The Wisdom of Fred

Fred the cat survived major dental surgery on Thursday and is back around here squawking his conservative values at me. Fred doesn't like change. Fred says change usually involves bad surprises. He has been around almost 17 years, so he has learned a few things.

I am intrigued by James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State; How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. There is some conservative wisdom in here. Many of these attempts were well-meaning. He sees as one of the greatest influences "high-modernist ideology," something that developed as a result of scientific and technological success. It is "above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws." But applying science to social issues is difficult, not the least of which is due to the fact that human beings are self-interpreting creatures. That is, in order to understand and maybe even predict their behavior one has to see the world through their eyes. This raises all sorts of difficult problems in history and the social sciences. Anyway, this seems to be a conservative insight to which maybe we all should give more consideration.

But let's not confuse the issue with current politics. Here is one of the many fascinating quotes from the Browser each day. Jane Hamsher, on party politics:
The left-right paradigm is insufficient, in that it presumes everything can be explained within the context of back-and-forth shots fired between political “tribes” that have coalesced within the two party system. But they’re firing past the larger corporate players who operate freely within both camps, whose role is rarely accounted for. And it should be clear by now that they have captivated leadership on both sides.

Scott points out that large-scale capitalism "is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay." It too crimps innovation and trial-and-error learning. While the left presupposes a false view of human knowledge in support of social engineering, the right ignores the dangers and downsides of capitalism. Or proposes it's own form of social engineering relying on one-size-fits-all religious models.

Finally, conservatives also have some insights into social justice, although they more often than not take it to extremes. Here is a good post from Tim Harford on a faulty line of typically liberal thinking. Individuals often need to be treated as individuals and not just as members of a group.