Politics and Monomyths

We live in a world of stories.

As I described on my other blog, these stories come in many levels. We constantly tell ourselves stories about who we are, where we are going, why we are here. It's how things make sense to us, as part of some broader story--and when the link between our story and the story of those around us breaks, it can be profoundly isolating.

In part, that's because we write our own stories alternatingly as part of and in opposition to the broader supernarrative of our societies.

All societies have such supernarratives. They influence the tales we tell our children before bedtime. They drive career decisions, affect relationships, and structure institutions and laws.

These supernarratives--called monomyths--did not rise with mass media. Rather, they have existed since literally the beginning of recorded language (and perhaps before; I don't claim to know how cavepeople interpreted their paintings).

Ultimately, these monomyths help us crystallize our ideal citizens, encapsulating in a single person the values, hopes, and aspirations of the society. By describing our heroes, we learn what we believe, even if we cannot live up to our own ideals.

The classical monomyth, as put by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, runs as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The hero, after completing his mythic task, then typically stays in the community to lead them in a new, elevated state. Think Odysseus (Ulysses, for you Latin readers), Heracles (Hercules), and Jason.

More generally, the basic model is: a hero leaves his community, goes to some other place (physical or otherwise) to combat an enemy or an obstacle, and returns after winning in order to bring back benefits to the original community, wherein he is an important figure because of his actions. Star Wars follows this pattern; so do many Disney movies, such as Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.

However, there is an alternative, more recently developed supernarrative that pervades American culture. I think of it as derived primarily from the Christian Bible, wherein Jesus emerges from within the Jewish people to save them (and, as Christianity spread, humanity) from their sins, and then disappears.

John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett describe the American monomyth thus:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with the threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

If you prefer another referent, you can look no further than pretty much every comic superhero ever: Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Catwoman, Captain America. Or movies: The Matrix, anything with John Wayne or James Bond (British, to be sure, but as Americanized in movies as they come), Gladiator, Ripley in Aliens, even Men in Black. I invite you to go down this list and see how many heroes fit the archetype.

In fact, I'd say 300 is the American monomyth (I will call it that, instead of Christian, as I did not invent it) intersecting with a classical foundation. The heroes go out from their community to face an external threat, but they end up sacrificing themselves (in Christian fashion?) and leaving it to others to complete the classical cycle.

I add only this slight twist: the American hero must remain, throughout the story, in some way apart from the community he is saving, because the threat usually has some insidious and/or internal component. He must be of the community in one way, yet distinct in order to defeat the threat.

We can see examples of this narrative pervading political discourse, particularly in the last few years. Certainly, some of President Obama's more zealous supporters make him seem like such a hero--but then, was not George W. Bush seen much the same, as an outsider coming in to reform the system for a few years and then retire to his ranch?

Perhaps more interestingly, we can see the same narrative in the present political opposition, with Tea Partiers and the like thinking of themselves as living in that community under threat.

Where does this leave Nietzsche's rejection of Christianity as unbefitting the great-souled man? How can we reconcile this picture of American idealism with Randian classical heroes?

Might the next century see a reversion to the classical monomyth, due to the massive collective action problems we face? Or might we need to forge a new one to deal with the tensions between individual identity and social existence wrought by technology?

Gear up. We've barely finished Chapter 1.

On the Need for Greed

Greed is not good. There, I said it.

At least, it's not good alone. Greed, in combination with a strong sense of fair play, can be very good. It's the latter part that was and is missing from the Madoffs of this world.

We learn early in microeconomics that individual agents acting in their strict self-interest will under certain conditions produce Pareto-efficient outcomes. Among the necessary conditions are a lack of force or fraud in the exchange relationships; eliminating those factors is a serious problem for real-world governments.

But there is a deeper issue: Pareto-efficiency is not equal to welfare-maximization. This has long been an open question in ethics, whether decreases in some people's welfare can be traded for a larger increase distributed across the population. Utilitarians say yes; Lockeans say no. I think both could agree, however, that we would be willing to set the laws such that those whose greed leads them to attempt to circumvent the system will be stymied.

If people believe in fair play (or if laws induce people to act as if they believe in fair play), then pure, unadulterated greed could actually cause the world's Madoffs to produce useful things for society in order to fulfill their desires. Otherwise, we are rewarding cleverness for its own sake-- at our own expense.

On the need for safety nets

If another person commits to work toward the common good of my polity, I have a duty to ensure he doesn't starve, has a place to live, and has a shirt on his back.

Unless redistribution toward the poor actually would destroy the economy--not just slow down, not just "stagnate," but actually fall apart--we have a responsibility to ensure these things for anybody who tries to hold up his/her end of the bargain.

Otherwise, we are forgetting that money provides the tools but not the substance of living, as Aristotle says. If my pursuit of money is only possible by making others live in poverty while willing to work, it is not worth it. If I have extra tools and somebody else does not, I can be happy with less while he cannot be happy without more.

The state, to be properly called such, lets us focus not on living but on living well. All of us.

The time-cost of political participation

When we evaluate the governments of ancient states, we need to remember that they drew their leaders from the set of people who had free time.

If a lot of people can take time off from plowing while not starving, then democracy may be possible. Athens, with its moderate climate and fertile soil, provides a solid example. On the other hand, as Jared Diamond notes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, if a leader can easily deprive her enemies of resources, it's easier to maintain a monarchy, as in Egypt.

To evaluate a government, we first have to examine the empirical conditions under which that government existed. Then, out of that feasible set, we can rank the existing government against the others.

In a more modern context, we should consider ways to minimize the (time) cost of acquiring information about government so that we can maximize citizens' effective free time and make our government more participatory. Many commentators have said that Americans just don't care; I think it has as much to do with the complexity of the subject matter as anything. When you have to dig deep into the Department of Labor website to find anything of value--and when the responses are as useful as

Question: How many hours is full-time employment? How many hours is part-time employment?

Answer: The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not define full-time employment or part-time employment. This is a matter generally to be determined by the employer. Whether an employee is considered full-time or part-time does not change the application of the FLSA.

then it's not surprising that nobody knows or cares what goes on in government until it's directly relevant to their lives.

President Obama showed during his campaign that people want to believe, want to participate, want to be part of the national mission. We just need to make it easier.

To the stars

As political entities grow, from individual to household to city to country and beyond, their goals expand in parallel.

Aristotle notes in the Politics that at the level of the city (polis), the smallest self-sufficient entity existing in his day, the citizens ought to be truly united in pursuit of their common goal of promoting the good life.

Perhaps the city could self-sufficiently pursue the good life in his day. With the advent of nuclear weapons (at the latest), this dynamic changed: we no longer can be secure in our pursuit of the good life without engaging in some kind of multi-city strategic alliance--typically a country.

In fact, even beyond the security requirement, the challenges of today require greater common effort to solve. Ultimately, unless we're comfortable with individual countries establishing colonies in space to the exclusion of others, the effort to move off-world will require some unified planning. Thus, we have to take a broader view of our "fellow-citizens" than Aristotle did.

No longer can we simply be citizens of a city or a country. The future lies in recognizing our common humanity.

Setting the bar

Your average happiness throughout your life is determined in your first few years.

Major events can move the needle a little this way or that, but in general, you're stuck. This can be a positive thing, if you happen to have a high baseline happiness. Or it can be quite negative, if you have to experience a major event just to qualify as "happy."

This effect highlights the necessity of involved parenting in the early years. If a parent can convince a child that the world is fundamentally a place in which to be happy, that positive things can and do happen to people who try hard, and that happiness is an internally-determined quality, you're setting them up with a high baseline.

Otherwise, they will have to rely on good uncertainty.

Good uncertainty

Anything can be boring.

In an important way, success is only success because of the possibility of failure. Winning a prize means nothing if you cannot lose. Discovery, progress, and health are so wonderful in large part because we understand and have seen the lack of each. Anything can be taken for granted.

Eliezer writes,

What we need to maintain our interest in life, is a justified expectation of pleasant surprises.

The hardest part about that goal is that expectations are justified only by experience, so that if your life has had few pleasant surprises so far, it's hard to perceive the world that way. However, for those whose lives have had substantial pleasant surprises mixed in with the normal trials of life, this expectation seems rather reasonable.

The key, however, is the uncertainty. If the events weren't surprises, they would still probably be pleasant (though perhaps impatience would diminish or eliminate the benefit), but not quite the same.

That's why taking risks is so important. Without them, we can and will see only small changes in our happiness over time. The spikes of unexpected success--particularly when contrasted with the troughs of temporary failure--constitute a memorable life.

Monopolistic energy

Is energy the ultimate natural monopoly?

In the short term, the answer is clearly no: there are many methods of producing electricity, for instance, and none of them necessarily benefit from the natural monopolistic arrangement.

But long-term, when we've stopped using coal and even are depleting our nuclear supplies, when we've tapped the major sources of hydro power and wind power, etc... is solar power best produced in a monopolistic setting?

While many natural monopolies come from distribution issues (water) or public goods (defense), the solar monopoly would be due to the vast differences in geography between high-quality and low-quality sites. The middle of the Arizona desert, I'm told, is a fantastic place to collect solar energy; Seattle, not as much.

In fact, in the real long-term, solar panels may need to be either placed in space or covering a substantial fraction of the Earth's surface. In either case, the defense requirements of the arrangement are such that it may be impracticable for private companies to support the whole grid.

Perhaps this can be the issue that the world unites behind as the 21st century progresses.

The development of polities

With the kinds of problems now facing the international community, we may be forced to return to a conception of political life more like Aristotle's.

In ancient eras, the formation of political organizations was something of a necessity for survival. A family might be able to produce sufficient food to live, but only by working toward that as a common goal. However, since production was largely a mechanical task that took labor and land as essentially its only inputs, slaves could perform the same functions for greater profits. As families and tribes grew, it became easier for them to subjugate other families and tribes.

Military power also had increasing returns to scale, up to a point. As a community grew larger, it wasn't just able to produce more soldiers but was actually able to field a more effective army per person, due to the technology of the time. Two hoplites were more than twice as effective as an individual hoplite, because they could maneuver, attack from multiple angles, and outflank the enemy; bigger armies usually won, and so empires that could field them grew rapidly. Survival, then, depended on being allied with the right group and focused on maintaining the existence of that group (including being willing to fight for it).

After the fall of the Roman Empire, technology began to dominate on the battlefield. The improved lethality of horsemen (with the invention and adoption of the stirrup) and the development of increasingly easy-to-use distance weapons such as the crossbow meant that armies now had to field higher levels of technology per person rather than simply putting as many swords as possible in a line.

This change in the nature of warfare may have had a hand in the changing political situation. The dominant political units after the Roman Empire were no longer vast territory-holding dominions but usually lordships bound loosely together in times of great need. Peasants had little ability to choose their polity, and there were fewer major empire-empire wars, so there was comparatively little feeling of national or political unity. Survival no longer depended on whether each individual committed him- or herself to the common project.

I'd suggest that this has reversed again in modern society. Many of the problems we now face--global warming is a signal example, but more broadly the collapse of the financial system or the potential of epidemics--require massive joint efforts to attack. We may not be worried about survival because we can make plenty of food. But perhaps we should be worried about the potential effect of these other disasters, many of which are man-made.

Are we willing to throw ourselves into the common project of humanity?

Election after election after...

One of the downsides of democracy is the elections.

They take up time, money, and other resources (including attention). And they don't even necessarily produce the optimal results.

Leaders seem to spend as much time preparing for elections as leading.

But for all those negatives, would you really rather have anything else?

Where are the necessary inefficiencies in your life?

Beyond Dilemmas

It can be hard to think in terms of infinite possibilities.

Hell, it can be hard to think about 100 options simultaneously. What's the highest number of reasonably simple options you can consciously consider at the same time? 50? 20? 10? 5?

For most policy decisions, I'd say we tend to think in terms of two choices at a time. Do we cut down this forest, or do we not? Do we make gay marriage legal or not? Do we X, or not?

Sometimes, if we're really ambitious, we might consider three choices. Do we raise interest rates, lower interest rates, or keep them the same?

But even for situations where we are considering only two options, we have to recognize that there are usually near-infinite implicit options. The key is timing.

Let's say we have two potential policies, X and Y. X will provide benefits of $100/year for 100 years, and Y will provide $3000 the year it is implemented, but will never allow X to be implemented thereafter nor provide any benefit after the first year.

For a discount rate of 3%, the present value of X is ~$3255 and of Y is $3000. If we treat these as the only two options, then we would clearly go with X.

But those aren't the only two options. After 30 years of implementing X, the discounted value of the 70 years remaining under X is less than $3000. So to maximize the benefits of our policies, we should run X for 30 years and then do Y.

If you imagine that X is "preserving a natural resource" and Y is "harvesting that resource" (where the resource will naturally disappear even under X in 100 years), this may be more clear.

The point is that we shouldn't think of policies as being unchangeable--indeed, taking into account the incentives of future policymakers should be an important step in major decision-making (RAND has a freely downloadable monograph on the subject here).

How can time play into your decisions?

Unintended Positive Consequences

To paraphrase a midterm question from Economics of Law last quarter:

If judges decide cases by flipping a coin, should we expect the law to tend toward efficiency?

I said yes, that the law would tend towards efficiency by the principle behind stare decisis, that people would adapt their lives to the predictable environment created by the law and thereby improve social welfare.

This response, while perhaps interesting in its own right, fails to answer the more basic question of whether the law becomes more efficient over time under these conditions. The correct response was "yes, because cases brought to court will tend to be produced by socially inefficient arrangements, so even random decision-making will slowly resolve social inefficiencies."

It's not that I had simply been wrong; I wasn't even thinking of the problem in an open enough frame of mind.

I had essentially taken the status quo and asked how the system would respond to this impulse. The question was looking for an analysis of the parameters of the system, not its evolution.

In determining questions of public policy, we have to remain similarly open to this kind of analysis, lest we fall prey to the Lucas critique. Too often we assume that the lack of a central decision-maker is a problem.

Spaceport America

The world finally will have a spaceport.

I'll discuss in future posts why I think it so important that humans develop extra-planetary colonies. For now, let's just say I think it should be one of the highest priorities for the world over the next hundred years.

The details are somewhat more complicated than that assertion makes it sound. This spaceport project is an important step, allowing commercial ventures to make progress in an area thoroughly dominated by government. While government ventures are going to be integral to any colonization program--I find it pretty unlikely that governments are going to allow the monopolization of a planet--private corporations have stronger and more consistent incentives to promote space travel.

The real problem in the near-term is how property rights should be allocated in space--and by whom. As in Antarctica, there isn't yet an "owner" of space, and therefore it's a nontrivial problem to distribute or acquire rights. An international organization set up to manage such issues would have a great deal of power over the next major step for civilization, so the politics involved may be difficult to resolve in the near term.

The best we have so far is the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. You tell me: does that look robust or empowered enough to handle the vast and varied needs of our future in space?

Starting and Ending with a Resolution

This is my resolution: to post once daily on this blog for at least the entire year.

This blog is about ideas. Not all will originate with me--indeed, I expect that I'll base the majority of these posts on a theme someone else brought to my attention. However, I will do my best to make an interesting, original contribution.

If you have any suggestions for topics, want to comment on a post, or would like to get in touch with me for any reason, you can reach me at cmilroy[at]uchicago.edu or chris.milroy[at]gmail.com.

365 posts. That should be quite the journey. It might be the biggest project I've ever undertaken.

We'll see what the resolution will be.