MAS962 Part 1

Lenny Foner

The dictionary definitions of various political terms were really quite informative. I've heard these terms bandied about all my life, but it had never occurred to me that one might be able to find at least semi-rigorous definitions of them, much less four different reference works that discussed them in dictionary form. (I suppose this gives away my lack of a polisci degree.) The Owthwait definitions seemed particularly well-thought-out; the Scrutton readings seemed to be crying to be turned into true hypertext, considering the little stars in front of each cross-referenced term, and also had a wealth of detail. (Bullock also had the feel of incipient hypertext, too, but its use of small caps somehow made this seem less a crying need; here we have an interesting example of typography being a major influence in how I perceived the document.)

These definitions, incidentally, were a particular surprise when they came to talk about libertarianism for a very personal reason: I went to middle and high school with Emily Nozick, Robert Nozick's daughter---but had never really inquired much about what he did as a professor at Harvard. The small world syndrome comes home to roost, indeed.

Once the terminological groundwork has been laid, we can move onto other issues. The chapter from The Gordian Knot certainly didn't pull any punches about what its authors feel to be the problems of the current telecommunications environment; its lucidity and straightforwardness were a joy to read compared to the turgid prose found in many works dealing with this subject. I also find myself substantially in agreement with the position expressed in this chapter, being a cynical realist myself about the ability of either governmental industrial policy or the so-called market mechanism to yield acceptable results from the standpoint of civil society.

My opinions on the issues are similarly middle-of-the-road: for example, the totally hands-off policy towards government industrial policy that resulted in Bush's firing of Craig Fields, then head of DARPA, for attempting to keep the US in the playing field for flat-panel displays seems misguided at best; I'm much happier with the somewhat proactive tack taken by Clinton and Gore, though I'm not convinced that the governmental apparatus can either move fast enough or in the correct direction to really help in most cases. Similarly, the deviations from ideality of market mechanics in the telecommunications industry that lead to gross market failure (e.g., lack of competitive easy entry and exit, obscure and incomparable pricing, inequities in the expertise of buyer and seller, and so forth) make me very wary of anything good happening in a totally unregulated arena---and that's looking only at the economic picture, and not including the unfortunate sociopolitical tendency of most communications providers to buckle under the vagaries of public opinion and to attempt to limit speech at the first complaint, even in cases where the First Amendment probably applies.

The readings on participation and democracy were, in my opinion, quite uneven. Further, they were substantially misdirected, with the exception of the piece from The Economist, which pursued a somewhat different tack and which I thoroughly enjoyed (despite the apparently vehement disagreements with both my position, and that of the article, that were written in the margins!).

Let me start by caricaturing the position of several of the articles. The gist seems to be that democracy, and civil society in general, is in decline. Why is this? Because people have lost a sense of community and a moral center to guide their actions. These are two separate aspects of the same problem; to wit, the loss of community is due to the increasing mobility and social isolationism of urban living, while the loss of a moral center is due to liberal relativism which leads to a sense of self-satisfied entitlement and an unwillingness to sacrifice for (or even to avoid taking advantage of) the greater community. These two synergistic effects then both rob individuals of the feeling that their participation can make a difference, and also devalue political discourse into an acquisitive game of using political power solely to influence entitlement programs. They also lead to rising crime rates, increasing dissatisfaction with modern living, and a panoply of other ills.

I am unconvinced.

There appear to be several trends (and perhaps even some non-trends or illusionary trends) confounded here. Further, the central thrust of the argument may be misdirected.

Let us start with the issue of "community". Advances in the technologies of transportation and telecommunications have indeed brought us to an unprecedented situation in human history---we can simultaneously relocate very large distances almost effortlessly, hence abandoning the geographical locus of what was once our only available community, while simultaneously keeping in high-bandwidth, cheap communication with individuals scattered across the country and indeed around the world. No wonder, therefore, that the traditional geographic community is undergoing some amount of strain. I would argue, however, that in many ways the nostalgic (and, historically, very real) notion of a community as being geographically centered is a foible that should be increasing discarded.

By the historical accident that it used to be hard to move large distances, and hard to communicate large distances, there was (and still is, but to increasingly smaller degrees) a pressure to make the geographical disposition of a collection of individuals be the defining aspect of what "community" meant. Since knowledge of, trade with, or relocation to other environs was difficult, this tended to force a homogeneity upon geographically clustered individuals that, de facto, required them to use that basis as the basis of their community.

Yet there are other ways to structure a community, such as by the interests of its members in some collection of topics. If barriers to movement and communication are removed, such topics need not have much relevance to the geographic locations of the individuals discussing them. And with the advent of cheap, long-distance telephone service, mass media covering large distances, but most especially the bidirectional, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, peer-to-peer nature of the Internet, we can already see exemplars of communities which are bound together not by any accident or design of their geographical interests, but by what topics they care to discuss. (We also see, in virtual communities such as LambdaMOO and other MUDs, nongeographic communities which function as virtual geographic communities, by virtue of a shared infrastructure and the spatialized, consensual virtual reality of simulated physical space.)

Let me now tackle the other prong of the apparent dilemma, that of the loss of a moral center leading to purely selfish motivations and an increasing tendency towards "the tragedy of the commons." I have several reactions to such statements when I hear them:

• Such comments are often the result of nostalgia for the "good old days"---days which did not, in fact, ever exist. (There's a reason why Otto Bettmann wrote a book called The Good Old Days---They Were Terrible!. [He was talking about the US from 1865 to 1918, but the 1950's seem to be another era which engenders similar weird nostalgia---probably having to do with its prosperity and increases in the US standard of living more than anything else.])
• Those who speak of "moral centers" are often speaking in code. They wish to use such notions to exert a coercive force to control the behavior of others, but often do not wish to do so overtly. I always get nervous at such attempts---the same references to the "moral certainty" of the 1950's also refer to McCarthyism, intolerance towards sexual unorthodoxy, and all the rest.
• As an atheist, I find the close coupling of religious ideas (usually those from Western religious traditions, of course) with morality to be a curious but not inevitable conclusion. I've studied a large variety of religions very closely (for example, I used to be part of a weekly discussion group whose sole purpose was this study), both to attempt to understand their appeal to such a huge percentage of populations in most regions of the world, and with an eye towards more believable characterization of individuals in the fiction that I write. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of such study), I find it rather audacious that people who speak of community seem to accept the intolerance and sense of moral superiority that comes part and parcel with many Western religions as being part of what makes a community stable. These views frighten me; such moral certitude in the service of community makes me think that there is a much greater similarity between the stands of, e.g., communitarians (either low or high) and the fictional world of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale than many people would like to admit.
• Much of the data concerning the symptoms of this rise of moral relativism is suspect. For example, though the popular perception is that violent crime has risen dramatically in recent years, many careful studies of such statistics often discover that true rates have remained constant or fallen. (Whether moral relativism is even the cause of such crime is, of course, a difficult question, and not one I intend to address here.) It is also difficult to separate out other contributions, such as the increasing criminalization of many former legal behaviors---as mentioned in the reading, Reagan's attempts to solve many societal problems with an experiment in mass incarceration can distort many measures.

  It is often also the case that those who do the most to encourage such flawed perceptions are those with other agendas, such as political figures or the increasingly tabloid aspects of the news media. Of course, I don't mean to completely minimize either such statistics (when valid---but they are so rarely valid when checked) or the other possible symptoms of such relativism. For example, its tendency to turn politics into an entitlement game means that other, much less controversial measures can be used, such as the rather incredible rise of entitlements in government budgets.

• Finally, and most importantly, it is not clear to me that, in communities as they are coming to be, there is a lack of volunteerism, community spirit, or, for that matter, community consensus on behavior (with both its good and its bad aspects a la small-town living and, unfortunately, coercion). By this, I mean nongeographic, electronic communities, such as on the current Internet. We have many examples of community service, all undertaken without hope of financial compensation:
  • Large numbers of volunteer information servers
  • The ubiquity of anonymous FTP servers
  • The incredible amount of freeware on the net
  • The rapid rise of Web-page self-publishing, much of which concerns itself with making available useful information to those who are browsing, rather than self-aggrandizement.
  • The zeal with which many will answer questions for free.
• In short, there is a longstanding tradition of giving on the network. Further, we have examples of the same enforcement of community standards that geographical communities have often used, especially those without police or legal reinforcement. Two examples that spring readily to mind are:
  • The popular network reaction to the green card lawyers, and
  • The rejection of purely self-interested advertising messages on the net.

I don't mean to totally dismiss the methods and arguments in the papers about democracy by any means. For example, the proposed experiment in The Quest for a Civil Society of gathering a number of bright public policy experts and asking them to solve some problems without altering existing laws is one whose time is long overdue---it has long been my opinion that the legal backgrounds of the large majority of government policy makers have caused them to suffer from the problem of "when what you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," in that their legal backgrounds cause them to consider legal solutions to all problems. Perhaps, to take an example familiar to most of the people in this class, individuals with backgrounds in engineering might apply their own knowledge of systems dynamics and chaotics to attempt to produce a system which can self-organize without centralized control, and which explicitly acknowledges that market theory does not fulfill this need in the case of imperfect markets and imperfect players.

In conclusion, I suggest that we take some of the examples of the current network to heart, and realize that prior models of community organization may not longer be appropriate---we have, almost without realizing it, passed an event horizon in terms of mobility and communication that may cause present and future human societies to bear little resemblance to those of the recorded past. In the long run, geography may not matter.