Ironic Processing
By Virginia Postrel
http://www.reason.com/0011/co.vp.ironic.html
When I give a speech about the big-picture political and cultural ideas in my
book <A
HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0684862697/reasonmagazineA/">The
Future and Its Enemies</A>, 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 itâ*s not really a joke. Donâ*t get me
wrong: Unlike some Clinton haters, who have the same opinion of his boss, I
donâ*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"â*the intellectual wannabe who
seems like heâ*d rather have my job than Bill Clintonâ*sâ*or the political
Gore, who speaks in poll-tested phrases. Both versions share the patronizing
world view perfectly expressed in the vice presidentâ*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.
Goreâ*s responses elicited scorn, derision, and dismay in Washingtonâ*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 Lemannâ*s article revealed more
than Goreâ*s interest in odd ideas; it gave readers a peek at his political
philosophy. And the substance of Goreâ*s world view is troubling.
Gore believes society needs to take ideas from science and apply them to
politics and economics, and heâ*s frustrated that scientific ideas are too
unfamiliar to the general publicâ*and his political colleaguesâ*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 itâ*s impossible to collect all relevant information
(including the knowledge of individualsâ* 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 Goreâ*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 isnâ*t good for most
problems, but thatâ*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 Goreâ*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 possibleâ*the specialization that lets people do what theyâ*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 <A HREF="http://www.aaas.org/meetings/gore.htm">
bemoaned</A> "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
subpartsâ*a process that sometimes obliterates the connection to the whole and
the appreciation for context and the deeper meanings that canâ*t really be
found in the atomized parts of the whole."
No wonder the pundits scoffed. That Gore doesnâ*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. Theyâ*re the little pieces that donâ*t
count for much until theyâ*re brought into the grand scheme, connected to the
whole. You connect them to those deeper meanings by deciding what goals they
should pursueâ*programming them to solve the right problems.
Follow this analogy, and you wind up with a platform that reads something
like Goreâ*s campaign document, <A
HREF="http://www.algore2000.com/pdf/gore_prosperity.pdf">Prosperity for
Americaâ*s Families</A>. 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. Todayâ*s IRAs
donâ*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. Thatâ*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 donâ*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 nationâ*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 havenâ*t paid Social Security taxes the same
benefits as employed women who have. Parents whose kids arenâ*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 Americaâ*s Families goes on and on in this vein. To keep the
nationâ*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 creditsâ*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 (<A HREF="mailto:vpostrel@reason.com">
vpostrel@reason.com</A>) is the author of <A HREF="http://www.futureand.com/">
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise,
and Progress</A>, recently published in paperback by Touchstone.
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R. A. Hettinga