Politics as Error Correction

The day after my mom died, I somehow wound up discussing political philosophy with an Uber driver.

I don’t remember how we got there, exactly. Grief does strange things to the normal ordering of conversations. But I remember telling him that I thought society genuinely needed both conservatives and liberals, because they serve different functions.

Not parties. Not campaign slogans. I mean the underlying temperaments.

Genuine conservatism, at its core, is something like: “It’s worked this way for a long time. Maybe we should be careful before changing it.”

That isn’t stupidity. In fact, it’s often wisdom.

Institutions, traditions, customs, even laws can survive for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious. Sometimes the person who wants to tear something down understands exactly what it does. Sometimes he understands about fifteen percent of what it does and is about to discover the other eighty-five percent experimentally.

That is the conservative blind spot in reverse: sometimes something has lasted a long time because it works, and sometimes it has lasted a long time because no one had enough power to change it.

This is where the left becomes necessary.

Unfortunately.

Somebody has to ask why we are still doing something merely because we have always done it that way. Sometimes tradition is accumulated wisdom. Sometimes it is accumulated stupidity.

Jonathan Haidt did a better job than most people of explaining why the political left and right so often seem incomprehensible to one another. They are not merely arriving at different answers. They are often noticing different moral problems in the first place.

One side is more likely to ask, “Who is being harmed by this?”

The other is more likely to ask, “What happens if we dismantle this?”

Both questions matter.

Living in California makes the blind spots particularly easy to see. When one political philosophy becomes dominant enough, its assumptions stop feeling like assumptions. They become background reality. Objections are no longer treated as competing concerns. They start sounding immoral or incomprehensible.

That is where ideology becomes dangerous.

Not necessarily because the underlying values are bad, but because every ideology has things it sees clearly and things it is remarkably good at not seeing at all.

Which, oddly enough, brings me back to HAL 9000.

HAL was not simply an evil computer. HAL was given conflicting directives and expected to reconcile them.

Humans do this constantly with ethics.

We value equality, freedom, fairness, compassion, public safety, privacy, due process, tradition, social cohesion, and individual autonomy.

Wonderful.

Until two of them point in opposite directions.

Then things get interesting.

People like to pretend ethics are fixed, but societies revise their moral assumptions constantly in response to circumstances. Practices that once seemed necessary later look barbaric. Things once considered immoral become ordinary. Technology changes. Scarcity changes. Demographics change. Material conditions change.

And eventually the moral arguments change with them.

That is one reason the birth rate bothers me.

Not because I think low fertility means we wake up next Tuesday in The Handmaid’s Tale. That is not how trajectories work.

The end result of falling off a cliff may be death. That does not mean you died the moment your foot left the edge.

The problem is the direction of travel.

A society with fewer workers supporting more retirees eventually has to make choices. Hopefully productivity, automation, immigration, later retirement, or some combination of those things absorbs most of the strain.

But if they do not, the questions become less comfortable.

What does society owe the elderly?

What do younger people owe society?

At what point does having children stop being treated entirely as a private choice and start being framed as a social obligation?

Hopefully killing old people and mandatory rape remain safely confined to the category of Things Civilization Should Never Try. I would personally appreciate civilization maintaining that particular standard for at least the remainder of my lifetime.

But history makes me suspicious of statements beginning with, “People would never…”

People would.

People have.

The more interesting question is what pressures cause a society to redefine what it considers acceptable.

And this is why I keep coming back to the idea that political opposition is not necessarily a defect in the system.

It may be part of the correction mechanism.

Conservatives notice some failure modes liberals miss. Liberals notice some failure modes conservatives miss.

That does not mean both sides are equally right about everything. Sometimes a policy is simply stupid. Sometimes a factual claim is false. Sometimes somebody is just an asshole with a microphone.

But a healthy society probably needs people asking both questions:

“What are we refusing to fix?”

and

“What are we about to break?”

A society that only knows how to preserve eventually becomes incapable of correcting itself.

A society that only knows how to reform eventually discovers why some of the things it dismantled existed in the first place.

Usually shortly after dismantling them.