Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

The idea of consilience itself is a concept of Greek origin that assumes an intrinsic orderliness in our cosmos, which makes it understandable by human reason. As such it is the prerequisite of any scientific knowledge of our surroundings, since there cannot be knowledge —at least in a form that we can communicate and share with others— without the use of reason. In this book E. O. Wilson calls for a return to this old project that attempted to unite all of human knowledge into a single corpus —not so different from the efforts to find a theory of everything that we have heard of so much lately, although extending far beyond the realm of physics and reaching towards many other disciplines, including the social sciences. Along the way, Wilson takes us on a fascinating journey through the different attempts to build this synthesis in human history and reflects over our contemporary state.

Technical description:
Title: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.
Author: Edrwad O. Wilson.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Edition: First Edition, New York (USA), 1998.
Pages: 332 pages, including index.
ISBN: 0-679-45077-7

Entry from Wikipedia.
Find it on Amazon (US, UK).

The "armies of the disaffected" and the need to reform representative democracy.

Halstead and Lind talk about the armies of the disaffected as the new mainstream of American politics:

For good or bad, the Information Age has changed the nature of American democracy. In most high-profile matters, the public is no longer a passive bystander —its voice is heard through almost instantaneous public opinion polls, focus groups, and various public interest organizations. As Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans discovered in the mid-1990s, those who veer from the new center pay the price, as Mr. Gingrich did with his political life. America's silent majority is no longer so silent.

These armies of disaffected, independent-minded voters, together with a large number of centrist Republicans and Democrats, are neither conservative nor liberal in the traditional sense. Polls show there are majorities of Americans who are socially tolerant yet supportive of law and order, fiscally conservative yet accepting of government intervention to ensure economic fairness and security, committed to racial unity yet skeptical of race-based affirmative action, concerned about the strenght of our economy yet equally concerned about the health of our environment, and deeply committed to both electoral and educational reform. Needless to say, Americans who share all these views do not feel at home in either of today's major parties.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 216).

This is also a contemporary trend that is happening elsewhere. Many American analysts tend to be quite inward-looking, assuming that most social trends they notice in the US are either unique or perhaps even the direct consequence of some sort of mythical American creativity. In reality, societies are evolving in a similar manner here and there. There are, of course, different stages of development from place to place, but once two countries reach a given state of development they experience similar social, political and economic trends. It's the labeling that may be different —and that, incidentally, may also lead to some confusions about the uniqueness of the underlying phenomenons. Here in Europe, political analysts are more prone to refer to these armies of the disaffected as non-partisan or even new middle class. Yet, the reality they are referring to is about the same: individuals who are less prone to see things through the ideologically charged visions of yesteryear, centered on a pragmatic approach to the problems that prizes the search for solutions rather than the discovery of all-encompassing systems of thought and, above all, more difficult to predict when it comes to their voting patterns. The situation, then, is pretty similar on this other side of the Atlantic, which also makes our challenges about the same: how to adapt our political institutions (i.e., representative democracy) to live up to these new expectations generated by the information society and a more educated, more sophisticated population. We need to reform democracy to adapt to these changes, and so far there are few radically innovative proposals in this regard that I am aware of. Halstead and Lind are no exception to this either.

Reforms in the 21st century.

According to Halstead & Lind, we may be about to face a big era of reforms similar to the one we witnessed at the beginning of the 20th century:

Clearly, the first years of the new millennium are not one of the great ages of political reform, like 1782-1800, 1860-76, or 1932-68. Rather, the first years of the twenty-first century in the United States can be compared to the first years of the twentieth. Then, as now, the challenge was to adapt American society to a new phase of technological civilization —the second industrial era in the 1900s, the Information Age in the 2000s. Then, as now, it was becoming clear that systemic change, not merely incremental reform, was in order.

But then as now systemic change was not yet possible. The reformers of the late nineteenth century like the Mugwumps and the Populists shared a vague sense that things were not right, but they failed to correctly analyze the situation. The Mugwumps, ignoring the transformation of the industrial economy, tended to assume that most problems resulted from political corruption. Their favored forms were important but limited to the democratic process, like the secret ballot. The Populists, by contrast, feared industrial progress and sought to preserve an America of family farms. Like the Mugwumps, they tended to blame the side effects of industrialization on elite conspiracies rather than on structural change. Populists therefore favored this or that crackpot panacea —the nationalization of the railroads, or a currency based on bimetallism. The parallel with the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century is almost exact. The contemporary equivalent of the old Mugwumps were obsessed with campaign finance reform and gimmicks like term limits, to the exclusion of more important reforms. And the hard-core Populists of our time, represented by Patrick Buchanan, sought to restore an earlier economic and social order by means of industrial protectionism.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 212-213).

I still think Gramsci described it best when he tried to define the concept of crisis:

When the old is dead, the new cannot be born.

That is precisely what happened at the beginning of the 20th century, and it's now happening once more: the old is dead (or about to die), but the new is not fully born yet. We can already begin to see the shapes the new world will take, but they are not completely defined yet. On the other hand, while it's becoming increasingly obvious that the old way to deal with things is not acceptable anymore (i.e., it's not sufficient, it fails to provide us with the answers we need), we still stick to them out of fear not so much of what's to come as fear of the unknown. We are indeed in the middle of a large transition between two different forms to understand and organize the world, moving away from the old industrial paradigm and closer to the information age. We can already see some of the characteristics that will define the new future, but cannot fully grasp them yet. Thus, our reaction is, at least partially, one of fear and disbelief. We cannot rule out desperate attempts to hit the brakes and return to a more comfortable past (i.e., populism and protectionism in a different, more up to date guise). But, in the end, the new information age and its new rules will come one way or another. Our best bet is to adapt to it by implementing the needed reforms. That's what Halstead & Lind propose in their book. When everything around us falls apart, we cannot stay put. There are basically two possible reactions: either we make a desperate attempt to hit the brakes, and we will be smashed to smithreens by the unstoppable advance of social and economic evolution, or we make an effort to constantly ascertain the main features of that new world that's fastly taking shape in front of us and implement the reforms to adapt to it and make the best out of it.

Sometimes it takes those who oppose the reforms to consolidate them.

Sometimes it takes those who oppose the reforms to consolidate them:

Each of the three American foundings has come to an end when all parties accept the rules of the new system and agree to abide by them. Often this "ratification" of the institutional revolution takes the form of the election of a president representing a faction that had bitterly fought against the reforms only a few years before. The founding of the first republic, for instance, was ratified when Thomas Jefferson became president in 1800. Many of Jefferson's supporters had fought against the adoption of the 1787 federal Constitution, but when he captured the presidency, they changed their strategy to one of working within the system rather than working to undermine it. A presidential election also marked the ratification of the second republic of the United States, which arose from the carnage of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this case, southern Democrats acquiesced in naming the northern Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president in return for the end of Reconstruction in the South. From that time on the southern elite would work using the new rules of Lincoln's second republic. Then the election of 1952 marked the ratification of the third republic, whose framework was built by Franklin Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman beginning in 1932. Throughout the thirties and forties, many Republicans had bitterly denounced the New Deal for creating a tyrannical federal government. As president, however, Eisenhower signaled the acquiescence of the Republican majority by refusing to undo any major New Deal program.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 211).

Over time, this concept has become a truism of political science. For example, it wasn't until the fiery anti-Communists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided to establish diplomatic relationships with China that most Americans came to accept it. Likewise, it wasn't until Bill Clinton and Tony Blair changed their own party policies that Labour and the Democrats finally accepted the reforms introduced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, thus allowing them to return to power and move on from there. In the end, the best way to return to power is to accept whatever decisions the opponent took from government that may have improved society as a whole and work not against them but with them, from the newly established position. Or, in other words, the best way to guarantee a safe return to power is from moderate positions, instead of promising to undo what the opponent did.

Conservatism and reforms.

Politics is full of contradictions. The common assumption is that traditionalists want to maintain the status quo and, therefore, supporting them is the best way to guarantee that things will continue to be as in the past. Yet, as Halstead and Lind explain, perhaps reformism is a better way to implement changes in a non-intrusive manner while keeping the essence of what worked in the past:

Indeed, it is reformers rather than reactionaries who have a better claim to the label of conservative. Who are more conservative —those who would sacrifice the part to save the whole, or those who would prefer to lose the whole rather than to alter it in any way? The true patriots in American history have always understood that when conditions change it is necessary to pursue perennial goals by new means. Renovation is conservation by means of innovation.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 208)

It's, after all, Giuseppe Lampedusa's old statement, according to which "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change". The conservative approach, desperately hanging onto any and all tradition as if they are supposed to be considered good simply due to age, regardless of whatever else changed in society and people's minds, is, contrary to what some people believe, the best way to promote radical changes and revolutions. And these, for the most part, have never brought about anything worthwhile other than in the revolutionaries' feverish imagination.

Intergenerational divide.

There is so much talk about racial, gender and economic discrimination that I had never considered the possibility of what Halstead and Lind label as "generational apartheid". Yet, it tuly is a clear trend not only in the US but in contemporary society in general —although it may take slightly different forms in different societies, obviously:

Another major barrier standing in the way of intergenerational harmony is physical, resulting from outmoded zoning laws. As we have noted, our system of generational apartheid segregates neighborhoods by age as ruthlessly as racial apartheid used to segregate neighborhoods by race. A typical American may grow up in a middle-class suburb, and spend the college years in an "apartment city" surrounded by tens of thousands of single young people, before moving to a neighborhood for young couples with "starter" homes, followed by a more prosperous middle-class neighborhood for families with children, and finally by a neighborhood where virtually everyone is old. This bizarre pattern, in which each stage of life is accompanied by a physical migration, is not the result of "market forces", inasmuch as real estate is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the United States. Rather, this generational apartheid is the result of ill-considered zoning regulations and development policies that mandate that all housing in a particular neighborhood be similar, and that the functions of dwelling, work, and education be kept far apart.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 187-188).

The fact is that traditional societies promoted an almost permanent communication across generations that has been eroded as we moved to a more complex, more fluid, more dynamic type of society. Together with the cult of the youth and practices such as ageism, we have also witnessed an increasing lack of consideration towards experience and seniority that has ultimately led to the segregation of the elderly in pseudo-internment camps. The fact is that, in today's society, we appreciate novelty for its own sake. The old avant-garde mentality that prizes whatever is new above all —including, yes, the primacy of anything that's shocking simply because it is so—, has seemingly spread to society at large. As a consequence, the elderly have ben left out of society and play almost no role.

Now, according to Halstead and Lind, the government is to blame due to "outmoded zoning laws". I beg to differ. This social phenomenon is too extended throughout the world to allow us such an easy way out. The fact is that societies where such zoning laws don't even exist —for instance, in most of Europe—, there is still a clear tendency towards segregating them in special residencies and, above all, to keep them out of mainstream society. There was a time, not so long ago, when age and experience were attributes that made it easier for a candidate to win an election. Today, on the other hand, a certain youthful exuberance is almost a sine qua non for success.

The immigration debate and the increase in social and economic disparities.

In discussing the issue of immigration policies, Halstead and Lind mention a very uncomfortable truth that is avoided all too often:

The reason the immigration debate is so contentious is that any policy choice inevitably involves significant trade-offs. There is simply no such thing as a win-win immigration policy; whatever choice is made, there will always be winners and losers, both domestically and internationally. For instance, high levels of low-skilled immigrants (most of America's current immigrants fall in this category) tend to benefit domestic employers and capital owners, as well as the poor from abroad who come to our shores. However, the same policy also tends to depress wages for America's current working poor, and to increase the disparity between our educational and economic haves and have-nots. In studying this matter, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that increased immigration tends to disproportionately depress the wages and economic circumstances of low-skilled and low-income workers, while benefiting the wealthiest Americans.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 176-177).

They are right. Our media still discusses these issues from the anticuated perspective of right versus left. Thus, defending a stricter immigration policy is usually equated with conservatism, while a more loose policy is normally seens as more liberal or progressive. However, this barely scratches the surface of the problem, which is far more complex. What if, as suggested above, the constant influx of immigrants into our countries acts as an influence to lower the wages of those whose incomes are already at the bottom of the ladder to start with? What if it's precisely the business owners who benefit the most from this trend by lowering costs here, without a need to even take the jobs offshore? How does this affect the welfare system that we had built in the last few decades? More important still, what is the impact on our middle class, which had expanded during the heady years of the postwar, leading to a more stable society? All these are questions that need answers, and the answers cannot follow the traditional right versus left approach. After all, how progressive is it to support lower wages for our working class while the wealthy business owners benefit from it? It's no surprise that populism and the far-right are growing so much precisely among the displaced working class of the developed world, those who have seen their wages decrease and their hopes of becoming middle class someday wither away. These are the true issues we have to cope with, and we have to do so without prejudices and old assumptions. It's no secret that the social and economic disparities have grown in the US in the last two or three decades. What's not so well known is the fact that the main cause may have not been the "neoliberal policies" everybody likes to blame, but rather a high level of immigration and the pressure of the global markets. Exactly, there goes another cherished dogma of the left!

Interracial marriages and the concept of the "melting pot".

In spite of the bad image the US has abroad as the land of racism and segregation, the truth is that interracial marriages are far more widespread than most people —including many Americans— think:

Recent immigrants from Latin America and East Asia are intermarrying with the post-European white majority at a remarkable rate -one in two Asian-Americans, one in three Latinos. The younger Americans are, the more likely they are to be in transracial marriages. In 1990, for example, only 53 percent of married black Americans under the age of twenty-five were in black-black marriages —compared to 84 percent of blacks over the age of sixty-five. Nothing short of a complete reversal of today's high intermarriage rates can prevent the formation, at different rates in different regions of the country, of a mixed-race majority in the United States in the long run. The golfer Tiger Woods —who jokingly describes himself as "Cablinasian", by which he means a fusion of Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian— may well be a forerunner of the "average American" in the centuries to come.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 173).

There are a couple of issues to consider here. First of all, contrary to the myth many Americans like to believe, the US is not the first society that has managed to build a sense of community from people with different ethnic origins. Far from it, this has been the norm throughout history. As a matter of fact, the concept of nation-state, firmly linked to that of a single language or ethnic identity, is quite recent. It doesn't go further back than a few centuries. Regardless, the only reason why we consider the French, the Germans or the Italians to have some sort of ethnic homogeneity is because they started their own particular melting pot hundreds of years ago. Other than that, genetically speaking, they are far from homogeneous. In other words, countries like China, Italy or Turkey are what the US may be like in a couple of centuries, the result of all these interracial marriages and the peaceful —and not so peaceful— coexistence of many different ethnicities on the same soil.

The second issue to consider is how this trend will affect racial policies, in special affirmative action. In this regard, one has to agree with Halstead and Lind that such policies will make less and less sense as we move towards a society where the different races are mixed. The idea is pretty much anathema to today's liberals, but it's difficult to think how else the racial policies we have been implementing so far —clearly based on a static sense of identity— can be applied to a fluid society like the one that's to come. Simply put, a policy such affirmative action that assumes that each individual will be identified with a single ethnicity has little future in a global world, it seems.

Theories of social reform.

Halstead and Lind briefly discuss the different theories of social reform:

The problem is as much conceptual as practical. For centuries, philosophers have debated the legitimacy of different approaches to social change. Some, like the Marquis de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham, and other rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment tradition, have sought to reform existing institutions in light of an abstract ideal or goal by deducing first principles of social order. Pragmatists, like John Dewey and Richard Rorty, have rejected grand master plans and called for ceaseless experimentation in the design of institutions. Skeptical thinkers, like David Hume, Edmund Burke, Isaiah Berlin, and John Gray, have criticized the notion that society can be redesigned by either abstract reason or pragmatic experimentation. Society, they have argued, is not a mechanical construction but an organic entity, based on gradually evolving traditions. The task of reformers is to water and fertilize —and now and then prune— a growing plant.

(Halstead & Lind: p. 167).

As it tends to be the case with secular debates, the reason why different schools of thought have persisted over time is usually related to the fact that they all have something to offer, I think (or, as some other people would put it: perhaps all of them are right in some sense). For example, it should patently clear by now that without a will to apply social reform and improve our societies we would have never made it too far. I'm not referring only to the fact that we might still be living in caves and hunting wild animals out there, but also to the fact that most of what we hold dear these days (democracy, solidarity, education, compassion, comfort...) would have never existed should humans have taken the conservative approach according to which it's always best never to mingle with things and carry out social experiments. On the other hand, perhaps the main lesson to be learnt from our tragic twentieth century is precisely that shaping societies after abstract models is not a good idea. Traditions exist for a reason, after all. They have evolved over centuries and, one would suspect, respond to some very deep need of human nature. Yes, we can change them, but it's something that we should never do willy-nilly. Finally, we have what Halstead and Lind call the pragmatists, who are skeptical of grand projects and prefer a more modest (although continuous) experimentation that tries to improve our lives. Of all the approaches, I definitely choose this latter one. As usual, the middle ground appeals to me.

An alternative to the sales tax.

In the vein of offering new and innovative solutions to today's problems, Halstead and Lind come up with an alternative to the sales tax:

Here's a concrete alternative. Why not replace our fifty separate state sales tax systems with a single and simple national consumption tax, whose proceeds are rebated to the states on a per capita basis? Unlike regressive sales taxes, a personal consumption tax can be made highly progressive by exempting a certain amount —say, the first $15,000 of consumption— so that the average cost of basic necessities like housing, food, and transportation would be free from taxation. At the same time, such a system would remove all tax collection burdens from businesses and ensure a level playing field for both "brick" and "click" industries.

A person's annual consumption could be calculated based on a simple formula: income minus savings and investment equals consumption. For example, if, after income taxes, you made $45,000 in a given year, saved $10,000, and spent the remaining $35,000, then with the $15,000 deduction, your taxable consumption would be $20,000. Naturally, the exemption level should be increased somewhat for each dependent. Because the sales tax does not differentiate between individuals with dependents and those without, our system would become more family-friendly in the process of becoming more progressive. A consumption tax designed for the new economy should also be education-friendly, given today's need for constant skills upgrading. Accordingly, education expenses might be viewed as investments rather than as consumption, and thus exempted from taxation.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 131-132).

This proposal would be a significant change not only in the US but also in the EU, where the value added tax (VAT) is still the main source of revenue. It certainly sounds more fair, although we would obviously have to study its effects more in detail. Would it allow our governments to raise a similar amount of money, for instance?

Representative vs. direct democracy.

The problems experienced by the traditional systems of representative democracy in the last few decades has led to a renaissance of proposals that put forward direct democracy as the solution in one form or another. We are told that electing political representatives who don't always vote what their own base supports somehow distorts democracy, and we are also told that representative democracy always leads to the creation of a "caste" of "professional politicians" who quickly forget whom they represent and what brought them there. Yet, all this was already debated a long time ago, and pretty much every political scientist thought that we had reached a consensus that was widely accepted as logical and sensible by the vast majority of citizens in our advanced democracies. As Halstead and Lind state:

In essence there are only two theories of democracy: representative democracy and direct democracy. Representative democracy is based on the idea that voters do not choose policies, they choose policymakers. It is these policymakers who choose policies —after debate and compromise with other elected leaders. Ideally, elected representatives should act on behalf of the values and interests of their constituents —not on behalf of their opninions, which may be based on ignorance or prejudice. Elected representatives, in this view, are like doctors or lawyers; their duty is to tell those who hire them the truth, even if it's something the client does not want to hear. Great leaders, be they legislators or chief magistrates like presidents and governors, are those who are willing to risk their political careers in order to promote the long-term interests of their constituents and their nation, even when that interest is not yet understood by a majority of the public.

(Halstead & Lind: pp. 125-126).

Beyond the idealization of direct democracy as a political nirvana, we should realize that it is often little else than a finely veiled form to sustain tyranny (Muammar al-Qaddafi and Hugo Chavez are perhaps the best examples of this). But why is this? There are, as usual, multiple reasons. I'll try to summarize at least a few here. First of all, direct democracy assumes that there is such a thing as a clear, already finalized public will that's somehow immutable and solid as a rock. It doesn't allow for any sort of flexibility, fluidity or, even worse, change of mind. It doesn't allow either for the typical give and take that has become to characterize complex societies, where different interests and social groups are constantly re-defining their relationships with regards to the others and also with regards to the policies. On the contrary, the theory of direct democracy assumes that there is such a thing as a public will and a public interest that can be set on stone once and for all. In this sense, it shouldn't surprise anyone that those thinkers who strongly defended these ideas —it all started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but many of the Bolsheviks also spoke up in favor of direct democracy— ended up justifying totalitarianism in one form or another. After all, what reason is there to allow those invididuals who stand for ideas that run against society as a whole to live a free life? Once we manage to find out what the public will is beyond any doubt, we have laid the first stone of the totalitarian State. Second, and directly related to the previous point, direct democracy does away with the need for dialogue and political consensus. Since the citizenry can directly decide what it thinks about any particular piece of legislation at the ballot box, there is no need for people who represent the different social and economic interests to negotiate and make any effort to reach an agreement that satisfies all parties involved. Why bother? Let's just vote and figure out what the citizens decide without any further wait. In doing so, direct democracy increases the polarization of the citizenry and favors the dictatorship of the majority. Third, let's be honest, direct democracy is the best way to let demagoguery run free in our societies. There is nothing easier than stirring up people's hatred with rhetorical masterpieces that blame the escapegoats —usually those who think, act or look different— in order to solve all our problems. Just get rid of all the Jews, all the blacks, all the gays, all the immigrants or whatever else, and our problems will automatically go away. Besides, anyone who has assisted to an Assembly of students while in College knows how easy it is to manipulate people's views when they are burning to find someone to blame for their problems. Fourth, and finally, there are quite a few technical problems that make it direct democracy in any advanced society. It sure doesn't make much sense to implement direct democracy on nation-states with millions of citizens. How do we do it? Using the Internet and new technologies. But are we sure that people truly want to spend hours after hours doing the work that requires to decide between different pieces of legislation —not to talk about the work that's needed to put them together?

Let's be real. In the end, the only solution that makes sense is what we already have: a representative democracy with some elements of direct democracy via referendum and similar. Our political systems are not failing due to a lack of direct democracy, but rather due to a whole slew of other issues that we have been discussing in other entries: the excesses of party discipline, the importance of money to launch a campaign, the problems with electoral systems that distort what citizens think, etc. That's where we should do the work, instead of wasting our time with a concept —direct democracy— that would quickly morph from a dream to our worst nightmare.