Politico

I am at the Marriott Library here on the U campus. Two of my teachers canceled class today, which frees me for the next little while, and I just read a swell op-ed. Therefore, I will now radiate my thoughts on the subject. David Brooks, in today's New York Times Op-Ed, authored The Republican Collapse, and spoke of epistemological modesty in the realm of politics as "the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan." He illustrated this principle with a comparative analysis of ideologies of the nature of societal change:

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism: that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation's unique network of moral and social restraints.

I find it preposterous that, with the knowledge we have of the social sciences, there are still such polar disparities in regard to the nature of societal change. After all, isn't policy making all about catalyzing societal change? Shouldn't we be acting in accordance with what evolutionists, economists, social psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have clearly demonstrated to this point? These scholars understand how change happens. Organizational behaviorist Douglas McGregor articulated a feature motive for our current situation with this rebuke:

The knowledge in the social sciences is not sparse, but frequently it contradicts personal experience and threatens some cherished illusions.

How much legislation proves unprofitable and even detrimental by virtue of politicians ignorance of the nature of societal change? I can't imagine anyone passing a bill through which they assume certain societal responses and behavioral perpetuation without understanding what some of the great minds have revealed to us.

McGregor, in his book The Human Side of Enterprise, made compelling analogies of the physical sciences and management, which may convincingly be applied to policy making:

In engineering, control consists in adjustment to natural law. It does not mean making nature do our bidding. We do not, for example, dig channels in the expectation that water will flow uphill; we do not use kerosene to put out a fire. In designing an internal combustion engine we recognize and adjust to the fact that gases expand when heated; we do not attempt to make them behave otherwise. With respect to physical phenomena, control involves the selection of means which are appropriate to the nature of the phenomena with which we are concerned.

In the human field the situation is the same, but we often dig channels to make water flow uphill. Many of our attempts to control behavior, far from representing selective adaptations, are in direct violation of human nature. They consist in trying to make people behave as we wish without concern for natural law. Yet we can no more expect to achieve desired results through inappropriate action in this field than in engineering.

When we fail to achieve the results we desire, we tend to seek the cause everywhere but where it usually lies: in our choice of inappropriate methods of control. The engineer does not blame water for flowing downhill rather than up, nor gases for expanding rather than contracting when heated.

Effective prediction and control are as central to the task of [policy making] as they are to the task of engineering or of medicine. If we would improve our ability to organize and direct human effort toward [constitutional] ends, we must not only recognize that this is so, we must also recognize [that] human behavior is predictable, but, as in physical science, accurate prediction hinges on the correctness of underlying theoretical assumptions. There is, in fact, no prediction without theory; all [political] decisions and actions rest on assumptions about behavior…Only as we examine and test our theoretical assumptions can we hope to make them more adequate, to remove inconsistencies, and thus to improve our ability to predict.

We can improve our ability to control only if we recognize that control consists in selective adaptation to human nature rather than in attempting to make human nature conform to our wishes. If our attempts to control are unsuccessful, the cause generally lies in our choice of inappropriate means. We will be unlikely to improve our [political] competence by blaming people for failing to behave according to our predictions.

Management consultant Paul Gustavson summarized McGregor’s conclusion with the adage, “[Governments] are perfectly designed to get the results they get. If you don’t like your results, then you need to change your design.”

Viktor Frankl supported this assertion:

…Optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon – laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.

Steven Levitt pointed out in Freakanomics that economics is "nothing more than the study of incentives and how they are pursued."

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchtower observed that change comes to pass by "gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process is simple, relative to its predecessor." In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. In his book, Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – that is, it has causal agency – and can propagate.

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species referred to change as a "process by which favorable traits become more common in successive generations of a population and unfavorable traits become less common." Darwin added that "it is far more satisfactory to look at [well-adapted societies] not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings - namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

What, therefore, is my proposition? Surely scientists, without knowledge of the law, should not be our nation's policy makers. Likewise, the status quo - attorneys who are not extensively trained in the physical or social sciences - should not be our nation's policy makers. I submit that policy making will not significantly improve until it becomes a collaborative effort of social scientists (change experts) and attorneys (legal experts).

Also, Trevor Quist just made fun of me for blogging at a time when I could justifiably be doing absolutely nothing.

Keep on rockin' in the free world.