A Simple Theory of Modernity

Going out on a limb for a BIG BIG Theory

Last week, I talked to Paul Vanderklay. He’s just released the full video of our conversation below. I’m building on three things which are public and many many more notes and documents and outlines which are private. I’m building on (1) Kurtis Hingl and I’s paper on “Ideas, Incompleteness, and Institutions” (2) Tegan and I’s project on the same ideas applied to churches and (3) the video symposium from a few months ago on Dan Klein’s “Mere Beholderism”. So great thanks to Paul for giving me a platform to tie this stuff together in public. I recommend you check out at least (2) and (3) if you’ve got time, before watching the video with PVK.

Before I talked to Paul, I was planning on writing out my thoughts as a full article here. What that became was the green piece of paper you can see me waving around in the video, but I did draft many half-baked thoughts which we did not cover in the video. If you’d like to finish the baking comment below.

The thoughts include:

• What would we consider supply vs. demand side theories for the increase of consistency?

  • Demand side explanations: rising religious heterogeneity, rise of the state, increasing economic complexity, deeper division of labor for exogenous reasons and the demand to regularize relations and increase the extent of the market.

  • Supply-side explanations: the printing press (any others?)

• How does heterogeneity of persons, preferences or ideas relate to demand for consistency?

  • It could increase the demand for consistent rules as we do not have other means of coordination (see Koyama and Johnson 2019).

  • It could decrease the demand for consistent rules as we do not have a means of overcoming the awkwardness that committing to only consistent rules creates (see Granovetter 1985).

• How does the innovation of the standardized shipping container relate to the tension between consistency and completeness?

• Modernity is the world where a nerd thrives. They know their system. They are committed to their system. But when exposed to a problem their system can’t address, they are awkward.

• The Western Pre-Cursors of Modernity

  • The scholastic movement

    • Smith’s discussion of the “casuists” fits here.

  • The use of rules to govern monasteries in the political chaos after the Fall of Rome

    • Monasteries are islands of consistency in pre-modernity.

    • Note the build-up to Weber’s later thesis that modernity is the application of the monastic life to the whole world, in such a way that we find ourselves without the spirit and left in an iron cage.

  • Something something Nominalism?

  • Cicero in “On Duties” advocates public virtue to be governed by consistent principled behavior in reaction to the abuses of Julius Caesar.

• Part of the debate over liberalism is whether order (and thus stable expectations) can ever be generated if we do not coercively apply rules to ALL conduct. If we stick to the liberty presumption, wouldn’t chaos reign in the realm of trade and coordination between households? Smith, Hayek and the spontaneous order theorists posit no. Marx, Keynes and those who believe markets are limited posit yes. This is a modernist Civil War over the sources of consistency. One of Hayek’s repeated insights was that the consistency of modern society is not only due in part to explicit formal agreements. The price system, an unplanned system, brings more consistency to the grocery store shelves than socialist central planning (unless consistent failure is a form of consistency). Pro-Market and Anti-Market camps are both modern in that they seek consistency. They simply differ in the sense of what the sources of inconsistency are. Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, released in the same year as Hayek’s Road to Serfdom finds the market as a great upsetter of social consistency taken for granted at the local level. Consistency introduced into the governance of the English open fields through enclosure, made the social lives of English peasants less consistent. Creative destruction has an ambiguous relationship to overall consistency.

• Liberalism can be criticized from two angles: (1) We ought to govern social life by conformity to consistent social rules that cover domains other than property and contract and conformity ought to be enforced by the state or (2) the procedures for constraining state and private action cannot be made effectively consistent. You can either criticize liberalism from within modernism or by criticizing modernism itself. To say that social life governed by precise and accurate rules is impossible is to say that liberalism is impossible. Smith’s school of natural jurisprudence is in truth as vague and imprecise as the “ancient moralists” but is pretending to be otherwise.

• Many “returns to tradition” are actually not returns they are modern ideologies trying to use old rules, and in all likelihood misusing old rules.