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REASON * November 2000
Ironic Processing
By Virginia Postrel
When I give a speech about the big-picture political and cultural ideas in my
book The Future and Its Enemies, the question and answer period almost always
starts with a down-to-earth query: "What do you think of George W. Bush and Al
Gore?"
"Well," I say, "Bush is a mixed bag. But I think Al Gore is the devil."
This line always gets a laugh, but it�s not really a joke. Don�t get me wrong:
Unlike some Clinton haters, who have the same opinion of his boss, I don�t mean
Gore is literally the Prince of Darkness. I simply mean that he operates
according to core principles that work to erode the freedoms of individuals
and the progress of the open society.
This is true whether you examine the "real Gore"�the intellectual wannabe who
seems like he�d rather have my job than Bill Clinton�s�or the political Gore,
who speaks in poll-tested phrases. Both versions share the patronizing world
view perfectly expressed in the vice president�s tendency to address his
audiences as though they were dim second-graders. Both want to tell everyone
else how to live, to subordinate our diverse, individualized purposes to their
own goals.
Back before his populist peroration at the Democratic National Convention, the
intellectual Gore gave a remarkable interview to Nicholas Lemann of The New
Yorker. Lemann was smart enough not to ask routine, soundbite-inducing
questions. Instead, he asked Gore about his favorite ideas, and he ran long
quotations from their conversations.
Gore�s responses elicited scorn, derision, and dismay in Washington�s political-
intellectual circles. He was way, way, way too interested in obscure notions
about complexity and fractals. He drew strange diagrams. He talked a lot about
metaphor. He dropped names of philosophers and physicists. Gore sounded like a
New Age version of Newt Gingrich.
The pundits were so flabbergasted by his strangeness that they paid little
attention to the content of what he said. But Lemann�s article revealed more
than Gore�s interest in odd ideas; it gave readers a peek at his political
philosophy. And the substance of Gore�s world view is troubling.
Gore believes society needs to take ideas from science and apply them to
politics and economics, and he�s frustrated that scientific ideas are too
unfamiliar to the general public�and his political colleagues�to be used that
way. He wants to replace the old metaphors of a clockwork universe and machine-
age government with something more up-to-date. His favorite metaphor is
"distributed intelligence."
That sounds promising. The insight that knowledge is scattered through society,
and that it�s impossible to collect all relevant information (including the
knowledge of individuals� purposes and preferences) in a single place, is
fundamental to understanding why central planning does not work, and why it is
incompatible with individual freedom. But Gore�s idea of distributed
intelligence does not in any way endorse the significance of dispersed, local
knowledge.
To the contrary, Gore imagines society as a giant computer system, using
massively parallel processing to attack a single problem. In such a system, he
explained in a 1996 speech to the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, "When a problem was presented, all the processors would begin working
simultaneously, each performing its small part of the task, and sending its
portion of the answer to be collated with the rest of the work that was going
on. It turns out that for most problems, this approach is more effective."
(Actually, massively parallel processing isn�t good for most problems, but
that�s a messy real-world detail.)
As a metaphor for society, this analogy suggests that someone in charge decides
what the problem is and parcels out tasks to individuals. Individuals do not
choose their own problems and purposes or respond to the needs and desires of
other dispersed individuals. Asked by Lemann to apply this idea to government,
Gore imagined members of Congress bringing information from their districts to
"assemble it at the center, in the Capitol building."
So "distributed intelligence," a phrase that appears to honor decentralized
knowledge, turns out to enshrine centralized decision making. This vision is in
keeping with Gore�s desire, in Earth in the Balance, for a "central organizing
principle for civilization," a goal to which all other goals are subordinated.
Gore also rebels against the dispersed knowledge that makes an advanced
civilization possible�the specialization that lets people do what they�re good
at and enables us to benefit from the knowledge of others, the specialization
that acknowledges that each of us is inevitably ignorant about most things. To
the AAAS, he bemoaned "the increasing segmentation of society," blaming it for
the failure of his favorite metaphor to capture the public imagination.
The problem of specialization, he told Lemann, was what Earth in the Balance
was all about. The book was an attempt, he said, "to understand the origins of
our modern world view, and its curious reliance on specialization and ever-
narrower slices of the world around us into categories that are then
themselves dissected, in an ongoing process of separation, into parts and
subparts�a process that sometimes obliterates the connection to the whole and
the appreciation for context and the deeper meanings that can�t really be
found in the atomized parts of the whole."
No wonder the pundits scoffed. That Gore doesn�t sound like much of a
politician.
His views can nonetheless be translated into a campaign document. You just have
to push the metaphor: The "atomized parts" are citizens, or voters, or
taxpayers, or just plain individuals. They�re the little pieces that don�t
count for much until they�re brought into the grand scheme, connected to the
whole. You connect them to those deeper meanings by deciding what goals they
should pursue�programming them to solve the right problems.
Follow this analogy, and you wind up with a platform that reads something like
Gore�s campaign document, Prosperity for America�s Families. Filled with
grandiose promises and constant repetition, this 191-page "plan" consists
largely of prescriptions to add more headache-inducing complexity to the tax
code, all in the name of rewarding good behavior.
Take retirement savings. Gore wants people to save, but he wants the savings to
cost people the same regardless of how much money they make. Today�s IRAs
don�t do that. A family making $25,000 pays no income taxes, so putting away
$2,000 in retirement savings costs the full two grand. A family that makes
$75,000 is in the 28 percent bracket, so sticking $2,000 in a tax-deductible
IRA costs just $1,440. That�s not fair, suggests the Gore document.
You could, of course, solve the unfairness problem by flattening tax rates, so
that everyone faced the same tax hit. You could even eliminate special
treatment of retirement savings and let taxpayers decide, in an unbiased way,
how to spend their money. But that even-handed approach would let the atomized
parts decide on their own purposes. It would offer no deeper meanings.
Instead, the current progressivity of the tax code becomes an argument for even
greater progressivity. Gore proposes a new Retirement Savings Plus program in
which people who save but don�t pay taxes will receive matching funds and
people who save and do pay taxes will get credits that go down as their tax
rate goes up. Having centrally decided that the nation�s little processors
should all attack the problem of retirement savings, he has to rig the pieces
of the problem assigned to each household.
Saving for retirement is important to Gore, but the true central organizing
principle of his plan is that everyone should be raising children and sending
them to college. His plan thus offers a tax deduction for college tuition,
establishes tax-sheltered accounts to save for educational expenses, and gives
a tax credit for after-school programs. It hikes the child-care tax credit
(including a credit for parents who stay home with very young kids) and
promises full-time moms who haven�t paid Social Security taxes the same
benefits as employed women who have. Parents whose kids aren�t either in
college or young enough for day care are pretty much out of luck when it comes
to tax cuts as, of course, are people who make too much money.
Prosperity for America�s Families goes on and on in this vein. To keep the
nation�s "atomized parts" from pursuing their own, unapproved goals, Gore
creates so many new specialized categories that he winds up contradicting his
own goals. His plan "corrects" the marriage penalty by doubling the standard
deduction, for instance, but that penalizes any couple who itemizes to take
advantage of any of its other credits�or of the old mortgage deduction.
The overall effect is an irony worthy of any machine-age, old-paradigm manager:
In pursuit of deeper meanings and centralized purposes, Gore winds up slicing
Americans into ever-narrower interest groups, favoring some and punishing
others.
Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the author of The
Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and
Progress, recently published in paperback by Touchstone.
End<{{
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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