This story has complex, interweaving goals. To make it clearer, we will personify our goals in the personality of three narrators. They will play off each other, fight, help each other, and fight some more. Like any good road-trip story, by the end they will understand themselves and each other much better. The fights along the way will be pretty gnarly. In particular, this section opens our story with an act of violence. But by the end they will have built a bond.
“I Want” Song
There are two narrators whose goals drive the large-scale story: the Not-Princesses.1
One of them is Moana. Her concern is blight: spreading political alienation. In particular, “thoughtful practitioners” are feeling the political influence of new technology’s “desires.” But since no one understands their concerns, they have no political representation. Since such “practitioners” form the core of principled conservatism, their alienation leaves conservatism increasingly unmoored. That, in turn, threatens democracy. Without principled conservatism, democracy fails.
The other of our Not-Princesses is Clara. Her concern is loyalty, tempered with balance. The real Clara felt a painful loyalty to the Prussian princes who supported her work. Our Clara feels a loyalty to the tech leaders who make the cutting edge work of our day possible. But like the real Clara, she fears that this culture has bought into Grand Illusion: self-aggrandizement that glorifies an increasingly unbalanced social contract. As she learned painfully the last time, a world caught up in such an illusion is in danger. Even when it seems to be flying high, it flirts with doom. The gift of technological progress bestow upon them by their loyal geniuses can turn in their hand. By it they can be destroyed. She seeks warn her benefactors of the dangers of her gifts. Tactfully, she seeks to protest the culture’s “monstrousness.” She wants to protect herself against attendant accusations of treason.
They Need Help.
In particular, our story opens with a conflict. Both Moana and Clara need help. In order to achieve their goals, they need an intellectual. The simple problem: only he knows how to sail. Not only how to sail, but how to fight. We want to break a Grand Illusion. We want to challenge a lava monster. We don’t stand a chance without help.
Both our characters need the help of someone who combines prowess in the mathematics of economics with a sense of history. In other words, a character like the hero of Asimov’s Foundation, who can use “an understanding of the mathematics of human behavior to save civilization.” For that reason, we call our third narrator the Psychohistorian.
Moana needs something specific: she wants political representation for the alienated conservative engineer. As we said earlier, politicians choose policies from a buffet served up to them by intellectuals. If intellectuals haven’t provided an appropriate option, then the engineer will choose an unpalatable selection. They can’t cook their own; they only can choose from what is there. People who understand the world through “folk wisdom” are highly suggestible. They don’t know what is going on in the clouds. All they see is thrown tints. The source is mysterious even to them.
So any theory about cloud-shapes is just an entry on a buffet. They can’t cook their own. This helplessness is a problem. Moana need to broaden the options on the buffet. And for that, she needs help.
Clara also needs something specific: she needs a historical analogy. She’s tortured by déjà vu. It has happened before that the wealthy have indulged in Grand Illusions. Loyal engineers have been tortured by intimations of technology’s “desires.” They have been haunted by dread. Then they have been silenced by accusations of treason. Technological change had knocked conservatism off its tooth; democracy has teetered.
While it is all new, its also not new. It is shockingly exactly like it happened the last time. It is so like the last time that we can bring back a hundred-year-old German chemist to narrate our story. She’s been there, done that. This time, she intends to survive the experience.
The déjà vu may freak us out. But memory is a potential strength. We have gone through it before—and gotten through it before. We have emerged on the other side before. We have reaped the bounty inherent in technological progress before. If we can see ourselves in the problem before, we can see ourselves in the solution before. But to pin down our analogy, we need an intellectual. And not just any intellectual: one with memory.
Blowdart…
Our Not-Princesses aren’t too pleased with the current crop of intellectuals. The nicest thing we can say is they model Maui well: good-hearted demigods with great gifts. Unfortunately, they reproduce his self-centered fecklessness as well.
Moana is unhappy with their failure to listen. Our current crop of intellectuals expect to “understand without too much with too much effort.” They don’t want to spend “years wrestling with answers” when they haven’t spend “years wrestling with problems.” But key ideas arise from the internal conversations of a professional engineering community. When professionals address other professionals, it is natural for them to expect an audience with years of experience wrestling with problems. For that reason, this community can be hard to understand.
Between these two communities, there is a dispute not just about worldview, but also about expectations. Where to draw the line is not exactly clear. But in any case, Moana is disappointed with this unwillingness to “wrestle with answers.” Maybe it is years worth of work. It could be made easier. But only to a point: some are inherently hard. And if this were physics, these engineers are not the rival scientists. They are the sub-atomic particles. Since when is “bully the sub-atomic particle” appropriate scientific method? Protons and neutrinos don’t explain themselves clearly either. It take years of wrestling to understand them too. You don’t see the physicists refusing, on that account, to even try.
Clara is not happy with their failure to remember. It has happened before a naturally conservative community of engineers has spontaneously generated a strange radicalism. It has happened before that some have been accused of a variant of treason. It has happened before that such accusations have driven some to despair—and even suicide. It has happened before that some so accused defended themselves with the strange assertion that technology has desires of its own. It has happened before that these were signs heralding the breakdown of democracy. Clara was unhappy that these signs were not treated as a cause for alarm when they first appeared. And now that the democratic breakdown is apparent, she is even more unhappy that these patterns aren’t being taken as clues to trace the breakdown back to its source. Doesn’t anyone remember that all this has happened before?
The unhappiness of our Not-Princesses translates into a resolve. We spoke earlier about Emerson’s advice. In his sense, we are out to “kill the king.” As we explained, Emerson’s suggested resolve lived in the world of ideas. The acute unhappiness of our narrators makes them capable—in this cerebral world, mind you—of extreme measures. They aren’t going for a mamby-pamby conflict of “schools.” They want to win; they don’t intend to miss.
But, as we said, they need help. Like the movie’s Moana, they need to learn to sail. Why would an intellectual facilitate violence against his own world? In the movie, Moana demands “teach me to sail!” Maui refused with a dismissive “Pfft!”
So what happened? He got a blowdart in the buttcheek. The coconut-warriors poison paralyzed him. Thus incapacitated, he had no choice but to do what Moana wanted.
In the Buttcheek.
Similarly, our Not-Princesses will take a Psychohistorian sailing with them. He is a properly professorial type, with the goals and agenda of an academic. He wants to make his discovery; prove his point; follow the rules; win the acclaim. We won’t let him.
We’re going to stick him with a blowdart. Thus paralyzed, we will hijack his agenda. We don’t care. At various points he will protest that he is made to go too slow; and then too fast. When he want to stop he’ll be made to go on; when he wants to go on he’ll be made to stop. He’ll want to find certainty through evidence; he’ll want to FRED. His raft-mates aren’t interested. They are perfectly happy to let him name a step a mere hypothesis, and move on to the next one. We will pile hypothesis upon hypothesis. It will all be, academically speaking, shockingly improper. We don’t care.
Our story isn’t meant to depict real academic progress. Instead, it is a Disney movie soft-focus rendition of academic progress. Our real purpose is not to generate an understanding of the world. Instead, it is to envision a confident intellectual capable of understanding the world. In other words it is all part of the whisper: “you’ll be a hero…”
The Future Historian
Our Psychohistorian is not without some influence on the itinerary of our road-trip (or raft?). Occasionally our story invokes a fourth narrator: the conservative historian of 2200. One might see him as the destination of a side trip taken on the Psychohistorian’s insistence.
In the movie, Moana demanded to be taken straight to the thick of the fight. Maui demurred. Without the restoration of his powers, he felt he had no chance against the lava monster. First he took a side trip to recover the magical fish hook he lost in his first fight with the lava monster (right after stealing the heart.) Moana moderated her impatience for this side goal. She even accompanied him to Lalotai, the realm of monsters. Maui was certain that realm would kill her. Surprisingly, not only did she make it through, she saved him as well. As even Maui had to grudgingly admit, she “did me a solid.”
Similarly, our Psychohistorian will insist on a side trip. He worries, like Maui, that he has lost his magic. His math isn’t giving him the confidence he needs. So he insists on a hook-recovery detour: a mathematical derivation of the attitudes of our imagined conservative of 2200. As we said, we have to choose such a far-away date because only the distant future is mathematically derivable. Keynes’ “too easy, too useless a task” is “in tempestuous seasons” to “tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
Easy and useless it may be, but the Psychohistorian wants a vision of that far-away flat ocean. A mathematically derivable vision. Since the task is to restore the heart of conservatism, we want to know what conservatives of the distant future will insist on conserving. To have any chance of winning our fight against conservatism become monstrous, we need to be thus armed.
It’s called Wayfinding
There is another sense in which our Psychohistorian is assertive. When Moana asked to be taught to sail, Maui replied with scorn in his voice: “It’s called ‘wayfinding’, princess, and it’s not just sails and knots. It’s seeing where you’re going in your mind. Knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.”
Most of the academic predilections of our Psychohistorian will be brutally suppressed. But not this business of “knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.” About that the Not-Princesses are enthusiastic
[TODO: I’m not sure if my little spiel about wayfinding should be here or in The Abyss Stares Also essay. It needs to be one of the two places. I plan to recapitulate what I wrote in the introduction about folding history over twice.]
Not Just Knots
Our two Not-Princesses represent the two sides of this. Moana intensely wants to know where she is going. While Clara intensely wants to know where she’s been.
[More on the double fold of history. Assign each fold to a not-princess?]
Pass The Popcorn
The good fun of it all has a purpose. Implicitly, this story is an expose of the mistakes of the elites. As de Tocqueville pointed out, even good intentions can call out the guillotines. So preemptively, we push a counter-suggestion to our would-be beheaders: sit back! Enjoy the show!
The character of Maui embodies the fecklessness of our benighted elites. But it is a cuddly, good-hearted fecklessness. He means well. And we know, in our heart of hearts, he will come around. He will save the day. Of course he has to be a bit reluctant, a bit frightened and feckless. It wouldn’t be a good movie if he wasn’t! A good road-trip buddy movie can’t start with everyone being best buds at the beginning. There has to be tension, and conflict. Why would anyone watch if there weren’t?
But our demigod will come ’round. All he needs is coaxing. Moana whispers in his ear: you’ll be a hero. The road trip is the process of making him into the hero he’s really been all along. That’s the fun of it. It will happen.
In other words, we want to project confidence in the elites. This book challenges the elites to face the problems of a New Economy. Unavoidably, so doing (at least in public) will simultaneously open a battle with those like Tucker Carlson who preach that the elites are “disgusting.” Embarking on this fight creates a dangerous moment. Any delay in dealing could add to the dismay of the disgusted.
I am challenging the elites; but also defending them. Unlike Carlson, I am fundamentally an elitist. I seek to defend the elites while also diagnosing their difficulties. All without empowering those who might seek to overthrow them. The cuddly good-hearted fecklessness of our demi-god is my main argument in their defence. Implicitly, in all this we are pushing an anti-revolutionary creed: “Workers of the World: Pass the Popcorn!” It will be a good show. Sit back and watch!
- Moana is my favorite princess movie because she’s actually a leader. She’s focused on the fate of her followers. She succeeds in making things better for them. By contrast, I was bitterly disappointed with Frozen. It was supposed to be a feminist statement… in which a princess who inherits a kingdom has a temper tantrum which puts everyone in deep freeze. Um, where’s the empowerment here? Women can screw up the world just as well as men can? We can be just as good at treating our dependents as toys to be pushed around by our every pique? Whoop-de-do. Is it just me, or can we aspire to better than that? If that’s what happens when princesses get power, I’d just as soon be a Not-Princess. And take it—as Moana does—as a badge of honor. ↩︎
