Knowledge And Decisions

Emphasis on the characteristics of social processes implies a systemic analysis of social causation, in contrast to an individual or intentional analysis of why things happen as they do. At the extreme of the intentional approach is the animistic fallacy which explains the phenomena of society or nature as the fruition of a deliberate plan by leaders, God, conspiracies, or other intentional agents. In the animistic approach, the rationality and morality of the agents involved is crucial to the outcome. But in the systemic approach, the outcome does not depend on the individual agents’ subjectively pursuing the end result of the system. Much futile controversy in the social sciences has resulted from attempts to show that individual agents do not have either the goal or the degree of rationality necessary to intentionally produce the end results claimed by a systemic analysis.² Where the results are systemically produced, it is no more necessary for the agent to share that goal than it was for prehistoric trees or dinosaurs to know genetics in order for evolution to take place.

The systemic approach is a methodological rather than a philosophic or political position. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were systemic social analysts. In Smith’s classic, The Wealth of Nations, laissez-faire capitalism was advocated — as a system — because of (beneficial) systemic characteristics which were “no part” of the “intention” of capitalists,³ whom Smith excoriated as dishonest, oppressive, and ruthless,⁴ and for whom he had not a single good thing to say in a 900-page book. By the same token, Karl Marx’s Capital condemned capitalism for (detrimental) systemic characteristics which Marx refused to attribute to the individual moral failings of the capitalist, who remained objectively the creature of circumstances, “however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”⁵ Marx’s criticism was of the capitalist system, as such, and an argument based on charges of immorality among capitalists would have been an argument for moral reform rather than institutional revolution. Both Smith and Marx dealt with the systemic logic of capitalism, and neither based his theory on individual intentions, or on a hyper-rational man, which both have been accused of.⁶ Smith was not Samuel Smiles and Marx was not Charles A. Beard.⁷

The divergence between individual intention and systemic result affects both causal and moral arguments. The political right and left share a moral version of the animistic fallacy which attributes such systemic results as statistical “income distribution” to personal morality — wealth implying merit (the right) or guilt (the left). Morality is intentional and therefore individual, while purely systemic results are neither just nor unjust, though some results may be preferred to others. War, slavery, or genocide can be morally condemned as deliberately chosen policies, but the repeated ravages of bubonic plague were simply tragic consequences of sociobiological systems in a given state of knowledge. Systemic results can be improved, as by the expansion of technological boundaries, but such social improvement is morally neutral. The desire to judge systemic results morally can be seen in the medieval practice of attributing plagues to sins which had aroused the anger of God, or the modern practice of attributing unhappy systemic results in general to the moral failings of a personified “society.”

The treacherous academic analogy of “solving” social “problems” often goes counter to the concept of optimizing subject to inherent constraints. Inherent constraints imply limitations not only to what can be judged morally but also limitations on what can be achieved rationally. There may not be any “solutions” analogous to academic exercises with pre-arranged happy endings and no loose ends left dangling. This has not only intellectual but social implications. Whatever systemic results are possible in any particular economic or social system must leave unsatisfied desires, and simultaneous political and economic equilibrium requires that the political system accept those unsatisfied desires rather than assume automatically that it can “solve” such “problems.” This point is no brief for any particular system; the principle is general. As was said long ago: “It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated ...”⁸