Thank you for putting into words what many of us have been suspicious and uneasy about. I never cease to marvel at your ability to grasp the subtle texture of reality and explain it clearly.
All the seemingly objective “technocratic” analysis of human behavior within our supposedly democratic institutions and bureaucracies is rendered meaningless in the face of the present corruption (blackmail? corporate ownership of our legislators, judiciary and administrative overlords). Our “democracy” vanished when money (citizens united) became speech. Israel, Russia, Oligarchs, and crypto currencies have effectively rendered all notions of democratic governance moot.
What could be a better example of the failure of technocratic liberalism but school reform? For several decades we were told over and over again that policies preferred by the ed reform crowd simply would, had to, must cause major learning gains, and it was only the corruption and obstinacy of the teachers unions that was holding back that process. Now even the most idealistic ed reformers tends to have a rather sheepish attitude towards it all, after their preferences failed again and again and again. And now instead of the relentless claim that replacing public schools with private or quasi private alternatives would inevitably result in large and durable learning gains, they now tends to say that choice is good in and of itself, quietly avoiding mention of the very rationale that once underlined their entire approach.
Great article. You lay out beautifully the failure mode of what Inglehart of the World Values Survey called the Materialist worldview (or Hines's Modern worldview, or Spiral Dynamics Orange Strive-Drive vMeme, etc.). The "Analytical Frame" is a brilliant term for this mode of thinking. It indeed treats problems as Complicated systems that can be solved using Complicated (if/then/else) process thinking. It simply cannot handle governance of Complex systems, much less Complex Adaptive ones. In a sense "governance" as a term should be depricated like Frankly the whole piece is brilliant and easily explains ideas I've been wrestling with for years.
The part I think you did not highlight is that when process-based technocratic governance fails it leaves open the possibility to collapse back to earlier, simpler forms like simple rules-based hierarchies and top down authoritarianism. It does so to quell the perceived chaos and force top-down order. Since the U.S. Constitution established a hierarchical system enforced by rules (laws) based on traditional elite governance with a representative twist, it tends to be subject to "falling back" to pure authoritarianism when it is under stress (WWII, 9/11, Pandemic, etc.). I can understand why you didn't touch on this since it was already taking on a big idea and this dynamic deserves its own article(s).
I'm an expert on certain things... and have been an expert on other things in the past. But every time I started a rotation, whomever the counterpart I was evaluating/coaching was, the first thing I would say is "I teach common sense, and whether what you did was the right thing is driven by results."
The problem with the expert class these days is a tendency to say "well, actually...", and then something that runs counter to common-sense. We as Americans worship on the alter of expertise, but outside of a few narrowly technical fields (I want the helicopter I'm flying in designed by an expert, never mind that common sense says it should fall out of the sky), "expertise" is frequently just another word for "credential" in our society. And the credentialed class is increasingly out of their depth.
You've identified exactly the distinction I'm trying to make. Your approach—"I teach common sense, results drive whether you did the right thing"—embodies the epistemic humility I'm advocating for. You're an expert who understands the boundaries of expertise.
I absolutely trust virologists on virology, engineers on helicopter design, and experts within their technical domains. The problem isn't expertise itself—it's when "expertise" becomes credentialism, when technical knowledge gets extended beyond its domain, and when expert recommendations become substitutes for democratic deliberation rather than inputs into it.
Your point about results-driven validation is crucial. In genuinely technical fields, expertise can be tested against reality. But in many domains where credentialed experts claim authority, there's no clear feedback mechanism. Political scientists who couldn't predict Trump, economists who missed 2008, public health experts whose confident COVID predictions proved wrong—their credentials granted them authority that exceeded their demonstrated knowledge. That said, I still trusted them a lot more than the people telling me to take ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I did get vaccinated, and I do not regret it to be clear. My point here is, quite nuanced.
The analytical frame I'm critiquing treats political and moral questions as if they were technical problems with objectively correct solutions. But as Hume understood, you can't derive "ought" from "is." A virologist can tell us how viruses spread, but they can't tell us what level of risk we should accept or how to balance competing values. Those are questions for democratic deliberation informed by—not replaced by—technical expertise.
When expert recommendations consistently violate common sense intuitions, that should prompt questions about whether expertise is being applied appropriately, not automatic deference to credentials.
The goal is expertise that serves democratic reasoning, not expertise that replaces it.
Expertise and credentials have been frequently used to shut down debate, which is why they have become so discredited. Politicians (and public health experts) saying "trust the science" to not just justify shutdowns, but persecute those who disagree that shutdowns were an appropriate response to the threat posed by covid. Climate change advocates (and scientists) saying to "trust the science" when advocating the destruction of our economy to halt climate change. These "experts" are pushing their own politics in advocating solutions and then act shocked when people treat them like political actors.
The flip side of this is that politicians get an out, by claiming to not be fully responsible for the consequences of their actions. And they also get an appeal to authority, which over the short-term was useful to them.
The cost of all of this is of course our institutions. Founded on at least the perception of being impartial, most of them have, due to their own actions, lost that, and as a result are now being targeted. Based off your writing, I think you and I probably differ as to whether we believe most of our institutions are salvageable in their current form, but I think we largely agree as to where their root problems lie.
I certainly do not think these post-truth populists burning the institutions down is going to make things better, no. I think they might get us all killed and drive us to civil war or worse.
I know, I read your work. I just don't view them as worse than the post-truth leftists who've marched through our institutions and have been imposing their views on the rest of us for the last decade. Honestly, I see an authoritarian right rising against a soft-totalitarian left, and that left has been the driving force behind the changes that have been shattering our societies norms and destroying the neutrality of our institutions.
And since I don't see a side that is standing up for the "reasonable people who just want good government that adheres to America's founding principles and could have a conversation with an average person from the 1990's without that person thinking that they were a lunatic," I think we're all in the position where we have to choose what we view as the least bad option.
I must confess I think anyone who thinks Trump is "less bad" that Harris would have been, is sorely mistaken. Even taking on board on the faults of the technocratic center.
That's the thing. I don't view the "technocratic center" as being anywhere near the center anymore. They used to be, but that view is about 20 years out of date. The official institutional perspective of all of these "technocratic" organizations was wholly captured by the left. How many mandatory left coded trainings have people who work for institutions had to sit through regarding all sorts of issues? I've had more than my fair share, and my institution is probably the least captured. The right didn't fight back because it outwardly professed to believe in the neutrality of those institutions... which handicapped them while those institutions were being captured.
Trump first did this with the legacy media... he stopped deferring to them, recognizing that they had long since ceased being worthy of being deferred to as anything other than a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party establishment. This term he has been going after everyone else. The right is (finally) fighting back instead of just acquiescing. My issue with this? He isn't actually fixing problems... but then, Democrats refused to acknowledge that problems even exist. So I'm left with... least bad options.
From my perspective on a national level? The side that acknowledges that problems exist, doesn't talk down to me or scorn me for being a white male, won't discriminate against my children for being half-white and half-asian when it comes to college admissions, job applications etc, and won't form a mob to come after me online and try and get me fired in real life for expressing opinions that 15 years ago were completely uncontroversial is the "least bad" option. As far as international relations go (something I'm very much involved in, and have been for quite some time)? I think the US had a choice between managed decline or something radically different, and we are now doing radically different. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but my view is a lot more nuanced than the people saying, "but our allies!?"
Since I'm retiring from my first career soon and am looking across the country (and around the world) for places to live, at the local level? The party that I can be confident over the next 20 years will continue to enforce laws, support economic growth, allow development to keep housing available and cost of living low, prioritize parents in public schools and try and keep taxes as low as possible is where I'm looking at as far as states to live in. There are a number of red, and some purple, states that meet that criteria. There are no blue states that do.
The Democratic party has huge problems when it comes to governance. My view of national politics has been shaped by a lot of things outside of the country that I've seen. One of the most important was how it was easier to understand what the rules of conduct were living in an authoritarian country in 2020 than it was in America. But where to live is local. It amounts to trust in a party to govern... and a lot of Americans are voting with their feet right now, and so am I.
Roe vs Wade - I think it can be summed as technocratic change; i don't think the nation was taken on a journey by politicians (would / will it fail, yes many times!); instead it was punted by them to SC. Same with gay marriage. they should have been constitutionally or by legislature legalised; or live with a detente of varying state policy.
I've seen it happen in other countries (India); politicians punt difficult social questions to Courts or other institutions ill equipped to deal with the complex fabric of society.
I fear that if there is a way back from this cliff, the answer the liberal technocrats will take away from it is not that more democratic participation was necessary in crafting policy solutions in order to ensure people felt their voices were heard in the creation of the laws by which they must live, but rather that the people have proved they are too stupid to be trusted with their own governance and an enlightened aristocracy of philosopher-kings that is beyond democratic accountability (since democracy brought us figures like Donald Trump) is necessary to ensure that society runs optimally.
I shall respond to the feeling of despair here with a passage from one my mythopoetic pieces to capture how I think about how to orient myself against these despairing feelings:
"You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this fleeting moment of stillness—between the trapeze swings, beneath the roar of the crowd—this, my Note from the Circus.
Because love, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes coherence possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.
And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:
Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.
This is the Grand Praxis. This is the work of being human. This is the path that was established at the beginning of all things and remains open to us now, in this moment, as we face the challenges of our time not with despair or denial but with the courage to create.
Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And in the constructing, we participate in the rhythm established by the first movement—the only movement—that makes all existence possible.
The most gut-rumbling danger of the intellectual arrogance you describe involves nuclear weapons, deterrence theory and their command and control systems. Technical expertise is an absolute necessity for obvious reasons, but then we immediately veer off into trying to prevent nuclear war by counting on fallible human beings operating in countries with wildly divergent political systems, histories and cultures to manage those differences indefinitely without someone, somewhere making one final miscalculation that extinguishes the human race within hours. You place a lot of faith in a spirit of cooperative adaptation in responding to unexpected events and new information but what should we do when confronting unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances?
If we confront an unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances, then there will be no second chances, I suppose. If this game of civilization we are playing ends, it ends. But I intend to keep playing, and I know my orientation in the game.
Beautiful you have nailed the tail on the donkey, by distinguishing complicated from complex systems, as if more data centers will save of from the messy business of participatory democracy, and the hard work building our ear muscles to be able to listen to and get to know our neighbors regarding the issues that confront us all, especially where we live and breath in the watersheds and habitats of our local and regional lives!
It’s a well-crafted argument, so full marks for that. But it’s purely conceptual, based in part on questionable assertions, and with nary a connection to day-to-day reality, and so not very useful. “The technocratic liberal establishment promised that rational analysis could perfect democratic governance.” - ??? When, by whom, and if so, how exactly, with specific examples, was that promise implemented to the detriment of democratic governance?
The major error is the failure to connect the argument with any of the myriad specific events and trends of Western history in the last about 50 years that have so influenced individual voters as to lead to Trump 2.0 - Vietnam, Watergate, globalization, laws and policies favouring capital over labour, the 24-hour news cycle, 9/11 and the War on Terror, right-wing and social media degrading public discourse from thoughts to feels, the save-the-banks-not-the-people response to the Great Recession, COVID, the unregulated and pervasive power and influence of big tech, etc. My view is that human history proceeds along a path of events and their consequences rather than in response to analytical frameworks.
I mean, every time we talk about anything in society, we are using conceptual frameworks. The question is not whether what I said is conceptual, but whether or not it is coherent and has explanatory power. And I don't think any of your appeals to historical contingencies does any violence on my arguments against liberal technocracy. My arguments against liberal technocracy are not even completely novel. Other political philosophers (like my friend Vlad Vexler) are making similar interventions.
Many thanks for your further response. I haven’t spent a lot of time considering the present moment from the perspective of political philosophy, but, respectfully, it seems to me that asserting the primacy of destructive “liberal technocracy” (which I don’t really understand; is there an illiberal technocracy operating somewhere?) ignores for no good or helpful reason the root causes - the numerous distinct, tangible forces that directly influenced voters to bring us Trump 2.0. Frankly, experts aren’t even a force, they are just a delivery system.
On a different issue, although you don’t provide a ‘way forward’ from the problem, the implication seems to be that governance by non-expert is preferable. If so, does it please you to see that Trump 2.0 is running that experiment?
I am not saying technocratic thinking is the primary problem. Nor am I making a comprehensive statement about what we ought to do. I am critiquing a way of thinking that is predominant in elite liberal discourse. A lot of people are suggesting I'm saying it's the root cause of all of our ills, which is in fact, not a claim I'm making. In fact, if you take my argument fully on board here, I would suggest that it would be hypocritical for me to make such a claim. I certainly think there are many factors—and I write about them all the time.
Your observations about right-wing and reactionary propaganda are not wrong. I make these same observations in my writings on the regular. But I might observe that they are exploiting vulnerabilities of democratic dissatisfaction that elite technocracy has played into. Opaque bureaucracies and a sense that policymaking should be left to qualified experts, is fertile ground for populists to demagogue against.
Put another way, I'm getting from this that the analytical frame is self-absorbed in good faith, while remaining either willfully or stupidly ignorant of the history of bad faith. If things are going your way -- and "money doesn't talk, it swears" (Bob Dylan) -- you could be insulated from the bad faith that regular people have to deal with and which has been growing in complexity under profiteering algorithms of self-referential narcissists (see Bandy X. Lee). Those of us with plenty of serious business keeping food on the table and paying bills, rely on good faith and play along as the wealthy capitulate to extortion and other corruptions. Our need for community requires us to pool our time and experience, to share insights (thank you, Mike!), and to formulate ways out of this gas-bag of pseudo-democracy. We're still here, still humping, and still welcoming equal opportunity in the eyes of god and in the eyes of the law.
Fascinating reflection, even if the vessel required to navigate collectively through increasing complexity feels pretty broken about now, and taking on a lot of water.
One of your recent analysis described the inevitably of Trump and Black Swan events would shape opportunities for those able to comprehend the occurrence. I agree with your thesis and watch to see what leadership emerges. Mandami in New York is one example and Gavin Newsome is another. Today California, Oregon, and Washington created a medical/health alliance to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our communities. New systems are emerging and naturally occurring opportunities of participation should begin to appear. Public education is another venue for the development of our young people to understand and create new systems to build upon. I’m hopeful 🤠🤠🤠
Thank you for putting into words what many of us have been suspicious and uneasy about. I never cease to marvel at your ability to grasp the subtle texture of reality and explain it clearly.
All the seemingly objective “technocratic” analysis of human behavior within our supposedly democratic institutions and bureaucracies is rendered meaningless in the face of the present corruption (blackmail? corporate ownership of our legislators, judiciary and administrative overlords). Our “democracy” vanished when money (citizens united) became speech. Israel, Russia, Oligarchs, and crypto currencies have effectively rendered all notions of democratic governance moot.
What could be a better example of the failure of technocratic liberalism but school reform? For several decades we were told over and over again that policies preferred by the ed reform crowd simply would, had to, must cause major learning gains, and it was only the corruption and obstinacy of the teachers unions that was holding back that process. Now even the most idealistic ed reformers tends to have a rather sheepish attitude towards it all, after their preferences failed again and again and again. And now instead of the relentless claim that replacing public schools with private or quasi private alternatives would inevitably result in large and durable learning gains, they now tends to say that choice is good in and of itself, quietly avoiding mention of the very rationale that once underlined their entire approach.
Great article. You lay out beautifully the failure mode of what Inglehart of the World Values Survey called the Materialist worldview (or Hines's Modern worldview, or Spiral Dynamics Orange Strive-Drive vMeme, etc.). The "Analytical Frame" is a brilliant term for this mode of thinking. It indeed treats problems as Complicated systems that can be solved using Complicated (if/then/else) process thinking. It simply cannot handle governance of Complex systems, much less Complex Adaptive ones. In a sense "governance" as a term should be depricated like Frankly the whole piece is brilliant and easily explains ideas I've been wrestling with for years.
The part I think you did not highlight is that when process-based technocratic governance fails it leaves open the possibility to collapse back to earlier, simpler forms like simple rules-based hierarchies and top down authoritarianism. It does so to quell the perceived chaos and force top-down order. Since the U.S. Constitution established a hierarchical system enforced by rules (laws) based on traditional elite governance with a representative twist, it tends to be subject to "falling back" to pure authoritarianism when it is under stress (WWII, 9/11, Pandemic, etc.). I can understand why you didn't touch on this since it was already taking on a big idea and this dynamic deserves its own article(s).
Bah. Editing fail on my phone. Just ignore the "governance" sentence fragment. I wish we could edit comments
I'm an expert on certain things... and have been an expert on other things in the past. But every time I started a rotation, whomever the counterpart I was evaluating/coaching was, the first thing I would say is "I teach common sense, and whether what you did was the right thing is driven by results."
The problem with the expert class these days is a tendency to say "well, actually...", and then something that runs counter to common-sense. We as Americans worship on the alter of expertise, but outside of a few narrowly technical fields (I want the helicopter I'm flying in designed by an expert, never mind that common sense says it should fall out of the sky), "expertise" is frequently just another word for "credential" in our society. And the credentialed class is increasingly out of their depth.
You've identified exactly the distinction I'm trying to make. Your approach—"I teach common sense, results drive whether you did the right thing"—embodies the epistemic humility I'm advocating for. You're an expert who understands the boundaries of expertise.
I absolutely trust virologists on virology, engineers on helicopter design, and experts within their technical domains. The problem isn't expertise itself—it's when "expertise" becomes credentialism, when technical knowledge gets extended beyond its domain, and when expert recommendations become substitutes for democratic deliberation rather than inputs into it.
Your point about results-driven validation is crucial. In genuinely technical fields, expertise can be tested against reality. But in many domains where credentialed experts claim authority, there's no clear feedback mechanism. Political scientists who couldn't predict Trump, economists who missed 2008, public health experts whose confident COVID predictions proved wrong—their credentials granted them authority that exceeded their demonstrated knowledge. That said, I still trusted them a lot more than the people telling me to take ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I did get vaccinated, and I do not regret it to be clear. My point here is, quite nuanced.
The analytical frame I'm critiquing treats political and moral questions as if they were technical problems with objectively correct solutions. But as Hume understood, you can't derive "ought" from "is." A virologist can tell us how viruses spread, but they can't tell us what level of risk we should accept or how to balance competing values. Those are questions for democratic deliberation informed by—not replaced by—technical expertise.
When expert recommendations consistently violate common sense intuitions, that should prompt questions about whether expertise is being applied appropriately, not automatic deference to credentials.
The goal is expertise that serves democratic reasoning, not expertise that replaces it.
Expertise and credentials have been frequently used to shut down debate, which is why they have become so discredited. Politicians (and public health experts) saying "trust the science" to not just justify shutdowns, but persecute those who disagree that shutdowns were an appropriate response to the threat posed by covid. Climate change advocates (and scientists) saying to "trust the science" when advocating the destruction of our economy to halt climate change. These "experts" are pushing their own politics in advocating solutions and then act shocked when people treat them like political actors.
The flip side of this is that politicians get an out, by claiming to not be fully responsible for the consequences of their actions. And they also get an appeal to authority, which over the short-term was useful to them.
The cost of all of this is of course our institutions. Founded on at least the perception of being impartial, most of them have, due to their own actions, lost that, and as a result are now being targeted. Based off your writing, I think you and I probably differ as to whether we believe most of our institutions are salvageable in their current form, but I think we largely agree as to where their root problems lie.
I certainly do not think these post-truth populists burning the institutions down is going to make things better, no. I think they might get us all killed and drive us to civil war or worse.
I know, I read your work. I just don't view them as worse than the post-truth leftists who've marched through our institutions and have been imposing their views on the rest of us for the last decade. Honestly, I see an authoritarian right rising against a soft-totalitarian left, and that left has been the driving force behind the changes that have been shattering our societies norms and destroying the neutrality of our institutions.
And since I don't see a side that is standing up for the "reasonable people who just want good government that adheres to America's founding principles and could have a conversation with an average person from the 1990's without that person thinking that they were a lunatic," I think we're all in the position where we have to choose what we view as the least bad option.
I must confess I think anyone who thinks Trump is "less bad" that Harris would have been, is sorely mistaken. Even taking on board on the faults of the technocratic center.
That's the thing. I don't view the "technocratic center" as being anywhere near the center anymore. They used to be, but that view is about 20 years out of date. The official institutional perspective of all of these "technocratic" organizations was wholly captured by the left. How many mandatory left coded trainings have people who work for institutions had to sit through regarding all sorts of issues? I've had more than my fair share, and my institution is probably the least captured. The right didn't fight back because it outwardly professed to believe in the neutrality of those institutions... which handicapped them while those institutions were being captured.
Trump first did this with the legacy media... he stopped deferring to them, recognizing that they had long since ceased being worthy of being deferred to as anything other than a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party establishment. This term he has been going after everyone else. The right is (finally) fighting back instead of just acquiescing. My issue with this? He isn't actually fixing problems... but then, Democrats refused to acknowledge that problems even exist. So I'm left with... least bad options.
From my perspective on a national level? The side that acknowledges that problems exist, doesn't talk down to me or scorn me for being a white male, won't discriminate against my children for being half-white and half-asian when it comes to college admissions, job applications etc, and won't form a mob to come after me online and try and get me fired in real life for expressing opinions that 15 years ago were completely uncontroversial is the "least bad" option. As far as international relations go (something I'm very much involved in, and have been for quite some time)? I think the US had a choice between managed decline or something radically different, and we are now doing radically different. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but my view is a lot more nuanced than the people saying, "but our allies!?"
Since I'm retiring from my first career soon and am looking across the country (and around the world) for places to live, at the local level? The party that I can be confident over the next 20 years will continue to enforce laws, support economic growth, allow development to keep housing available and cost of living low, prioritize parents in public schools and try and keep taxes as low as possible is where I'm looking at as far as states to live in. There are a number of red, and some purple, states that meet that criteria. There are no blue states that do.
The Democratic party has huge problems when it comes to governance. My view of national politics has been shaped by a lot of things outside of the country that I've seen. One of the most important was how it was easier to understand what the rules of conduct were living in an authoritarian country in 2020 than it was in America. But where to live is local. It amounts to trust in a party to govern... and a lot of Americans are voting with their feet right now, and so am I.
Roe vs Wade - I think it can be summed as technocratic change; i don't think the nation was taken on a journey by politicians (would / will it fail, yes many times!); instead it was punted by them to SC. Same with gay marriage. they should have been constitutionally or by legislature legalised; or live with a detente of varying state policy.
I've seen it happen in other countries (India); politicians punt difficult social questions to Courts or other institutions ill equipped to deal with the complex fabric of society.
I fear that if there is a way back from this cliff, the answer the liberal technocrats will take away from it is not that more democratic participation was necessary in crafting policy solutions in order to ensure people felt their voices were heard in the creation of the laws by which they must live, but rather that the people have proved they are too stupid to be trusted with their own governance and an enlightened aristocracy of philosopher-kings that is beyond democratic accountability (since democracy brought us figures like Donald Trump) is necessary to ensure that society runs optimally.
This is an argument that probably goes back to at least Plato: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/559
I shall respond to the feeling of despair here with a passage from one my mythopoetic pieces to capture how I think about how to orient myself against these despairing feelings:
"You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this fleeting moment of stillness—between the trapeze swings, beneath the roar of the crowd—this, my Note from the Circus.
Because love, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes coherence possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.
And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:
Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.
This is the Grand Praxis. This is the work of being human. This is the path that was established at the beginning of all things and remains open to us now, in this moment, as we face the challenges of our time not with despair or denial but with the courage to create.
Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. And in the constructing, we participate in the rhythm established by the first movement—the only movement—that makes all existence possible.
In the beginning, there was tension. And in every moment of creation, the beginning happens again." (https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-grand-praxis)
The most gut-rumbling danger of the intellectual arrogance you describe involves nuclear weapons, deterrence theory and their command and control systems. Technical expertise is an absolute necessity for obvious reasons, but then we immediately veer off into trying to prevent nuclear war by counting on fallible human beings operating in countries with wildly divergent political systems, histories and cultures to manage those differences indefinitely without someone, somewhere making one final miscalculation that extinguishes the human race within hours. You place a lot of faith in a spirit of cooperative adaptation in responding to unexpected events and new information but what should we do when confronting unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances?
If we confront an unforgiving complexity that allows for no second chances, then there will be no second chances, I suppose. If this game of civilization we are playing ends, it ends. But I intend to keep playing, and I know my orientation in the game.
Beautiful you have nailed the tail on the donkey, by distinguishing complicated from complex systems, as if more data centers will save of from the messy business of participatory democracy, and the hard work building our ear muscles to be able to listen to and get to know our neighbors regarding the issues that confront us all, especially where we live and breath in the watersheds and habitats of our local and regional lives!
It’s a well-crafted argument, so full marks for that. But it’s purely conceptual, based in part on questionable assertions, and with nary a connection to day-to-day reality, and so not very useful. “The technocratic liberal establishment promised that rational analysis could perfect democratic governance.” - ??? When, by whom, and if so, how exactly, with specific examples, was that promise implemented to the detriment of democratic governance?
The major error is the failure to connect the argument with any of the myriad specific events and trends of Western history in the last about 50 years that have so influenced individual voters as to lead to Trump 2.0 - Vietnam, Watergate, globalization, laws and policies favouring capital over labour, the 24-hour news cycle, 9/11 and the War on Terror, right-wing and social media degrading public discourse from thoughts to feels, the save-the-banks-not-the-people response to the Great Recession, COVID, the unregulated and pervasive power and influence of big tech, etc. My view is that human history proceeds along a path of events and their consequences rather than in response to analytical frameworks.
I mean, every time we talk about anything in society, we are using conceptual frameworks. The question is not whether what I said is conceptual, but whether or not it is coherent and has explanatory power. And I don't think any of your appeals to historical contingencies does any violence on my arguments against liberal technocracy. My arguments against liberal technocracy are not even completely novel. Other political philosophers (like my friend Vlad Vexler) are making similar interventions.
Many thanks for your further response. I haven’t spent a lot of time considering the present moment from the perspective of political philosophy, but, respectfully, it seems to me that asserting the primacy of destructive “liberal technocracy” (which I don’t really understand; is there an illiberal technocracy operating somewhere?) ignores for no good or helpful reason the root causes - the numerous distinct, tangible forces that directly influenced voters to bring us Trump 2.0. Frankly, experts aren’t even a force, they are just a delivery system.
On a different issue, although you don’t provide a ‘way forward’ from the problem, the implication seems to be that governance by non-expert is preferable. If so, does it please you to see that Trump 2.0 is running that experiment?
I am not saying technocratic thinking is the primary problem. Nor am I making a comprehensive statement about what we ought to do. I am critiquing a way of thinking that is predominant in elite liberal discourse. A lot of people are suggesting I'm saying it's the root cause of all of our ills, which is in fact, not a claim I'm making. In fact, if you take my argument fully on board here, I would suggest that it would be hypocritical for me to make such a claim. I certainly think there are many factors—and I write about them all the time.
Your observations about right-wing and reactionary propaganda are not wrong. I make these same observations in my writings on the regular. But I might observe that they are exploiting vulnerabilities of democratic dissatisfaction that elite technocracy has played into. Opaque bureaucracies and a sense that policymaking should be left to qualified experts, is fertile ground for populists to demagogue against.
Put another way, I'm getting from this that the analytical frame is self-absorbed in good faith, while remaining either willfully or stupidly ignorant of the history of bad faith. If things are going your way -- and "money doesn't talk, it swears" (Bob Dylan) -- you could be insulated from the bad faith that regular people have to deal with and which has been growing in complexity under profiteering algorithms of self-referential narcissists (see Bandy X. Lee). Those of us with plenty of serious business keeping food on the table and paying bills, rely on good faith and play along as the wealthy capitulate to extortion and other corruptions. Our need for community requires us to pool our time and experience, to share insights (thank you, Mike!), and to formulate ways out of this gas-bag of pseudo-democracy. We're still here, still humping, and still welcoming equal opportunity in the eyes of god and in the eyes of the law.
Fascinating reflection, even if the vessel required to navigate collectively through increasing complexity feels pretty broken about now, and taking on a lot of water.
This is an excellent description of our situation. And, as you say, the ground approaches.
Agree. CORRUPTION is the choreographer.
Thought provoking.
Thank you.
Mike. You lost me with the Covid bit. I so much appreciate what you inform me about.
Yes obviously pareto correct and I can't help but point out the view from nowhere should be properly attributed to nagel!
One of your recent analysis described the inevitably of Trump and Black Swan events would shape opportunities for those able to comprehend the occurrence. I agree with your thesis and watch to see what leadership emerges. Mandami in New York is one example and Gavin Newsome is another. Today California, Oregon, and Washington created a medical/health alliance to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our communities. New systems are emerging and naturally occurring opportunities of participation should begin to appear. Public education is another venue for the development of our young people to understand and create new systems to build upon. I’m hopeful 🤠🤠🤠