18th Century Ideas in Modern Politics
This isn’t what I was planning on writing but sometimes the universe tells you to get to work and, well I guess I’m trying to listen.
I also just want to open up by admitting that this idea isn’t fully cooked and if anyone wants to explain why I’m wrong I’d really like to have a good way out of this one because it’s not super optimistic. I also admit I’m going to be really simplifying some things because otherwise this becomes a book.
I struggle a lot with post modernism because I really want words to mean things. If I’m being perfectly honest it infuriates me that language slips, but I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve learned how to use emoji and I understand that literally also means figuratively. I don’t like it, but I accept that it’s real. As Gretchen McCulloch says, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.”1 and that’s always going to keep happening.
We are, however, a sentimental species and one that has a lot of institutional inertia. This is creating a lot of problems in general. I have serious concerns about some systems but first I think we need to discuss some language and history. Diving right in, Adam Smith is nominally accepted as the father of modern capitalist theory. His book “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” was published in 1776 and among other things coined the phrase “The invisible hand of the free market” which is just about the only thing that has carried on from that text. Smith was steeped in the writing of Locke and the other political philosophers in the general liberal school (Put a pin in that). He talked about how the market forces would be self regulating and would lead to the general betterment of people. He thought that the social contract was good enough.
He also was deeply concerned about wealth gaps and was very concerned about how the burgeoning industrial revolution might alter the balance of wealth and thus power in society. He realized that if you had an inescapable and very large underclass of working poor who could never get ahead that eventually the system would destabilize and collapse into violence so he included things like a negative income tax (Similar to the EITC today but more robust) to try and keep it from getting there. He also felt that the seemingly infinite land to move west and homestead was a critical release valve for people who didn’t want to accept living in the society that was growing. If you didn’t want to sign on to the social contract you could leave.
A few decades later Marx was writing about what effectively comes out to a peasants revolution towards the end of the industrial revolution. His argument was very much tied to historical theory and based his idea of workers rising up on popular uprisings that had happened historically. Marshall McCluhan argues somewhat offhandedly in “Understanding Media”2 that the biggest problem for Marxism was that he didn’t take into account how the advent of mass media would impact the ability to communicate and that the advent of the digital age really put to rest the idea of a Marxist revolution. I would argue that, more than the means of communication, Marx would be most directly challenged by the incredible amount of specialization that a modern world requires.
The critical thing to keep in mind when discussing either of them is that what they were fundamentally doing was looking at the historical development of society and economies and describing what that history meant for the modern (at the time) world.
It’s been in the neighborhood of 200 years since they were writing about these issues, but fundamentally we’re still using the language and frameworks they described to try and talk about what we’re dealing with today.
Milton Friedman wrote about capitalism, but what he’s describing isn’t what Smith was talking about because in the centuries between them the world changed radically. Friedman was writing in the 1960s. He was seeing the beginning of the digital age happening. He had just seen the post war America build itself into an incredible powerhouse both economically and politically. Smith was writing as the colonies were just starting to really get revolutionary.
Of course their theories would be different. They’re not writing about different countries; They’re fundamentally writing about different worlds. Those worlds are going to have distinct pressures and institutions that are going to mean the solutions are going to be different. The problem stems from Friedman pretending that what he’s doing is still capitalism, as if that 18th century economic and social theory had actually carried through to the modern (in his day) world.
Similarly, modern socialism doesn’t make a lot of sense in relation to Marx. The idea of the workers rising up and seizing the factories seems especially daunting when you consider just how many factories there are, and how wildly different and specialized they are. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I think a great thinker like Marx would find the concept daunting, not to mention that the global marketplace and supply chains make everything so much harder to address.
Now, this may all feel silly and pointless as an exercise, but there is a point to it. In the actual modern world we have endless arguments on social media about what is and isn’t “Socialism” and what is and isn’t “Capitalism” and we have endless fractures and frameworks for different flavors of those (plus a few more things we can throw into the mix. We have Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. We have Mixed Market Capitalists and we have Libertarian Purists. We have every possible flavor of Anarchist (AnCap, AnCom,AnSyn…) and the one thing that is true about literally all of this is that they’re claiming some kind of heritage to a theory that was first posited by some guy that died 200 years ago describing a world that is fundamentally alien to the world we live in now.
And at a more base and fundamental level we don’t actually have working definitions for the foundational language we’re using. “Liberal” and “Conservative” are effectively meaningless. The grounding philosophers of both schools, Locke and Burke respectively had deep disagreements with one another but conspicuously they have more similarity to each other than they do to the modern interpretations of the philosophies they created (or described). Modern American liberalism would be antithetical to Locke, and while I’m not an expert on Burke, from what I’ve read he would likely find the modern American Conservative movement offensive. That is, of course, if either of them could get over the concept of the internet. Or multiple 24 hour news channels. Or electricity.
But we hold tightly to all of these words as if they are talismans that give our arguments the weight of history. The fact that they were created to describe a world that died, was reborn, died again, and was created anew doesn’t slow us down. Sometimes we add “Neo” to the front of these words to pay lips service to that fact, but the reality is that Neoconservatives aren’t conservative in the Burkean sense of the word and Neoliberal is, as far as I can tell, an entirely empty term that means whatever the speaker thinks it means in that moment. The language is broken, and without something resembling a coherent language we can’t actually discuss these very important ideas. We can’t talk about things if we don’t have a common language.
What’s worse is that this isn’t just a problem of language. This is the same problem we are having with a lot of the base level systems that the country runs on.
Now, before I get into this next part, I want to say explicitly that I’m giving the most generous and steel manned argument I possibly can here. If you want to talk about the ways that the framers of the constitution are not great and how they had bad intentions, we can talk about that, but that’s not the point of this particular thing. This is me saying that even with the near godlike reverence that we have at a societal level for them, there is still a huge problem that we aren’t addressing.
The constitution was written at the end of the 18th century as a way to tie together 13 colonies that were effectively agrarian societies with some cities just starting to really drive their way into the industrial revolution. We’re talking about a century before the first automobile or light bulb. We’re talking about 15 years before the cotton gin. Henry Ford’s father was born 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The population I keep finding for the US in 1776 is about 2.5 million people. That number likely is only white people, but it’s also the number that I have. We’re talking about fewer people than Chicago, but more people than Houston in modern American.
Our constitution was created to manage a loose confederation of states with a population that was smaller than Kansas today where 97% of people lived in rural areas and a huge number of farmers were effectively subsistence farmers feeding themselves with a bit left over for the market. Our constitution was designed to basically stay out of people’s way because most of them were just taking care of themselves. The needs of the people at that moment in time were focused around the idea of small scale farming in a variety of unique geographical locations and so they built a framework to handle that. It’s a framework based on a bunch of the contemporary philosophers mentioned before, and is tied in with the economic theory that was gaining speed based on those philosophies. It was an integrated system based on the moment in which it was created.
Literally every single piece of the context has radically shifted since that moment.
Another fine example of this, that demonstrated some of the very real problems recently is the structure of stock exchanges. The NYSE was founded by 24 men under a tree in 1792. It was loosely based on a Dutch stock exchange from 1611. That exchange was (debatabley) based on things that existed as far back as ancient Rome.
24 men under a literal tree in 1792. That’s what created what is arguably one of the most well known and deeply rooted structures of our economy today. These men didn’t know what the future was going to look like, and they pretty certainly wouldn’t have been able to envision the idea of high frequency trading (HFT) firms and hedge funds. They didn’t design a system to be able to deal with that because it wasn’t even a concept. The foundation of the system was built for handfuls of traders doing dozens of trades. The system has been updated, sure and over the years they’ve tried to make it work but it’s just software kludge at some point here. We keep patching new pieces onto a system that just isn’t actually able to deal with it. The HFT firms are trading hundreds of thousands of transitions a second and the latency of the wires matters at this point. The stability of the market is being undermined because regulators can’t or won’t figure out a way to stabilize it without creating a conflict somewhere else in the system. And like with software, they’re playing defense on the security side which is always a losing proposition. They wait till someone finds an exploit and then they eventually try to patch it when it becomes a risk, but they can’t get out ahead of it to see what someone is going to do. That’s how we end up with junk bonds being bundled and resold and rebundled and resold until they bring the entire economy to it’s knees.
Because there wasn’t actually a rule against it (except the ratings agencies, but that’s another whole thing)
Now, I’m never going to be the one telling you not to read old books. I think that digging into foundational texts is super important. I think that they help us come to understand the systems and structures that control our world today. Understanding how we got here is a critical step to figuring out where we go next.
But when you’re doing that, you also need to understand the context of it. You need to be able to piece together why what they were saying made sense. You need to understand why ideas were revolutionary in their time, but also why they may not apply anymore. Machiavelli wasn’t wrong, but given that we don’t live in a citystate ruled by a Prince his teachings are somewhat less applicable. The Art of War was not ever meant to be a description of business theory. Freud changed the world, but also did way too much cocaine and was desperately wrong a lot of the time. Shakespeare was telling a lot of dick jokes.
The point of language is to convey information. That’s what I’m trying to do here, and it’s always tricky because the meanings do change over time. The problem we have now, however, is that the definitions have become so broad and so vague that they no longer actually convey anything. I would call myself a political leftist. If I’m feeling particularly fancy I might say I’m a technocratic humanist. I could be lazy and just say I’m a liberal, but the reality is that with any of those terms, the very next thing is going to be “but what does that mean to you?” because I’m not a classical liberal, political leftist is anything from Emma Goldman to Noam Chomsky to Bernie Sanders, which are not the same thing at all. Technocratic humanist is, at the end of the day, jargon I can use to sound lofty. None of these words tell you anything about what I actually believe in. They don’t convey information, and I’ll have to use more words to tell you what the words mean to me than I would in just telling you what I believe in.
And I get it. I live in a world where I’m constantly looking at 18th and 19th century technology and structures and am trying to make them work in the modern world. I work on boats that used to function with an understanding that you’re just going to lose some number of crew on trips and that’s baked into the theory. I’m dealing with trying to balance historical accuracy with modern materials and safety requirements. It’s hard, and one of the most humbling things is when you realize that for all your modern knowledge the guy in 1790 that set the rig up the way he did it was actually right even if it looks wrong. Old ways and old patterns do have value, and we need to be careful about babies and bathwater; we just also do need to know when the bathwater is not doing the job anymore. Something being old doesn’t mean it’s where we need to stay.
The founders of all of these schools of thought were looking backwards in developing their ideologies and theories. They were using historical frames to describe the world around them, and that’s invaluable. We do, however, need to recognize the limitations of those observations. I’d love to say we need to develop new language, but that’s always a challenge and you end up in the Universal Standard problem so I don’t have a good solution to it. Along with a new language we also need new ideas. We can base the ideas on other things. We can look at the history of the industrial revolution and the digital revolution to help us understand the coming AI revolution. Marx couldn’t. Smith couldn’t. Burke couldn’t. Even Friedman, who died in 2006, would have struggled to describe the world we live in today with any relation to classical market theories.
I don’t have any good answers to any of this. We need to replace huge and fundamental systems with something that works for the modern world, but we need to do it very intentionally. People smarter than me need to be trying to define and describe what these new systems will be, and in the mean time we need to be trying to take care of each other and keep harm to a minimum.
I just might caution people to rely on the language less. Explain what you believe in, but understand that if you use “Socialist” or “Conservative” or any other wide classifier there is a statistical probability that the other person will think it means something that isn’t what you mean.
1https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/
2https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/understanding-media
