Here, I offer praise for sitting back and doing nothing.* [ * Based on: “In Praise of Passivity,” Studia Humana 1 (2012): 12-28. ] 1. Medieval Doctors At the end of his life, George Washington developed an infection of the epiglottis of his throat, a rare and potentially life-threatening condition. He received the best medical attention available. The doctors applied “the proper remedies”, which in this case included five episodes of bloodletting that drained half of his blood. Somehow, this didn’t work. He died shortly thereafter. Needless to say, the “treatments” he received either had no effect or actually hastened the end.
I find all of them persuasive, except point 4.1 about not voting. It overlooks that you’re not necessarily just picking policies to impose on someone, but you’re potentially picking someone who would impose LESS. This might not be super clear between say Biden and Trump, but many times it’s very clear, especially when one party/candidate is pushing socialism or worse.
By analogy, saying not to vote is a bit like telling one of ailing George Washington’s extended family not to help choose a doctor, because doctors are bad. But the better advice may be to help him pick a more chill doctor rather than one of the aggressive drain-half-your-blood ones (as there’s no hope of convincing him to not have one at all.)
(The feebleness of the act differs across the analogy scenarios, but I don’t think that is relevant to the point.)
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether political "passivity" -- i.e. pursuing selfish cultural pursuits instead of fighting in politics -- may, counterintuitively, have a large positive cultural impact. This is applying Adam Smith's invisible hand point about economics to culture. Perhaps selfishly enacting "freedom-oriented" culture in one's own life (e.g. going to the gun range, hunting, boating, etc.) has a much larger societal impact.
Voting isn't what it used to be certainly. In the liberal democracies we set great store by our pluralist party politics and such is the obsessive media coverage of its gladiatorial contests between elected politicians that it can appear to represent more or less the whole story of how we are governed. Whereas in truth it very much depends on which party is ‘in power’. Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Great post. Our laws certainly suffer from error costs as a result of voting. And encouraging people to vote, producing excessive voting, raises these costs. But there is still value in "some" votes over others.
If (1) democracy is valuable for crowdsourcing information to create better informed policy, (2) votes can be informed (signal) or misinformed (noise), and (3) better policies can be produced by a better informed/misinformed vote ratio, then (4) we'd want to encourage informed votes and discourage misinformed votes.
Fantastic, very well said. Personally I’ve always found the epistemic humility arguments for limited government the most persuasive and you did a great job distilling the argument.
SDo we live in a republic, oligarchy, or confederacy? If we are using ordinary language, it could be all three. Rome had a republic that was highly oligarchic. Plato wrote about a republic that would probably be a dictatorship, at best an oligarchy. Switzerland is a confederacy, aren’t they? They are different from the US in important ways, but ...
I don’t see republic and oligarchy as mutually exclusive, and though no one would use the word “confederacy” (unfortunate associations?), the writers of the constitution tried to implement federalism; and before the constitution was ratified, there were the articles of confederation.
If you maintain a truly representative government, the representatives should be required to have reasonable expertise in government. What we have today in America seems far from that.
“It would be better if the constitution prohibited the government from intervening in more areas — and thereby removed those areas from democratic control. “
This assumes that our politics is democratic, and the alternatives are not. Alright, it uses the term in a way that it is often used, and mostly conveys a meaning. But I think the terminology blunts the point a bit. People are still in charge when politics isn't, and often much more so. Democracy can be monolithic, or it can be pluralistic. Our way or the highway, vs. do what you will.
Very interesting post!
I find all of them persuasive, except point 4.1 about not voting. It overlooks that you’re not necessarily just picking policies to impose on someone, but you’re potentially picking someone who would impose LESS. This might not be super clear between say Biden and Trump, but many times it’s very clear, especially when one party/candidate is pushing socialism or worse.
By analogy, saying not to vote is a bit like telling one of ailing George Washington’s extended family not to help choose a doctor, because doctors are bad. But the better advice may be to help him pick a more chill doctor rather than one of the aggressive drain-half-your-blood ones (as there’s no hope of convincing him to not have one at all.)
(The feebleness of the act differs across the analogy scenarios, but I don’t think that is relevant to the point.)
Those AI images are creepy!
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether political "passivity" -- i.e. pursuing selfish cultural pursuits instead of fighting in politics -- may, counterintuitively, have a large positive cultural impact. This is applying Adam Smith's invisible hand point about economics to culture. Perhaps selfishly enacting "freedom-oriented" culture in one's own life (e.g. going to the gun range, hunting, boating, etc.) has a much larger societal impact.
Voting isn't what it used to be certainly. In the liberal democracies we set great store by our pluralist party politics and such is the obsessive media coverage of its gladiatorial contests between elected politicians that it can appear to represent more or less the whole story of how we are governed. Whereas in truth it very much depends on which party is ‘in power’. Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Great post. Our laws certainly suffer from error costs as a result of voting. And encouraging people to vote, producing excessive voting, raises these costs. But there is still value in "some" votes over others.
If (1) democracy is valuable for crowdsourcing information to create better informed policy, (2) votes can be informed (signal) or misinformed (noise), and (3) better policies can be produced by a better informed/misinformed vote ratio, then (4) we'd want to encourage informed votes and discourage misinformed votes.
I believe this may be accomplished by compensating non-voters (essentially subsidize passivity), as I argue for here: https://neonomos.substack.com/p/let-the-government-buy-your-vote
Fantastic, very well said. Personally I’ve always found the epistemic humility arguments for limited government the most persuasive and you did a great job distilling the argument.
SDo we live in a republic, oligarchy, or confederacy? If we are using ordinary language, it could be all three. Rome had a republic that was highly oligarchic. Plato wrote about a republic that would probably be a dictatorship, at best an oligarchy. Switzerland is a confederacy, aren’t they? They are different from the US in important ways, but ...
I don’t see republic and oligarchy as mutually exclusive, and though no one would use the word “confederacy” (unfortunate associations?), the writers of the constitution tried to implement federalism; and before the constitution was ratified, there were the articles of confederation.
So that one was a trick question.
If you maintain a truly representative government, the representatives should be required to have reasonable expertise in government. What we have today in America seems far from that.
Your approach makes me think of Walter Block's book Defending the Undefendable.
“It would be better if the constitution prohibited the government from intervening in more areas — and thereby removed those areas from democratic control. “
This assumes that our politics is democratic, and the alternatives are not. Alright, it uses the term in a way that it is often used, and mostly conveys a meaning. But I think the terminology blunts the point a bit. People are still in charge when politics isn't, and often much more so. Democracy can be monolithic, or it can be pluralistic. Our way or the highway, vs. do what you will.