Finding the Purpose of a System
Addressing criticism of The Purpose of Politics
The first person to read my piece on the purpose of politics had two trenchant critiques. Criticism is nothing more than judgment, and as I’d asked for feedback, I’m bound to do something with it.
First, he said that the work demands a high level of reading comprehension. This is a feature, or defect depending on where you stand, of all my writing, as I enjoy material that unpacks in the mind as it is read. If I want to share what I believe to be a vitally important framework with a larger audience, then I must address the problem. I intend to record audio versions of my works, as hearing them interpreted facilitates understanding but also connects listeners to the author in a different way. A new notion for putting my framework into reach of more people is to write an allegory of the original piece. If treated as a work of fiction, learning the map and how political space functions becomes a game of low consequence, and what is learned from the story carries over directly to both theory and practice. There would, of course, need to be a wizard in the story.
His second critique involved the purpose of a system. I believe he was neck-deep in the Regulation section, prior to my introduction of Responsibility, but the judgment wants response. I’m paraphrasing him without permission and pulling from direct messages between us, but he says that the purpose of a system is what it does, that systems are rarely designed but rather evolve. I’m grateful not only for the feedback but also the opportunity it presents for me to clarify some concepts. What follows is response to the critique, not the critic, as I wish my pointed replies to be met with sharper ones. Consider three different systems: a hammer, a ship, and a government.
Hammers
Cameron, you fool, a hammer is not a system! A hammer is a tool, and this simple admission is immensely informative. It is an instrument, an object, it is used, it must be used as it has no agency. What does a hammer do? It seems useful for driving nails, so we may call it a nail-driver. We can bash all sorts of things with a hammer though. It can be used to break off the heads of stripped screws. A hammer can be used to pry up boards. Masochists gratify themselves by smashing their thumbs with hammers. Sadists gratify themselves by smashing the thumbs of others. Hammers can be used to shape things as well. Whatever engineering changes in hammers have occurred since the ur-caveman lashed a rock to a branch and clobbered something, however many specialized hammers have been developed, the hammer hasn’t truly evolved from its original design. It remains a means of multiplying force through leverage.
You might reply that I’ve given the purpose of a hammer, multiplying force through leverage. As a system, this seems to be the one thing it does. A hammer ought to be designed to reliably deliver force. When it is designed this way, we think nothing of it, until the haft cracks or the head decouples, after which we have what was formerly a hammer. Is what a hammer does also what it ought to do? I have used a hammer as a shim to hold up the corner of a filing cabinet, as I’d dropped a key and it magicked itself into that 1/16” gap beneath. A hammer was handy, so I put it to use. That isn’t what a hammer ought to do, but it did, beautifully, and without objection. I chose to misapply the hammer to this task and things turned out exactly as I planned, until I dropped the key again, but the hammer continued being useful for what it was designed to do. The hammer is an instrument, an object, with no agency, and we are free to use it as we see fit. I’m using this foolish example as foil for ships and governments.
Ships
Where a hammer is the superior realization of rock lashed to branch, a ship is the ne plus ultra of floating logs. When ur-caveman first spied a floating log, how the current seemed to carry it downstream, giving him visions of riding with the water instead of thrashing in it, he leapt into the water and grabbed the log, trying to haul himself atop. Because Nature’s humor is largely slapstick, the log spun ur-caveman back into the water, and he tried again. Other cavemen came to the banks to see the spectacle. Finally, Krog will join his ancestors! Og will lead us in our campaign against the wily smilodon! But Krog relented, clinging to the log with one arm and flailing back to shore. Krog has plan. Krog bind log.
A ship seems to be an instrument for humans to be on the water without swimming or drowning. Ships have evolved dramatically since Krog lashed two logs together and found he could ride the current without being so easily overturned. What changes have ships undergone? Power plants have improved, going from polling to oars, sails, and now engines. Capacities of ships have changed. Materials of ships vary greatly from the scavenged timber of Krog’s domain. Shapes of ships have similarly shifted. Why make these changes? Modern ships can do more, have greater capacities, travel further, be (somewhat) less likely to sink or run aground, and generally seem better suited to fulfill the vague purpose above of being an instrument for humans to be on the water without swimming or drowning. Now for the final lesson of the hammer.
A hammer is an extension of the person wielding it. I deceived you earlier through common language. A hammer doesn’t actually do anything, the wielder does things with the hammer. I do not accuse anyone of the delusion that hammers, left unattended, will drive nails or pry boards for their owners. A person wielding a hammer uses it. It is appropriate to name yourself as driving a nail rather than crediting the hammer. Hammers are instruments to be used. A ship would seem like an instrument to be used, though more complex, until you’ve piloted a ship. Ships are not mere instruments, which is why they have proper names.
The captain of a ship, who is also helmsman on occasion, does not use the ship, he commands it. This is less an outright fiction and more of a myth, being true enough to agree with experience. What a ship ought to do and what it does are not equivalent. A person wielding a hammer becomes unified with it in use and they become separate when idle. One hammering does not command the hammer, as that would be odd. A captain is at pains to achieve unity with the ship, though the best captains come close, more often achieving sympatico. Unlike the hammer, which does nothing, a ship seems to do things on its own, to have a will of sorts. Calling this anthropomorphization is boring and dismissive. On a ship, the crew of the ship understands the vessel in terms of themselves, and the ship is not fully in the control of the crew. Ships are objects, instruments to purposes, but we do not fully understand them, cannot generalize them enough to employ them as tools with total certainty, so they are more subjects than objects. Krog’s raft, the Sauroktonos, is a true instrument, as he could unify with it. The Sauroktonos had only two logs lashed together, but Krog could, once learning his vessel, know what he could do with it and what he could not.
The Blind Helmsman
When wielding a hammer, a person loses all other available function with the hand holding it. Using the hammer enhances capability in one sense but limits it in another. I am unlikely to wield a hammer and drink coffee from a mug with the same hand, unless I wish to do both badly. By employing this tool, I constrain my freedom. This should be simultaneously one of the most banal and profound things you ever read. The hammer does nothing, cannot do anything, and if I wish to employ it, I am choosing by consequence to do nothing that cannot be done with a hammer. In what way is a captain constraining his freedom, reducing his agency, by employing a ship?
The Sauroktonos relies on current to move. Krog learns to carry a long and slender branch with him to push his vessel out of shoals. The current of the river seems uniform on top by varies wildly beneath the surface. Krog learns to lie prone on the raft and feel the current, using the branch to drag one side of the raft in the water, changing its heading. He begins to mutter words of thanks to the river when his travels are simple, and takes to praising his raft when the river is in tumult. Krog is severely constrained by the vessel he is unified with, because he can do little to change the conditions of its passage through the river. Yet, despite these limitations, Krog chooses less freedom by piloting his craft because of the advantages.
Modern sea-going vessels are vastly more useful than the Sauroktonos. Engines remove ships from the mercy of currents and winds. Hulls are fashioned from metal which, though they will oxidize, are not likely to burn on the water as wooden ships have done. Ships have capacities today which allow not only gargantuan volumes of freight but also provisions and stores for crews and passengers to live on more than subsistence at sea. And navigation technology has retired masters of sextant and chronometer, making it possible for a blind man to take the helm. Yet, with every advance, a captain is less able to unify with the ship. The captain can do more with the modern ship, but he is on a vessel which is not under his full control. In fact, the captain can only assume he has control of his vessel by comparing what the ship is doing against what he commanded it ought do.
Improvements to ship design and technology make vessels more useful, but they do not improve the agency of the captain or his crew, with respect to operating the ship. They have become instrumental to operation. Where Krog was on the water with his raft, the captain and crew of a modern vessel are merely on the ship. The captain or any member of the crew on a modern vessel has less agency than Krog did on the Sauroktonos, without regard to how much more useful contemporary ships are than Krog’s raft. Krog had sole responsibility for the Sauroktonos. No crew to give orders to. No specialists to assign to maintaining engines or sending communications. No technology to fail him beyond the bindings on his raft, of which he learned to carry replacements. The Sauroktonos was an object when idle, becoming a subject when Krog mastered it on the water, unifying with it. A modern vessel begins as a subject of sorts, being neither fully knowable or controllable by any one of the crew. The crew must follow informal regulations, oft made formal, to maintain conditions of the ship, allowing it to operate. Responsibility for the ship and her crew is legally in the hands of the captain, but in reality this responsibility goes beyond the ship. A panoply of shipbuilders, engineers, and companies were responsible for constructing the ship before her crew ever came aboard, and the effects of those efforts and intentions will be suffered by the crew. Every specialist on ship has a small portion of responsibility for the vessel, though nominally seated with the captain, and though the crew cannot truly unify with the ship, they can with one another.
Being human and being used as an instrument is not a favorable situation, and this is why ships have names. The captain and crew cannot unify with the ship at this scale, so they do the next best thing: they unify with one another and negotiate with the ship. It is a glorious fiction, but it also rings true, so we take it as myth and enjoy it, celebrate it, even when voyages end in tragedy. We do not negotiate with objects; they do nothing, have no agency and no desires. A subject however, a person, they can be open to trade, a relationship. And so the captain and the crew negotiate with their ship, under the myth of the ship being a person, and she cares for the crew while they care for her. If you’ve endured my map, consider this a species of dignity. The alternative to this myth for a crew is to be mere instruments of the ship.
Governments
All of this circumnavigation to say that if the purpose of a system is what it does, look at the example of a modern ship. The ship conveys cargo and crew from port to port, but it also turns the crew into instruments. In defiance, even a mediocre crew will band together and follow the myth of their ship personified, working with her on their voyage. All of the effects of a system are necessary to consider, especially with that definition of purpose. What ought a system do? With the full reality of a system and its effects in mind, turn your gaze to governments. As governments are composed of people (for now), we can say authoritatively that government is capable of doing, unlike a hammer.
What is government doing? What ought they be doing, and how does this differ from what they are doing? Are the employees of the government mere tools of it, or do they master it? Do they pretend to work with the government, or is it only a machine? Are the citizens of a government instruments or ends? If we follow the myth of government personified, is she behaving with dignity? If government is evolving, are we prepared for the horror of its final cause?
I understand the purpose of politics, and by my measure, every contemporary government fails to meet this purpose, but I am a heretic, and my enthusiasm is penchant. Answer the questions above for yourself, without regard to the flotsam and jetsam I’ve strewn over the page. The second question may be easier to answer than the first. I cannot accept that purpose is an accident of present conditions.
With enough idle time and a healthy personal treasury to keep me away from gainful employment, I’ll pursue a proper crucifixion of utilitarianism, but this will do for the moment. I’ve pulled the original critique out of context and made something that my critic did not intend. Call me Ishmael. I remain grateful for my critic and hope to post his response.
Fair winds to you,
Cameron