December 3, 2012

• Radicals and Revolution

  JDN 2456265 EDT 10:08.

   

  I do not consider myself a radical or a revolutionary. It could be argued that I have some radical ideas, because I would like to see many things about society change, some in fairly drastic ways. And I could be considered a radical of the Saul Alinsky school: “true revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.”
  But what differentiates me from the people I would think of as radicals is that I don’t see our current state as all that bad. I’ve heard people say things like “Anything but this,” “anywhere but here,” and I think they seriously lack imagination. The world could be a lot worse than it is.

  Just in the 20th century, the Nazis could have won WW2, or the USSR could have won the Cold War. Nuclear war could have wiped out 99% of the human population and destroyed civilization as we know it.

  Go further back, and democracy might never have been invented. The scientific method might never have been discovered. Feudal monarchy sustained by divine right of kings was in place for over a thousand years, what makes you think it couldn’t still be around now? We could have been wiped out by many a plague, especially if we’d never invented antibiotics.

  The modified capitalism we have today is surely a flawed system in many ways. But can you really not see that it’s better than most of the alternatives? Better than subsistence farming, better than a barter system, better than feudalism, better than mercantilism, better than Stalin’s Communism; and those are just the systems that human societies have used, not counting all the combinatorically vast space of possible social systems, most of which are so unstable they fall apart before you can implement them. Maybe there is a form of socialism (or even communism?) that would be better, but you have to actually specify how that would work and how we get there from here. In fact, I think that the best form of socialism is one that includes a large swath of capitalism, like what they have in Sweden and Denmark today. But hey, maybe you’ve got a better idea. Here’s the thing: It has to actually be fleshed out as a workable system, because that’s what we’re comparing to, actual workable systems. You can’t compare the flaws of real-world capitalism with the ideal utopia of imaginary socialism. (The ideal utopia of imaginary capitalism is also quite wonderful; it’s also, well, imaginary.)

  Does the world need to change? Yes. But it needs to change slowly. Now, you might ask, why slowly? Given that we want to get from A to B, isn’t it best to go as fast as possible?

  Well, it would be, if we knew exactly how to get there. If you could write down in detail the precise list of changes we need to make from our current state to get to the best possible human society, and then actually implement all those changes all at once, yes, that would be amazing. But you can’t.

  Instead, we have to work by trial-and-error. We have to make a few tweaks here and a few tweaks there, and find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s possible to be too conservative, not making any changes at all. But it’s also possible (indeed, far easier), to be too radical, making changes rapidly and haphazardly before their consequences are understood.

  Social change is often analogized to biological evolution, and that’s no accident; there are a number of similarities (though a number of differences as well, watch out). Modern evolutionary genetics makes one thing very clear: Don’t mutate too fast. You want to mutate, yes. But you want to mutate very slowly, making very tiny changes at a time. That way, natural selection has the opportunity to keep you on a good course toward improved fitness. If you mutate too fast, you destroy your current equilibrium and may not survive at all. (Indeed, there’s an easy way to mutate really fast: Stand next to a nuclear explosion, just outside the blast radius, so you only get the radiation. You’ll find it isn’t good for your fitness.) The optimal mutation rate for long-term fitness is extremely slow.

  To see why, suppose you’re trying to change a mouse into an elephant, and all you can do is resize one bone, muscle, or organ at a time. (Sound ridiculous? Well, it’s actually where elephants come from.) If you tried to enlarge the head to elephant size right away, the whole animal would fall apart under its own weight. If you enlarge the legs first, now it can’t walk. Instead, what you have to do is make the legs 1% bigger, then the head 1% bigger, then the lungs 1% bigger, and so on, and keep cycling through this process many, many times. To make the animal a million times bigger, you need to increase each part by 1% a total of 1,390 times. (Probably not as many as you thought!) That will take a few million years, but it can be done. Has been, in fact.

  Similarly, changing a society requires a complex system of interlocking parts to be changed. Not as complex as a mouse, perhaps; but still pretty complex. Because humans are intelligent (unlike genes), we can even get away with a more than 1% change along one dimension–like when we gave women the right to vote, that’s actually a 100% increase in the voting population. We can coordinate some changes so we don’t have to do them all strictly sequentially. But still, we can only change a few things at a time, and we can only change them a moderate amount. Try to change too rapidly, and the system becomes unstable; if you’re looking for a single explanation for why Communism in the USSR and PRC became so terrible, this seems like a pretty good one. Trying to change everything at once means giving way too much power to a small number of people–and then, predictably, that power gets abused. I hope the revolutions in the Middle East don’t go this way, but it looks like they will actually; because once again, we didn’t reform piece by piece, we tried to do a revolution all at once.

  I can understand the temptation. So much is wrong with the world, shouldn’t we try to change it all as fast as we can? But no, we have to take it step by step. Otherwise, we might make it worse. And never doubt that it could be a lot worse.

  • 12:12 pm
  • 1 Comment