Isegoria

An anonymous liberal biorealist — yes, it’s hard to imagine — takes a first cut at biology and justice — and Mencius Moldbug offers his advice:

Your project is ambitious, original, invigorating. I hope something comes of it. I would love to see your real identity disclosed one day in the Times Book Review. Keep it up.

That said, here is the basic problem I see: you are trying to reason your way outside the many logical and factual contradictions of 19th and 20th-century Anglo-American liberal democratic thought, more or less from Bentham to Rawls, using only your own philosophical muscles.

Well, you have no shortage of those! A strong man can wrestle an alligator and win. A marathoner can outrun a horse at distance.

Still, if I have to wrestle an alligator, I’d rather have my .45. If I have to race a horse, I’ll make sure I bring my BMW. That is — if my goal is victory, rather than entertainment.

The BMW or .45 in this case is the enormous corpus of pre-liberal and non-liberal thought, ten times as old and at least as massive. (Despite all the subsidized logorrhea of the 20th.) Denied this corpus, you are struggling with great energy to reconstruct it on your own. You would like to see farther, but without standing on any giants — whose existence, in fact, you deny.

So far as I can discern, your only reason for eschewing pre-liberal thought is that its believers were defeated politically and militarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is therefore no longer studied or at least officially sponsored.

This is an excuse, not a reason. Let’s take this .45 and see what it does to your alligator.

For instance: you start with the highly contentious (really almost Orwellian) Rawlsian definition of “justice” — ie, fairness, assuming a basically Christian concept of charity.

Now the word “justice,” of course, is Latin. Predating all this Jesus stuff. And the classical and Continental authorities (originally Ulpian, I believe) give us a two-word definition of “justice” that satisfies me perfectly: suum cuique, “to each his own.” If this two-word formula strikes you as too much the tautology, there’s an equivalent three-word chestnut — pacta sunt servanda — “promises are to be kept.”

Going down this path gives us a definition of “justice” which is not moral, but legal. Of course this is in keeping with the actual origin and meaning of the term, which is why I feel free to regard the Rawlsian redefinition as contentious at best, Orwellian at worst.

Note also that this formal definition strikes us as intuitively correct, as can be seen when we consider its negation. If promises are not kept, if each does not receive his own, we recognize this instantly as a case of injustice. Moreover, in what way can we find injustice, when each receives his own, when all promises are kept?

Here is the .45. Now, let’s shoot that alligator.

You and Rawls are wrestling with the charitable responsibilities of the State. Under your moral definition of “justice,” this is a knotty problem indeed.

The fundamental question is: does the State owe payment X to recipient Y? (The State may also deliver services, but substituting monetary payments is a Pareto optimization.)

The answer is: has the State promised payment X to recipient Y? If so, then X is Y’s own; promises must be kept; failure to pay would be an injustice. If not, no payment is owed; payment is an injustice, a robbery of the State.

Now, we can separate State payments into two categories. One is payments that are fundamentally debts, ie, promises of future payment exchanged for present value. For instance, I would put Social Security in this category, although the Supreme Court disagrees. Insurance claims, of course, are also financial debts. Is it just for the State to pay its debts? Of course it is just.

There is another class of promise and payment, however, which represents a condition of paternal dependency between State and citizen. As non-liberal authorities from Aristotle to George Fitzhugh will tell you, this relationship is fundamentally analogous to that between (a) parent and child, and (b) master and slave.

Thus, it is just for me to buy milk for my daughter, because I have accepted the obligation of caring for her as a dependent. In return, dependency always implies authority: because I feed my daughter, I get to tell her what to do.

Historically, you will find it another of your human universals that dependency without responsible authority leads directly to moral degradation, often literally dehumanizing. Of course we see this everywhere in the 20th-century welfare state, unique in history as a charitable system utterly unconcerned with the well-known degrading impact of dependency.

Thus, under the cold light of Ulpian, we see that all payments of the welfare state resolve into two categories: debt payments, and paternal dependency. Both of these are entirely just, because they are promises fulfilled.

The English word for an adult unrelated dependent is “slave.” The transfer of the bulk of the African-American population from the control and responsibility of private masters, to the State, is not a freeing of the slaves. It is a nationalizing of the slaves. (With a brief window of actual independence, not coincidentally the golden age of African-American civilization, between the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Great Society.)

Moreover, in “welfare reform,” we actually see a recognition of this fact. Even liberals realized: since we have nationalized the slaves, we have to make them work. Otherwise, their human condition becomes unmentionable. Fact. Somewhere, Carlyle laughs.

Mencius Moldbug has been searching for Hari Seldon in “the awesome, humbling lost library that is Google Books”:

With more or less the entire Victorian corpus, modulo a bit of copyfraud, the Hari Seldon game is to enquire of this Library: which writers of the 19th would feel most justified, in their understanding of the eternal nature of history, humanity and government, by the events of the 20th? Whose crystal ball worked? Whose archived holograms delivered the news?

Broadly speaking, I think the answer is clear. Hari Seldon is Carlyle — the late Carlyle, of the Pamphlets. I consider myself a Carlylean pretty much the way a Marxist is a Marxist. There is simply no significant phenomenon of the 20th century not fully anticipated. Almost alone Carlyle predicts that the 20th will be a century of political chaos and mass murder, and he says not what but also why. And what a writer! Religions could easily be founded on the man — and perhaps should be.

But there’s no reason the Library need contain only one Seldon. Our mission today suggests a different candidate: another titan of Victorian letters, Sir Henry Maine. Here is history’s actual message on Climategate, delivered without benefit of Ouija: Maine’s Popular Government (1885). The Ouija board adds, Glenn Reynolds style: read the whole thing. It’s quite readable, especially if you can tolerate UR.

I will leave you with some samples. What is unique about Maine, even among his fellow Seldons, is that he is not just the greatest Victorian scholar of comparative government; he does not just correctly predict his future and our past; he also predicts our future. At least, in Maine you find many predictions which come true; few which come false; and a few which have not yet come.

First, watch him refine Austin’s understanding of aristocracy and democracy:

The most interesting, and on the whole the most successful, experiments in popular government, are those which have frankly recognised the difficulty under which it labours.

At the head of these we must place the virtually English discovery of government by Representation, which caused Parliamentary institutions to be preserved in these islands from the destruction which overtook them everywhere else, and to devolve as an inheritance upon the United States. Under this system, when it was in its prime, an electoral body, never in this country extraordinarily large, chose a number of persons to represent it in Parliament, leaving them unfettered by express instructions, but having with them at most a general understanding, that they would strive to give a particular direction to public policy.

The effect was to diminish the difficulties of popular government, in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions. But this famous system is evidently in decay, through the ascendency over it which is being gradually obtained by the vulgar assumption that great masses of men can directly decide all necessary questions for themselves.

The agency, by which the representative is sought to be turned into the mere mouthpiece of opinions collected in the locality which sent him to the House of Commons, is we need hardly say that which is generally supposed to have been introduced from the United States under the name of the Caucus, but which had very possibly a domestic exemplar in the ecclesiastical organisation of the Wesleyan Methodists.

The old Italian toxicologists are said to have always arranged their discoveries in a series of three terms — first the poison, next the antidote, thirdly the drug which neutralised the antidote. The antidote to the fundamental infirmities of democracy was Representation, but the drug which defeats it has now been found in the Caucus.

By “Caucus” Maine means, of course, the modern political party. Note his perfect description of the same paradox we see in Lippmann’s work — the spontaneous appearance of an antidote to democracy, often promoted under the very name of democracy itself. You knew, of course, that representative government was an antidote to democracy; you also knew that progressive scientocracy was an antidote to democracy; you never connected these two points. Or associated them with “the old Italian toxicologists.”

Note also that in 21st-century scientific bureaucracy, we have seen only two of these three steps. We have seen democracy and its antidote. The latter quite toxic itself, and growing only more so. We have not, however, seen the neutralizing drug — yet.

Here Maine explains his theory of aristocratic judgment:

Under all systems of government, under Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy alike, it is a mere chance whether the individual called to the direction of public affairs will be qualified for the undertaking; but the chance of his competence, so far from being less under Aristocracy than under the other two systems, is distinctly greater. If the qualities proper for the conduct of government can be secured in a limited class or body of men, there is a strong probability that they will be transmitted to the corresponding class in the next generation, although no assertion be possible as to individuals.

Whether — and this is the last objection — the age of aristocracies be over, I cannot take upon myself to say. I have sometimes thought it one of the chief drawbacks on modern democracy that, while it gives birth to despotism with the greatest facility, it does not seem to be capable of producing aristocracy, though from that form of political and social ascendency all improvement has hitherto sprung.

But wait:

But some of the keenest observers of democratic society in our day do not share this opinion Noticing that the modern movement towards democracy is coupled with a movement towards scientific perfection, they appear to be persuaded that the world will some day fall under intellectual aristocracies.

Society is to become the Church of a sort of political Calvinism, in which the Elect are to be the men with exceptional brains, This seems to be the view suggested by French democratic society to M. Ernest Renan. Whether such an aristocracy, if it wielded all the power which the command of all scientific results placed in its hands, would be exactly beneficent may possibly be doubted.

Our exact problem in a nutshell — 125 years ago.

The faults to which the older privileged orders are liable are plain enough and at times very serious. They are in some characters idleness, luxuriousness, insolence, and frivolity; in others, and more particularly in our day, they are timidity, distrust of the permanence of anything ancient and great, and (what is worse) a belief that no reputation can be made by a member of an ancient and great institution except by helping to pull it down.

But assuming the utmost indulgence in these faults, I may be permitted to doubt whether mankind would derive unmixed advantage from putting in their place an ascetic aristocracy of men of science, with intellects perfected by unremitting exercise, absolutely confident in themselves and absolutely sure of their conclusions.

Yeah.

Maine misses one small point here: this “ascetic aristocracy” will degenerate in talents, as well as morals. One fact that rings loud and clear from the CRU emails is the basically second-rate nature of these bureaucratic pseudoscientists — not just evil, but also not that bright. Though still aristocrats of unremitting intellectual exercise, to be sure, next to the broad population. We can’t all be Feynman.

And finally — the future:

The question, however, will not long or deeply trouble those who, like me, have the strongest suspicion that, if there really arise a conflict between Democracy and Science, Democracy, which is already taking precautions against the enemy, will certainly win.

This is how bad Sir Henry Maine is. Not only does he tell us about the great battle at the end of time which will pit Democracy against Science, a conflict unthinkable to you and I until this freakish spirit chat with the ancestors, but now perfectly clear and clearly inevitable — but he has no dog in that fight. Bow to the ancestors! For lo, their greatness is palpable.

Frankly, I remain skeptical. In real life, Hari Seldon never gets it exactly right. Science has already proven far more durable than Maine imagined. Its destined foe, Democracy, has never been weaker or more contemptible. Still, if history shows us anything about the latter, it shows us that Democracy can lie dormant and apathetic and seemingly dead for decades, even centuries, then burst out again in volcanic explosions of frenzied mob energy, irrational, irresponsible and irresistible, driving God knows where in a river of heads on pikes.

Should we prefer this? Or the long grim gray decaying reign of Michael Mann, Climate Stalin? Democracy, infinitely stranger and more dangerous; Science, the frozen tyrant we now know. Dear reader, the ancestors have left this one to you.

Is our current climate too hot, too cold, or just right?

[I]n the pre-IPCC era, climatologists (such as Professor Lamb) simply took it for granted that the present temperature is well below the optimal point. This can easily be seen in the names they assigned to past periods warmer than the present — such as the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Holocene Climate Optimum. Had they considered this a serious question for debate, it would have been easy to choose a neutral name.

We can easily see the reasoning behind “Optimum” by looking at a more recent historical precursor to the AGW movement: the embarrassing false step of the global-cooling movement. We have always been at war with Eastasia. However, Time magazine has performed the decidedly anti-Orwellian act of making its entire 20th-century archive free, and apparently unexpurgated, on line. So you can click here, and see what Time said when we were at war with Oceania.

One of the things you’ll notice is that much, much less effort is required to conjure disasters due to global cooling, than disasters due to global warming. Crop failures and starvation don’t involve a long chain of fanciful inference.

That 1974 Time article, Another Ice Age?, reads like it was written yesterday — with a few points inverted:

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

It is a long way from Science to the Federal Register, Mencius Moldbug says, but not as far as many think:

Think of this leg of the decision process — from hockey stick to cap-n-trade — as a slow, arduous, but essentially automatic mechanism, like colonic peristalsis. The various political glands in the pipeline, including Public Opinion Itself, can exert resistance, but not insert independent input. They are brakes, but not motors. They can stall the process, but not stop it, and certainly not turn the wheel and do something else instead.

Climate science is a Hydra, according to Mencius Moldbug:

So here is what will happen to climate science if Mann, Jones, et all go to jail: it will become stronger. Considerably stronger. At least, in the near and medium term.

What happens when you kill the top 20 members of al-Qaeda? Everyone in the top 200 joins the competition to replace them. Decapitation is not an effective attack against a disorganized institution. For every Mann or Jones, there are 10 or 20 ex-students trained by a Mann or Jones. Do not these disciples aspire to their mentors’ positions? Damn tooting they do! Moreover, just because they lose their leader, does not mean that leader will be replaced by those who are the most disloyal to him.

In short, any such involuntary circulation of elites will have a notably beneficial effect on the entire movement. The reader of the CRU emails cannot help but fail to notice what was already obvious: as scientific minds, Mike and Phil are most definitely among the second-rate. Why? They are leaders in climate science simply because of their seniority; they got in when paleoclimatology and climate modeling were (as they deserve to be) scientific backwaters; through bureaucratic ruthlessness, they made their field big and powerful.

Therefore, not only do these pioneers have many disciples, but the disciples were attracted to a hot — no pun intended — and growing field. Thus, they are likely to be both more ambitious than their sacrificed former leaders, and more talented. If Mann, Jones et al get the axe and become poison in any position of formal authority, even if they lose their jobs, even if they go to jail, their former students will continue to worship them (and exclude any of their peers who don’t).