This chapter introduced Fred Brooks, star project manager. In the course of his work managing software projects, he developed a highly non-standard worldview. When a liberal economist detected the spreading political influence of Brooks’s ideas, he read it as radical leftism. As such, he rejected the rumors out of hand.
The Alienated…
Notice something shocking about this picture. Brooks, the originator of this worldview, was not a radical−or even a liberal. He was a card-carrying Republican: a pillar of the party kind of guy. His natural politics was far to the right of the liberal economist who recoiled from reports of his influence.
His political shift came about only because of his struggles with new technology. That experience shifted him left—or in some direction vaguely left-like. But given Brooks’s natural political inclinations, the force motivating that shift couldn’t have come from inside himself. Instead, Brooks was carried along by something technology “wanted.” And, as I have argued before, when technology seems to “want,” we should worry.
Why worry? Well, now we have an archetype, we might ask our questions about him specifically. How did the effect of technology shift his politics? It did not lead him to change parties. Nor did he become an activist. Instead, it made him alienated. He effectively withdrew, both intellectually and politically.
Anyone with historical memory should view this observation with terror. A recent article “How America Ends” observes: “the fate of democracy lies in the hands of conservatives. Where the center-right flourishes, it can defend the interests of its adherents, starving more radical movements of support.”
When conservative centrists like Fred Brooks become politically alienated, then their party weakens. In previous cases of political disintegration, “where center-right parties faltered, ‘not their strength, but rather their weakness’ became the driving force behind democracy’s collapse.” [TODO: reference How Democracy Ends]
Conservatives’ Demands
In other words, when someone like Fred Brooks is politically active, his party will nominate rational conservative centrists. But when he becomes discouraged, he draws away from political participation. Then he won’t influence nominating process at all. As a result, his party will nominate the candidate chosen by those further right.
Ultimately, he’ll vote for that far-right candidate. He might not hold any affection for their fulminations. But he likes the left wing offerings even less. He’s bitter about what he sees as the northeastern elite’s disrespect for “thoughtful practitioners.” And someone who taught Sunday school class in a conservative church for twenty years isn’t going to vote for a secular cultural liberal. Not even if the fate of democracy is on the line.
That makes it critically important for the health of democracy that those such as Brooks can find candidates who represent their concerns.
Are Strange…
Recently, worried liberals have sought to understand the disintegration of the Republican Party. To that end, they interview its most enthusiastic supporters. But this has proved to be an exercise in frustration. Krugman points out that many of the purveyors of right-wing craziness also sell fake medicine: “Indeed, right-wing extremism isn’t just an ideological movement that happens to get a lot of money from sellers of snake oil; some of its extremism can probably be seen not as a reflection of deep conviction, but as a way of promoting snake oil.”
In other words, about a quarter of the population is simply gullible. And it is profitable to sell them easy nonsense. There isn’t much more to say than that. There is no guidance to be found from their perspective. All we learn is that some people like easy nonsense. This is no revelation.
That raises a question: why does our political system ever work? Why don’t snake oil salesman run everything, all the time? The completely gullible may make up a sizable portion of the population. But not a big enough chunk to take over all by themselves.
In better times, there are centrists conservatives with true convictions. The gullible right wing has the saving grace of being fairly suggestible. They will go along with the decisive centrist conservatives—as long as there are any. If Fred Brooks had political representation that matched his predilections, those to his right would vote for whomever he voted. But if the only people with any convictions are left-of-center intellectuals, then the whole system becomes unmoored. Leftists can’t hold the wheel all on their own.
There are reporters fanning out to talk to people who might explain the disintegration of the system. But they are looking in the wrong places. They aren’t hearing the dog that doesn’t bark. It isn’t the exercised extremists who matter. It is the alienated centrists.
To correct this difficulty, this tale has chosen one to be our icon. That gives us a goal: to imagine the politics which would please a “thoughtful practitioner” like Brooks.
And Shaggy…
The obstacle, however, is obvious: Brooks’ concerns are strange. Nobody can represent them because nobody understands them! It isn’t clear what he wants. It certainly isn’t clear what political position he would support.
Brooks has convictions. But those convictions aren’t expressed in a form that obviously corresponds to a recognizable politics. They are, as Brooks tells it, shaggy beasts—literally. Werewolf, Salmon, Borg, and tar-pit trapped woolly mammoths: not exactly the stuff of which party platforms are made!
Nor is Brooks putting out any effort to make it easier for anyone. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he pouts and sulks. Then he disappears.
His attitude has a terrifying property: he doesn’t have any idea of the content of his demand. He doesn’t know what he’s asking intellectuals to do for him. He doesn’t know what he’s asking politicians to do for him. He doesn’t even realize the problem is new—that it isn’t “always thus.” Not knowing the magnitude of the problem, he isn’t giving anyone any credit for it being hard.
Yet Peremptory…
It is hard. Later, we will name it. Once we can call it by its right name, we can see something terrifying about it. Arguably, it is the hardest intellectual and political problem in human history.1
But our frustrated centrist conservative has zero consciousness of that. Like a hungry baby, he has no idea of the lengths to which people must go to meet his demands. Nor does he care. He only thinks about his own discomfort.
On the other side, an obstacle is that intellectuals and economists expect the ideas they consume to be considerably pre-digested. Krugman’s Rules for Research, for instance, says, “it is also crucial to express your ideas in a way that other people, who have not spent the last few years wrestling with your problems and are not eager to spend the next few years wrestling with your answers, can understand without too much effort.” By the standards of his community, Brooks expresses his ideas well. But he is writing for an audience of fellow professionals. That means he doesn’t apologize for his expectation that his audience has spent “the last few years wrestling with [the] problems.” He equally well expects them to spend the next few years wrestling with the answers. That’s what professionals do; that’s what they are paid to do. So the lack of apology is understandable.
There is a difficulty, however, when these ideas move out of the professional community from which they originated. It is a culture shock.
Brooks, and every other professional of his caliber, has spent years wrestling with the Tar Pit Problem. As he said, they were “surprised by the stickiness of the problem.” MIT—or at least its western half—is suffused with a consciousness that only comes from such “years of wrestling.” I remember quite vividly the first moment of my first computer science class at MIT: the lecturer stood up and said “this is not a class about programming. This is a class about managing complexity.” The decisiveness of that declaration made an impression.
There was an implied imperiousness: “we won’t even bother to teach you programming. You are smart enough to learn that on your own.” And indeed they don’t: I have written elsewhere[TODO:reference] that MIT is akin to the Marines in their specific disavowal of any obligation to teach marketable skills. Like the Marines, they refuse to teach salable skills because they believe in teaching something more important. A student at MIT is elite—and that elite must be taught not just how to fight, but how to win. Such training is different in kind. In particular, this elite-troops mentality automatically assumes the willingness to spend years “wrestling with the problems.”
And Will…
Our centrist conservative has an implicit demand. But it isn’t even directed at his own intellectuals or his own politicians. He’s tolerant of the conservative intellectuals and politicians who ignore and abuse him. No: it is the liberal intellectuals and politicians towards whom he feels the most bitter resentment. Feeling science has failed him, he’ll direct his representatives to cut funding for it. Not only will he vote against the liberal politicians. He’ll also vote for politicians who betray liberal values. He will willfully rip up the intellectual, cultural, and political infrastructure necessary to meet his demands.
The expectation that by intellectuals that answers can be “understood without too much effort” divides them. Brooks and his followers expect effort. As we just explained, this community expects acolytes to work hard to learn “the sailors eye.” Anyone who refuses is “stupid.” Perhaps this is a tad unreasonable? More than a tad, even. But on the other hand, the other side refuses to spend years merely listening, even to the thorny problems of a serious professional community. They demand to understand without much effort. That is also a tad unreasonable. Or more than a tad. It is difficult to meet half-way because both sides have dug so deeply into these extreme expectations.
This book will try to steer a path between these two extremes of expectations. We will expect effort. Even a great deal of effort. But not so much as Brooks’s community would demand. We have some sympathy for the expectation that “the sailor’s eye” can be elucidated. It can be made easier for mere landlubbers to attain. Additionally, we acknowledge this enterprise of elucidation is creative. One doesn’t just learn what the sailor’s know. One learns more. For that reason alone, the exercise is worth doing.
But we are also going to be somewhat disappointed in our effort to make things easier. Bitterly disappointed, even. Our process does make our story easier to understand. It doesn’t make it that much easier. It also adds new difficulties, thorny in their own right.
It isn’t easy. The reason isn’t just because we don’t know how to make it easy. Maybe we are somewhat challenged in that regard. But that isn’t the only problem. It is truly, fundamentally hard. Brooks expects effort. We will too.
Only Get Worse.
As we foreshadowed in the introduction, in this fight, centrist conservatism is knocked off the gear’s teeth. Nobody holds the wheel. It swings free. Unmoored, its enormous momentum becomes a threat unto itself. We must grab this heavy swinging wheel and hold it firmly. Nothing less is good enough.
This is only the first half of the difficulty of it all. Suppose someone magically solves the intellectual portion of this puzzle. Will our character be suitably impressed? Will he appreciate the effort expended on his behalf? Will he finally give out the “A” he previously so churlishly withheld?
Don’t count on it. Toto, we’re not in fourth grade anymore. We may remind the reader of a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville:
Only a great genius can save a prince who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long oppression. The evil, which was suffered patiently as inevitable, seems unendurable as soon as the idea of escaping from it is conceived.
This was written in his history of the French Revolution. He observed that the peasants most likely to rebel violently were not the most oppressed. No: the rebels were the ones for whom things were getting better—getting better, but not fast enough.
So even if we solve the theoretical portion of the problem brilliantly, we have another problem. Exactly the thing Tocqueville claims is folly is what we would be forced to do: ask people to continue to endure an evil patiently, after they have been made aware of it as an evil. We will ask them to think calmly and rationally the idea of escape. We won’t expect them to react in any way precipitously or violently.
Old Alexis is mocking our naïveté from his grave.
The bottom line: even if this is the hardest problem in human history, nobody’s giving partial credit. The voters just want us to make it better. And just being able to make things better isn’t enough. If we figure that part out, we also have to make it better fast enough. Nothing less is good enough.2
Introducing The…
This project was motivated by my observation of the political alienation of Fred Brooks and his community. It terrified me. As a result, I embarked on an intellectual project. I hoped that by “lifting” Brooks’ worldview, I could make it visible to intellectuals and politicians. If politicians could see Brooks’ needs, then he might win proper representation. Then, I hoped, the gaping political vacuum might be filled.
The intellectual goal, however, was strictly subsidiary. I only cared about it insofar as it served the purposes of my larger goal. As I said both in the last essay and earlier, I care more about creating an image of heroism. Like Moana, I want to whisper in the demi-god’s ear: “You’ll be a hero…”
Girl Gang
To communicate our goals, we will bring a gang of narrators to life. Each narrator represents a character with an agenda. They fight for their agenda with the other members of the gang. They might well lose their fight: one agenda might shut down another. But then again, they have to ask each other for help—and learn to trust each other.
The whole thing takes on the form of a classic road trip movie. Except we are road-tripping into an understanding of the future. Even so, we might as well have fun with it. Who doesn’t love a road-trip?
In particular, the goal announced in this section we will represent with the character Moana. In her story, Moana was driven by fear of blight. She was the daughter of a chief (not a princess, by the way. She seemed to feel “chief’s daughter” was most decidedly not “princess.”)
Her home island was suffering from a spreading blight. Her grandmother told her the secret: the blight was caused by Maui’s theft of the heart of Te Fiti. The heart had been lost in the ocean. Moana retrieved the stolen heart and set out on a quest to convince Maui to return it to Te Fiti. The purpose of her quest, though, was to fix the blight that was destroying her island. The rest of the heroics were all a means to this end.
Similarly, all our intellectual heroics are means to an end. We are worried about a kind of blight: Fred Brooks’ political alienation. It was, as Moana’s grandmother observed, “a blight that will only continue to spread.” Like Moana, we want to find the heart whose loss has begun this blight. Eventually, we will seek to return it, to heal the lava monster that conservatism has become.
Moana joins the other character whose goals motivate this endeavor: the Clara who seeks leadership instead of suicide. Together they make our Not-Princess gang.3
Moana cares about blight; Clara about loyalty. Moana seeks to give conservatism back its heart. Clara seeks to give it back its balance: to re-establish the Always True. Together, they will road-trip (or raft trip?) with our third character, the Psychohistorian. Like Maui, this conceited demigod is a foil. But he is also a source of aid, without which their quests cannot hope to succeed. In the next section, we will complete our picture of our gang as they embark on their journey.
- I’m conflicted: on the one hand, making that assertion might seem stuck-up. To say “look, this is the hardest problem in human history” might seem self-congratulatory. Am I continuing smugly: “it is that hard, but look I solved it.”? However, it is hardly so congratulatory if we note it took me twenty bloody years. Going on twenty-five. The progress per year was pretty pathetic. At the time, it certainly felt pathetic. I’m pushing the difficulty not to boast. Instead, it is politically essential to emphasize the difficulty. We need to win from voters patience and forgiveness of our sins. After all, while I’ve been ever so slowly chipping away at it, tens of thousands of people have died deaths of despair. More have died of preventable illnesses poorly managed by irresponsible politicians. How can I look in the eyes of parents who have lost children? Or look in the eyes of children who have lost their parents? How can I say I couldn’t have worked faster or done better? The thought of the sea of accusatory looks is crushing. Furthermore, one might note, I haven’t solved it. Even if what I have is good enough—which is still in doubt—there is still an enormous gulf to cross. The goal—a solution to mollify angry voters—lies across a great gulf. A massive gulf. And not much time. I haven’t solved that problem—by far the harder part. That’s scary. The voter’s self-centered viewpoint makes the problem pass/fail. They give no partial credit or “A for effort”. As someone who got through MIT only by wringing out every bit of partial credit I could get, this property is blankly terrifying. ↩︎
- As a lover of partial credit, this is terrifying. As I mentioned earlier, it was the only thing that got me through MIT. Why did partial credit save me? Because I was a generalist, sampling several technical fields. Technical fields are not friendly to generalists. I wanted to take the hardest courses in the physics, math, and_ computer science major. Hard courses are the most fun. They are the ones that change your life. But spreading myself around like that meant I could only squeak through “B’s” in them. And I could only do it by getting partial credit for half-right answers on lots of tests. This book probably shows the result of this training. On one hand, I learned the fortitude to sticking to the path of a committed generalist—even in the face of lots of negative feedback. That helped me tackle this problem—and keep at it. But on the other hand, the resulting practiced sloppiness may come back to haunt me. That said, angry voters don’t give partial credit; but they don’t care about lack of polish. Intellectual do, but I don’t care if I only get partial credit from them. So we aim for completeness but not polish. ↩︎
- Despite what Maui says, we don’t picture either of them either wearing a dress or possessing an animal sidekick. For all I loved the movie, Moana’s sidekick was the most underwhelming in the whole Disney canon. They shouldn’t have ditched the pig. The stupid-chicken joke got old—fast. Besides, what sidekick would one assign to an old-fashioned Prussian scientist? Chemistry labs full of poison and explosives can’t have animals running around. Perhaps a chemical vapor? Even if her story could be given the Disney treatment, that would be absurd. ↩︎
