In the previous post, we made the acquaintance of my hypothetical unaffiliated neighbor. He’s basically a decent fellow whose moral commitments are focused on the only kind of morality he understands – fairness. The kinds of morality that flow from community affiliation – loyalty to a specific tradition and the bearers of that tradition – appear to him (as an outsider to all such traditions) as manifestations of clannishness and xenophobia. In the name of fairness, he seeks to at least level the playing field on which successful and unsuccessful communities compete by undermining successful communities. I find this objective malign enough, but in this post I’ll explain why the malignancy is compounded by the methods that flow naturally from the logic of unaffiliation.

Recall how communities reach a collective decision regarding some issue. The starting point is the received wisdom regarding comparable issues. Multiple spontaneous individual decisions, as well as deliberate rulings by elders, ultimately coalesce into some sort of consensus that is incorporated into the received wisdom of the next generation. The process, like the community itself, is assumed to continue indefinitely. Now consider how the same issue might be resolved in the absence of a community. In such a case, received wisdom carries little weight. The role of elders is assumed by experts, whose job is not to interpret received wisdom but rather to design optimal solutions from scratch. And the relevant time horizon is short since decisions are not tentative steps in an open-ended process, but rather attempts to optimize something or other here and now.

This approach to decision-making should frighten you. Decisions made by experts more inclined to defy tradition than to respect it are much more likely to lead to catastrophe than decisions that evolve naturally from time-tested traditions. This is all the more true if the objective of such decisions is to maximize something in the short term rather than to achieve some good enough result for now and allow the process to continue to creep in the right general direction. There might not be any very good solution in the short term to what ails us and the insistence on finding one is likely to wreak havoc.

But let’s get back to my neighbor. He knows two things. He wants to bring successful communities down a few notches and he trusts experts, not elders, to figure out how to get things done. In other words, he is inclined towards policies that affect very many people (communities) that are crafted by very few people (experts). Not to put too fine a point on it, my neighbor’s view of the world – a view that follows logically from his lack of affiliation with any moral community – is one in which the consequences of decisions flow from the top down. He trusts experts to compute just how to redistribute and to diversify in the very best possible way. Do I need to explain how this takes us down the road to serfdom?

When you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail. And when you trust experts to engineer societies, the world’s most pressing problems are bound to be the ones amenable to social engineering. Like Thomas Sowell’s “anointed”, my neighbor is well practiced at discovering crises that imperil cities, countries, preferably the cosmos itself, but to which the benighted masses are oblivious. The experts, however, know just what to do, namely, regulate the dangerous behavior of the masses.

So, for example, I’m an agnostic on global warming (or whatever they call it these days), at least as far as the science goes. But as far as second-order information goes – the evidence for deciding whom to trust – I can’t help but notice that global warming wins the unaffiliated trifecta. First, it involves a quixotic quest for eternal good health. Second, it sets up modern civilization as the villain. Third, it proposes a solution in which experts curtail the behavior of the masses. Without knowing a damn thing about the science, I’m simply not willing to take seriously any story that fits the genre quite that perfectly.

More generally, I’m frightened by people like my unaffiliated neighbor (hypothetical neighbor, I emphasize) for whom fairness always trumps other virtues, for whom feel-good crusades trump lives, and for whom expert theories trump common sense. I am particularly wary of those who shift the power to make decisions that affect the many up to the few anointed ones unsullied by community affiliation.

Of course, the mechanism most commonly used to concentrate power in the hands of these anointed is …(drumroll)… the state.

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Thus ends the first half of this series of posts. From here on, I’ll be discussing which roles states can fulfill effectively and which they can’t. In particular, I’ll be discussing what a Jewish state is good for and what it’s not good for. And just to hint at the tie-in with all the stuff I’ve been discussing until now, consider this: who has an interest in a very powerful (vis-à-vis its citizens) Jewish state, those who are committed to the Jewish People as a community (or collection/hierarchy of communities) or those who do not identify with the Jewish People as a community?