I should distinguish between contemplative and instrumental rationality: the former is about getting facts right, not believing false arguments, etc.; the latter is about getting what one wants, whatever that might be. (The former is a limiting case of the latter.) Given a list of desires and beliefs, instrumental rationality tells you what actions are (in some pretty obviously meaningful sense) “rationally binding.” In certain very specific contexts (e.g., a prisoner trying to escape), what one wants is clear, and instrumental rationality is a useful tool.

Perhaps some cases in the historical core material of economics — purely profit-maximizing regimes of endeavor — resemble this; however, whether any of it applies to everyday life is much less clear, as it is not evident that people have fixed desires in any meaningful sense. (I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew Gelman’s aphorism that “the utility function is the epicycle of social science,” which I probably consider to be more broadly true than Gelman does.) In order to adapt instrumental rationality to everyday life, one is forced to do a sort of three-step: (a) assume that a utility function exists, (b) use a combination of survey data, “revealed preference,” behavior, and intuition-pumping to figure out what the utility function says, © accuse people of being irrational when the “best” utility function doesn’t do a good job of predicting their behavior.

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I’ll restrict myself to a brief note on “ideology” as the term is used in physics. An “ideology” is a widely believed but vague and/or unprovable rule of thumb that can be applied to prove various specific results. It is, in general, a rule about what questions to ask and what kinds of answers to look for. The “renormalization group“ idea in physics is an ideology that plays a role that’s roughly like that played by evolution in biology: one cannot reduce it to a precise, true, non-vacuous statement, but it guides the field. Ideologies are what Weinberg refers to as the “soft” parts of theories:

There is a “hard” part of modern physical theories (“hard” meaning not difficult, but durable, like bones in paleontology or potsherds in archeology) that usually consists of the equations themselves, together with some understandings about what the symbols mean operationally and about the sorts of phenomena to which they apply. Then there is a “soft” part; it is the vision of reality that we use to explain to ourselves why the equations work. The soft part does change; we no longer believe in Maxwell’s ether, and we know that there is more to nature than Newton’s particles and forces. … But after our theories reach their mature forms, their hard parts represent permanent accomplishments.

This distinction exists to some degree outside particle physics — a great deal has been learned about the lineages of various species, etc., even if the ideology that led to these discoveries turns out to be false. But it’s worthwhile to distinguish between the predictions of a theory — i.e., predictions that come out of the “hard part” — and those of an ideology, which come from the soft part. The latter cannot be disproved in any straightforward way — they are just patterns we impose on selected agglomerations of fact — and change, as often as not, because the community becomes interested in other problems where the ideology is less useful.

So, at a minimum, the tension that Clark associates with modernism is at least as old as Hume and Blake. One is tempted to write a long essay about this but it would never actually get written — I’m too lazy to finish anything — and the point of this blog is to record my half-digested impressions without worrying about structure etc. So I’m just going to assemble a few notes.

1. Modernism is, of course, one of two successful responses to modernity, the other being Romanticism. Romanticism wasn’t a formalist movement in any deep sense; its basic tendency (seen from the modernist end of the telescope) is escapist; still, escapism might be fruitful under some conditions, and it might be that current conditions are better suited to good escapist art than to good formalist art.

2. Related to this, High Modernism was perhaps a decadent movement in Empson’s sense that it depended on a tradition that its example was destroying. The best modernist art and literature works largely through unexplained and jarring juxtapositions. The idea always seems to be to force a new emotion into existence by making you think in multiple registers, each with a certain level of vividness, at once. A lot of the juxtapositions only worked while they remained unexpected, i.e., before the first-wave modernists were assimilated. Much of the later work maintains the unexpectedness by stylizing to a degree that makes the tension unimmediate and therefore ineffective. A lot of Pound is no longer readable: the Pound of flesh is now a Pound of maggots. Looking at the pictures that accompany Clark’s text, one is tempted to say that something like this must also have happened in the visual arts beginning around Picasso.

3. An excess of contingency is implicit in an excess of form: why that pattern, one could ask, rather than any other? (The number of possibilities grows with the complexity of the pattern.) Had Keats’s odes been identical except for being acrostics, we might think them less inevitable. In Clark’s terms, Through the Looking Glass is a deeply modernist work, being schematic in the same way as Ulysses and some of the paintings Clark discusses. Victorian writing differs from Modernist writing in lacking the element of direct shock. My sense is that the shock value was primarily about forcing people to look at the work rather than through it, by frustrating their expectations. I don't think this is feasible or interesting at present because the better sort of readers have no expectations at

4. To oversimplify somewhat, the internet has resolved the central tension of modernism; the dominant tendency is currently toward solipsism, and the basic tension is between the world of windowless monads and human nature, which is reluctant to adapt to this world. (The “objective” tendency is represented by neuroscience, which “tells us” that the mind is maladaptive.) So the natural theme of fiction is psychosis, and the struggle to reimagine a reality that is perfectly intelligible on its own terms — which are Leibniz’s — in ways the mind is at home with. There have, for instance, been several novels lately — Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances (very good!), Richard Powers’s Echo Maker (juvenile and lame), etc. — about characters who are obsessed with the fogeyish notions of authenticity and identity. (The latter two are about people with Capgras syndrome, which (for novelists) is a disorder that leaves you convinced that your family and friends are actually exact replicas of your family and friends.) I wonder if Clark has read these books and what he makes of them.

I’d describe myself as a left-wing individualist; I’m antagonistic in the abstract to most forms of communitarianism, unions, small-business-worship, homeschooling, extended families, nationalism, ethnic pride, segregation, etc. (And yes, from my perspective left-wing and right-wing communitarianism are similar phenomena.) On the other hand, I believe a fair bit of the negative communitarian case against modernity and modern liberalism: I’m not convinced that progress makes people happier; I agree with Naomi Klein (whom on the whole I dislike) that corporate interests corrupt politics, and that either politics must be insulated from big business or big business must somehow be shrunk (I’d prefer the former); I buy the conservative belief that diversity and urbanization spoils the sense of community and the real benefits that come with it (though I’d say, if so then fuck the sense of community). Etc.

I’m unsympathetic toward libertarianism largely because I don’t believe libertarian arguments. The value system, on the whole, I’m not that antagonistic towards. I’m in favor of wide personal freedoms, a moderately strong system of property rights — that is, I would like property rights to be strong enough that they are predictable, which is a pretty powerful constraint — and flexible employment. (On the other hand, flexible employment includes people with preexisting conditions; the current system, where some people simply can’t afford to lose their jobs, strikes me as intensely wrong. Similarly, I think that people in general ought to have the right to free speech de facto and not just de jure; one shouldn’t be liable to starve for protesting.) Lateral mobility seems at least as important as upward mobility, esp. assuming long lives and rapid technological change; I’m in favor of a reasonably strong safety net that allows people to change jobs in mid-career. And I just don’t think any of this is possible without big government and high taxes. I am quite strongly against outsourcing the safety net to families, charities, etc. because they’re bound to be discriminatory in ways I disapprove of.

I tend to distinguish between liberties that I consider valuable in themselves, e.g. the right to say almost anything you like with a reasonable shot at finding an audience, the right to a fair trial, the right to a decent education, etc., and those that are administratively useful, such as most property rights, the right to leave your money to your kids when you die, the right to read Joyce to your five-year-olds, etc. I don’t really have a problem with curbing the second kind of liberty if it serves any purpose and can be done predictably and systematically. (I’m a big fan of the rule of law: retroactive punishment, arbitrary seizure, etc. seem deeply wrong in themselves.) I approve of stuff like McCain-Feingold. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with laws mandating that private establishments can’t expel people for certain kinds of free speech, even if that seems somewhat anti-property rights.

I disagree with the linear-programming approach towards social policy, the notion that policies are best thought of as constrained optimization problems. The way I see it it’s only necessary for things to work well enough, or even not terribly, while satisfying as many constraints and desiderata as one wants to impose. Arguments that some policy change would make some system less efficient tend not to move me; the relevant question is whether they would make the system intolerably less efficient. I have a similar sort of attitude toward meritocratic objections to affirmative action (though for unrelated reasons I’m ambivalent about AA itself). If the govt forces companies to employ grossly unqualified people, or makes it impossible for e.g. whites/Asians to find reasonable employment or colleges, then that’s obviously a bad thing; if not, I don’t much care in principle if “The Best” people don’t get the best jobs. The exception to this is some areas in which there’s social utility to having a rat race because it makes people work extremely long hours, which leads to socially beneficial outcomes (e.g. research/some engineering jobs); in such cases, meritocracy provides the only sensible form of organization.

In general, I don’t find meritocracy (or its flip side, equality of opportunity) a useful concept. Opportunities are never going to be equal — even if the state ran education, some kids would get the best nannies — and in any case it’s not obvious that people with better genes deserve better outcomes. (The only argument for meritocracy I believe in has to do with encouraging hard work.) Some talent will inevitably be wasted; what matters from the point of view of progress is that meaningful opportunities should exist for people with exceptional abilities, and this condition is weaker and more enforceable than equality of opportunity.

I don’t think, however, that the current American educational and penal systems — by and large — offer meaningful opportunities even to talented poor kids in inner cities or Appalachia (never mind the third world etc.); the existence of an underclass of this kind seems to me a natural consequence of massive inequality, and also of the fact that there is, as of now, a de facto safety net for middle-class whites. If middle-class people were likelier to be locked up for trivial offences and suffered the same sorts of consequences as the urban poor habitually suffer — if enough suburban stoners ended up with AIDS — we might have a humane prison system. Similarly with busing and inner-city schools. The obstacle here is that it’s easier for the middle class to move out, insulate itself, and use its advantage in political clout to prevent busing; and the very poor end up trapped in ghettoes. I don’t see how it’s possible to address this sort of thing structurally without ensuring a more even distribution of wealth — though that is unlikely to be a sufficient condition.

One of the aspects of the communitarian critique that I find particularly interesting is the notion of the decline in the dignity of work — in pre-industrial societies, a higher proportion of jobs required skill or strength; the fashioning of worthwhile objects gave a meaning to one’s life, outside of consumption, that it is substantially harder to get out of a job at McDonald’s. (As Gregory Clark points out, it seems likely that the extent of structural unemployment — the fraction of the populace that hasn’t got the skills or the ability to do any kind of job that there is the demand for — will rise to a reasonable fraction of the populace.) This is a natural result of globalization — there is a market for only the best books, art, and (to some extent) science; both a small community and a large one naturally sustain roughly the same number of writers, and therefore a world splintered into disconnected islands would allow for a much greater fraction of the populace to take some pleasure in their skill. What the reader gains from having access to the best stuff being done is, however, enormous [though what does that mean? I don’t think it makes people objectively happier], and in the end I do believe in progress.

I started writing this down because I figured it would help me organize my thoughts; apparently it hasn’t. I’ll skip the bit about aesthetics for now.