Matthew Parris, writes the following, in the course of pointing out what a total joke the UK government has become:
“The British electorate have an intuitive grasp of politics, but there’s one misunderstanding to which the generality is prone: to think driving a country would be like driving a car. Your eye would be constantly and intelligently on the road ahead; miss the brake, let your foot slip, jerk the wheel, or turn round to argue with the passengers, and you’d crash. The truth is different. As those who acquire power discover to their dismay, the controls are mushy and indirect, and the machine will run on, driverless, for some time. In the harsh light of experience, the illusion that a British Cabinet is in day-to-day control cracks.”
If it is true that the UK electorate think that a country is like a machine, with an engine, brakes, headlights, gearbox, controls and steering wheel, then that surely only demonstrates how far the poison of socialism, or what Hayek called constructivist rationalism, has seeped into the consciousness of said electorate. A country is not a single vehicle, which has been created by some single designer or set of designers, and which is designed to perform a specific purpose – such as take someone on a road from A to B. To think of a country in that way also begs the question about the choice of driver. We hope the driver will be safe, alert, and not take dangerous risks. The analogy is completely wrong. A country in fact is, as we should have learned from Michael Oakeshott, an association of persons who form certain common institutions and abide by certain laws and customs for the purpose of achieving their diverse ends.
There are many bad ideas that need to be shot down, and the “country-as-designed-machine” one is high on my hit-list.
There are two countries, one composed of the people and their interactions – the economy, society, families, individuals all doing there thing. Also there is the actual physical country, the earth, trees, climate, weather and so on. Both ‘systems’ are incredibly complex, and inherently non-understandable in a scientfic or engineering sense (deterministic chaos comes in here too).
The problem is the arrogance of some people in thinking that such systems can be modelled and controlled in a sensible way. Scientists and engineers know that even human built systems have emergent and unpredictable behaviour – so the existing systems that make up the country (or rather the world) in terms of both humanity and the environment cannot be modelled, or controlled. Perhaps some prediction is possible but only in a very uncertain sense, and only really for the weather (which isn’t sentient and doesn’t have a form of free will which would allow it to go off and do its own thing on a whim (yes I know there is some discussion to be had about human free will)).
This arrogance – that the systems are just a machine and can be controlled – require that the elements in these machines (the people) must be reduced to machine parts to be controlled totally. This is necessary for the arrogant would-be controllers of all to enact their imaginary control. Hence we have the socialist need to totally control everyone lives, and the environmentalist need to invent their levers to control the climate.
Ultimatly it is of course futile. The ‘system’ of the climate is too big and too complex to be affected in any meaningful or predictable way by human action. The ‘system’ of the economy and society is not controllable even if you (try to) control the individual elements (people). To feed their arrogant egos, to let them play out the fantasy of small gods controlling these big systems, misery is enacted upon people all in the guise of a pretend good cause.
Hanlon’s razor states that one should not attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetance (or a similar statement), but this is wilful incompetance on such a large scale that one does suspect some element of malice.
I don’t think you can blame socialism-as-we-know-it for that particular fallacy. The phrase ‘the ship of state’ comes to mind. That a rationalist totalitarian like Plato should have coined the metaphor came as small surprise when I looked it up – but the fact that it’s been a cliché around these parts for as long as it has, suggests this sort of thinking is pretty deeply rooted in our culture.
It’s as old and ingrained as the idea that ‘we’ need ‘someone at the helm’. Although I agree that the shift from “Mind the wind! Keep us off those rocks!” to “Make a hard left at the third junction and proceed down Queer Street at twenty-nine miles an hour,” does bring a new and shiny level of hubris to the conceit…
I had the exact same thought: at least those who used the ‘ship’ metaphor had the sense to implicitly acknowledge that there exist forces beyond their control, like the wind and the rocks, and, I don’t know, the sun?
…but arrogance invites both.
I hate the use of terms such as “the Prime Minister should get on with running the country”, as if he’s our dad. He might try to run his disfunctional and kleptocratic government, badly, but the “country” runs itself, all the better when politicians keep their noses out.
Sounds more like aviation. The dirty little secret of flying is that aeroplanes actually fly themselves very well for long periods of time with just the slightest nudge here and there by the pilot.
Was a piece on TCS daily earlier this year along similar lines, but focused more on the economy rather than the country as a whole.
Sadly the majority of people still think all it takes is for the ‘right’ person (i.e. the ome they support) to be in charge and all will be right with the world
Politicians don’t “drive” a country as one “drives” a car, but as drovers “drive” a herd of cattle.
One of the worst common forms of words is that the government should “run the country” (as in “how will you run the country” and so on).
It is a form of words for exactly what government should NOT be doing.
It is not a matter of whether the “controls” are exact or “mushy” – governments should not “run” countries.
“a wise a frugal government, that will restain men from injuring each other, but will leave them otherwise free to further their own industry and improvment”.
We have moved a long way from the Jeffersonian aim – although even John Dewey (the arch Progressive) came to believe in it in his later years.