...To finish the earlier Scott Alexander quote, “If your goal is to replace the current systems with better ones, then destroying the current system is 1% of the work, and building the better ones is 99% of it.” If there are goals other than a Tyler-Durden-esque smashing of the system in order to let anarchy reign, you need to be incredibly sure your goals are clearly specified.
And this is where I mention Trump, the elephant-nominee in the room. His goals are unclear, and he’s strategically refusing to be coherent long enough to change that. That means he’s building a coalition with shared dissatisfaction, without needing to clarify where he’s headed..
So in my view, Holden’s rejected (a) is absolutely correct as the interpretation—but the problem is that it’s an often dangerous / destructive rhetorical strategy for taking over, not a vision for how to actually change things. The vision for how to change things is separate.
But leaving aside Trump, the problem for anyone with a clear vision is that specifying a Utopia which would actually work—a feat which has never been accomplished—is still the easiest part of radical reform. The far trickier parts are about getting from the present system to the future one. Doing radical reform without revolution is akin to rebuilding a bicycle into a motorcycle, without stopping along the way.
On the other hand, the idea that we can tear things down and build the new system once we get rid of the current one is more akin to stopping and smashing the bicycle, and then thinking we can make new parts and somehow wind up with a motorcycle because we have some diagrams of how to build one. However seductively promising revolution seems, it requires implementing radical new systems correctly, in a single try, after breaking all of the necessary systems which it’s replacing. And so I would suggest that the feasibility of managing it once you smashed all the working pieces is somewhere between never-before-done and impossible.
The same author also summarized a paper on the French revolution:
The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom[...]
An alternative thread runs through the French Revolution, social activism, and modern complaints about vetocracy. Its thesis: entrenched interests are constantly blocking necessary change. If only there were some centralized authority powerful enough to sweep them away and do all the changes we know we need, everything would be great[...]
Into this eternal battle comes The Consequences Of Radical Reform: The French Revolution, by Daron Acemoglu, Davide Cantoni, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (from 2009; h/t Rob B). Under Napoleon, the revolutionary French took over large swathes of Europe. They abolished their client states’ traditional systems, replacing them with the Napoleonic Code and other “modern” legal systems. Europe at the time had so many tiny duchies and principalities and so on that you can actually do a decent experiment on it—for every principality Napoleon conquered and reformed, there was another one just down the river which was basically identical but managed to escape conquest. So the authors ask: did the radically-reformed polities do better or worse than the left-to-their-traditions polities?
(admittedly, this is measured in GDP, urbanization, and other “legible” statistics—but pretty broad ones, measured over decades from a distance of centuries, in a way that seems to track very-long-term development and is hard to fake)
Take a second to make a prediction here—a real prediction, with a probability attached.
If you’re really feeling bold, post a comment with your prediction before reading further.
Are you sure you want to keep reading now? You’ll never get another chance to predict this from a position of ignorance!
...okay, fine. The study concludes:
> The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. Our interpretation is that the Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this helped pave the way for future economic growth. The evidence does not provide any support for several other views, most notably, that evolved institutions are inherently superior to those ‘designed’; that institutions must be ‘appropriate’ and cannot be ‘transplanted’; and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse economic effects.
Notice how merciless the authors are—not only rejecting the superiority of evolved over designed institutions, but equally skeptical of the superiority of local over foreign ones. “The evidence,” they say, “does not support the thesis that institutions are efficiently adapted to the underlying characteristics of a society and that evolved institutions are superior to those that are designed or externally imposed.”
In fact, they think that when designed imposed institutions fail, it’s probably because they don’t go far enough:
> The success of the French reforms raises the question: why did they work when other externally-imposed reforms often fail? Most likely this is because the reforms were much more radical than is typically the case. The French reformed simultaneously in many dimensions and weakened the powers of local elites, making a return to the status quo ante largely impossible. Even when some pre-revolution elites returned to power after 1815, there was a permanent change in the political equilibrium. This scope and radicalism of the French reforms are common with the post-war reform experiences in Germany and Japan and stand in contrast with many other reform experiences.
Thanks, that’s great. But to be fair, this was about importing working systems to new places, after a decade of checking that they worked, not fully novel systems. So I don’t think you get to count this as evidence for mutiny, though it does provide evidence for the value of cosmopolitanism—something I don’t think was being questioned here, or is debated much in EA generally.
I would suggest that the feasibility of managing it once you smashed all the working pieces is somewhere between never-before-done and impossible.
How does the American Revolution fit into this? Wasn’t the US basically created from scratch, and now is arguably the most successful country in the world?
David is probably thinking more about the French revolution, or the Great Leap forward.
It is difficult to answer this without getting into detail on these issues:
The French revolution was initially driven by moderate reformers, but spiraled into dysfunction because no revolutionary institution could provide stability. Once you deleted all of the original institutions (“smashed all the working pieces” as David said), leadership fell to power-seeking fanatics with crazy epistemics. There was also fear from both internal and outside forces (Vendee, First Coalition) that constantly disrupted governance and fed extreme elements.
The Great Leap Forward was driven by a central leadership with a sort of magical thinking: they had contempt for normal material limits and conventional wisdom, and was certain that productivity would be massively unlocked by smashing landholdings and moving people in communes where they work together (“smashed all the working pieces”). It is grotesque now, but the very low industrial capital of China and the impressive success of the 1st five year plan, makes judgement look better. It is also worth comparing Mao’s epistemics with beliefs in today’s tech boom (“move fast and break things”, techno-optimism) that seems to have another explanation in regulatory capture and loose capital markets.
In both situations above, the leaders were obsessed with the systems they opposed. They were certain if you smashed everything, things would be fixed, but they weren’t literate in the nuances of how politics or industry functions. All the leaders were brought to heel at huge human cost, and the mundane, conventional processes they hated were essential in restoring order.
Wasn’t the US basically created from scratch
The “American Revolution” was elite lead, they were literally Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton educated dudes. Their motivation was almost literally not wanting to pay taxes, and there is a credible subtext that the colonials were motivated by British colonial restrictions against taking native land—the natives were British subjects too, and the British tried to keep the colonials in front of the Appalachians. (Note that the idea of this subtext comes from established scholars and predates the current wave of social justice and native issues). The American revolution only had to deal with an awkward, trans-Atlantic British response. There was no san-culottes or mass starvation, keeping an orderly, continuous leadership.
and now is arguably the most successful country in the world?
From my guess, every domestic institution in the US basically existed before and after the revolution. The main novelty of the revolution was the creation a new “state” from the British colonies (the quotes are not necessarily a sneer, there is genuine uncertainty about what the US was supposed to be). The founding fathers were only able to do this incompletely, resulting in a violent civil war. Even after adjustments, American political institutions are suboptimal compared to other western democracies and the dysfunctions plague us to this day.
(Honestly, this isn’t a very virtuous comment and I hope some more educated person stomps all over all this if it’s wrong.)
I agree with this. I was just pushing back against the “somewhere between never-before-done and impossible” characterization. Mutiny definitely goes wrong more often than not, and just blindly smashing things without understanding how they work, and with no real plan for how to replace them is a recipe for disaster.
I’d also point out that the US is successful in many, many ways, but it’s hard to argue that US government is significantly better than the UK, most of Europe, etc. And that’s what was smashed and rebuilt along slightly different lines.
For reasons others have pointed out, the American revolution is weaker evidence, but I certainly agree it’s at least marginal evidence against my point—or at least, evidence that smaller revolutions are less likely to fail than bigger ones.
And as others explained in far more detail, the Americans smashed very little in terms of what made their system work, and invented very little—they just wanted to do things which had been done before, many of which they were already doing to some extent, independently.
Another example that comes to mind is Japan’s Meiji Restoration. I don’t think it fits neatly in any of the categories. It’s a combination of mutiny, steering and rowing. But just like the American revolution, I think it illustrates that very rapid and disruptive change in political and economic systems can be undertaken successfully.
The ability to maintain, or improve steering and/or rowing seem to be two important preconditions for a successful mutiny.
Also, the various revolutions that swept Eastern Europe and led to the end of the Soviet Union also seem to be successful mutinies. Of course, the reason these countries ended up under Soviet communism and needed to rise up was because of the Bolshevik mutiny, but still.
I feel like people in EA are mostly anti-mutiny because the only people advocating for it seem to be far left, anti-capitalist types who don’t seem to have a realistic plan for how to go about it, or a coherent plan for what could replace it. But I don’t think EA should be closed to the idea of mutiny in principle. It’s just that any mutiny proposal has to pass a really high bar.
I’ve claimed before that the critical enabler for eucatastrophe is having a clear and implementable vision of where you are heading—and that’s exactly what is missing is most mutinies.
To offer an analogy in the form of misquoting Russian literature, “all [functioning governments] are the same, but each [dysfunctional new attempt at government] is [dysfunctional] in its own way.
The very quick summary: Japan used to be closed off from the rest of the world, until 1853 when the US forced them to open up. This triggered major reforms. The Shogun was overthrown and replaced with the emperor, and in less than a century, Japan went from an essentially medieval economic and societal structure, to a modern industrial economy.
The very quick summary: Japan used to be closed off from the rest of the world, until 1853 when the US forced them to open up. This triggered major reforms. The Shogun was overthrown and replaced with the emperor, and in less than a century, Japan went from an essentially medieval economic and societal structure, to a modern industrial economy.
This is a good summary. I guess I have heard about this before, because I read a bit about the Qing dynasty and the Sino-Japanese wars.
(Note that I haven’t read these books and your comment updates me toward reading them.)
Acemoglu and Fukuyama are brilliant, but speaking in the abstract, I am skeptical of drawing too much from Big Idea sort of books. They tend to focus on and line up facts in their narrative. This doesn’t tend to lead to robust models and insights if we want to do something else with the underlying history.
Instead, it seems ideal to consume several books from several established scholars specialized on Japan and the Meiji restoration.
I will try to search Amazon/Goodreads and maybe report back.
The US inherited a lot of things from before, including its common law legal system; people literally debate the relevance of the 1328 Statute of Northampton in contemporary US court cases.
Certainly, but I still think that it counts as an example of a successful “mutiny.” If overthrowing the government and starting a new country isn’t mutiny, I don’t know what is. And I don’t think anyone sympathetic to the mutiny theory of change wants to restart from the state of nature and reinvent all of civilization completely from scratch.
The US revolution is very often considered to be an unusually conservative revolution—even the arch-conservative Burke contemporaneously admired it in many ways. It was much less disruptive than revolutions like in France, Russia or China, which attempted to radically re-order their governments, economies and societies. In a sense I guess you could think of the US revolution as being a bit like a mutiny that then kept largely the same course as the previous captain anyway.
I agree that the US revolution was unusual and in many ways more conservative than other revolutions.
I guess you could think of the US revolution as being a bit like a mutiny that then kept largely the same course as the previous captain anyway.
I feel like this is really underselling what happened, though I guess it might be subjective. Sure, they didn’t try to reinvent government, culture and the economy completely from scratch, but it was still the move from a monarchy to the first modern liberal constitutional republic.
It was much less disruptive than revolutions like in France, Russia or China, which attempted to radically re-order their governments, economies and societies. In a sense I guess you could think of the US revolution as being a bit like a mutiny that then kept largely the same course as the previous captain anyway.
I agree with the weaker claim here that the US revolution didn’t radically re-order “government, economy and society.” But I think you might be exaggerating how conservative the US revolution was.
The United States is widely considered to be one of the first modern constitutional democracies, following literally thousands of years of near-universal despotism throughout the world. Note that while many of its democratic institutions were inherited from the United Kingdom, sources such as Boix et al.’s “A complete data set of political regimes, 1800–2007” (which Our World In Data cites on their page for democray) tend to say that democracy in the United States is older than democracy in the United Kingdom, or Western Europe more generally.
One of the major disruptive revolutions you mention, the French Revolution, was inspired by the American revolution quite directly. Thomas Jefferson even assisted Marquis de Lafayette draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. More generally, the intellectual ideals of both revolutions are regularly compared with each other, and held as prototypical examples of Enlightenment values.
However, I do agree with what is perhaps the main claim, which is that the US constitution, by design, did not try to impose the perfect social order: its primary principle was precisely that of limited government and non-intervention, ie. the government not trying to change as much as possible.
Regarding understanding Mutiny, I’ll point to Scott Siskind/Alexander’s point about Trump and breaking the system, and something far too long which I wrote a few years ago to explain what Holden is now calling mutiny;
So in my view, Holden’s rejected (a) is absolutely correct as the interpretation—but the problem is that it’s an often dangerous / destructive rhetorical strategy for taking over, not a vision for how to actually change things. The vision for how to change things is separate.
But leaving aside Trump, the problem for anyone with a clear vision is that specifying a Utopia which would actually work—a feat which has never been accomplished—is still the easiest part of radical reform. The far trickier parts are about getting from the present system to the future one. Doing radical reform without revolution is akin to rebuilding a bicycle into a motorcycle, without stopping along the way.
On the other hand, the idea that we can tear things down and build the new system once we get rid of the current one is more akin to stopping and smashing the bicycle, and then thinking we can make new parts and somehow wind up with a motorcycle because we have some diagrams of how to build one. However seductively promising revolution seems, it requires implementing radical new systems correctly, in a single try, after breaking all of the necessary systems which it’s replacing. And so I would suggest that the feasibility of managing it once you smashed all the working pieces is somewhere between never-before-done and impossible.
The same author also summarized a paper on the French revolution:
Thanks, that’s great. But to be fair, this was about importing working systems to new places, after a decade of checking that they worked, not fully novel systems. So I don’t think you get to count this as evidence for mutiny, though it does provide evidence for the value of cosmopolitanism—something I don’t think was being questioned here, or is debated much in EA generally.
How does the American Revolution fit into this? Wasn’t the US basically created from scratch, and now is arguably the most successful country in the world?
David is probably thinking more about the French revolution, or the Great Leap forward.
It is difficult to answer this without getting into detail on these issues:
The French revolution was initially driven by moderate reformers, but spiraled into dysfunction because no revolutionary institution could provide stability. Once you deleted all of the original institutions (“smashed all the working pieces” as David said), leadership fell to power-seeking fanatics with crazy epistemics. There was also fear from both internal and outside forces (Vendee, First Coalition) that constantly disrupted governance and fed extreme elements.
The Great Leap Forward was driven by a central leadership with a sort of magical thinking: they had contempt for normal material limits and conventional wisdom, and was certain that productivity would be massively unlocked by smashing landholdings and moving people in communes where they work together (“smashed all the working pieces”). It is grotesque now, but the very low industrial capital of China and the impressive success of the 1st five year plan, makes judgement look better. It is also worth comparing Mao’s epistemics with beliefs in today’s tech boom (“move fast and break things”, techno-optimism) that seems to have another explanation in regulatory capture and loose capital markets.
In both situations above, the leaders were obsessed with the systems they opposed. They were certain if you smashed everything, things would be fixed, but they weren’t literate in the nuances of how politics or industry functions. All the leaders were brought to heel at huge human cost, and the mundane, conventional processes they hated were essential in restoring order.
The “American Revolution” was elite lead, they were literally Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton educated dudes. Their motivation was almost literally not wanting to pay taxes, and there is a credible subtext that the colonials were motivated by British colonial restrictions against taking native land—the natives were British subjects too, and the British tried to keep the colonials in front of the Appalachians. (Note that the idea of this subtext comes from established scholars and predates the current wave of social justice and native issues). The American revolution only had to deal with an awkward, trans-Atlantic British response. There was no san-culottes or mass starvation, keeping an orderly, continuous leadership.
From my guess, every domestic institution in the US basically existed before and after the revolution. The main novelty of the revolution was the creation a new “state” from the British colonies (the quotes are not necessarily a sneer, there is genuine uncertainty about what the US was supposed to be). The founding fathers were only able to do this incompletely, resulting in a violent civil war. Even after adjustments, American political institutions are suboptimal compared to other western democracies and the dysfunctions plague us to this day.
(Honestly, this isn’t a very virtuous comment and I hope some more educated person stomps all over all this if it’s wrong.)
I agree with this. I was just pushing back against the “somewhere between never-before-done and impossible” characterization. Mutiny definitely goes wrong more often than not, and just blindly smashing things without understanding how they work, and with no real plan for how to replace them is a recipe for disaster.
I’d also point out that the US is successful in many, many ways, but it’s hard to argue that US government is significantly better than the UK, most of Europe, etc. And that’s what was smashed and rebuilt along slightly different lines.
For reasons others have pointed out, the American revolution is weaker evidence, but I certainly agree it’s at least marginal evidence against my point—or at least, evidence that smaller revolutions are less likely to fail than bigger ones.
And as others explained in far more detail, the Americans smashed very little in terms of what made their system work, and invented very little—they just wanted to do things which had been done before, many of which they were already doing to some extent, independently.
Another example that comes to mind is Japan’s Meiji Restoration. I don’t think it fits neatly in any of the categories. It’s a combination of mutiny, steering and rowing. But just like the American revolution, I think it illustrates that very rapid and disruptive change in political and economic systems can be undertaken successfully.
The ability to maintain, or improve steering and/or rowing seem to be two important preconditions for a successful mutiny.
Also, the various revolutions that swept Eastern Europe and led to the end of the Soviet Union also seem to be successful mutinies. Of course, the reason these countries ended up under Soviet communism and needed to rise up was because of the Bolshevik mutiny, but still.
I feel like people in EA are mostly anti-mutiny because the only people advocating for it seem to be far left, anti-capitalist types who don’t seem to have a realistic plan for how to go about it, or a coherent plan for what could replace it. But I don’t think EA should be closed to the idea of mutiny in principle. It’s just that any mutiny proposal has to pass a really high bar.
I’ve claimed before that the critical enabler for eucatastrophe is having a clear and implementable vision of where you are heading—and that’s exactly what is missing is most mutinies.
To offer an analogy in the form of misquoting Russian literature, “all [functioning governments] are the same, but each [dysfunctional new attempt at government] is [dysfunctional] in its own way.
This seems like an important and interesting example that advances your point.
I don’t know anything about it.
Do you (or anyone else) know a good book or author on the subject?
The very quick summary: Japan used to be closed off from the rest of the world, until 1853 when the US forced them to open up. This triggered major reforms. The Shogun was overthrown and replaced with the emperor, and in less than a century, Japan went from an essentially medieval economic and societal structure, to a modern industrial economy.
I don’t know of any books exclusively focused on it, but it’s analyzed in Why Nations Fail and Political Order and Political Decay.
This is a good summary. I guess I have heard about this before, because I read a bit about the Qing dynasty and the Sino-Japanese wars.
(Note that I haven’t read these books and your comment updates me toward reading them.)
Acemoglu and Fukuyama are brilliant, but speaking in the abstract, I am skeptical of drawing too much from Big Idea sort of books. They tend to focus on and line up facts in their narrative. This doesn’t tend to lead to robust models and insights if we want to do something else with the underlying history.
Instead, it seems ideal to consume several books from several established scholars specialized on Japan and the Meiji restoration.
I will try to search Amazon/Goodreads and maybe report back.
The US inherited a lot of things from before, including its common law legal system; people literally debate the relevance of the 1328 Statute of Northampton in contemporary US court cases.
Certainly, but I still think that it counts as an example of a successful “mutiny.” If overthrowing the government and starting a new country isn’t mutiny, I don’t know what is. And I don’t think anyone sympathetic to the mutiny theory of change wants to restart from the state of nature and reinvent all of civilization completely from scratch.
The US revolution is very often considered to be an unusually conservative revolution—even the arch-conservative Burke contemporaneously admired it in many ways. It was much less disruptive than revolutions like in France, Russia or China, which attempted to radically re-order their governments, economies and societies. In a sense I guess you could think of the US revolution as being a bit like a mutiny that then kept largely the same course as the previous captain anyway.
I agree that the US revolution was unusual and in many ways more conservative than other revolutions.
I feel like this is really underselling what happened, though I guess it might be subjective. Sure, they didn’t try to reinvent government, culture and the economy completely from scratch, but it was still the move from a monarchy to the first modern liberal constitutional republic.
I agree with the weaker claim here that the US revolution didn’t radically re-order “government, economy and society.” But I think you might be exaggerating how conservative the US revolution was.
The United States is widely considered to be one of the first modern constitutional democracies, following literally thousands of years of near-universal despotism throughout the world. Note that while many of its democratic institutions were inherited from the United Kingdom, sources such as Boix et al.’s “A complete data set of political regimes, 1800–2007” (which Our World In Data cites on their page for democray) tend to say that democracy in the United States is older than democracy in the United Kingdom, or Western Europe more generally.
One of the major disruptive revolutions you mention, the French Revolution, was inspired by the American revolution quite directly. Thomas Jefferson even assisted Marquis de Lafayette draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. More generally, the intellectual ideals of both revolutions are regularly compared with each other, and held as prototypical examples of Enlightenment values.
However, I do agree with what is perhaps the main claim, which is that the US constitution, by design, did not try to impose the perfect social order: its primary principle was precisely that of limited government and non-intervention, ie. the government not trying to change as much as possible.