[x]

Things have changed a lot since the 1940s. At that time it was assumed by many people that planning and government control were inevitable and the only question was whether they would be imposed gradually and regulated democratically or whether they would arrive in a more drastic fashion and be administered dictatorially. Today, people are much colder to the idea of centralized control.

"Piecemeal social change" sounded fine when totalitarianism was the alternative, but today it has an elitist, Orwellian ring. Government may be a necessity and some regulation of business unavoidable. Nations still do regulate industry and administer various agencies. The focus today is on individual liberty and government non-interference, though, and most of us tend to tune out people who want to use government to run people's lives. We may need them at some point or in some situations, but don't like them hanging around when things are more or less running well by themselves.

"Democratic control" was a plausible slogan in an age of totalitarianisms, but now we experience it as just more bureaucratic interference and red-tape. Consequently, to many people today, Popper looks more like the autocratic, top-down rulers that he was critical of in his own day. It's certainly ironic, but those who believed that he distorted the views of Plato or Hegel will probably smile at his being lumped in with them as ambitious would-be guardian-rulers. More or less the same is true of Dewey, at least where conservatives are concerned: democratic pragmatism isn't so much contrasted with totalitarian thought-control, but seen as another species of modern nihilism.

Right or left, we should all be glad that the totalitarianism isn't an option now, but that does mean that politicians and theorists associated with the struggle against fascism or communism don't seem to be the most relevant to our needs today.

[rogerv]

Planning is something we all do. People who never plan wind up reacting to circumstances rather than acting on circumstances in a way that promises reasonably good outcomes. This is, I think, the heart of the matter. What does it mean to be rational? It does not mean to lay out some inflexible plan in advance, and try to force everything into shape. It is more like flying a plane or driving a boat: you have a destination you are trying to reach, and adapt your course to flying or sailing conditions to stay on course; or you recognize that a particular destination is unrealistic and give up on it and look for an alternate destination. It's like a good business plan. You decide what direction a company should go, try to be realistic in estimating costs, sources of finance and revenue, likely customers, likely competitors,etc. You cannot know in advance how things will turn out. But you can monitor the execution of the plan to see if you are on target for your goals.

Rationality simply describes the character of the thinking involved in thinking about what we want to do, why we want to do it, what will likely result if we do it, what obstacles we may encounter, etc. It also involves come up with some indicators that will tell us if we are doing what we think we are doing (rather that something else), if we are drifting off course, if the situation has changed in important ways and we may need to rethink our goals, etc.

Just letting things happen is not a formula for success. It is a formula for letting short term considerations crowd out long term ones; it is a formula for letting personal interests weigh more heavily than the interests of the larger community; it is a formula for waste and reduplication of effort because of the lack of coordination between the efforts of different groups working on the same problem; and without a reality check, we may all assume we are doing one thing only to find out, to our grief, we have been doing something else entirely. Rationality may require we step back from what we are doing for a while, and make sure we are accurately describing our actions, make sure that our actions really are connected with our institutional goals, and that our institutional goals really are serving some interests outside our institution (that is, that preserving our institution has not become the primary goal of the institution).