have different conceptions of the limitations of human beings and of the limitations of resources, relative to the insatiable desires of people, but also have very different conceptions of cause and effect as it operates in social processes.
In the vision of the anointed, it is the dispositions, wisdom, intentions, talents, will, and commitment of social decision makers which are crucial. In the tragic vision, where human knowledge and foresight are very limited for all, causation more often operates in systemic ways, with innumerable interactions producing results controlled by no given individual or group, but falling into a pattern determined by the incentives and constraints inherent in the logic of the circumstances, rather than as a consequence of specifically articulated, syllogistic rationality.
Systemic causation operates in a wide spectrum of circumstances, whether in the world of nature or in human societies. Vegetation on a mountainside may fall into a pattern, not because any of the plants or trees sought to produce such a pattern, but because different temperatures at different heights favor the survival of different species. Even where human volition is involved, the overall pattern that emerges need not reflect anyone’s volition. The Dow Jones industrial average may stand at 4086, not because anyone planned it that way, but because that was the net result of innumerable transactions by innumerable people seeking only their own individual advantage on the particular stocks they were trading.
More broadly, language arises out of gropings, accidents, experiences, and historical borrowings and corruptions of other languages. No wise individual or council sat down and designed language—either as a general concept or as specific languages, except for artificial languages like Esperanto, which have languished in disuse. The richness, complexity, and subtleties of language have arisen systemically, from the experiences and interactions of millions of ordinary human beings, not from a top-down “plan” formulated by some elite. From time to time, linguistic practices are codified or modified by intellectuals, but this is an incidental part of a vast drama.
Systemic causation creates an order which arises as a consequence of individual interactions directed toward various and conflicting ends, not toward the creation of this order itself. The characteristics of such an order can be analyzed, even if they cannot be created—and this order may, in particular instances or in general, be superior to what can be created, as the case of artificial versus naturally evolving language suggests. The eighteenth-century school of French economists called the Physiocrats coined the term laissez-faire to express their view that “the natural order” that would emerge in a market economy was both discernible and more beneficial than attempts to control such complex interactions from the top. That has likewise been the central theme of the twentieth-century writings of Friedrich Hayek, who has sharply distinguished an emergent “order” from a contrived “design.”78 In short, systemic causation has been an enduring feature of the tragic vision, whether among economists, legal analysts, or social thinkers in various other fields.
Systemic causation takes many forms. Legal traditions, family ties, social customs, and price fluctuations in an economy are all systemic ways in which the experiences and preferences of millions of people powerfully influence the decisions of millions of other people. Where the tragic vision and the vision of the anointed differ most fundamentally is on the reality and validity of such systemic processes, which utilize the experiences of the many, rather than the articulated rationality of a talented few. Related to this difference is a sharp difference in the role of dispositions, intentions, or goals in the two visions.
The very terms of discourse among those with the vision of the anointed have historically reflected their preoccupation with dispositions, intentions, goals, whether these were “liberty, equality, fraternity” in the eighteenth century or “social justice,” “compassion,” or “women’s liberation” today. By contrast, those with the tragic vision have emphasized process characteristics, often treating the dispositions, intentions, or goals of those operating within these processes as incidental or irrelevant. For example, although Adam Smith regarded the intentions of businessmen as selfish and anti-social,79 he saw the systemic consequences of their competition as being far more beneficial to society than well-intentioned government regulation.80
Although the overall results of systemic interactions are not directly controlled by anyone, they are neither random nor unfathomable. Otherwise, there could be no such thing as economic analysis of market competition or scientific analysis of ecological or evolutionary patterns. Determining the particular characteristics of particular kinds of systems of reciprocal interaction can be a demanding task—but it is a task seldom undertaken by those with the vision of the anointed, who see little standing between intention and result, other than such subjective factors as compassion or commitment. Thus, systemic causation seldom plays a major role in the prevailing vision of the anointed, however important it may be in the tragic vision. Where the world is conceived in the tragic vision as a system of innumerable and reciprocal interactions, all constrained within the confines of natural and human limitations, individual problems cannot be solved one by one without adding to other problems elsewhere, if only by using up the resources available to deal with them.
A noted controversy among economists back in 1946 may illustrate more specifically and concretely the nature of systemic causation. The issue was whether raising the government-mandated minimum wage level would lead to higher pay for low-level workers or to a higher unemployment rate among such workers after their new pay levels reduced the number of such workers in demand by employers. This controversy, which raged in a leading economics journal (the American Economic Review) and was reprinted repeatedly in other places, was between an economist who saw the issue in intentional terms and others who saw it in systemic terms.
After surveying hundreds of employers with questionnaires asking whether they would lay off workers in the wake of an externally mandated increase in wages—and finding that most did not say that they would—Professor Richard A. Lester of Princeton University concluded that the prevailing economic analysis was wrong.81 However, the economic analysis he was attacking was not about employer intentions but about systemic consequences. It might well be that every employer in the affected industries intended to maintain his employment—but the inherent constraints of consumer demand for the products could easily make it impossible for all the employers to do this, as their attempts to pass on their higher wage costs in higher prices reduce consumers’ purchases of their products.
This was only one of many possible ways in which systemic results could differ radically from employer intentions or from the intentions of those who promoted minimum wage laws. But it is only after shifting the focus from intentions to systemic interactions that such counter-productive consequences become apparent in the analysis, without having to wait for painful social confirmation. In the wake of a minimum wage increase, the possible adjustment paths include the following:
1. Capital could be substituted for labor intentionally by individual employers buying machinery and laying off workers.
2. Capital could be substituted for labor systemically by a loss of profits and market share by the more labor-intensive firms, which are more hard hit by the minimum wage increase than the capital-intensive firms are.
3. Higher-skilled and higher-priced labor could be substituted for lower-priced labor intentionally by individual employers.
4. Higher-skilled and higher-priced labor could be substituted for lower-priced labor systemically by the greater loss of business by those firms more heavily dependent on the lower-skilled labor whose costs have been increased.
5. Marginally profitable firms could be forced out of existence, reducing industry employment, even without any reduction in employment by any of the surviving employers.
The specific path of adjustment in the industry is less important than the fact that the adjustment must be made to higher labor costs without a corresponding increase in revenue from product sales. What employers intend does not matter, even in situation 5 above, where the surviving firms may be able to maintain their employment as planned. However, situation 5 has its pitfalls for those researchers who survey employers before and after a minimum wage increase, for the result may be that employment among surviving firms is as high (or higher) than ever, even though industry employment has gone down due to some companies going out of business. The fatal pitfall in survey research is that one can only survey survivors. As a distinguished economist pointed out at the time of this controversy, by using such research methods one can prove that no soldier was killed in World War II.82
If systemic causation is the dominant social force, that leaves much less of a role for the anointed, much less importance to the difference between their knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, on the one hand, and the knowledge, wisdom, and virtue of ordinary people, on the other. A downgrading of the importance of the special wisdom and virtue of any elite has been a feature of the tragic vision for centuries, going back at least as far as Hobbes in the seventeenth century and remaining a dominant note in the twentieth-century writings of Friedrich Hayek and others. According to Hobbes: “A plain husband-man is more Prudent in the affaires of his own house, than a Privy Counselor in the affaires of other men.”83
This conclusion reflected in part a belief that the incentives facing decision makers had much more to do with the quality of their decisions than differences in ability and virtue among them. It also suggested that these latter differences were exaggerated. Both beliefs have remained common, for centuries, among those with the tragic vision. Adam Smith thought that men differed from one another less than dogs.84 So did Friedrich Hayek two centuries later.85 Oliver Wendell Holmes likewise believed that great and conscientious minds had less impact on the law than might be supposed. He acknowledged “the countless number of great intellects that have spent themselves in making some addition or improvement” in the law—“the greatest of which,” he said, “is trifling when compared to the mighty whole.”86 Hayek applied this principle to social processes in general:
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.87
The tragic vision of human limitations clearly applies to all, with no exception for any elite. Exempting the anointed from the systemic processes which produce legal traditions, social customs, market mechanisms, and other processes for expressing the life experiences of mankind becomes much more questionable in a world of systemic causation. The importance of the anointed’s “compassion” or commitment to “social justice” is similarly reduced in a world where intentions are incidental and results depend much more on the kinds of social processes at work—and the incentives generated by such processes.
In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong—surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences. It is not that the anointed advocate such processes, as such, but that their preoccupation with goals often neglects the whole question of process characteristics. The very standards by which social “problems” are defined tend likewise to be third-party standards. Thus “waste,” “quality,” and “real needs” are terms blithely thrown around, as if some third party can define them for other people. Government actions to enforce these third-party preemptions are often advocated in the form of bureaucracies to replace the systemic processes of the marketplace.
Such practices as judicial activism, intended to produce socially more beneficial results than a strict adherence to legal rules and traditions might produce, look very different within the framework of systemic causation. To derange a whole process, evolved from the experiences of millions of people over centuries of legal development, on the basis of the beliefs or feelings of a particular judge or set of judges about a particular issue before them, risks raising up humanity in one place and pulling it down in another, to use Holmes’ analogy.
“Hard cases make bad law” is another way the tragic vision has been expressed. To help some hard-pressed individual or group whose case is before them, judges may bend the law to arrive at a more benign verdict in that particular case—but at the cost of damaging the whole consistency and predictability of the law, on which millions of other people depend, and on which ultimately the freedom and safety of a whole society depend. There cannot be a law-abiding society if no one knows in advance what law they are to abide by, but must wait for judges to create ex post facto legal rulings based on “evolving standards” rather than known rules. An expanding penumbra of uncertainty surrounding laws creates incentives for a growing volume of litigation, as well as for a blackmailing of law-abiding individuals and organizations into out-of-court settlements because they cannot be sure how some speculative charge against them will be viewed by judges operating under “evolving standards.”
In a system of human interactions, the incentives generated by those systems—whether economic systems or legal systems, for example—are crucial to those with the tragic vision. But those with the vision of the anointed see dispositions as crucial, and hence emphasize the inculcation of the proper attitudes through schools, the media, and otherwise. Whether the issue is child rearing, criminal justice, or foreign policy, those with the tragic vision tend to rely on incentives while those with the vision of the anointed tend to rely on creating favorable dispositions. Those with the vision of the anointed often advocate the settlement of international differences through “diplomacy” and “negotiation,” rather than by “force”—as if diplomacy and negotiation were not dependent on a surrounding set of incentives, of which the credible threat of military force is crucial. Yet unilateral military cutbacks have often been advocated by those who favor diplomacy and negotiation. Indeed, such policies were not only advocated but followed by Western democracies for a dangerously long time during the period leading up to the outbreak of World War II.
Among the social incentives of systemic interactions, generated more or less spontaneously, are personal ties within families, within communities, or among citizens of a given nation. All these systemically generated ties have been treated as precious sources of motivation and cohesion by those with the tragic vision, who see such ties as countering the inherent selfishness of individuals. Yet these same ties have aroused less enthusiasm, often suspicion, and sometimes even disdain or hostility by those with the vision of the anointed, to whom such particularistic ties are seen as obstacles to broader social interests or to being a “citizen of the world.” Once again, these different conclusions go back to underlying differences in the way the world is conceived and corresponding differences in what ranges of options are assumed to be available. To those with the vision of the anointed, the alternative to particularistic ties are universalistic ties, while to those with the tragic vision the alternatives are individual egotism and mob psychology.
Within the framework of systemic causation, proclamations of high principles and deep compassion are irrelevant distractions which promote a dangerous confusion between what you would like and what is likely to happen if what you advocate is put into practice. But those with the vision of the anointed tend automatically to attribute statistical differences between groups to intentional reasons (discrimination) or to dispositional reasons (racism, sexism), with seldom a serious thought about systemic reasons, such as age differences, cultural differences, or differences associated with childbearing and homemaking. It is considered an act of generosity if the latter reasons are not dismissed out of hand but are accorded a “perhaps”—and all this without a speck of evidence being used to distinguish between these possibilities and those possibilities whose only superior claims are based on their being part of the intentional and dispositional reasons at the heart of the vision of the anointed.
Nowhere does the difference between systemic causation and intentional causation show up more dramatically than in discussions of racial issues. With such negative phenomena as racism, as with such positive phenomena as compassion, systemic causation does not depend simply on whether these dispositions exist but on the situational incentives and constraints within which they exist. An owner of a professional basketball team and an owner of a symphony orchestra may be equally racist, but it would be financially suicidal for the former to refuse to hire black basketball players, while the relatively few black symphonic musicians could be denied jobs with much less effect on the overall quality of a symphony orchestra or its financial viability. While these examples are hypothetical, empirical research in countries around the world shows repeatedly that discrimination is in fact more severe in those sectors of the economy where the costs incurred by the discriminators are less.88 Even in South Africa under apartheid, where racism among white employers was buttressed by legal discrimination against black workers, those very employers often defied or evaded the apartheid laws to hire more blacks, and in higher positions, than permitted by the government.89 The South African housing market produced such racial integration, in defiance of the law, that whites were in some cases a minority in areas legally designated as being for whites only.90 Yet this whole field of the economics of discrimination has been dismissed as “a lot of hot air” by an academic whose sole evidence was a Federal Reserve study of mortgage lending in Boston91—a study whose fatal flaws have already been noted in Chapter 3. For many others with the vision of the anointed, no evidence at all is necessary for asserting that racism and discrimination underlie statistical disparities.
In contrast to the vision of the anointed, systemic causation says that there are often underlying and quite rational reasons for decisions, even if the expression of those reasons are neither obvious nor well articulated. In short, there is an underlying reality reflected through systemic processes, however imperfectly. It is not simply a matter of subjective dispositions. This reasoning can be taken a step further: A fundamental reality is not vitiated by the fact that different human beings see it differently, even if some respond irrationally.
For example, in nineteenth-century Japan, the fundamental reality was that the Japanese were technologically far behind the Western industrial nations—and that this had enormous implications for the country’s military vulnerability, political subordination, and chances of survival as an independent nation. A wide spectrum of Japanese recognized this and acted upon it, ultimately creating the scientific, technological, and economic foundation for Japan’s emergence a century later as one of the leading industrial nations of the world. However, not every Japanese was perfectly rational about their initial shock at discovering how far behind they were, compared to the West. Among the reactions were these:
Associations were formed to promote the use of Roman letters in the writing of Japanese and to abandon the kanji and kana characters. Suggestions were made that the kimono be abolished along with many Japanese foods. One man, Yoshio Takahashi, even published a book, The Improvement of the Japanese Race, in which he claimed that the Japanese were physically and mentally inferior to westerners, and he urged that all Japanese males divorce their wives and marry western women who would bear children with superior characteristics, and so improve the Japanese stock! A song composed in 1878 for children as they played with a ball, called the Civilisation Ball Song, was designed to impress on their young minds how superior western technology was. At each bounce of the ball, they had to recite the names of ten objects that would improve their country: “Gas lamps, steam engines, horse-drawn carriages, cameras, telegrams, lightning conductors, newspapers, schools, letter post and steamships.”92
Nothing would be easier than to ridicule some of these attitudes. Certainly no one today could consider the Japanese race mentally inferior, for example, after their remarkable achievements in overtaking Western nations technologically in just one century. But a sweeping dismissal of the concerns behind even these extreme reactions in nineteenth-century Japan would be as mistaken in general as these reactions were on particular points. There was an underlying reality, however varied and sometimes irrational the subjective responses were to it. It was not just a matter of subjective dispositions, nor would psychological reeducation of the Japanese, or redefining the backwardness of nineteenth-century Japan out of existence with cultural relativism, have made a dent in that underlying reality. Everything cannot be reduced to psychological attitudes or “perceptions.”
Systemic causation does not presuppose perfect rationality on the part of human beings. On the contrary, its rationality is a systemic rationality, such that any professional basketball team owner who refused to hire black players under competitive market conditions would simply not continue to survive as an owner. Similarly, systemic causation would not explain the highly varying proportions of female employees in different industries and occupations by the subjective attitudes of men in those particular industries and occupations, but by the varying situations in those sectors of the economy where women are prevalent or rare. It would, in fact, be an incredible coincidence if men’s attitudes toward women should continue to be radically different from one industry to another, over a span of time sufficient for a complete turnover of the men in all the industries.
The point here is not to resolve issues involving women or minorities in the labor market. The point is to illustrate the difference between seeking systemic explanations of social phenomena and presupposing that subjective dispositions provide a sufficient causal explanation. A spectrum of subjective responses to any situation is virtually inevitable and these responses will almost invariably include both wise and foolish reactions, as well as reactions well articulated and clumsily expressed. Nothing would be easier, on any issue, than to seize upon foolish, malign, or confused statements or actions, in order to present a social problem as due to subjective dispositions which differ from the superior dispositions of the anointed. But, if causation is seen as systemic rather than dispositional, then the task is to discover the underlying reality behind the varied subjective expressions. Perceptions are like mirrors which reflect the real world with varying degrees of distortion, but proving distortion does not disprove the existence of a reality which cannot be talked away.
Perhaps the most fundamental difference between those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed is that the former see policy-making in terms of trade-offs and the latter in terms of “solutions.” This is not merely a difference in words or in optimism, but a difference in procedures. To those with the vision of the anointed, the question is: What will remove particular negative features in the existing situation to create a solution? Those with the tragic vision ask: What must be sacrificed to achieve this particular improvement? As the distinguished economist Herbert Stein said of evaluating a political candidate:
There are always conditions that one could wish were different or better than they are. The relevant question is whether there is a cure for the condition which the candidate knows and can put into effect and which will not have consequences that are worse than the initial condition.93
Implicit in these different approaches to policymaking are different assumptions as to whether other people are so irrational as to have set up unhappy situations for no reason, so that costless improvements are now available. Belief in such differential wisdom and rectitude is more congenial to the vision of the anointed, for whom potential solutions abound, requiring only the discernment to discover them and the power to put them into practice.
No one denies the existence of constraints, though the vision of the anointed does not incorporate these constraints as a central feature and ever-present ingredient in its thinking, while the tragic vision does. Moreover, the trade-offs made necessary by constraints are seen differently by the two visions. To those with the vision of the anointed, it is simply a question of choosing the best solution, while to those with the tragic vision the more fundamental question is: Who is to choose? And by what process, and with what consequences for being wrong? As already noted in Chapter 2 (and as will be seen in subsequent chapters), it is so easy to be wrong—and to persist in being wrong—when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.
Often, those with the vision of the anointed more or less automatically collectivize decisions and then take on the role of deciders themselves, whether the issue is sex education, subsidizing the arts, health insurance, or innumerable other social issues. However, there is no a priori reason why different individuals should not have different trade-offs in all these areas—which is to say, there is no necessity for the anointed to preempt and collectivize these decisions.
A simple example may illustrate concretely the difference between seeking a solution and seeking a trade-off. When a baby was killed in a tragic airplane crash in 1989 by being ripped out of its mother’s arms by the force of the impact and being sent hurtling through the cabin, a political “solution” was proposed by having a federal law requiring babies to be strapped into their own seats on airplanes. But a study by economists indicated that such a law, requiring parents to purchase an extra seat, would divert a portion of the traffic to cheaper alternative modes of transportation on the ground—most of which have higher mortality rates than airplanes. Over a period of a decade, there would be an estimated saving of one baby’s life in airplane crashes, a loss of nine lives in alternative ground transportation, and an additional cost of $3 billion.94
Few people would regard this as a reasonable trade-off. But it is only by analyzing the issue as a trade-off that we avoid the dangerous and deceptive appearances of a “solution.”
The proposed legislation to increase airline safety by requiring a separate seat for children was a perfect example of what Justice Holmes referred to as raising humanity in one place while pulling it down in another. Nothing is easier than to increase safety in some arbitrarily defined sector in some arbitrarily chosen way, in disregard of what this does to safety elsewhere and in other ways. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is all too congenial to the vision of the anointed—and to politicians.
More generally, political attempts to “solve” various “problems” seriatim ignore the costs created by each “solution” and how that exacerbates other problems. It is by no means impossible to solve downtown parking problems in any city, for example, by building more parking garages, either above ground or underground, but the resources required for such a task would leave many municipalities dangerously lacking in policemen and fire protection, municipal hospitals, and public schools. It is no answer to suggest raising local taxes or getting federal grants, for these actions simply relocate the trade-off, without getting rid of it. It is like infinite regress. If the parking problem is worth eliminating, even at the large and inescapable costs of doing so, then clearly it should be done. But no one should imagine that this is a “solution” rather than a trade-off.
Much of political rhetoric is concerned with presenting issues as isolated problems to be solved—not as trade-offs within an overall system constrained by inherent limitations of resources, knowledge, etc. The issue is posed as one of providing “affordable housing,” “decent jobs,” “adequate health care,” and the like. The cost problem is often waved aside by some such general statement as, “Surely a country that can put a man on the moon…” or fight a war in the Persian Gulf, or build a nationwide highway system, etc., can afford to do whatever is proposed. From a trade-off perspective, however, all these expensive activities of the past are reasons why we have less to spend on other things, not reasons why we can spend more. We cannot undo the flight to the moon, unfight the Gulf War, or unbuild the national highway system. One of the most severe constraints is the constraint that time moves in only one direction. Trade-offs that should have been made differently in the past are now irrelevant.
What can be afforded seriatim vastly exceeds what can be afforded simultaneously. Simple and obvious as this should be, it is often ignored in denunciations of government inaction on various festering social problems or “unmet needs.” But even an ideal set of trade-offs must—and should—leave a whole spectrum of unmet needs, because the cost of wiping out the last vestige of any problem is leaving other problems in more dire condition. In short, trade-offs must be incremental rather than categorical, if limited resources are to produce optimal results in any social system as a whole.
Despite the importance of incremental trade-offs, the language of politics is filled with categorical rhetoric about “setting priorities,” “providing basic necessities,” or “assuring safety” in foods, medicines, or nuclear power. But incremental decisions differ as much from categorical decisions as trade-offs differ from solutions. If faced with a categorical choice between food and music, every sane person would choose food, since one can live without music but not without food. But if faced with an incremental choice, the decision could easily be just the opposite. If food were categorically more important than music, then we would never reach a point where we were prepared to sacrifice resources that could be used to produce food, in order to produce music. Given this premise, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach should all have been put to work growing potatoes, instead of writing music, if food were categorically more important.
A world where food had a categorical priority over music would be a world of 300-pound people, whose brief lives would never be brightened by a song or a melody. The fact that no one would advocate such an absurd and disastrous outcome, in such an obvious case, does not mean that people will not advocate equally absurd and disastrous outcomes in more complicated cases, where the connections are harder to follow and where the categorical language of “priorities,” “necessities,” or “safety” is set in the concrete of law or public policy—and where the consequences are either left unmonitored or are monitored by agencies with a vested interest in the continuation of the laws and policies which justify their own existence, money, and power.
Put differently, many a sound and beneficial principle becomes a dangerous absurdity when it becomes a fetish. That is why any categorical principle must be assessed not only in terms of its soundness as a principle, but also in terms of what happens when that principle is applied categorically. Laws tend to be categorical, as do court determinations of what is and is not “unconstitutional.” That is fine when the law prohibits murder or kidnapping, for example, since virtually everyone is against these things in virtually all cases. But when laws and court decisions become the chosen instruments of social trade-offs, then it is not enough to examine the good intentions or even the sound principles behind the policies chosen, without examining also the effect of pursuing those policies through a categorical process. As already noted in the case of mandating separate airline seats for babies, policies chosen for the sake of safety can in fact make life more dangerous.
Looked at more broadly, the pursuit of safety in disregard of costs means a degree of sacrifice of economic prosperity—and economic prosperity is itself one of the key factors in longevity. More prosperous individuals, classes, and nations tend to have lower death rates around the world, simply because of their greater ability to guard against diseases and against such natural disasters as earthquakes and floods. The costliness of first-rate medical care and medical research requires no elaboration. Earthquakes in San Francisco or Los Angeles do not kill nearly as many people as earthquakes that hit Third World cities. Flood conditions can be detected sooner and evacuations begun and carried out more quickly where there are ample resources to produce all the cars, planes, and other vehicles needed to move huge numbers of people out of danger. All these things are made possible by the material wealth which is often treated so disdainfully by those promoting “safety.” But to kill the goose that lays the golden egg is, in effect, to kill people.
None of this means that safety laws and policies must be rejected categorically. On the contrary, it means that such laws and policies must be either accepted or rejected incrementally, in the light of what is being sacrificed in the specific instance. But that in turn means that the incremental trade-off must be made through institutions and processes capable of such incremental decision making, as courts of law or government bureaucracies seldom are. For example, if the costs of smokestack emissions must be paid in emissions fees or fines by those who own the smokestack, then their incentives will be to reduce those emissions in the most efficient way possible—to the point where the cost of further reductions would exceed the fees or fines. This is likewise the optimum trade-off for society, which gains nothing by further reductions at costs exceeding the damage done by the remaining emissions.
To eliminate another thousand dollars’ worth of emissions at a cost of a million dollars is to make the society $999,000 worse off. Yet this can easily happen when laws, regulations, or court rulings categorically force cutbacks in emissions in some arbitrarily specified way to some arbitrarily specified level of “safety.” Often the officially specified way of reducing pollution is not the most efficient way of doing so, or may have been the most efficient way when the laws, regulations, or court rulings were made but is no longer, as technology advances. Were the same goal being pursued incrementally through market processes, not only would polluters have incentives to reduce their pollutions in the most efficient way, but others would also have an incentive to keep trying to find still better ways to do so. But, once official categorical edicts have specified a particular way of reducing emissions, there is less incentive for others to find alternative technologies for accomplishing the same purposes, when the costs and uncertainties of gaining official acceptance for the new technology reduce its prospective profitability.
In many other ways as well, market economies often find it easier to decide issues incrementally. When an insurance company, for example, seeks additional customers for its fire insurance, it must determine incrementally how much risk it is prepared to accept in order to get the additional business and how much it must condition its insurance policies on certain actions by the customer, in order to reduce the risks of an outbreak of fire. Make the conditions too stringent and another insurance company gets the customer; make them too lenient and losses from fires will exceed the premiums paid by the additional customers. But when a government agency attempts to insure against various disasters, either directly or by providing “disaster relief” after the fact, it seldom weighs such considerations incrementally or imposes constraints on the creation of risks. Instead, dangerous locations or behavior are subsidized at taxpayer expense, and the media often applaud the “courage” of those who choose to continue to live in harm’s way in areas prone to flooding, hurricanes, fire, or other natural hazards.
Because inherent limitations of human knowledge are among the most severe constraints, decision making often involves not simply a trade-off of known consequences of alternative courses of action, but instead a weighing of varying probabilities of various outcomes. A certain level of pesticide residues in the soil creates a certain level of probability of a given increase in particular diseases, while banning the use of such pesticides creates a certain level of probability that other, insect-borne diseases will increase—as, for example, a resurgence of malaria followed bans on DDT. Thus, the issue is not one of categorical “safety”—or even safety to some arbitrarily specified level—but rather of weighing alternative probabilities of alternative consequences. To say that pesticides, nuclear power, medicines, automobiles, or other things must be “safe”—either absolutely (which is impossible) or within some specified level of risk—is to say that only one set of probabilities will be weighed. Put differently, to minimize the overall dangers to human life and health is to accept specific, preventable dangers rather than follow policies which would create worse preventable dangers. The issue thus is not whether nuclear power is “safe” but whether its dangers are greater or less than the dangers of supplying the same power from coal, oil, hydroelectric dams, or other ways of generating electricity, or the dangers in reducing the availability of electricity. Fewer or dimmer lights are almost certain to increase both accidents and crime, for example, and brownouts and blackouts create other dangers when people get trapped in elevators or fire alarm systems no longer function.
To say that particular dangers on one end of a spectrum are intolerable, either absolutely or beyond some specified risk level, is to say that alternative dangers on the other end of the spectrum are acceptable in whatever open-ended ways they work out. People die when life-saving medicines are kept out of the United States because those medicines have not met the specified safety standards of the Food and Drug Administration. Laws to protect orphans from being adopted into unfit homes condemn more orphans to institutional care or to repeatedly disruptive movements through a whole series of foster homes, both of which can do lasting damage. Banning police use of certain forceful methods of subduing people resisting arrest will indeed lead to a reduction in the number of people injured or killed while being taken into custody—at the cost of an increase in the number of policemen injured or killed in these confrontations. There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
The language of politics, and especially of ideological politics, is often categorical language about “rights,” about eliminating certain evils, guaranteeing certain benefits, or protecting certain habitats and species. In short, it is the language of solutions and of the unconstrained vision behind solutions, the vision of the anointed. Indirectly but inexorably, this language says that the preferences of the anointed are to supersede the preferences of everyone else—that the particular dangers they fear are to be avoided at all costs and the particular benefits they seek are to be obtained at all costs. Their attempts to remove these decisions from both the democratic process and the market process, and to vest them in obscure commissions, unelected judges, and insulated bureaucracies, are in keeping with the logic of what they are attempting. They are not seeking trade-offs based on the varying preferences of millions of other people, but solutions based on their own presumably superior knowledge and virtue.