Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: Book Four
Goals might be realized either deliberately, spontaneously, or through a combination of deliberation and spontaneity
Book Four Synopsis: The different ways that a goal, any goal, might be realized lie on a continuum. On one end of the continuum are goals with respect to which the relevant actor’s (or actors’) knowledge is adequate. With regard to these goals, the actor(s) can design, implement, and administer an adequate plan of action for realizing the goal. Such goals can be realized entirely deliberately, in other words. At the other end of the continuum are goals with respect to which the relevant actor is utterly ignorant, completely incapable of realizing on the basis of their absolutely deficient knowledge reserves and learning capacity. Such goals can only be realized spontaneously, i.e., only if circumstances, considerations, forces, etc., outside the actor’s ken and control intervene to compensate for the actor’s relevant epistemic deficiencies. In between these two extremes are goals the realization of which require a combination of deliberate planning and spontaneity.
Dramatis Personae
Emma – 30 years old; Fifth-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in political philosophy and epistemology; ABD (“all-but-dissertation”); dating Andre
Andre – 35 years old; Fourth-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in philosophy of science; Academic Advisor to undergraduate students in the Philosophy Department; dating Emma
Connor – 24 years old; Second-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in normative ethics; a devout political progressive
Jack – 25 years old; Second-year philosophy PhD student, specializing in logic and epistemology; a devout political libertarian
Book Four
Emma: And that’s why you’re Zippy the Wonderdork! You couldn’t just quit while you were sort of ahead. You had to push it and leave yourself exposed.
Jack: Nothing is exposed. I’m well-covered, fully-dressed. You only wish I were naked.
Andre: Jesus…
Emma: OK, but remember, you asked for it.
Jack: I’m all ears.
Andre [sotto voce]: You’re all something…
Emma: Connie’s view, which we’ll call the “Rousseauian” position for short – we will set aside the question how far this is fair to Rousseau – supports advocacy of policies ostensibly in the public interest, the common good, consistent with the so-called general will.
Jack: OK.
Emma: It seems to me that advocating for a policy or a suite of policies, for a party platform or some of its various planks, implies various things about the advocate’s beliefs. Every person who holds political beliefs, beliefs about what goals policymakers should try to realize, regardless of their political predilections, implicitly assumes that the policymakers whose task it is to bring about states of affairs associated with these goals are sufficiently knowledgeable to bring about these states of affairs. Policy advocacy implies belief in policymakers’ ability to bring about relevant states of the world associated with either the goals of the policy or, at least, with marginal improvement on the condition of the world. No one advocates for a policy unless they believe it likely to improve the world, all things considered, i.e., without making some other equally important problem worse, on the margin. Would either of you support a policy, whatever it might be, if you believed its pursuit likely to, on the whole, exacerbate social problems, or if you believed the overall costs to outweigh the benefits of its pursuit, if you believed it likely to make the world a worse place, in other words?
Connor: Of course not.
Jack: Your question is underspecified. On whose conception of “better” and “worse”?
Emma: On your own personal conception.
Jack: No, probably not. At least, it’s hard to imagine a case where I would advocate for a policy that I had reason to believe likely to make the world a worse place, on the whole, as I conceive better and worse.
Emma: So, advocating for a policy implies that the advocate believes the policy will benefit society on net, either by realizing its ostensible goals or otherwise by improving the world on balance. As you just agreed, it is hard to imagine anyone advocating for policies that they think likely to aggravate social problems, all things considered, as they themselves conceive these problems.
Connor: Yes, I see the point. Even Jack – or Zippy – here wants the world to be a better place. He just has a bad conception of good.
Jack [laughing]: Don’t be mad, just because I destroyed your most treasured beliefs.
Connor: Pfff. Whatever, Zip.
Emma: Quiet, children. Now, what determines whether a policy ultimately achieves this minimal ambition?
Connor: Uhh, I don’t know……circumstances?
Emma [laughs]: OK. Which circumstances? What conditions determine whether a policy succeeds or not?
Jack [thinking]: They’re different from case to case.
Emma: Are they?
Connor: Of course. The circumstances that determine whether a war is won are vastly different from the circumstances that determine whether a welfare policy or – to pick up Andre’s earlier example – a public-health policy, achieves its goal.
Emma: I’m not so sure. Here’s what I mean: surely, you’re right that what matters to the success – or the non-failure, as we’ve defined it – of a policy, is whether it is adapted to the unique circumstances it encounters, during the time period relevant to its effects. Indeed, it is this fact that makes possible a general explanation of the success or failure of policies, whatever the goals at which they are aimed.
Jack: OK, interesting. Please proceed.
Emma [laughs]: Thanks, I will. Let me ask the question in a slightly different way: who is responsible, I mean causally responsible, for realizing the purported ends of a policy? Who is charged with bringing about states of the world that citizens, voters, constituents, what have you – the “people” – either approve of or do not? [Laughing] Come on, boys, I’ve already given you the answer!
Andre: Oh, I know! I know! Can I guess?
Emma [smiling]: Of course, my love.
Andre: Policymakers! Politicians. They’re the people ultimately charged with acting in citizens’ interests, with bringing about goals preferred by constituents. Actually, now that I think about it, this seems true regardless of the prevailing formof government, whether democratic, autocratic, or something in between. Policymakers are – everywhere, at least, in contemporary political contexts – expected to bring about results that promote citizens’ interests or which, at a minimum, the citizens approve of.
Emma: Very good. You get a gold star!
Andre [laughs]: I’m so proud!
Emma [smiles]: It seems to me that a policy objective, whatever it might be – landing people on the moon, winning World War II, mitigating suffering from some disease, reforming health insurance, literally, whatever goal we might aim at through political action – can be realized either deliberately or accidentally. We can either develop a plan adequate to realize a goal, then successfully implement the plan, or the goal can come about of its own accord sans such intentional planning. More carefully, a goal can be realized entirely in one of these two ways, or through some combination of deliberate decision-making and accidental – or, perhaps better, spontaneous – forces that are not consciously directed at realizing the relevant goal, but which produce the desired result as an unintended consequence or by-product.
Jack: So, basically, imagine a continuum with completely deliberate goal realization at one end and entirely accidental goal realization at the other end.
Emma [laughs]: If you need a visual, yes.
Jack [smiles]: It helps.
Emma: It seems to me that realizing a goal entirely through deliberate decision-making, without resort to spontaneous forces – that is, by making a plan in advance for the realization of the goal and then putting the plan into action such that the goal is ultimately realized entirely on the basis of the plan, requires that the designers of the plan, policymakers in our case, possess knowledge adequate to its deliberate realization. In effect, policymakers need to possess knowledge concerning relevant causal mechanisms sufficient to control circumstances adequately to realize the desired policy goal. Generally speaking, a policy objective is realized because either policymakers know enough to deliberately realize it or circumstances not reflected in their plans are adequate for its realization, despite their ignorance. If policymakers lack some of the knowledge required to deliberately realize an objective, it can be realized only to the extent that something they do not intend, something that has escaped their plan – an accident, spontaneous forces, luck, or outrageous fortune – intervenes to compensate for their ignorance.
Connor: Either policymakers know enough to realize some policy end or, if they do not possess this knowledge, they get lucky, and the end is realized even though they are ignorant to some degree—you’re saying that these are the two fundamental ways, with an infinity of intermediate ways involving a combination of knowledge and luck, that a policy goal can be realized?
Emma: Yeah, basically, but I don’t want to identify spontaneity with luck. Luck is a kind of spontaneity, but, more generally, spontaneous forces are just those not encompassed in the plan of the relevant actor or actors, forces that can either conduce – or not – to the realization of the goals of the plan. So, luck is a kind of spontaneous force, but so too, for example, are the forces of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
Connor: Ugh. So, like, miracles, basically?
Emma: No, not like miracles. Spontaneity is not identical with, neither does it require the occurrence of, miracles. Of course, if miracles occur – a dubious proposition – then they are spontaneous in that they are necessarily unplanned, by any human mind at least, but spontaneous outcomes extend far beyond the miraculous and, as I just said, far beyond the merely fortuitous.
Connor: How so?
Emma: Consider what you are denying when you deny spontaneous outcomes.
Connor: I’m not denying them! I’m just trying to understand what they are. I mean, look, clearly, politicians are causal cogs in the policymaking machinery and, sometimes, this machinery works effectively: The Great Depression ended; World War II was a victory; men were landed on the moon, et cetera. In emphasizing the role of what you call “spontaneity,” it sounds like you’re saying that policymakers played no role in these successes.
Emma: I am not saying that. I am saying that their causal input, such as it was, was probably not sufficient for those policy successes, that something else – luck, fortune, the invisible hand, or some other accidental considerations – had to intervene in order for those outcomes to be realized. World War II was not won because Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt followed a rational plan determined in advance. They adapted – well, I might add, they adapted well, surely better than did Hitler and Hirohito, or Tojo, or whoever was in charge of the Japanese war effort – to ever- and rapidly-evolving circumstances. Historians love to play “what if”-games like this about WWII. What if Hitler had invaded Britain after Dunkirk? What if he had not turned against Stalin? What if the Japanese had attacked Vladivostok rather than Pearl Harbor? What if the Germans had won at Stalingrad? In the end, the victory emerged from the choices, actions, and interactions of millions of people, on all sides of the conflict, from the by-and-large evolutionarily superior adaptations to ever changing circumstances of many of the people on the Allied side and the relatively inferior adaptations of many individuals on the Axis side. Of course, I would never deny that Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were important cogs in this machine, but I would insist that their ever-changing plans were at no point – except perhaps at the very last moments before the Japanese signed the Instrument of Surrender – sufficient to win the war without the intervention of spontaneous forces not encompassed in their plans. The Allies won the war – not the wisdom of three men – and they were in many respects lucky to do so.
Andre: Four men, if you include Truman.
Emma: Right, I always forget about him.
Jack: He is easy to forget, oddly, given—
Emma: Given his world-altering significance? Yeah. Anyway, we don’t need to reflect upon a six-year-long globe-spanning war in order to understand that unplanned considerations can and, I think, typically do, play a role in social outcomes. World War II is probably too causally complex to really illustrate the oft-decisive role that spontaneous forces play in our lives, not to mention, in world history. Even a much simpler example, another one that you mentioned – the Apollo 11 mission – ultimately hinged on spontaneity for its success. I assume I can take it as axiomatic that Apollo 11 succeeded? [Laughing] There are no secret moon-landing hoaxers among us, are there?
Connor [laughs]: No, of course not.
Jack [laughing]: No! My mother actually worked for NASA in the late 60s. She would have been in on it, had it been a hoax.
Andre: Really?
Jack: Yeah, but my mom can’t keep a secret about anything…her favorite phrase is “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but…”
Andre [laughing]: Can we assume she’s never taken you aside and said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but Stanley Kubrick directed the whole thing on a Hollywood soundstage!”
Jack [laughs]: Yeah, never.
Emma: OK, so the Apollo program will be our example of simple phenomena that—
Jack: Wait, that’s your example of simple phenomena? Putting people on the moon seems pretty difficult to me…
Emma: Granted. But, as I’m using the term, complexity is not necessarily a measure of how difficult it is to realize some result, but of the number of and interrelations between causal factors that figure in the manifestation of some phenomena. Of course, the two notions of complexity often go together: phenomena that are causally complex in my sense will often be practically complex – or, as you put it, “difficult” – to make happen, but this need not be the case. If our knowledge of some causally complex phenomena is adequate, they may prove relatively simple to realize. Conversely, some phenomena may be relatively causally simple, yet prove difficult to realize inasmuch as our knowledge of the causes is inadequate. Indeed, this, I will argue, is precisely the case with regard to putting a man on the moon: causally simple, though – obviously – practically difficult. Actually, to get at the point, let’s start by distinguishing the parts of the Apollo program that concerned physics from those parts of the program that did not concern physics.
Connor: For what purpose?
Emma: When I say that the Apollo program is an example of a simple phenomenon, I should be clear that what I mean is that its specifically physical aspects were simple. I am happy to grant that other aspects of the program – the socio-political elements and those aspects that involved individual psychology – may have been quite complex. Indeed, my argument will hinge precisely on the generally greater complexity, as I defined it in causal terms before, of these non-physical, as opposed to physical, phenomena.
Connor: OK.
Emma: Considered as a physical phenomenon, landing a person on the moon is a very basic problem in applied Newtonian mechanics, terrestrial and celestial. This is true not only with respect to the problem of the projectile’s trajectory from Cape Canaveral to the Sea of Tranquility – a problem that is only slightly more difficult than accounting for the trajectory of a baseball struck by a bat, given knowledge of relevant initial conditions – but also with respect to each of the individual engineering problems that collectively constituted the rocketry aspects of the program.
Andre: There are sciences or, at least, branches of sciences, and engineering specialties dedicated to each of these problems.
Emma: Indeed. Perhaps more importantly, controlled experimentation presents relatively few difficulties in these fields. Scientists and engineers are able to isolate and experiment upon relevant phenomena in a variety of controlled environments. Given that we’re in a Newtonian context when we talk about space travel, moreover, there is no need to worry about emergent effects from the combination of isolated casual factors and, importantly, the scientists and engineers know this. In short, inasmuch as landing a person on the moon is a physical phenomenon, our knowledge is relatively secure. We know how to do it.
Andre: So, what you’re saying is that, to the extent it was casually complex, in your sense, to put a man on the moon, the complexity was a function of the non-physical factors, of the socio-political, the psychological, factors, involved in, say, acquiring and sustaining adequate political support from Congress to finance the project, in keeping the human beings, the astronauts, administrators, and engineers, involved in the program adequately focused on their respective tasks.
Emma: Exactly right. Don’t forget that it was only Armstrong’s skill as a pilot that kept the lunar module from crashing into the Moon’s surface at the last moment. Despite our command of the physics involved – well, not our command [laughs], but human command, of the physics involved – the success or failure of the Apollo program, or, at least, the Apollo 11 mission, ultimately hinged on a causal factor – one person’s ability to respond under pressure to unexpected circumstances – that can be said to have figured in policymakers’ plans for the program only in a very loose sense. Naturally, they always intended to put the best possible people inside that capsule, but they could not have foreseen, much less did they intend, the specific combination of circumstances to which Armstrong was made to respond in order to prevent disaster. Put one of the other Apollo astronauts in that landing-craft or – hell – change Armstrong’s state of attention just slightly, and who knows what might have happened?
Jack: So, even this, the Apollo 11 mission, perhaps the most planned-down-to-the-moment-and-minutest-detail policy pursuit in the history of mankind ultimately hinged on luck or, what you’re calling, more generally, spontaneous forces.
Emma: Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying. I haven’t conducted a comprehensive survey of world-historical events, but I suspect that, if you were to perform such a survey, you would find similar elements of spontaneity at work in nearly every one of them. I imagine that no one here has read Hume’s History of England, in whole or in part?
Jack: It’s 2,400 pages!
Emma: I know. It took me the better part of a year to read it. That’s why I said, “in whole or in part”! You wouldn’t have to read all 2,400 pages to get a feel for Hume’s central theme, which is that history is a concatenation of mostly random, unforeseen, and often unforeseeable events, at best only feebly controlled by capricious and venal, selfish and short-sighted, idiots, basically.
Connor [laughing]: Jeez. What a hopeful message!
Emma: If you’re looking for hope, Connie, read self-help books. We’re doing political philosophy in the light of world history. There are no grounds for optimism.
Connor: That’s uplifting.
Emma: One more thing before I turn to other matters. You said you weren’t denying spontaneous forces, just trying to understand them. I think that reflecting on what it would mean to deny spontaneity might be a good way to understand what it is.
Connor: OK.
Emma: Rejecting invisible-hand or spontaneous forces is akin to believing that everything that happens in society, whether you judge it good or bad, or whatever, is the deliberate result of advanced planning, that social outcomes can never be the consequence of causes unplanned, unintended, and unknown by anyone. It amounts to believing that society is always and everywhere under the control of some uniquely knowledgeable and capable puppet-masters. It amounts to believing that every aspect of World Wars I and II, Apollo 11, and the Challenger disaster, were deliberate products of someone’s advanced planning. I shouldn’t have to say it, but that is an incredibly stupid thing to believe…
Andre: Unless you’re a conspiracy theorist…
Emma [excitedly]: Exactly! Denying that spontaneity operates in society makes someone a conspiracy theorist about many things. It implies that there is some deliberate decision or some sequence of purposeful decisions behind everything that happens in society, that nothing happens without someone first aiming and planning to make it happen, and then successfully realizing that aim as planned.
Andre [pondering]: Doesn’t that mean there can be no accidents? Does someone who denies spontaneity necessarily deny accidents?
Emma: I think so. A driver who goes off the road after skidding on a patch of ice is necessarily the victim of someone’s plan, if not his own, because, without spontaneity, everything that happens must result from a pre-made plan successfully implemented.
Connor: But, aren’t you equivocating on “accident” there? It’s one thing to say that car accidents happen. It’s one thing to say that our personal lives don’t always go the way we plan. It is another thing to say that accidents happen in society. I’m still not sure I understand what that means.
Emma: To say that accidents happen in your personal life is just to say that no one – not you or anyone else – is in complete control of your life or of the various results of your actions. This is all it means to say that accidents happen in society: no one is in complete control of society or of the various outcomes that emerge from the actions and interactions of the individuals in society. To admit accidents in your personal life is to deny that your life has a puppet-master; and this is all it means to admit accidents in society. In both uses of the concept it is to admit that humans are not marionettes and that life, personal or social, has no buttons, levers, or pulleys. To put it another way, accepting the operation in society of the invisible hand or of spontaneous forces is identical to acknowledging that society is not always the product of design, whether of gods or of men, or, what is much the same thing, it is to point out that policymakers are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, that they’re nothing like gods. Indeed, I suspect that you might be struggling to get the point precisely because you have been raised, like all of us, to think of politicians as the prime movers of society, as possessing knowledge and powers sufficient to make particular things happen in society, as if by taking an oath of office they come to understand mystical secrets and to possess magical powers inaccessible to the unelected. The policymakers’ disease is overestimation of their own capacity to control social phenomena; the constituents’ disease is overestimation of their rulers’ capacity to control events. Everyone, regardless of political perspective, implicitly attributes special knowledge to policymakers, seemingly mindless of the crucial role that spontaneous forces play in society and world history. Political thought – whether we’re talking The Republic or Fox News – is a complete hash on this question.
Connor: I’m sure that’s the first time Fox News and Plato’s Republic have been mentioned in the same breath.
Jack [smiling]: False! I told you to watch Glenn Beck!
Connor [laughing]: Oh my god. Why am I friends with you?
Jack [smiles]: I ask myself the same question.
Book Four: For Further Reading
On Spontaneous Order
Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 1994), Liberty Fund
David Hume – History of England ([1754–1761] 1985), Liberty Fund
Adam Ferguson – An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ([1767] 1996, Cambridge University Press
Adam Smith – An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1982), Liberty Fund
Carl Menger – Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics ([1883] 1985), New York University Press
F. A. Hayek – The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 15: The Market and Other Orders (2014), Bruce Caldwell (ed.), University of Chicago Press
Thomas C. Leonard – “Reflection on Rules in Science: An Invisible-Hand Perspective” (2002), Journal of Economic Methodology, 9 (2), 141-168
On the Distinction between Simple and Complex Phenomena
F. A. Hayek – “Degrees of Explanation” ([1955] 2014), in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 15: The Market and Other Orders (2014), Bruce Caldwell (ed.), 195-212, University of Chicago Press
F. A. Hayek – “The Theory of Complex Phenomena” ([1964] 2014), in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 15: The Market and Other Orders (2014), Bruce Caldwell (ed.), 257–277, University of Chicago Press.
Scott Scheall – “Lesser Degrees of Explanation: Further Implications of F. A. Hayek’s Methodology of Sciences of Complex Phenomena” (2015), Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 8 (1), 42-60
On the History of the Apollo Program and the Apollo 11 Mission
W. David Woods – How Apollo Flew to the Moon (2011), Springer
Jonathan H. Ward – Rocket Ranch: The Nuts and Bolts of the Apollo Moon Program at Kennedy Space Center (2015), Springer
Jonathan H. Ward – Countdown to a Moon Launch: Preparing Apollo for Its Historic Journey (2015), Springer
James R. Hansen – First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (2018), Simon & Schuster
James Donovan – Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 (2020), Back Bay Books
Book Four: Discussion Questions
1. Consider and discuss the implications of advocating for a particular policy. What beliefs are implicit in a person’s advocacy of a particular policy?
2. What circumstances ultimately determine whether a policy succeeds or not? What role do policymakers’ reasons, motives, intentions, etc., play in determining whether the policies they pursue succeed or not?
3. Given a particular goal, what kinds of knowledge do policymakers need to possess to deliberately realize the goal? How might the goal be realized, if they lack some of this knowledge?
4. Discuss the relationship between spontaneity and luck.
5. In what sense might the causal complexity of social phenomena be a problem for attempts to control society?
6. Discuss the relationship between conspiracy theories and the denial of the operation of spontaneous forces in society.
7. In what sense are personal accidents similar to and different from societal accidents?