gdcritter: Reflecting on You Are Not Alone

Bill Whittle has another of his too-infrequent essays out. This one is You Are Not Alone, and in it he takes you through his analysis to demonstrate the conditions under which becoming a barbarian is the rational choice. His examples include explanation of why the "broken windows syndrome" works and effective means of destroying respect for law by convincing the society that laws are for chumps. Along the way he notes that

Everything the West has achieved — all the science, prosperity, security and freedom — is based upon the free exchange of ideas. We tolerate offensive ideas so that this free exchange of information may continue. Disagreement is the crucible of wisdom. The price we pay for this cooperation is the daily offense we suffer at the exposure to ideas we find distasteful.

There's a critical insight here. Look back over history and, to the degree you can, see where the societies had more freedom (particularly freedom of expression) and where they made more progress and created more prosperity. Such a review may be skewed by the fact that, across the distance of history, we are more able to see ideological ferment than ideological freedom, though the latter does not imply the former. But even with that limitation, the correlation is striking. Freedom of speech is not just an important freedom — it is mankind's most important freedom. That's probably why that is the freedom most constantly under attack (as this exemplifies) around the world by all those who want to be in control.

One fascinating thought that appears at points in the essay is that a key, critical difference between a society that we would call modern & civilized and one that we would call backward & barbarian is one that is not easily apparent. It is simply whether the society's dominant viewpoint is short-term or long-term. If the society takes a short-term view, it will follow strategies for immediate gains even if the gains they produce are small, and even if those strategies prevent long-term success. That is not a fault — given those societies' conditions, it is the rational choice. To make larger (and faster) progress the society has to cross a threshold, achieve a critical mass, so that it has the luxury of (and can see the value of) taking a long-term viewpoint. As a result, we make things with greater permanence. Bridges are engineered rather than just built, and last many years instead of a season or two. (This is Whittle's example, from The Bridge Over the River Kwai.) Architects plan every detail of buildings before construction begins. (Think of the World Trade Center. This process sometimes becomes somewhat iterative, as seems to have been the case with the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona.) And we're now applying that same sort of architecture and planning process to computer software development, now that we're coming to expect longer-term software performance.

Some of these examples suggest the transition from short-term to long-term viewpoints does not necessarily affect an entire society. We are told, for example, that most of Egyptian society was functioning at a near-subsistence level in the time of the pharoahs, yet that society built the pyramids and temples Egypt is so famous for. Same thing for medieval Europe and its cathedrals. It may be said, though, that these are the societies that showed the way — the ones that had made enough progress to enable some groups of people the luxury of longer-range thinking, and the necessary supporting luxury of not having to spend most of one's time working at getting the next meal. Even so, it still seems the quantum leap necessary for a society to begin making exponential progress is the shift from short-range to long-range thinking by the society as a whole. Or, as Bill Whittle puts it,

nice, forgiving and non-envious [arising from a long-range viewpoint] are advanced strategies that require a topsoil of general goodwill, trust, and respect for the rule of law.
Societies that embrace these qualities will always out-compete those that don’t.

And all that is just the set-up for the rest of Bill Whittle's essay. The best I can say about that is go read the whole thing. And think about it.

For explanatory purposes here, though, let me continue on with a related thing or two. If you take Bill Whittle's essay and put names to the active proponents of the short-term and long-term strategies in today's world, and flesh out the concepts with current world events, you get something like Melanie Phillips' essay Liberalism vs. Islamism. To avoid misunderstandings, here are the definitions she uses:

Islamism - "the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam."
Liberalism - "the commitment to a free society ... from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law."

On the first definition, she says "I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have." On the second, I woud note that her definition is what others have called classic liberalism.

Phillips sees Liberalism and Islamism, so defined, as being in a death struggle — though many twist their logic into pretzels trying to deny it. And so she asks and answers a key question:

Why is a liberal society so reluctant to defend its own most cherished values of freedom and tolerance? The answer, I suggest, lies both in the intrinsic nature of liberalism — and also in what I would call our dominant culture of corrupted liberalism, in which true liberal values have actually been turned on their heads.

Essentially, she is saying we have been changing from a liberal society to a "liberal" one, to a society that still has the right words but has lost (or is losing) their substance. That is the same issue Bill Whittle was writing about in his essay — and the same one that (with Whittle's essays for inspiration) has made me write this one.

Is this a problem? Definitely. Can we recover? Absolutely. The only question is how and when (and under what conditions) we choose to do so. That is what You Are Not Alone is really all about. And that's another reason why I remain optimistic. I agree with Bill Whittle: