I wonder how many budding reactionaries, like myself, have some engineering background.
The most striking feature of modern government is how little it has improved over its historical predecessors. Is this recognition a product of my engineering education?
If you compare the state of electrical engineering today to the state of electrical engineering in (say) 1900, the differences are obvious and enormous. More importantly, progress is clearly evident.
If you make the same comparison for politics (or political science), progress is not evident (to say the least). If anything is evident, it is retrogression. We seem to be getting less at a much higher cost.
Every time someone brings up this topic, someone else immediately offers the counterexample of slavery/Jim Crow/etc.
Fine, I’ll try to deal with that. The US did a shitty job of ending slavery. The British ended slavery before we did, they ended it more effectively, and hundreds of thousands of people didn’t die in the process. The US continues to do a shitty job of rectifying racial inequalities. The push to solve the problem of racism has become an old-fashioned patronage system. Democrats channel money to blacks who vote democratic. Is this really your best example of progress? Do those who believe in modern representative democracy have nothing else to offer? Is an achievement that is 150 years old really even an achievement of modern government?
It seems to me that an understanding of old political thought – which was as successful or more successful than our own – is a prerequisite to suggesting any changes to our government.
To repeat myself, the salient feature of the study of government and the modern practice of government is retrogression in quality. Our understanding of government and our ability to govern is getting worse over time.
I wonder how many budding reactionaries, like myself, have some engineering background.
I do, I work at a software startup for my day job.
Engineering in political situations is far more difficult, since there is no engineer, external to the system, that can make modifications. The only forces that can change the system exist within the system itself.
The British ended slavery before we did, they ended it more effectively, and hundreds of thousands of people didn’t die in the process.
The British had it a bit easier since British subjects owned far fewer slaves in total, and the slave holding areas were outside of the mainland.
I read recently that a major force behind freeing the slaves in Brazil was the votes of free blacks – if true, this is a decent argument for democracy.
On the flip side, democracy probably did make the slave problem much worse in the south. As late as 1832 Virginia almost voted to end slavery. But due to the well known phenomena of democratic/party polarization, by the 1850′s for a Southern to write an anti-slavery article would risk violent reprisal. The south also enacted the slave codes and banned manumission laws after the rise of democracy. If the civil war had gone just a bit differently, and Lincoln made peace with the South by enshrining slavery, one would then see the history of democracy as one of strengthening slavery instead of ending it.
The progressive history sees the American story since 1865 as one of civil rights/equality/diversity gradually triumphing over racism.
I think that the correct, reactionary interpretation, is that we have been in a long, two-side race war, caused by democracy, with at times one side or the other getting the upper hand. From 1865 to 1875 blacks and northerners teamed up to oppress white southerners. From 1875 to the 1960′s white southerners oppressed blacks. Since 1960′s SWPL’s and blacks have teamed up to oppress white proles. This entire cycle needs to stop, on both sides.
I don’t mean to suggest that politics be subjected to an engineering process.
Instead, I wonder whether an engineering-oriented focus on practicalities reveals the epic failure of government to not-decay over time.
These are very useful sentences:
“The progressive history sees the American story since 1865 as one of civil rights/equality/diversity gradually triumphing over racism.
“I think that the correct, reactionary interpretation, is that we have been in a long, two-side race war, caused by democracy, with at times one side or the other getting the upper hand.”
I’m a reactionary with no engineering background – my love and my academic focus has always been history.
My younger brother, however, is an engineer (degrees in aerospace and software, working on a doctorate in systems). When he was just starting to make his own identity, he followed my footsteps in being a libertarian. For at least five years, however, he’s been very annoyingly and even fanatically progressive. The two points to which he consistently returns are atheism (I can’t figure out why, since no one in our family actually comes out and argues that there’s a god, and certainly our parents didn’t raise us to believe in one) and that the economy can and ought to be managed by bureaucrats.
I tried discussing this latter view during a long car trip a few years ago. What I came to understand was that we were arguing not over facts or interpretations, or even theories, but about worldviews. His is entirely informed by being an engineer. He’s so used to designing more highly effective wings and/or databases and/or weather balloons that he doesn’t think there’s anything in life – his or anyone else’s – that can’t be engineered.
When I asked him once whether it wasn’t difficult to switch from being an aerospace engineer to being a software engineer, he told me that the main thing all these programs teach is the engineering mentality and methodology. I see now how dangerous it is.
In my view, the free market system itself is an engineering design. Unless your an arch-anarcho-capitalist, you believe that the free market itself is a creation of government/rule of law. The “free market” can be best understood as an extremely elegant, uber-modular design for an economy.
You called for an arch-anarcho-capitalist? Free market is the design that gets used between strangers when using force would be a net loss (which encompasses both well-armed anarchies and very rare governments).
Couldn’t free markets just as easily be called the absence of any design?
This is an interesting thought. I suppose it matches reality. After all, what market is currently more free than Somalia’s? No one wants to seriously emulate Somalia (looking at Somalia may be interesting from an intellectual perspective, but no one is moving there).
I think some engineers get too cocky about their ability to design. Design is always full of trade-offs. However, subjecting humans to the design process has an incredibly bad track record.
Very perceptive comments re engineering and arrogance.
I think we are still missing a connection in the negative correlation with female attention…
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