We Can Land On A Comet, But We Can't Admit Gruber Was Right

Sometimes life throws you a softball. Still trending on Twitter is the unintentionally hilarious hashtag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant, an ode to the wonder of the human spirit and the tragedy of grave misclassifications. Here's an example of one that straddles the line between tragedy and comedy:

#WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant stop making dickheads famous.
— Matt Burfield (@mattissotrendy) November 13, 2014

Rosetta and its probe Philae are very impressive engineering feats, which is to say that they've demonstrated their programmers' keen grasp of physics, chemistry, navigation, math, and sundry other deterministic disciplines. Unfortunately for anyone with a troy ounce of taste, including both myself and Mr. Burfield above, dickheads continue to achieve and maintain fame.

The fame of dickheads is not an engineering problem; it is a social problem.

Social problems arise because people have agency. They can make decisions of their own accord. And in a free society, we oblige ourselves to tolerate the banal, crass decisions of others because the alternative is the sort of totalitarianism seen in regimes like the DPRK. If you're a working class American you would no more want to be forced to attend polo matches against your will than a Rhode Island elite would enjoy being forced to go to NASCAR races unwillingly. Orwell was close, except the boot stomping on the human face forever has a Nike logo and is at the 30 yard line.

Ergo, Gruber. The other news of the day (which is hardly news) is that PPACA architect-in-arms Hans Jonathan Gruber took command of Nakatomi Plaza was caught on tape on three occasions making the uncontroversial (in the social sciences, anyway) claim that voters are stupid (or irrational, or ignorant, or mood affiliation to that effect). Tyler C comments here, B. Caplan retorts here. Me? I think both of them are right. Tyler says that Gruber broke political kayfabe, and that since he's not a career politician, he shouldn't be expected to lie continuously and adroitly. Bryan says that lying is wrong, and that since the constituency insists politics are treated as an extended morality play populated by cartoon characters, any contribution to the charnel house of deception is unethical. To me, these two opinions are not even remotely incompatible. Tyler's looking at an individual's rational response to the incentives he faces; Bryan's critiquing the entire institution, while condemning a man for taking part in it.

My unreliable utopia has no famous dickheads, no kayfabe in politics, and is probably well-suited to life on a comet in deep orbit. Until I can strap myself to the shuttle pod of Rosetta II, I'll probably have to accept my BATNA of the injustices of asset forfeiture, the militarization of police, the relentless non-stop low-grade wars abroad, the inhumane treatment of peaceful immigrants, the grotesque war on drugs, the awful criminalization of sex work, and whatever other petty tyrannies men and women in positions of political authority can muster. I suppose it could be worse. At least America hasn't gone full Venezuela.

Yet.

Antifragile Amish

Eccentric columnists are one thing. The infamously hedonistic Amish are quite another. While Thompson urged the young people of this fair nation to flirt with the weird, our dulcet domestic Dutch diaspora demands nothing from us English. Nothing beyond ordinary peaceable recognition of property rights anyway. From the wool I've gathered, the yarn I see spun is that the Appia Amish is one of family and community first. Their take on technology is that alienation is the tip-top cardinal error. Gazing into the unblinking eye of the television (or, egads, Buzzfeed) bears the opportunity cost of foregone time forging social bonds. No and no, and no again. Nein. Neen. Stem tegen.

Incidentally, the rite of rumspringa is of interest to euvoluntary exchangeurs on its own merits, questioning what counts as coercion. Nominally, kids who've finished sowing their wild oats have the option of abandoning the community for good. Few elect to do so. Why? From what I gather, the practice of strengthening community bonds is extremely effective. There appears to be a nice thick margin where the (relative) nihilism of the English Ways is sufficiently terrifying that the home community retains a strong appeal, privations notwithstanding. Does this count as a flavor of coercion? "Sure you can move to Austin and work in an office with people you don't know, an outsider for the rest of your life. Or, you can come back home where everyone you've ever known (for better or worse) is waiting for you." Coercion by... what? Love? Community? Uncertainty aversion? It's definitely (probably? possibly?) not a coercion likely to engage the moralizing sentiments of the moderate English (for those not in the know, "English" is the term the Amish use to describe non-Amish, so even my blushing full-blood direct immigrant Lithuanian bride would be English to Amish folks). But enough digressing, people. I'd like to consider the larger upshot of a robust Amish community.

And that upshot is the preservation of a not-horrendous aggregate BATNA. Amish communities preserve heirloom seed stock, a fine hedge against a tightly-wound GMO monoculture disaster. They retain vast stores of knowledge of animal husbandry, carpentry, masonry... well, pretty much all the skilled trades you need to run a fully-functioning community minus a nationwide power grid or electronic communications network. Should some great gnashing non-ergodic event wipe out global power distribution, the odds that the world would end up looking like a Kevin Costner movie would be at least somewhat hedged by trade in physical goods as well as skill capital between the Amish and the English.

So then to the moral intuition. It's my general impression that most workaday Americans, when they take a moment to even think about the Amish (and I don't mean to focus on them specifically, I think the moral intuitions could apply to Mennonites, Quakers, or other plain-style religious Diasporas) find the notion behind opting out on a community scale to be perfectly hunky-dory, offensive "Amish Mafia"-style nonsense television programming notwithstanding. Question then: is the intuition behind this similar to what I posited for truck systems? Or is it thanks to a widespread appreciation for the First Amendment? Something else entirely? I'm hesitant to pin my hopes on people's appreciation for my BATNA preservation argument. I think that this sort of reasoning appeals to people who support more funding for near-earth collision monitoring, but not to the median voter.

What of it then, my cherished readers? Do you think the various Pennsylvania Dutch are euvoluntary? Why or why not? If not, how far should political paternalism extend into the community? Does your answer to that last question encourage you to think about how far political paternalism should extend into any community? What's the difference?

Euvoluntary Rebellion?

Hume's Essays contain a treatise on the legitimacy of what he calls "passive obedience" (Part 2, essay XIII in the Liberty Fund edition). He, like Locke after him, argued that under normal circumstances, ordinary citizens owed fealty to the king for pretty much utilitarian reasons. In his words, "common sense teaches us, that, as government binds us to obedience only on account of its tendency to public utility, that duty must always, in extraordinary cases, when public ruin would evidently attend obedience, yield to the primary and original obligation." In this case, the primary and original obligation is "Salus populi suprema Lex", the supreme law of the land is the ~safety~ of the people. "Safety" is an imperfect translation of "salus" these days, but that might be more a transformation of vernacular English than a flaw in the original Hume.

Hume then goes on to say more or less that the public owes to itself an unflinching primary duty in accordance with this first Law to rebel in cases "when the public is in the highest danger, from violence and tyranny." Unsurprisingly, he nodded in reflective approval at England's shrugging off the reprehensible James II in the Glorious Revolution in 1688. This follows naturally from his comments on coercion. If you believe that voluntary exile tends to be spectacularly non-euvoluntary ("Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?") and you believe that in the presence of tyranny, the power of petition holds no suasion over the sentiments of the prince, the lowest-cost alternative is to overthrow and depose the sovereign.

Common sense, right? Not so fast, says Bryan Caplan, who makes a set of compelling arguments in favor of peace, also grounded in ordinary pedestrian morality. In Caplan's world, war is hell (and Bryan has made no small effort to catalog the horrors of totalitarian regimes) and its benefits are murky. For open conflict to make sense, you'd need to apply rigorous cost-benefit analysis, the kind that ordinary members of the public are particularly bad at conducting (cite: most of the public choice literature, try Mueller's Public Choice III for a start, then Caplan's own Myth of the Rational Voter). Both Caplan and Hume counsel peace as the default, though one's is domestic, the other's, foreign. They differ in that Hume gives two criteria for legitimate rebellion:

The first is, that [warmongers'] antagonists carrying the doctrine of obedience to such an extravagant height, as not only never to mention the exceptions in extraordinary cases (which might, perhaps, be excusable) but even positively to exclude them; it became necessary to insist on these exceptions, and defend the rights of injured truth and liberty. The second, and, perhaps better reason, is founded on the nature of the BRITISH constitution and form of government.

He then goes upside the head of the divine right of kings (as he is so very wont to do), presaging the revolt in the colonies and Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence. Contrarily, Caplan would probably say, "you know, the gap between life under British rule and American sovereignty probably wasn't bad enough to justify either the immediate loss of life in the Revolution or the ex ante relief of George III's "onerous" taxation (try not to giggle if you can) or his actual star-chamber, general-warrant despotism.

Hume and Caplan both seem to suggest a hierarchy of behavior.

1. In ordinary circumstances, obey the sovereign will
2. If things get bad, pack up and head for greener pastures
3. If things get really bad and your back is up against the wall, pick up a rifle

(2) and (3) are Scylla and Charybdis if we're to take both propositions seriously (and I see no reason not to). A reasonable exercise is then to consider the relevant margins of (in order) voice, exit, and rebellion and what a foreign polity might do to provide aid and comfort to the subjects of tyranny.

From abroad, voice is diplomacy (including foreign aid). This we already use for better or worse, and to the extent that there's a non-null core to the game, savvy diplomats can, by hook or by crook, avert insurrection. Bravo for those instances. But the core is occasionally null, as it seems in at least a few Middle Eastern countries over the past several decades. 

So if voice fails, what is the just response when a rebellion is underway in foreign lands? Hume did argue against relocating to bizarre alien lands, but I'm sure he'd agree that making a pittance is preferable to ending up on the business end of a spear. And Caplan is one of the great modern champions of open borders. Would not both these fine gentlemen argue in favor of nations eagerly accepting refugees? We might reasonably argue about the basic functions of government, but surely among the list would fall fundamental protection of life, right? Shouldn't any decent Rawlsian or Hobbesian or Lockean or Caplanian support at a bare minimum open borders for war or rebellion refugees?

Why does it seem then that the commonplace modern reaction to tyranny abroad is to impose economic sanctions, to lob ordinance, or even more flaccidly, to send UN inspectors? I can understand how elites would want to wage war (hint: it burnishes their legacy) but the public's complicity baffles me. It seems as if outright blood-in-the-streets rebellion is an execrable outcome , far worse than the slights that motivate typical swells of humanitarian sentiment. What's the difference? What am I missing? Is rebellion actually euvoluntary and I'm just not seeing it? What gives?