The tinkerer’s disposition
We owe where we are to the habit — and the freedom — of tinkering. ~ Jason, on the libertarian disposition
I think there are two types of tinkering. There is the tinkering of the individual and the community, the organic tinkering that simply comes from trial and error, from innovation and exploration, from markets and experiments and new ideas. Call it bottom-up tinkering, or grass-roots or whatever you like.
Then there is top-down tinkering, also known as central-planning. This is also a part of the ‘liberal disposition’ though I would say it’s the most dangerous part. It can be useful and good at times and in some forms. Government has to run and function and somebody has to tinker with how to do that. Roads need to be paved, trade agreements reached, armies levied. But that same progressive impulse can lead people to believe they can build nations with bombs and remake totalitarian societies in our own Democratic image. It can lead to disastrous welfare projects, or it can lead to necessary policy overhauls.
Either way, these two modes of tinkering are certainly both here to stay. I prefer the former, but I know we can’t get away entirely from the latter, and sometimes I don’t think we should. The trick is to get the two to work together and I think that’s done by making the central planner more accountable and his planning more transparent, and then giving out more and more responsibility to the organic tinkerers on the front lines of society. Decentralization of power not only keeps power in check, it returns power to the people. It diffuses and becomes more real and less dangerous to society.
Matt notes that we should “give an account of why any particular change might be good or bad.” I think that applies to the top-down tinkerer, but not so much to the bottom-up tinkerer. Those tinkerers can do trial and error without (for the most part) too dire of consequences. For those doing things at the top, giving an account of their reasons and actions is important and necessary.
All things in balance. Even tinkering. Maybe especially tinkering.
Erik, you’re definitely on to something with the two types of tinkerers. I would say the greater the change, the higher the burden of proof.
I also want to say that my call for reasoned assessment of change is not a call for experimentation. I think the rhetoric of science is pretty unhelpful, actually. The good we lose or gain may not be measurable through the blunt and limited instruments of social science. Negative externalities are important, but they are not the only way we have of weighing goods. We also need moral deliberation and judgment about the goods we value for individuals, families and communities.Report
How does this tie in to the military interventions in the 90s? It seemed like the Balkan actions (Bosnia, Kosovo) were less about democracy and freedom then about stopping civil war and ethnic cleansing. The lauded result was peace in Europe rather than the flowering of democracy.
But then you talk about a “progressive impulse can lead people to believe they can build nations with bombs and remake totalitarian societies in our own Democratic image.” Is that “progressive” or radical and revolutionary? It just comes across as a cheap shot against democrats, trying to tar them with the worst excesses of a radical Republican government from the last decade. What happened was not progressive, which is about progress and necessarily incremental progress through governmental changes, but the attempt to implement a radical revolution in the mid-east like the early Grande Armee after the French Revolution. Universal rights of man, disparagement of sectarian bonds; radical social and political upheavel though military force.
That is not “tinkering” or the tinkerer’s disposition. We dragged down the ancien regime, swept away the privileges of the elite (Baath) and executed the old king, Saddam.
Tinkering is actual tinkering when amending the rules of society and letting developments organically develop. Welfare reform, which gave broad discretion to the states, is one such example. But again, it’s not just changes on the left. The collection of Bush tax-cuts significantly shrank the governments ability to collect revenue and laid the foundation for large, structural deficits. Tinkering would have tied tax cuts to spending cuts to see if that is the organic balance desired by society. Cuts with spending increases was a more radical change that introduced the growth of fiscal instability, and seems to expand outside of the zone of ‘tinkering’.Report
Top down, coercive tinkering is a different kind of tinkering, one which should be limited within the scope of government responsibilities. One of our biggest problems is government tinkering which transcends the scope of government responsibilities and causes uncertainty in the private sector. Regulatory changes geared toward industry engineering creates an environment in which businesses become overly cautious, when what we need is risk taking, innovation and entrepreneurial confidence. The major externalities have been addressed a hundred times over, and now government tinkers with equality and justice in the social realm, and they are using private enterprise as the vehicle to actualize their tinker-dreams. This socialistic direction is the tinkering which needs to end.Report
@Mike Farmer, The government has been very heavily intruding into the social realm with top down (usually Christian) tinkering for as long as the republic has existed. If all centralized tinkering is bad than so are the traditional intrusions that conservatives hold so dear.Report
@North,
Great, North. Glad we agree. So now that we agree that top down tinkering is bad and has always been bad, can we all agree to stop?Report
@Jay Daniel, Well I’m no libertarian (too many problems with the commons for my tastes) so can’t agree with you there. But I will meet you half way and say that if it could be done better by a private or decentralized entity or if it would be better if not done at all then government or centralized entities shouldn’t be doing it.Report
@North,
What Jay Daniel said. Can you imagine defending slavery on tradition and the fact that both parties have supported slavery — it’s just national tradition, so what?Report
@Mike Farmer, What about slathering invocations to one religious sects beliefs all over legal tender or posting its tenants on the walls of court houses or subsidizing the property of theistic belief systems just to name a few examples?Report
@North,
Seriously, let me try one more time to make my position clear — damn the conservatives who tinker outside government responsibilities as defined by the Constitution,
and damn progressives, liberals, socialists, moderates, left-center, right-center, middle-up, Presbyterians, Zoroastrians or astrologists who tinker likewise, top-down from central control. Damn them if they started in 1776, 1802, 1914, 1956, 1983, yesterday, last week, or one hour ago.Report
@Mike Farmer, Fair enough Mike (and Jay Daniel), that’s a logically consistent position from where I sit. Just wanted to make sure it was clearly spelled out.Report
Eric’s argument dovetails rather nicely with Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
In biological terms, bottom-up tinkering can be thought of as changes which occur at the level of the genome and is random, chaotic, prone to failure, and only occasionally wildly successful. But if carried out by enough members of the species over a long-enough period of time, successful innovation occurs and is rewarded by increased representation in the overall genome.
In contrast, top-down tinkering can be construed as role played by the environment writ large. Under normal conditions, the environment is steady and reliable, providing opportunities for bottom-up innovations (i.e. genetic change) to be tested in predictable fashion. It is only when the environment undergoes cataclysmic change – and here I think of climate primarily, but other major environmental changes might apply – that the conditions for success at the bottom-up level are altered.
The analogy is hardly perfect but can be instructive in the political sphere. Top down changes, such as major infrastructure investments, large-scale regulation, interest rates, and other policies with widespread effects, should be changes slowly and with caution. At the same time, the individual should be allowed – even encouraged – to innovate with the expectation that occasionally a breakthrough might occur. Evolutionary theory holds, however, that the big opportunities rarely occur at the level of individuals but rather when the environment changes and new niches are made available.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this model does not suggest, as libertarian thought does, that changes at the level of the individual are the best ones that the system can make. Certainly intelligent agents are more deliberate about pursuing their self-interests than an unthinking genome, but ultimately it is the interactions of individual members – the essence of communitarianism – that determines whether the system will thrive or no.Report
Weird question- does creative anachronism count as tinkering? When I think of tinkering, I think generally of innovation; however, I’ve seen a lot of creative revivals of old ideas, art forms, traditions, or beliefs that have been beneficial. I kept thinking this during the heated discussion of traditions and folkways. Certainly, there’s much of the past that is better left in the past, but I’d like to reserve the right to basically steal the good ideas from the past that have fallen into disuse, and to call that “tinkering” as well.Report