In defense of open society

Something that is bothering me about your writings here is that they are long on sentiments and short on substance. You're dropping lots of names and using lots of big words but you aren't saying much. What exactly do you have in mind for our society, rogerv? Stop beating around the bush and tell us your master plan.

Many thousands were killed and maimed as we muddled through
our discoveries of the last few centuries. That worked out
to our advantage because there are many millions of us.
We only have a dozen or so societies and most of them do not
function independently. It would be foolhardy to attempt major changes with the hope that there might be something better out there.
Our world is in fact a laboratory where different theories
are advanced and tested. As these theories are proven they
are accepted by different cultures. Kind of like Darwin's
theory of evolution.
Certainly the evolutionary approach is a slow piecemeal approach, but it is for a reason, the stakes are enormous.
For every Greek culture that comes around we have a hundred
failed cultures that sounded good on paper.

You back? Must've been a nice vacation, since I made the comment to which you refer:

I have read Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies, and rogerv has made a fairly concise statement of Popper's contentions. The problem is, the "open society" Popper espoused is informed, structured by and internally butressed with philosophies that have now been tried and found wanting on the global stage.

Popper's mentoring of Soros aside, the premises of his arguments are flawed at the base. This is a house (or society) that will not stand.

back on 12-19.

"Open discussion" on the premise that there is any value left to be discussed in various collectist philosophies is pointless.

Part of the inefficiency of which you speak is because it is the job of government, as a deliberative body, to weigh competing interests and make necessary compromises. If it did not do so, it would not be representing us. So that is a good thing. As far as government being inherently inefficient and prone to corruption, I disagree. I think government is no worse in this regard than business. Government can be very efficient when it matters--disaster relief.

I think what you are saying about the complexity of society, and the number of variables, is true. But that doesn't make it impossible to study. We do have sociological and economic generalizations that hold up pretty well. And we have something called cognitive science that is showing great promise in unraveling the complexity of human perception, cognition and emotion. While you are right that in the past, we had very little control over social dynamics, and could do little better than simply observe after the fact how things went we may be able to do better than that in the future.

I agree with you that central control is not what we want. But rationality does not require big government. It simply requires (enforceable) ground rules that make social outcomes to some extent predictable and reliable. Innovation, important as it is, is not always desirable. Just as fire is useful in the right place, it can be dangerous in the wrong place. Social norms set the boundaries of acceptable deviation. In social interactions with strangers, we want to be able to count on a certain predictability of response--otherwise we find the encounter threatening. Any innovation in those encounters needs to take place within a framework of acceptable social boundaries.

Rationality and reliability, control, predictability, are desirable things. We can't control everything. But insofar as we can cointrol some things, we can bring about the things we desire more reliably. We are not stuck in trail and error. Just as we want machines to work in a predictable way, we want institutions to work in a predictable way. We want our legal system to give similar sentences for similar crimes. We want our educational institutions to reliably graduate students who have achieved a certain level of competence. Industry counts on that. So do all our institutions that accept graduates from our schools. Think of it like money in the economy: graduation, or a certain GPA, or a certain set of scores of standardized achievement tests, should represent an comparable range of skills, knowledge and aptitudes. Now, performance can always be improved. So we can't make do without innovation. But all innovation involves risk, and too much risk is counterproductive: one cannot count on the results. So, reliability is valuable. A near guaranteed delivery of a particular good is better than a much greater good that never materializes. Still, it makes sense to set aside some investment in research and development on the possible good, or to let some individuals try to produce it at their own risk.

I am short on substance because I have come to this subject rather late and have only begum thinking about it in any sort of detail. I'm afraid I can't give you what I don't have. I apologize for the academic tone and the name dropping. I have intellectual debts to acknowledge to people who have shaped my thinking. Still, your demand for specifics is appropriate.

My thinking about this started with Socrates. He claimed at his trial that his criticism of Athens showed he was a true patriot. That sounds odd in our day when social critics are accused of hating America, or being part of the 'blame America first' crowd. But I think it is correct. Socrates was of a view that Athens had missed the boat by focusing on material wellbeing at the expense of spiritual wellbeing. The Athenians cared more about trade than the sorts of people they were becoming. The Athenians were smug and self-congratulatory, and thought they had knowledge when they had nothing of the sort. So, it is my reflections on Socratic wisdom, and what it might mean for our day, that have started me thinking about all this. And since my model for knowledge is science, the Socratic view needs some adjusting before its relevance to our present problems is clear.

I have also been very much influenced by the pragmatists, like Peirce and Dewey, who link questions of meaning and truth to experience. To put it crassly, they don't look for truth in heaven, but down here on earth, in our every day experience. Dewey in particular thought we need to rethink the way we do philosophy in the light of Darwin's work. We need to think about thinking as something a naturally selected organism like ourselves might do in order to survive. We take a detour in theory because our habits and practices are not working the way we would like.

So, my core idea in this thread is that we will save ourselves some grief if we insist on institutions that are open to criticism, revisable in the light of experience.

Now, free creation of new institutions is something our society does well. We are a society of inventors and entrepreneurs. That is good. But we the people have to decide on the boundaries of acceptable institutional behavior, just as we decide on the boundaries of personal behavior. We don't want to set these boundaries too narrowly. Otherwise we squash freedom. So the point is to find the least restrictive alternative that will protect the interests of society as a whole while giving individual freedom its widest possible scope. So laws regarding fraud, workplace safety, pollution abatement are reasonable restrictions to insist upon, so that the good created by the firm is not outweighed by the damage done. People are entitled to make a profit on their investments, but not if it requires pushing off the costs of pollution abatement on the community. People are entitled to profits, but not at the expense of worker safety.

I also can see that some goods needed by society may not be attractive to private investors and may require public investment if they are going to be created. Flu vaccine may be one example. Not much profit to be had there, but it undeniably saves lives.

So I see government retaining its role as regulator and investor. I think the regulations and investments should be subject to public debate (and not imposed top down by paternalistic officials). And I think government policy in general (including laws passed) should be based on good reasons and not simply sectarian interests. I think we need government that really pays attention to the common good, not simply partisan or special interests. Such policy is more time consuming, involves compromises, but once achieved is more stable and effective.

I am not anywhere near to having worked this all out. I hope this shows I do have some definite, although tentative ideas at work here.

Hectic vacation! I would have posted a response earlier had I time. But it is good to be back, thank you.

I'm not sure why you think discussion of collectivist philosophies is a waste of time. Do you think we are past finding any of these views attractive in any of their multitude of variations? It seems to me the perennial attraction of collectivism is that, as Popper showed, it stems from our desire to find a sense of community, and to overcome selfishness. Now, there are intellectual mistakes here. Popper shows one: individualism vs collectivism is not the same as selfishness versus altruism. There can be selfish communities as well as altruistic individuals.

But it does seem to me that the communitarians at least find the liberal (and libertarian) individualism problematic because they cannot see that this view does justice to culture, tradition or the common good. There is a concern here. There is the problem of the tragedy of the commons. As a liberal I have to find some notion of the overlapping conceptions of the good to make sense of political society. It seems to me, libertarians have exactly the same problem to solve. Cultural conservatives may have an easier time of it, because they can appeal to religion, or traditional morality, or (perhaps) to human nature. But that way out leaves liberty restricted. Or at least, so it appears to me.

I think we can do better than this. I think we who abhor waste in industry should not be sanguine about the waste of human potential. Human beings are our greatest resource. We ought to invest in them as our future. I don't find social Darwinism an acceptable morality. We came to individualism because we have come to see individuals as valuable. Kant had it right: every human beings is an end in himself, not simply means to some (powerful) peoples ends.

I think the idea that evolution must be served (as though there were some laws of progress at work here, and not a series of individual decisions that could be made differently) is precisely what Popper criticizes as historicism (see especially "The Poverty Of Historicism" of which this two volume work discussed in this thread are supposed to be the appendix!).

Soros uses this stuff for his own purposes.

The original idea of an open society was good, but by now we should have a protective, almost Pavlovian response when we hear it, because it has become the code-word for Soros and his "Open Society Foundation."

Soros is a very rich cultist, and the cult is worship of Soros the great genius.

Human beings are not a resouce. They are the intended beneficiaries of resources.

Please do not call me a resouce in any but the loosest metaphorical sense. Better yet, pick a different metaphor.

I think competition is overrated. I think cooperation has given human beings far more than competition has. We have long periods of maturation where we are helpless and dependent. Without society, we would not survive to adulthood. As adults, there is protection is numbers, that made us safer from predators. Competition, to be productive, has to occur within a framework of overall cooperation. We need agreed upon standards of excellence to judge a particular competitor superior in performance, or a particular product better. Excellence doesn't come out of nowhere; there is a social context.

As for alternatives to bureaucracy, I don't know that they exist yet. I do think they are developing, thanks to cheap telecommunications, increasingly powerful computers and the internet. At least one important function of bureaucracies in the past has been their information gathering function. We can now do that quicker and cheaper, with fewer people. So I see some potential for decentralizing functions, and performing some of the work bureaucracies once performed, with fewer people by substituting technology for people. The function of coordinating efforts in different places, and ensuring the same rules are observed in each place, can be done this way. Now, even if this occurs, it won't eliminate the need for people. There will always be exceptional cases and the need for appeals. But I am encouraged that expert systems have already been applied by doctors in diagnosis, by engineers in designing machines--so I am encouraged to believe that we will have better ways of handling routine matters formerly done by large bureaucracies. We'll see.

As for the point about more flexible conceptions of rationality, the research in AI and cognitive science are showing better models for how revisable reasoning, open to new information, might be possible. The old divide between inductive and deductive logic is being challenged by more interactive models. Agencies that are designed along those models of rationality will be less rigid, more responsive to changes in the environment, and, I think, more effective. But there is always a lag between research and implementation, and these models are still under development. But, as we have just in time management in the corporate world, perhaps we will have just in time management in government bureaus.

Socrates was great! Don't ever let the liberals appropriate him, and depict him as some hippy social critic or profesiional protestor, which they sometimes try to do in order to justify themselves.

Socrates was an inquiring person, with good, healthy skepticism, but he was at heart a traditional loyalist. He insisted on staying in Athens and accepting the unjust verdict of the court because of loyality to his native city and its laws.

Socrates said that the most important things are excellence (meaning moral rectitude, sometimes called virtue or righteousness), institutions, and law. In another passage he states that wealth does not bring excellence, but excellence brings wealth and every other good thing. We find a very similar teaching in the Bible!

He was concerned that Athenian society had become rich through the probity of its ancestors, but had essentially forgotten its roots, which included the truly important things. He taught that honor is more important even than ones physical life. The maxim "Death before Dishonor" can be traced to him. That is a very anti-materialist stance, totally at odds with the fashions of the modern world, and yet as true as gravity.

In a very interesting passage, Socrates shows a healthy skepticsim for democracy. He says that a man in public life who opposes the multitude (the majority) for the sake of what is right will lose his life. I suspect that Socrates would have gone along with Churchill, who stated that "Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised -- except for all others."

I shouldn't rely on memory when it come to dates! I checked "The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World" Hitler's putsch took place in 1923. He appointment to chancellor under von Hindenburg took place in 1933--a decade, not five years as I had claimed. Much of that decade was uneventful. Hitler's party grew and the brown shirts became a force to reckon with. But the sweeping changes came within a year of Hitler's appointment. And after the fire in the Reichstag's, Hitler declared emergency powers and functioned as a dictator for that point on, arresting and intimidating opponents, passing the Nuremberg laws in 1935--with the sad results we all know.

Lenin became a Marxist in 1891, was part of the Bolshevik movement in 1903. But from 1900-1917, he was in exile and exerted influence only through his writings and correspondence. After the abortive revolution in 1905, the period from 1906-1917 involved the largely successful repression of revolutionist movements. This isn't to say that concessions were not made to the socialists. Some land reform occurred. But it wasn't until the successful revolution in 1917 that Lenin was able to impose his will on Russian society. And even then, from 1918-1921, Lenin has a civil war to deal with. He did institute changes during this period (some of which he scaled back in 1921 with his New Economic Plan (the partial restoration of capitalism). But Lenin has unchallenged power only from 1921 to his death in 1924. So whether you start the clock in 1917 or 1921-Lenin did not have a lot of time to bring about the changes he imposed. Seven years or three are not a lot in the general scheme of things.

Still, my original point stands. Whether the changes were made in long time or short, there was plenty of evidence the changes were bad. And my view is that such evidence should not be ignored.

Hi, docbnj,

I can understand the dislike conservatives may have for MoveOn.org. But it seems to me his Open Society Foundation has actually done some good work, trying to help NGO in countries that are working to democratize their own countries. I see more hope for approaches like his, that focus on giving aid to developing countries and seek to help build up a strong middle class, than in military approaches to democratizing the middle east. I think Soros may actually turn out to be one of the good guys if the goal is to substitute relations of trade for relations of military conflict and war. And his way is not to rely of the government to do it, although he does try to encourage the government and the world bank to do more.

I agree. But the contrast is worth making-the contrast between viewing people as costs or liabilities, rather than capital or assets. But you are right--people are not things, and should not be reduced to terms appropriate for things.

I agree. Socrates' model of 'persuade or obey' is a good one.

The original poster denigrates private property.

Excuse please! Life, liberty, property: the Lockean triad. It is the basis. Property is one of the true, basic human rights, coming before even many of the rights in our Bill of Rights. For example, you cannot have free speech without property rights: that is even more so in the modern world than in Locke's time.

There can be no markets without private property. One is helpless to preserve lives (ones own, family members', and neighbors') without property. Without property, there is not even such a thing as charity.

Without property rights, a person is a slave. Is it any wonder that socialists of all stripes attack property, and try to contrast property rights with "human rights"? Property right is one of the most fundamental. It is also one of the things which distinguishes us from animals. Property rights are repeatedly sanctified in the Bible: for a start, look at the Ten Commandments.

The poster wonders how society should be arranged for the best benefit. Who determines what is beneficial? Who does this arranging? Man, has that been a slippery slope, as the last few hundred years show!

He suggests that society must adapt to changing times. A free society does adapt. On the other hand, human nature does not change: never has. The problems of life are always essentially the same.

When a politician hawks his wares saying, "New, new!" he sounds like an advertiser selling improved detergents, or some new bauble. Believe the soap seller: his product might actually be new. Doubt the politician, because there is nothing new conceivable in his line of offerings. This is why reading history continually brings us that deja vu feeling.

That is why we conservatives should hold fast to fundamentals, and demand a life where individuals can excercise rational, ethical, moral bevavior, free from planners and sociological theorists. We want a free life, because only in a free life can morality be expressed.

No socialism, no slavery, but only freedom!!

"I think competition is overrated. I think cooperation has given human beings far more than competition has."

I agree to some extent with you about this. But a problem with relying more on cooperation than competition is the need for a common cause to cooperate on. This is the main reason why communism doesn't work. Idealism can only get you so far. People need to have something to strive for. In a society where the government basically owns everything and people can't compete to get ahead, they tend to just do enough to get by. Productivity suffers. Morale suffers. Corruption thrives.

I'm not sure what it is that you are after so it's really hard to have this conversation with you. You speak in generalized terms and don't offer any concrete solutions that we can agree or disagree on. I do agree with a lot of the sentiments you have expressed. I certainly do see the need for government, and for fairness in societies that governments can help foster. But I am very leery of governments in general and the notion that some utopian society is possible at this point in history.

I also understand what you are saying about using technology to streamline bureaucracy, but in my mind that still leaves us with bureaucracies, who will more likely than not just be more efficient at depriving us of our money and our freedoms.

This is a frustrating conversation. You aren't offering anything concrete to discuss.

"So, my core idea in this thread is that we will save ourselves some grief if we insist on institutions that are open to criticism, revisable in the light of experience."

I agree with this.

"Now, free creation of new institutions is something our society does well."

Too well, unfortunately, and the monsters often created seem to just grow and grow.

"But we the people have to decide on the boundaries of acceptable institutional behavior, just as we decide on the boundaries of personal behavior. We don't want to set these boundaries too narrowly. Otherwise we squash freedom. So the point is to find the least restrictive alternative that will protect the interests of society as a whole while giving individual freedom its widest possible scope. So laws regarding fraud, workplace safety, pollution abatement are reasonable restrictions to insist upon, so that the good created by the firm is not outweighed by the damage done. People are entitled to make a profit on their investments, but not if it requires pushing off the costs of pollution abatement on the community. People are entitled to profits, but not at the expense of worker safety."

I agree with this, except I'm not sure what you mean when you say that "[p]eople are entitled to make a profit on their investments, but not if it requires pushing off the costs of pollution abatement on the community." I think it's fair to charge the costs of pollution abatement to those who do the polluting. If that effects shareholders profits in the corporation doing the polluting, so be it. I don't know how much further you are wanting to go with this.

"I also can see that some goods needed by society may not be attractive to private investors and may require public investment if they are going to be created."

I agree with this as well, with limitations. But there are areas where I think we need government investment that most conservatives would probably disagree with. For instance, I think government should invest more in drug treatment and mental health services for people who come in contact with the criminal justice system. I'm a public defender. I handle nothing but criminal cases. A huge percentage of the people I represent are drug addicts or mentally ill, and there is a great deal of overlap between the two. The way we deal with these people for the most part today is send them to prison over and over again. People don't stop and think of the huge investment we are making in this policy, nor do they seem to notice that the return on our investment is appalling.

I think it would be a better use of our resources to try to deal with some of the underlying problems that are major contributing factors to criminal conduct rather than relying so much on the prison solution. I am seeing more and more conservatives coming around to this point of view, but only because they are now seeing how the incredible increase in incarceration rates since the late seventies is bankrupting states. We simply cannot afford to continue building new prisons and jails at the rate we have been building them. We can't just keep adding sentence enhancements, criminalizing more and more conduct, and increasing prison sentences when the prisons and jails we continue building are packed way beyond capacity to the point that we keep having to let more and more prisoners go before their parole eligibility dates, only to see close to 70% rearrested on new felony charges within three years of their release.

None of our rights are absolute, not even life liberty and property. We can be deprived of all three by due process of law. And the doctrine of eminent domain says the government can appropriate property for public use. That is not socialism, it is the Constitution.

Now to say the government must sometimes weigh the interests of the individual against the public interests i not to say the public will always win. There is a balance that must be respected or the right of private property really does disappear, and I am not in favor of anything of that sort. I agree with you that there is a connection between property and personal responsibility, and that we need to respect the former if we are going to preserve the latter. As for the question of who should arrange society, I think in a democracy there really is only one good answer: we should. We the people are the government, and our representatives must represent our collective will on matters of public interests. I do not favor paternalistic government deciding these matters for us. One thing I mean by open society is that we ought to encourage public debate with as wide participation as possible. That idea may not be new, but it is hardly the practice of our government at present. We have an administration that is not even listening to Republican critics, much less Democratic ones, and the reversal in the trend for open government and transparency of process in favor of secrecy is a reversal that is not in the public interest. I believe policy that gets a public airing, and thorough review by critics and proponents alike, is more likely to be sound policy. Cass Sunstein argues this in his book "Why Societies Need Dissent". He makes the point that when conservatives or liberals have large enough majorities that they can ignore the opposition, they behave badly and we get bad policy. I think he is right.

I disagree with the comment that human nature does not change. If one understands by nature what one has a propensity to do, then human nature changes with its environment. Since society changes, our behavior changes. facility with computers is becoming part of our nature in urban environments where computers are used. We find behaviors that help us adapt to and survive in the environments we find ourselves. That involves gains and losses. Without a doubt, we who have grown up in urban environments would be at a disadvantage competing with a bushman in the jungle. We have lost the knack for surviving with minimal technology--except for those who have deliberately trained themselves in those skills (through Boy Scouts or SAS). On he other hand, the bushman would probably have great difficulty adapting to an urban environment. The habits we have acquired almost without effort from our society, the bushman would have to learn with careful painstaking effort. Instincts would not be much help in either adjustment. Much of our 'natural' behavior is socially acquired.

I understand your frustration. I am pitching my discussion at the level of concepts, and the discussion is pretty abstract. It is possible at this level it is hard to disagree, like saying one is in favor of good behavior and not bad. Who could disagree with that? But of course, when we get down to cases, there may be considerable room for disagreement over what counts as good and bad behavior. I agree with you, we do need to get down to specific cases.