I wrote: >> I think that democracy (majority rule with minority rights) is the best way to deal with heterogeneity. Can you think of a better way, since we can't figure out how to allow each individual and group to be totally autonomous?<<
Ian writes: > Sounds great in theory, but history of US democracy shows, in effect, the tyranny of organized minorities on an enormous number of issues that have significantly shaped our political economy.<
(1) US democracy is polluted and thus warped by its submersion in a system of capitalism, patriarchy, and white ethnic supremacy, among other things. It is thus a mistake to generalize from US democracy to all democracy and to thus reject the latter. In any event, popular movements such as that for civil rights have been able to use the imperfect actually-existing democratic forms (e.g., the US Bill of Rights) for their own purposes, against the powers that be (or were).
(2) it's better to hear about the tyranny of organized minorities -- which can be addressed by deepening democracy -- than the anti-democratic nonsense about the "tyranny of the majority" (the rhetoric of a minority that wants to hold onto power over the majority).
> I suspect that if one did an in depth analysis of other democracies using collective action analyses, we'd see pretty much the same thing as democracies suffer from "free rider" problems.<
So what is your solution? anarchy seems to encourage free-rider problems. In the case of a dictatorship, the dictator can easily become the free rider (power corrupts, after all). So should we simply give up? or hope that Jesus comes and brings Heaven on Earth?
I had written: >>Power must come from below, rather than from some "condescending saviors."<<
Ian: >Except that very language of above and below, with it's connotations of hierarchy is exactly the problem.<
It would be a BIG mistake to ignore the actual-existing hierarchies. To avoid this language, we would be doing so.
> Power is too multidimensional/overdetermined/capillary/fractal to be reduced to hierarchy. Our very modes of describing contribute to the perpetuation of the idea that we need the myth of hierarchy to be performed in order to have social orders.<
that's like saying that if we don't talk about AIDS, it will go away.
Of course power is complex (though I wouldn't say "capillary," since it seems meaningless in this context). But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist -- and that it can't be fought.
> people should realize that Arrow's theory is a critique of _all_ collective decision-making mechanisms, not just democracy. It also applies to markets. Can you think of a method of collective choice that isn't subject to the theorem? <
> The Catholic church' ability to sustain it's flock of the faithful.<
isn't the RCC an example of a dictatorship, one way of getting away from the voter's paradox in Arrow's theorem? (Arrow assumes non-dictatorship (among other things) to get the theorem's results.) Of course, the pope's dictatorship isn't absolute. None are.
Are you advocating theocracy? And it seems that the RCC's recent history fits the generalization that power corrupts.
I wrote:>> we need some sort of state to prevent the kind of opportunistic behavior I sketch. A democratic state is the best kind. The current "democratic states" are pretty good at being states without being very democratic. In any event, for even a truly democratic state to fight environmental devastation, people have to actively want the state to do so.<<
Ian: > The state itself creates opportunities for all sorts of horrible opportunistic behaviors.<
such is obvious. So how are we going to get rid of the state? is anarchy the solution? can we assume that actually-existing people are so infused with fellow-feeling and public spirit that they will spontaneously cooperate to deal with the free rider problem, to preserve order, avoid civil war, and deal with big problems such as the environmental melt-down and the spread of AIDS?
> Why call current states democratic just because they have the institutional shell of liberal ideas?<
you may notice that I put the phrase "democratic states" in quotes. That's because I don't think of them as being anything but superficially democratic (unless popular movements can push them to be so).
>It would seem that large majorities in contemporary democracies don't seem to be demanding that their governments be democratic. The cynical quietism is still very rampant. Yeah, yeah we can blather on about the class character within contemporary democracies but it seems to me that quietism can't be reduced to class analysis.<
I never said that anything could be "reduced to class analysis." (I've seen this phenomenon before: I point to the class dimensions or the racist dimensions or the sexist dimensions of some real-world phenomenon as a way of understanding what's going on and hopefully how to fight it and someone accuses me or my statement of sufferering from "reductionism." The fact that this happens so much is a symptom, I guess, of postmodern cynicism: the world is so complex, overdetermined, multidimensional, and fractal that we can't say anything about it. But I probably don't understand postmodernism.)
The issue of popular quietism is too big to analyze here.
Ian wrote: >>>As for the Keynesian-Darwinian "long run" well....................<<<
> I don't understand the reference, or rather its meaning in this context.<<
> Haven't you been watching what's going on in biotechnology or reading about what's happening to ecosystems all across our planet or do you see Darwinism first and foremost as about speciation and the like? <
Sure, I've been paying attention. But you can't simply throw phrases around and assume that everyone understands what they mean or exactly what the context is. The same words can have different meanings to different people.
For example, when you first threw the name Condocet on the page, my immediate thought was not the "voter's paradox" but instead the "man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and the abolition of slavery, [who] sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs" (a quote from HB Acton, found on http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Condorcet.html). Of course he was both, but I didn't know which one you were referring to.
I still don't understand the idea of a "Darwinian long run," since the Darwin's theory doesn't have the kind of long run that Keynes talked about (i.e., when fixed capital is no longer fixed). It also doesn't have the "when we are all dead" meaning, since Darwin's theory sees nature as a continuous process, not as a time-limited planning horizon. Despite his vast improvements over NC analysis, Keynes was basically a static thinker, so it's very strange to hyphenate his name with Darwin's. They were both smart Englishmen of the upper-middle classes and the educational elite, but what did they share theoretically except the biases arising from that background?
I don't think of Darwinism as simply about speciation. However, I'd distinguish between Darwin's Darwinism, reductionist Darwinism, and a more general theory of natural evolution. The word "Darwinism" often needs to be qualified to make sense.
>You said a while back that the short run was Keynesian and the long run was Marxian, I'm just using Darwinian as a genuine marker for the contemporary political ecology-technology-cognition matrix of life<
this last sentence is beyond me, sounding like a bunch of buzz words to me (the kind of stuff Alvin Toffler produces), though perhaps it's my rampant ignorance of what the intellectual elite is talking about these days.
I wrote:>>Given the need for some kind of state, I prefer a democratically controlled one. To attain such a state, we may have to get rid of the actually-existing one -- or at least conquer it.<<
Ian:>The actually existing one in the US is probably unconquerable without a bunch of nukes going off and it doesn't appear to be desirous of listening to it's citizens given its cynical acceptance and exploitation of the problems posed by Condorcet and Arrow so why should we even attempt to subordinate "it" to "democratic will"?<
The first part of this sounds like cynical acceptance to me. It ignores the possibility -- that was beginning to be realized during the Vietnam war, for example -- that the repressive state apparatus might fall apart or become transformable from internal contradictions.
Again we see the business of the voter's paradox as a reason to reject democracy in favor of dictatorship, anarchy, or some unknown. I don't have time to critique Arrow _et al_ here, but it seems that if people are allowed to _learn_ and thereby to change their preferences, the kind of time-inconsistency that Arrow points to could slowly go away. One of Arrow's other theories is about learning by doing over time. Has anyone ever applied that to add a real time dimension to Arrow's paradox, the way game theorists talk about repeated games? (His "possibility theorem" is stated in mere logical time, not historical time.)
Is Arrow himself against democracy? (I doubt it; he's a self-described socialist, though quite a conservative one.)
I wrote:>> so you're against democracy and you think that the currently-existing state will oppress us forever?<<
> No to the first question.<
So what's the point of criticizing the ideals of democracy and conflating democratic principles with the corruption of actually-existing self-styled "democratic states"? We should be conscious of any real limitations of democracy, but we should also know that real-world "democracy" doesn't live up to democratic principles very well. The latter seems a bigger problem than the former.
> I just think large sections of the institutional ecologies we associate with contemporary democracies are in fact barriers to the kind of democracy we need for the 21st century, esp.including the primary institutions.<
That's a different issue. You were coming off as anti-democratic _in principle_. (Why else bring up the voter's paradox?) That's different from seeing the actually-existing self-styled "democracies" as being problematic on many levels.
> With regards to the second question, it's contestable that the state is oppressing people as a matter of deliberate policy. <
I never said it was. State oppression is more of a structural matter, reflecting the state's organic role in actually-existing class society.
>Oppressions are intersubjectively arrived at social orders *and* modes of perception of those social orders [collective self-reference]. It's not some objective condition and if people don't "see" it they're suffering from false consciousness kind of notion. That's not to say a multiplicity of oppressions do not exist and should be swept aside for clearly they do and need to be dismantled as quickly and peacefully as possible. The real question is whether the very elimination of some oppressions will facilitate the creation of others.<
This is a big question: oppressions almost always have both an objective and a subjective aspect: the oppression of workers, for example [and this is just an example, because I am not trying to reduce everything to class issues], does not just involve the state's use of police to back up the bosses' use of strike-breakers (and the like). It also involves the internalized acceptance of oppression by the workers themselves and various gender, ethnic, etc. divisions within their class.
I believe that I rejected the "false consciousness" theory in a different e-mail missive, so I don't need to talk about that here.
_Of course_ we have to be conscious of the problem of the old bosses being replaced by new bosses. That's why democratic principles are so important.
JD
