Good liberals take politics seriously.
No. They take the enforcement of 'the rules of the game' seriously. So long as this is done, politics can be entertaining without any peril to the commonweal.
That is why good liberals are not Rawlsian liberals.
No. They aren't Rawlsian liberals because, in the 'original position', we'd know about 'Knightian Uncertainty' and thus opt for piecemeal risk-pooling or minimal collective insurance rather than commit to lexically preferencing the interests of the least well off. Good liberals want independent 'checks and balances'- including an independent Election Commission which prevents gerrymandering and an independent Investigation Agency and so forth.
Imagine someone told you that politics is a “great game,” that when citizens respect just principles, they do so “in much the same way that players have the shared end to execute a good and fair play of the game.”
That would be fine provided we knew that players who broke the rules would be very heavily penalized thus, if they aint totes psycho, they won't take the risk.
You would probably wonder if they meant it, if they really believed that civic duties resemble those acquired when “we join a game, namely, the obligations to play by the rules and to be a good sport.”
That obligation can extend to severely punishing rule breakers. Thus a sportsman who takes steroids suddenly finds that he can't get sponsorships and nobody in his field will be caught dead in his company.
You would because, for most people, politics is a serious business.
No. Business is serious. Politics need not be a business. A witty and upbeat guy- like BoJo- may be preferable to a boring bead counter.
No doubt, this is because the stakes are so high: Political decisions can affect how millions live or die.
No. Policy decisions can do that. But few political decisions are policy decisions. It doesn't matter too much if the person implementing the policy- independently arrived at by a professional Civil Service- is young rather than old or cool rather than frumpy.
That is why we also take war so seriously.
Coz we don't want to get shot or bombed to kingdom come. But this involves having a highly professional, relatively independent, Military. If you army kicks ass, it doesn't matter if your President is a twee tree-hugger.
Today, it seems astonishing that nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz felt it necessary to insist, in his canonical work On War (1832), that “war is no pastime;
Back then there was a saying 'War is the sport of Kings'- especially in Germany. Clausewitz represented the thinking of the increasingly professionalized Prussian General Staff which, however, ended up fucking up big time.
it is no mere joy in daring and winning, no place for irresponsible enthusiasts. It is a serious means to a serious end.” Especially since the devastations of the twentieth century, we have had no need of such an admonition.
Then why bring it up? Everybody gets that Clausewitz lived in 'days of yore' when Princelings jumped on their horsies and waved their swords about.
Then why have so few objected to the Rawlsian metaphors that I just quoted?
Because they were as stupid as Rawls. Seriously, a guy who doesn't get that sensible peeps buy insurance to guard against adverse contingencies, is one whose major malfunction is ignorance and stupidity not shit to do with choice of metaphors.
John Rawls (1921–2002) was the most important political philosopher of the previous century,
because the last century understood that 'important political philosopher' means 'stupid, ignorant, cretin'. You only read that rubbish for shits and giggles.
and perhaps even of this one. Yet he was also someone for whom the good of justice was “no more mysterious than that members of an orchestra, or players on a team, or even both teams in a game, should take pleasure and a certain (proper) pride in a good performance, or in a good play of the game, one that they will want to remember.” How can this be?
This is perfectly reasonable. If we live in a realm known for the efficiency and reliability of its judiciary then there are 'positive externalities' from which we benefit. Similarly, sportsmen benefit if their sport is associated with good sportsmanship and musicians benefit if the orchestra to which they belong is noted for its coordination and meticulous execution.
Rawls believed that we ought to respect citizens’ basic liberties,
thus enabling them to be more productive
ensure equal opportunity among them,
thus enabling Society as a whole to operate closer to the Pareto frontier
and accept inequality in the distribution of wealth only when it benefits the least fortunate.
that is stoooooopid. A collective social insurance 'safety net' is the way to go. The fact is Social Contracts must be 'incomplete contracts'. But incomplete contract theory is a relatively recent development. Rawls can't be blamed for having studied and taught only stupid shit. The sad thing is that economists like Sen and Arrow didn't put Rawls on the right track. Harsanyi did critique Rawls but the silly man didn't get that Knightian Uncertainty obtains and so 'regret minimization' not 'expected utility maximization' is the way to go.
These are the principles advanced in his 1971 classic, A Theory of Justice. In a subsequent book, Political Liberalism (1993), he identified as “political liberals” all those who would endorse at least the first principle, respect for basic liberties, and do so in a way independent of any nonpolitical beliefs they may have.
But an enlightened despot may institute the same thing while democracies still lock up those who recruit for terrorist organizations. So, Rawlsian liberalism was empty. But by then, politicians didn't want to be identified with 'the L-word'.
To be sure, these works and the discussions based on them have given rise to some very interesting ideas.
If by 'interesting' you mean 'boring and stupid'- sure.
Yet they have also often amounted to little more than tinkering with the rules of a game that nobody—one hopes—will ever play.
Nonsense! Mechanisms do in fact exist and the reverse game theory of 'mechanism design' is ubiquitous in modern life. It determines how much I pay for stuff on Ebay and decides who gets 5G bandwidth.
“Who can be gotten to play unfair games?” Rawls once asked,
those who know it is fixed in their favor and those who have no other fucking option. On the other hand, nobody will play a game that is too boring relative to the reward or which is otherwise repugnant. That is why my 'Scratch my butt' board game- where players compete to scratch my butt while I concentrate on talking bollocks- hasn't taken off.
expressing a concern reflected in his vision of just politics as fair politics. The question, however, neglects the fact that, to put it bluntly, politics is no game.
If it has rules which are enforced and there are losers and winners then the thing can indeed be formalized as a game.
Yes, it has seen many “players.” To pick just one example, critics often (rightly) compare the previous US president to a professional wrestler.
While the present one is like the talking horse Mister Ed.
Rawls’s followers would doubtless think it self-evident that we need fewer politicians like Donald Trump.
It was because all the professional politicians were not like Trump that that amateur succeeded. He delivered the three things most Americans wanted- lower taxes, pushback against substantive due process fuckery and a transactional approach to foreign policy rather than forever wars in shithole countries. COVID prevented Trump getting a second term. Still, it would be safer to lock him up before he runs again.
Yet certain forms of liberal politics make way for exactly such individuals.
No. Some individuals can make a way for themselves regardless of regime.
Ironically, it took an admirer of authoritarianism, indeed a Nazi jurist, to make this connection clear. Carl Schmitt
was German. Germans can't make anything clear. They can merely confuse themselves and fuck over their own country.
criticized a conception of liberalism akin to Rawls’s for supporting the kind of constitution that “may dissipate into mere rules of the game and its ethics into a mere ethic of fair play.”
That didn't happen in Weimar Germany. Every party had its own militia. The Commies decided that the Social Democrats were the true 'Fascists' and so the SDs had to hand Hindenburg the power to rule by decree. Since Lundendorf had gone totally crazy, his side-kick, Adolf, took over but only because General Blomberg hated General Schliecher. This has nothing to do with some spoiled Catholic like Schmitt. The fact is most Germans thought only the General Staff's maximal program of conquest could rescue them from penury or (Keynes's idea) starvation.
And as political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss aptly described Schmitt’s critique, this kind of liberalism leads to “the establishment of a world of entertainment, a world of amusement, a world without seriousness.”
But Ronald Reagan was a great two term Governor of California and, a few years later, POTUS. Nothing wrong with entertainment or amusement. German 'seriousness' made Germans stupider than shit. Putin is no big bag of laughs. Zelenskyy is a professional comedian. We see Putin as shallow. The Ukrainians are totes serious about getting their territory back. We can't be sure they will prevail but if anybody deserves victory it is those led by the comedian, not the grey little spy.
Ultimately, that can become very serious indeed.
Or can get sillier and sillier. Just don't start unwinnable wars or go off a fiscal cliff. Otherwise you are welcome to have a Ministry of Silly Walks.
The fact that Strauss was a Platonist adds even further irony,
because he wasn't actually a pederast.
since Plato is the thinker most responsible for the idea that, if not politics, then political philosophy is a kind of game.
Which Aristotle played with Alexander till the latter decided conquering the world would be more fun.
That is why he has Socrates apologize in the Republic for having “forgot that we were playing,” and so having taken the project of constructing an ideal “city in speech” too seriously.
He was indeed a deeply silly man. Still, Plato set up an Academy where math was taught. Math is useful. Philosophy isn't but, it must be admitted, reading Plato does give you an idea of how well bred gentlemen converse- in between bumming each other.
Rawls proposed his own famous thought experiment: taking a step behind a “veil of ignorance” in order to reason from the perspective of “the original position” and thereby arrive at the principles of justice. It is worth noting that he once called this “the reasoning game.”
Nobody had told him about John Maynard Smith's notion of 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and why they dictate eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'. I suppose it was useful to have a 'progressive' making an obviously foolish 'Lefty' argument because if anybody got up your nose with his shite, you could use math to show the fucker was fucked in the fucking head and had less commonsense than a cabbage.
The fact is nobody knows whether they might not be knocked down by a bus tomorrow or whether their pension pot will suddenly disappear. That's why people will pay into a Social Insurance pool. Nobody would be crazy enough to say 'the least well off must be served first' because nobody knows who will be the least well off. There is an obvious moral hazard.
By all accounts, however, Rawls took political philosophy seriously.
Coz that's how he made his living.
Yet when communitarians such as Michael Sandel complained that his approach implied a particular conception of the self, Rawls demurred: “When…we simulate being in this [original] position, our reasoning no more commits us to a metaphysical doctrine about the nature of the self than our playing a game like Monopoly commits us to thinking that we are landlords engaged in a desperate rivalry, winner take all.”
But, in the 'original position', the basic rule of contracts still arises- viz. commit to nothing save for consideration. Indeed, a contract is null and void if consideration did not pass. Thus you may get me to agree to share my earnings with you if I become rich. I do become rich but tell you to go fuck yourself. The Court laughs at you. You should have got me to accept 'consideration' for there to be a contract. Otherwise, it is clear, I just told you what you wanted to hear so as to get you to shut the fuck up.
Rawls tried to avoid metaphysics because he felt that it interfered with his great game.
Sadly, he also avoided Jurisprudence and Economics of the commonsense sort.
People will probably always disagree fundamentally about religion, philosophy, and morals,
not if it involves serious inconvenience and expense
and it is no coincidence that these topics are also bound up with metaphysics in various ways.
Because stupidity is always metaphysical.
Rawls nevertheless thought that, despite holding very different fundamental beliefs, people can still come together by adopting systematically unified rules for politics.
Which they will only do for consideration. My dinner party guests say they will agree to abide by the rules of my new game. Then they discover it is 'Scratch my butt'. They tell me to go fuck myself. Also, in future, kindly provide beer of a type which hasn't already passed through your urinary tract.
After all, don’t such rules already regulate other shared activities,
if they are useful- sure. There is a payoff matrix which constitutes 'consideration'
not least that of playing games?
games may have rules and feature strategic behavior but the really useful ones can morph into relationships with open ended commitments. But whether they are robust depends on the fitness landscape.
It takes more than a set of systematically unified rules to constitute a game, however.
A game need not have 'systematically unified rules'.
To qualify as such, the rules must be adopted, first and foremost, for their own sake.
Nonsense! Take 'castling' in Chess. That was an innovation which was introduced to speed up the game and make it more entertaining.
It’s for this reason that the answer to any question about why people should respect them—no touching the ball with your hand, say, or kicking the puck into the net with your skate—is ultimately always “just because.”
Nope. The answer is that the restriction makes the game more interesting as more skill is required of the players.
That’s how the game is played, nothing more. It must be so, since it is only when we accept the rules as ends in themselves that we can treat them in a disinterested, playful way.
This simply isn't true. Under particular circumstances we can alter the rules to make the game more rewarding. For example, an expert chess player may handicap himself so as to make a game with a novice more challenging for herself.
True, people sometimes also attach serious, external goods to games: Professional athletes, for instance, earn a living from them, just as fans sometimes take great pride in those athletes’ exploits. Still, we know these goods are situated outside the game because one can always play for free or without spectators.
Which means some goods are within the game- e.g. 'Scratch my arse' is satisfying to me even if I have to play it all by myself after all my dinner guests have escaped.
So we can understand why Rawls himself tells us—repeatedly—that we should adopt his theory of justice “for its own sake.”
i.e. destroy the economy just for the sake of showing Rawls had shit for brains.
Because justice, he believes, cannot come from following some self-interested modus vivendi.
It can only come from destroying the economy- right?
If anything, he sees it as based on a form of love. Which form? I can’t help but think that he wants us to love justice—just as the amateur (a term derived from the Latin amare, “to love”) differs from the professional in playing mainly for the love of the game.
Fuck off! The professional may love the game even more. Because her talent is scarce she commands 'economic rent'. I'd love to be paid big bucks for my excellence in 'Scratch my arse'.
In fact, Rawls once even claimed that the hazards arising from “our sentiment of justice” are “on a par with the hazards of love.”
Very true. Plenty of Rawlsians died of AIDS or monkeypox or whatever. This was because their sentiment of justice caused them to suck off homeless dudes or to take it up the arse from wandering hobos. It stands to reason that before you are entitled to fuck your beautiful wife, you must first satisfy the sexual desires of the most deprived in your society.
But so what? Rawls may have been overly fond of an inappropriate metaphor.
There was no metaphor. It was a fact that game theory had proved very effective in all sorts of fields- Econ, Nuclear deterrence, the Life Sciences, even Quantum Theory- by the time Rawls published his stupid shit. Someone should have told him about Knightian Uncertainty which is the reason nobody should ever commit to any type of contract absent consideration. Even then the contract would be 'incomplete' and Judges would permit a variation in its terms.
What harm is there in that? My answer is that the more people adopt a vision of politics like his, the more damage it will do.
But cretins like the author have been wholly disintermediated from politics. We are thankful if they don't masturbate in public. Still, that may be too much to ask.
Consider elected officials, or anyone else participating directly. It seems obvious that likening politics to a game will encourage them to behave adversarially, just like competitive players.
Very true. Nobody should stand for office without first taking the blessings of his rival. His campaign should focus on presenting all the other contenders as marvelous people. He should promise to be utterly shit at the job if elected.
Yet this rules out forms of conflict resolution aimed at serving the citizenry’s common good.
Why didn't Biden just get on his knees and offer to suck off Trump during the Presidential debates? Surely that would have 'served the citizen's common good' coz the sight of Trump's micro-dick getting caught in Biden's dentures would have been very amusing. The Chinese would certainly have appreciated it.
Conversation must clearly be set aside, since conversation requires earnest interlocutors, the kind who take their exchanges seriously.
But cretins like this author are 'earnest interlocutors'. What good have they ever done?
Moreover, who can listen with an open mind to someone seen as not merely an opponent but an adversary—that is, a person who gains only if, and to the degree that, one loses?
Everyone. I notice that my adversary is winning over people by saying 'You iz nice. I lurve you.' I decide to do the same. Suddenly everybody thinks I'm a nice guy. Previously they ran away from me because I'd say 'You smell bad. Your Mummy hates you. She only pretends otherwise so as to win a bet.'
The point about having 'adversaries' is that you focus on what they are doing or saying and steal any good ideas or techniques that they might have.
An even deeper challenge arises when we are faced with conflicts over what Rawls refers to as “the basic structure of society.”
This challenge only arises if the police or the army aint able to kill or incarcerate those trying to change that basic structure. Sometimes, the smart thing is to run away.
On such occasions, he would have citizens engage in what he calls “public reason,” which effectively means that they should stop competing and become their own referees.
Very true. That's what is stopping Putin's hordes. 'Public reason' and lots of Ukrainian dudes giving themselves a red card for having said nasty things about Putin or, as appears increasingly the case, beating the fuck out of his goons.
Yet we rarely expect competitors in a game to be capable of such neutrality.
Only if we also expect a person who wipes his own bum to only do so after she has wiped all the other bums in the vicinity. Surely, basic considerations of neutrality and fairness require us to let everybody fuck our wife before we do so ourselves?
That’s why I think the legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin had a slightly more realistic sense of what can and should take place.
But not what actually does take place.
Dworkin was in his own way enamoured of the idea of politics as a game or sport, but he thought that Supreme Court justices should settle societal disagreements over the application of basic rules, assessing arguments advanced by lawyers much as referees hear pleas from rival team captains.
Was he for substantive due process or did he hold Clarence Thomas's view? Who cares? It is obvious that SCOTUS aint neutral. It is partisan. Maybe rolling back all substantive due process makes us better off in the long run coz that way Legislatures don't get to shirk their duties by kicking the can down the road into the Courts.
The plain fact is that going to law costs money. The sensible thing to do is to disintermediate costly jurisdictions or only do adhesion contracts in those places. The Coasian firm exists to internalize externalities. There is no reason such firms can't use arbitrators for incomplete contracts rather than become hostage to a particular jurisdiction.
Rawls’s vision of justice as fairness also affects those who do no more than follow politics.
But not to the same extent as She-Hulk's view of Justice. Seriously, She-Hulk is totes cool. I'm in lurve with her.
Echoing Strauss now, I am led to ask: If citizens conceive of politics as a game,
then they will understand that game theoretic notions- e.g. Shapley values- arise. Thus they can make better predictions and improve the effectiveness of their political engagements.
why should we expect them to approach it as anything other than entertainment?
Because everything- including entertainment- has utility. As Hume observed long ago, Justice is about utility. It is concerned with the reverse game-theory that is mechanism design. Rights are linked to remedies under a bond of Law. But if those remedies are incentive incompatible the corresponding Rights will become ineffective. I have a Right to wipe my own bum. The Law may stipulate that I must wipe everybody's bum iff I can wipe my own. But this Law will soon be unenforceable. Why? Guys who can wipe their own bums rule the world. Those who can't have no countervailing power.
Political journalism that emphasizes scandal, infotainment, and a horse-race approach to elections already encourages this tendency far too much.
Whereas political journalism which lacks these features is read by nobody at all. Why not simply say 'Everybody should be Nice. Nasty peeps should go away'?
Surely, given today’s looming threats to liberal democratic values, we need less rather than more of it.
We certainly need less of this type of imbecility. But that's all the Academy can provide.
Finally, making politics into a kind of game undermines what Rawls himself called the strength of the citizenry’s sense of justice.
In America, this tended to involve lynching niggers and tarring and feathering nigger-lovers.
While it is true that games can elicit passion,
whereas it is not true that reading this shite can give you a raging hard-on
normally this is only of a rather superficial sort, and so not the kind that can support real-world commitments.
What 'real-world commitments' does this shite support? Saying 'boo to Trump!'? Anybody can do that even if they lack a PhD.
However, those are precisely what we need to make toward the things we care about—
e.g wiping our bum
not for their own sake, but for our own.
I say unto thee, wipe not your bum for the sake of your bum and so it can be less smelly and disgusting. Rather thou must wipe bums for the sake of the divine spark of bum-wiping which burns fiercely within the deepest and darkest recesses of your bum.
Surely justice is one of those things.
It is a shitty bum but there are people paid to wipe it. It would be foolish of us wasting time demanding more such bum wiping for abstractions. Still, it should worry us that Beauty's bum is not being wiped with the same assiduity as Justice's bum. This is a conversation that today, more than ever, it is urgent for us to have. It may be that the fate not just of liberal democracy but democratic liberalism hinges upon moving from playful games of 'Scratch My Arse' to a sustained commitment to wipe everybody's bum.
No comments:
Post a Comment