The Long View

The Overclass and the Improbability Drive

What is wrong with this comment by Jerry Pournelle about Christine O'Donnell, the Tea-Partying Republican senatorial candidate of Delaware?

O'Donnell is an example of citizen government. If self government is to work, someone other than professional politicians must be willing to govern. If we want to reduce the importance of the ruling class, then people who are not part of that well-groomed mutual admiration society must hold office. I am certain that O'Donnell will never vote for many of the horrors that have become law. I am certain that her Democratic opponent will. I will leave the rest to the voters of Delaware.

I am just old enough to remember when the United States arguably had a ruling class, the WASP Establishment that gelled after the Civil War and lasted to illuminate the Kennedy Administration with the sunset glow of its own decomposition. Much ink has been expended to describe the later constellation of credentialed castes that is continuous with the Establishment and does much the same things, but there is a difference in kind between the two moments of social evolution.

For one thing, though we may debate the competence of the old Establishment, at least until the very end they had the wit not to subvert their own legitimacy. Later practice is well summed up in this frustrated comment by Peggy Noonan:

But let's go to what is traditionally the only way journalists and political professionals judge such [ad hominem campaign ads]: Do they work? In the past they have. But here's a hunch: This year they will not be so effective.

The primary reason is the severity of the moment. But another is that negative ads worked so well in the past. For a generation, the American people have been told their politicians are lowlifes. You know what they now think of them? They think they're lowlifes! People don't really expect high character from their political figures anymore.

A real ruling class would not conduct public business in that way; no class of any description with a sense of its own identity and instinct for collective preservation would so do.

The most important feature of the Establishment, however, was its self-confidence. This could take the form of an expectation of entitlement or a bovine lack of intellectual curiosity, but at its best it meant the assumption, too deeply ingrained to be a conviction, that the WASP view of history and the public good was the best for everybody. The pre-World War II system of higher education was built to inculcate this assumption into students of all backgrounds. Consider the state of that institution today, when Thomas H. Benton (a.k.a. William Pannapacker) can ask, Why Do They Hate Us?

By now, most academics are inoculated against attacks from the right, the conversational relics of the culture war of a generation ago: …I almost feel nostalgia for that time, since the conversation was about what professors should teach. There was no doubt, as yet, whether higher education would continue in some recognizable form…. But now the criticisms of academe are also coming from the left, and not just from the think tanks and journalists, but increasingly from within academe…. The majority feeling seems to be that the present model of higher education is no longer sustainable, and that the necessary changes will focus—for good or ill—on the working lives of professors.

Several explanations for the hostility follow, including the important point that even an undergraduate degree these days can incur so much debt that a graduate suffers from a kind of indentured servitude that does not even include the consolation of a guaranteed job. I think, though, that this is the most important observation:

The notion that knowledge is always political, and that perspectives are always relative, has eroded the belief in expertise and earned authority. If everyone's biased, including professors, why not just "go with your gut"? It's much easier, and it empowers you against the academics whose admonitions—as we have lost influence—have become increasingly condescending, sanctimonious, and shrill.

More important than the public perception of academia is academia's own loss of morale; it's the tale of the decline of the class system writ small. The Establishment had the self-confidence to demand deference from the wider society. To some degree, for at least part of their history, they may even have deserved it. Those are the characteristics of a ruling class. Today there is no such thing. There has not been one for a long time.

Can there be one again in the future? Maybe, but it would have claims to merits different from those of its predecessor, and perhaps not so attractive. Remember Toynbee's "Dominant Minority"?

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Readers of this website may remember the late David Feintuch's space-opera series, The Seafort Saga, which takes place in what I interpreted as a generically Spenglerian future. The author had a few kind words for my review, though he did not endorse or comment on my interpretation in detail. (He also went on to write three more novels beyond the ones I reviewed.) I mention the matter here, because one of the things I gagged on in the premises of the series was the Neo-Victorian ruling class's attitude toward education.

In the Seafort books, the universal state that arises in the 21st century gives up not only on mass higher education but on universal literacy. Enlightened opinion has it that the attempt in the 19th and 20th centuries to educate everyone falsified and diluted culture. Most people in the world of the books were still schooled to some degree, of course, but it was a matter for private initiative and no affair of the state. For a variety of reasons, I never expected to encounter this attitude in the light of day. But look, here is David Warren saying much the same thing:

I have been devoting a few Sundays to the basic political questions, reversing the pundit's task from carping, to proposing alternatives broadly. It is easy enough to be against things, but in the end we should answer what we are for.

In the case of education, we are confronting an immense prejudice,… We easily accept the associated notion that "in a democracy, public schooling is necessary to assure minimum standards for citizenship." That schools should provide the machinery for the indoctrination of the masses follows naturally from this. Think it through. The proposition actually reverses the first principle of democracy: that government should answer to citizens, and not citizens to government. And remember, that all "progressive" educational proposals require political compulsion…. The desire to educate one's children does not depend upon the state. It is innate in every human. The responsibility to raise them to some understanding of the world in which they must participate should be assumed by persons, not by Procrustean things.

If you believe David Feintuch, this attitude leads to a certain amount of cannibalism in the abandoned subway tunnels of Manhattan. I don't expect to encounter that, either, except between midnight and 5:00 AM.

* * *

Time is limited, if certain astrophysicists are to be believed:

There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new model of the universe... [A] universe that expands forever is infinite and eternal...

Today, a group of physicists rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding universe cannot be so because the laws of physics do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the universe must end, say Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.

This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible observation, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these events occurring. And when that happens, the laws of physics simply don't apply. They just break down. "This is known as the "measure problem" of eternal inflation," … They don't know what kind of catastrophe will cause the end of time but they do say that we won't see it coming. They point out that if we were to observe the end of time in any other part of the universe we would have to be causally ahead of it, which is unlikely.

Intrepid readers may view the paper here. Part of the argument is the the Guth-Vanchurin paradox, which is not described in detail, but which seems to use the Bayesian reasoning of the Carter-Leslie Doom Soon Hypothesis. The basic notion is that, if you are using up something that you know is finite but you don't know how finite, you can use a statistical test to judge how much you have left. If what you are running out of is time, in other words, if you are trying to judge something's remaining lifespan, you can do this without knowing exactly what will end it. (You can also assign risk probabilities of risk to contingencies that at first might have seemed very unlikely.) In any case, a footnote in the paper offers this whimsical aside:

Ken Olum has pointed out for some time that one way to interpret a geometric cuto_ is that \we are being simulated by an advanced civilization with a large but _nite amount of resources, and at some point the simulation will stop." The above interpretation adopts this viewpoint (minus the advanced civilization).

Other parties are less amused, as we see in this post from Not Even Wrong

I’ve been critical of multiverse pseudo-science because it doesn’t make any testable predictions, but it seems that tonight there really is one.…The argument seems to be that multiverse arguments require introducing an artificial cut-off to get finite numbers, so the cut-off must be there and we’re going to hit it relatively soon on cosmological time scales.

This seems a bit like the argument that space cannot be infinite because, if it were, the night sky would be white with stars. In this case, the argument is that, if time were infinite, the Improbability Drive would always be working, and you could not walk down the block for fear of being hit by flower pot or sperm whale that materialized in the stratosphere.

Remind me, now: why doesn't an objection like this apply to infinite-worlds theories generally?

* * *

Just a few points about Gliese 581g, the recently discovered plant orbiting the red dwarf Gliese 581 that probably has terrestrial geology and is very likely in the star's "habitable zone." (All that "habitable" means is that water would be liquid on the surface of any planet in the zone with an atmosphere dense enough to keep it from volatilizing away.) Since red dwarfs are dim, the habitable zone is quite close to the star, and any planet so close would be tidal-locked. The day would be as long as the year; in this case, 36 days.

Learning this, I set out to discover what the weather might be like on a tidal-locked planet. I soon discovered a television series, Alien Worlds, which aired in Great Britain in 2005. One of the alien worlds, "Blue Moon," is very much like the moon Pandora in the film Avatar. (I assume everyone knew this and just neglected to tell me.) Another alien world, Aurelia, is like Gliese 581g, a tidal-locked planet orbiting a red dwarf. A digest of the series seems to suggest very exotic weather, with perpetual gale-force winds around the day-night boundary and a perpetual monsoon downpour at the solar pole.

I wonder. Venus is almost tidal locked; its day is as long as its year, but the rotation is retrograde. Still, apparently weather systems circle the planet in just four days. There are strong winds at the poles but little wind on the equator. Actually, wind speeds in general are low on the surface. If the atmosphere of Venus is too gloopy for you, then try Titan. That moon is tidal locked, but its atmosphere circulates in a way comparable to that of Earth. The atmosphere not immobile or catastrophically violent.

Something else to remember is that Earth is eathlike only for moment. The Doom Soon argument actually has some force with regard to the life expectancy of the biosphere, and I expect that is true everywhere.

Look, here's a reassuringly floral illustration from Teilhard de Chardin's Phenomenon of Man for you:

Click to Enlarge

These things are ticking time bombs, you know.