A lot of social justice type people really like the idea of The Revolution. Someday, they say, we will smash white supremacy/capitalism/patriarchy/the state! And then everything will be perfect and rainbows and sunshine and Kumbaya!
Fortunately, this never really gets beyond reblogging “If I Had A Hammer I’d Smash The Patriarchy” pictures, but nevertheless I feel like this is an extremely destructive tendency that needs to be nipped in the bud before people start building barricades.
Imagine that social justice is like climbing mountains. You want to walk to the top of the tallest mountain because… I don’t know, it’s there. But, instead of a normal human, you are a video game character with two powers: Walk and Jump.
If you use Walk, you move to the next square on the board. It’s pretty easy to get to the top of a mountain that way: all you have to do is keep going up. Even if you make a mistake, it’s easy to move back to where you were. Unfortunately, the mountain you’re trying to climb on might not be the tallest mountain in the mountain range.
On the other hand, you can use Jump. If you use Jump, you land on literally any other square on the board. Jump has a chance of putting you in a better position. Of course, a lot of squares are lower than where you started out, especially if you’re pretty high up the mountain already. Even worse, sometimes when you Jump you break your legs and then you can’t move at all.
Trying to reform the system– starting a women’s shelter, agitating for better food stamps laws, educating your friends about racism, whatever– is using Walk. A world without a woman’s shelter is worse than a world with a women’s shelter. It’s still horrible; if it wasn’t horrible, we wouldn’t need a woman’s shelter. But it’s a little better.
Revolutions use Jump. Sometimes revolutions are awesome and you end up with the United States and a democracy instead of a king! But a lot of the time revolutions end up as Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or the Khmer Rouge. I mean, sure, you don’t think that your plan to smash the state will lead to mass starvation and murder, but neither did the people who supported Stalin. He did not get into power because he promised to put dissidents into gulags.
I’ll take “guaranteed to be a little better” over “chance that it’s way better, chance of gulags” any day.
The other problem with revolutionary thinking is that it tends to blind people to the stuff that can improve the world right now. A lot of revolutionaries nowadays don’t really have a plan for how the revolution is going to come about, except “everybody talk about revolutionary theory a lot.” To be fair, this is a much better plan than “let’s accidentally make Stalinist Russia,” since discussing revolutionary theory is an entertaining hobby that is unlikely to hurt anyone. But it doesn’t help people either.
One more rape crisis center or one more person educated about good consent and respecting boundaries seems like such a small victory when compared to a world without rape. But we know how to achieve the former and have no idea how to achieve the latter (except that it possibly involves dancing). Energy directed towards “let’s make a world without rape!” is wasted unless it causes actual changes in the actual world that we live in.
Thing of Things 
I’ve had similar thoughts in the past. I think the danger of revolution is that it promises incredible power to help the world if you just know how to use it… but of course, everyone’s human, so it’s hard to know how to use it without causing massive harm.
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Even the US revolution wasn’t all that amazing, since it was still followed by a century of legal slavery. There was just a lot of Walking after that first not-totally-awful Jump.
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I’m also reminded of this paragraph of Scott’s:
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And part of the reason it did work so well is because it actually left a lot in place! The colonies were already pretty self-governing.
Of course, if we’re talking about whether the American Revolution was a good or bad idea, I think it’s obligatory to link to Gwern’s thoughts on the matter… (I have no idea if he’s right, but worth pointing out.)
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The american revolution is misnamed. It was a war of independance, not a revolution.
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I don’t buy that.
— He says that other colonies gained independence by waiting, but how much of the ability to gain independence by waiting was influenced by the example of the American Revolution showing that it’s a bad idea not to let your colony go?
— For the Civil War, he simultaneously says that 1) Britain could get rid of slavery earlier, and 2) the Civil War wouldn’t have started because the South was a counterweight to the North and the South depended on England’s tacit support. I am not sure if #2 is supposed to mean that without independence, England wouldn’t need to support the South or that without independence, England would support the South enough to stop the war, but either way, this negates the implication in #1 that Britain can just stop slavery without considering how the colonies would react. Furthermore, experience with real-life colonies has shown that England often used divide-and-conquer to keep its rule, and could very well have made the Civil War worse by inflaming tensions.
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@JE … That’s backwards. The American Revolution was actually conceived of as a “revolution” — as in coming around in a circle, restoring old rights — it’s actually the French Revolution that wasn’t a revolution, as people used to understand the term.
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From a computer science perspective, this describes the random restart hill climbing algorithm, one of a class of related algorithms that’s seen a lot of attention in the machine learning scene. You’ve already discovered the major weakness of simple hill-climbing, which is its tendency to get stuck in local maxima.
Depending on what the fitness landscape looks like, a number of different algorithms may be chosen. One of the more common is simulated annealing, which can loosely be described as “start by jumping all over the map, then take incrementally smaller jumps as you find better scenarios, until you’re finally walking to your destination.”
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I’m reminded of this this old Obsidian Wings post. (Which goes along with what dangerwaffle and osberend have mentioned above about revolution not being a random jump.)
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Ugh, this was supposed to be a top-level comment, not a reply to Nornagest. Blech.
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Yeah, Ozy’s a computer scientist and they don’t even know it yet! 🙂
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Simulated annealing seems to predict the fact that reform is morecommon in affluent, free societies and revolutions are more common in desparate situations.
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Yeah, the worse your current situation is, the better the expected value of a change to a random possibility – you have a lot less to lose.
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Yeah. And from the opposite perspective, it does a pretty good job of explaining why revolutionists’ first move is usually to try to convince people that their situation is about as bad as it realistically can be.
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@Nornagest
It also explains the tendency of revolutionists to dislike reform, even when it’s an apparent direct improvement.
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@Susebron: Yep. The relevant revolutionary jargon is “the worse the better.”
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I’m pretty sure the only way to have a world without rape is universal mass surveillance+police robots everywhere. Which I would actually not be opposed to with a hyper-socially liberal government. (Or have everyone live in virtual reality and they can just leave the server if someone tries to rape them). (Technically “kill everyone” would also work, but that’s obviously not an option).
My understanding (which may be wrong) is that in all the successful Communist revolutions the revolutionaries which won (there were many factions in the Russian civil war) were in favor of killing dissidents and such from the beginning. People seem to overlook this when talking about how revolutions turn out. I have no idea if its true or not, but I’ve never actually heard the hypothesis “the reason the USSR/Maoist China/Cuba/etc. turned out so nasty is because the revolutionaries were explicitly pro-nastiness (and thus things would not have necessarily been so bad for anti-nastiness revolutionaries, though they would have still had economic problems)” put forward.
(There may be selective pressures that make having anti-nastiness revolutionaries hard. I don’t know).
(Also, I don’t think it is necessarily an indefensible position to say that, while the USSR/Maoist China did horrible things for no good reason, the revolutions were actually net goods despite this. I don’t know again.)
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> I’m pretty sure the only way to have a world without rape is universal mass surveillance+police robots everywhere.
That’s another advantage that incremental reforms have over revolutions: their goals are achievable.
If you are trying to build a world that is 100% without rape, then, realistically, your only solutions are to kill everyone, or to castrate all men (assuming you are the kind of person who believes that only men can commit rape), or institute mass surveillance on the kind of scale that even Stalin would assess as being a little over the top, or maybe to achieve the Singularity.
If, on the other hand, you are trying to reduce the number of rapes per year by at least 10%, then you don’t need any of that, and you can actually succeed within your lifetime. And then, maybe your children can set themselves the same goal. True, you will never completely eliminate rape this way — but you’re going to help a hell of a lot more women than the Stalinist Singularity guy would.
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The argument I’ve seen for why real revolutions* are inherently dangerous is essentially a situation-specific version of the leftist death spiral that neoreactionaries are often going on about**:
1. A real revolution rapidly destroys all non-ideological sources of legitimacy: legal validity, tradition, the person of the monarch, inertia, etc.
2. So the only remaining source of legitimacy for anyone trying to claim authority is ideology.
3. Because ideology itself is not being validated by anything external, the ideology that is going to win is the most instinctively compelling.
4. In the sort of crisis that triggers a revolution in the first place, radicalism is more compelling than moderation.
5. Therefore given any currently ruling coalition, it is always possible for the more extreme wing of that coalition to overthrow the less extreme wing, and thereby itself become a ruling coalition in turn.
6. Therefore, every revolution becomes progressively more extreme until either an unusually well-organized less extreme wing of a newly-minted ruling coalition manages to pre-emptively purge everyone more extreme than they are (e.g. Robespierre’s destruction of the Hébertists) or the whole thing society collapses in an orgy of bloodshed.
*Is it really a revolution if Edmund Burke sympathizes with it?
**Which I don’t endorse as a thesis in general.
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“Because ideology itself is not being validated by anything external”
…no?
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> *Is it really a revolution if Edmund Burke sympathizes with it?
Burke was Irish, and so was no true Scotsman.
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There is another source of legitimacy that is not consumed by the revolution: the experience of seeing someone else lead you through harrowing times. This creates a sort of bunker-mentality group loyalty focused on a particular individual as the leader. If a group of people all have this feeling for a particular leader and that group is sufficiently skilled at employing organized violence, they can take control of a polity.
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The other problem with revolution is that moderates tend not to have the courage of their convictions – extremists are far more likely to turn their weapons on their fellow revolutionaries for not going far enough than the moderates are to turn their weapons on their fellow revolutionaries for going too far. (One notable exception: Israel.) And killing all your political rivals within the revolution tends to be a pretty good way to make sure you end up in charge after you’re done setting up institutions to replace the ones you overthrew.
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To play the contrarian to an entirely reasonable and well-written post: there are a lot of cases where you’ve gotten stuck and can’t get farther ahead. For instance in your videogame, what if you’re at a mountain peak. Any uses of Walk will only go down, and it’s a long time before you’re above this peak again. But there exist higher mountain peaks, so what are you gonna do?
My favorite example of liberal traps is “privacy”. A lot of us who have something to hide greatly value our privacy. Society might sanction punishing us if it knew our secrets, so just an agreement to never discuss our secrets seems good for us. A step forward might mean better privacy protections.
But this also leads you to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. Instead of saying the Army can’t fire you for your sexuality, privacy-ideology just allows that they can fire you, BUT they’re not allowed to ask. It’s better than the world without privacy, but it also starts making a LGBT sailor afraid that they might be caught or found out. This breeds paranoia and actually leads to a fairly unpleasant life.
Sometimes you can make lives better by ameliorating some systems (using privacy, or charity, or other liberal values). But sometimes you need to emphasize that the cruelty that this right protects you from is outright wrong. Your employer shouldn’t get to fire you for your sexuality. In fact, they shouldn’t be able to fire you without cause. In fact, your physical and mental well-being shouldn’t be dependent on what some middle-manager thinks of you or your stores profitability.
(In fact, oppressors will often ameliorate the costs of their oppression specifically as a tactic to prevent questioning of the system. The white judges who handed down fines preceding the Montgomery bus boycott made them trivial, like $9, specifically so no one would bother challenging the system.)
Judging when to do this is hard. For one, it takes a fairly deep understanding of the probability distribution of the Jump command. But there are times that “the issue we are arguing over” is just a cover for a much more foundational issue that could probably be fixed if people wanted to.
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An addendum to above:
In particular, a lot of the most emotionally motivated calls for revolution over reform are when we see two groups fighting and we wish they weren’t. Republicans vs Democrats. Men vs Women. Reproductively mature ants vs youknowho. Southern white people versus Souther black people. The Walk command may figure out which group is marginally better than the other, and seek to help that group (sometimes viciously so), but the Jump command recognizes that the whole competition is unnecessary.
Watching two groups you care about fight each other bitterly can often be much harder than taking a random risk and hoping it’s a world where they don’t tear each other apart.
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No, this is exactly the opposite – a situation which revolutions are uniquely bad at handling. If two groups are fighting, then at best, a revolution will accomplish nothing besides changing which group is winning, which is nice if you were in the group that was losing but not very helpful at actually resolving the conflict. At worst, it will fail and make the group that’s currently winning a lot angrier, leading to reprisals that will make the group that’s currently losing a lot angrier, and so on and so on.
The reason calls for revolution over reform in these situations are so emotionally motivated is because they usually come from people in the group that’s currently losing. Being in the group that’s currently losing really sucks, and becoming the group that’s currently winning is a much faster solution than making peace is. Not to mention the possibility that the would-be peacemakers are actually just enemy spies trying to get you to let your guard down.
In either case, the Jump command is never going to manage to escape this competition. The only way out is to find a way to reconcile the two groups, and that’s ALWAYS going to be a long, hard slog.
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I agree with the general outline of this, but I think there’s a significant problem with the Walk/Jump metaphor.
A revolution is not a random jump. Leftist revolutions have some common, predictable failure modes. Here’s one, drastically oversimplified:
1. Just after taking power, the Revolution is in a vulnerable position. It hasn’t consolidated its power yet, or figured out the best way to handle its problems.
2. The Revolution has enemies, both internal and external – people who either benefited from the old order, or haven’t realized that they didn’t. These enemies are generally powerful in at least some respects, precisely because they’re mostly people the old order was set up to benefit.
3. Since the Revolution is in power (for now), internal enemies will mostly be smart enough to hide. External enemies will also realize a good way to threaten the Revolution is to sponsor or encourage internal enemies.
4. Being both vulnerable and threatened by powerful, hidden enemies, the people in charge of the Revolution become paranoid.
5. The Revolution starts suppressing dissent and oppressing the very people it was meant to liberate, ironically in the name of “safeguarding the revolution.”
Some version of the above happened in Revolutionary France and Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. There are significant differences between those three cases, of course – but the similarities are also significant. (Oddly, the video game Bioshock also portrays pretty much the same process quite well, except happening in a newly founded extreme libertarian society.)
The general failure of leftist writers to identify this pattern and come up with a plan for avoiding it in the next revolution, rather than just handwaving it away, is a source of great frustration to me as a person who agrees with a lot of leftist goals but wants an actual workable plan for getting there.
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(Ack! I meant that to be its own comment, not a reply to Blue! If you can easily fix it please do so, thanks!)
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You may note that DADT did not, in fact, require a revolution to be repealed. I think you’re underestimating what the Walk command can do.
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Didn’t we fix Don’t Ask Don’t Tell by walking? I get the whole “the good is the enemy of the perfect” point you’re making, but I’m not convinced the political landscape actually has isolated peaks. At worst it had flattish plateaus that make it harder to tell which way is up.
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“To play the contrarian to an entirely reasonable and well-written post: there are a lot of cases where you’ve gotten stuck and can’t get farther ahead.”
There are historical examples of this. for instance it wasn’t the Abolition Movement and the underground Railroad that dismantled slavery, it was a war that killed 625,000 men. That war was hideously destructive of Southern society, though plainly not nearly destructive enough, at least of its elites, as the later rise of Jim Crow shows,
But for every example like that there are probably ten that show what gory mistakes revolutions are. Let us not forget that Communism began as a social justice movement, and that in the Soviet Union it killed at least 20 million people in its collectivization of land and imprisoned up to 60 million at various times in the gulag system, and that in China, after destroying the entire landed gentry class, several million people, it turned around and killed another 18-45 million people through famine and imprisonment.
And this was not some anomaly unique to the 20th century. The Reformation was actually 130 years of three-sided revolution – Catholic/Lutheran/Calvinist. It destroyed medieval European civilization and left clean ground for the Enlightenment, but untold millions of people died. Puritanism was a social reform movement, in which absolutely everything personal was political, and it was a Puritan army in eastern Ireland that committed genocide against my ancestors (and I will get over it the minute those ancestors are no longer dead.) The ethnocide portion of that atrocity flooded so many Irish slaves into the Caribbean and southern colonies that they left a permanent imprint on the forms of English spoken there.
So yeah, sometimes it takes dynamite to blow a logjam, but there will be a butcher’s bill to pay.
And by the way reform movements don’t all have clean hands either. Puritanism is alive and well in America.
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Words cannot convey how intensely unsympathetic I am to the Chinese landowners.
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“Words cannot convey how intensely unsympathetic I am to the Chinese landowners.”
Unsympathetic enough to exterminate them? There’s a name for that.
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“But this also leads you to “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. Instead of saying the Army can’t fire you for your sexuality, privacy-ideology just allows that they can fire you, BUT they’re not allowed to ask. ”
From the vantage of 2015 it is easy to underestimate the sea change that DADT represented. it was incomplete and in fact the incidence of people being put out increased, but it represented a hug change and it generated lots of outrage – which was a very good thing.
More than anything what defeated the homophobic policies of the military was quiet but very strong opposition among senior leadership. it was a process of personal evolution once they started to reflect on how many gay servicemen they had served alongside of. (The ick factor involved male homosexuality almost exclusively.) and the homophobic advocacy of civilians had the effect of radicalizing these people and accelerating that evolution. (Who the FUCK is that trivial little jody-fuck civilian to disrespect these fine soldiers!!!???)
This is what brought DADT down. As soon as senior leadership was able to show there wouldn’t be some huge revolt in the enlisted ranks, who turned out to be well ahead of the senior people anyway, the civilian opposition to repeal collapsed.
This was a central issue in my life and I watched every development with keen interest.
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I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to have this instinct that if you go around yelling and being destructive, positive change will somehow happen. It’s the like the Underpant Gnomes from South Park:
Step 1. Yell, scream, riot, break stuff, blow things up, assassinate leaders, kill people.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Utopia!
The most explicit form of this instinct was the Propaganda of the Deed from Anarchist thought in the 19th century. I am sure that someone who is an expert in the history of anarchist thought will tell me that the actual idea is more complex and subtle than that. But it seems to me that the folk version of the Propaganda of the Deed was “If you kill people and blow stuff up, somehow that will inspire people to overthrow capitalism.”
Most other revolutionary ideas don’t encode that instinct so explicitly, but I think it’s still there in most of them. I think it’s speaking to some part of human nature, the same way lots of different sexual purity ideologies with totally different and contradictory justifications exist.
This instinct is utterly missing from me, whenever I saw people protesting something at college my thought was: How is this helping? Is this going to achieve anything? I usually concluded that it wouldn’t.
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As I understand it, there are two distinct ideas that can motivate propaganda by deed. One is that destruction will trigger state repression against the working class, which in turn will radicalize them. It’s a deliberate attempt at trigger toxoplasma, based on the belief that one’s own side is ultimately stronger.
The other, and arguably more fundamental, notion is that the working class largely wants to kill their masters and liberate themselves, but they don’t really believe that it’s possible. So you engage in exemplary murders and liberatory acts. If you’re lucky, that inspires the working class to rise up. But even if you’re not, it will (you hope) inspire more other people to take up propaganda by deed than you’ve just lost to the state’s response. So the next wave of bombings and robberies will be larger, and the next will be larger yet, and so forth until finally the working class does rise up and overthrow the government.
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I realize this isn’t your main point, but:
This instinct is utterly missing from me, whenever I saw people protesting something at college my thought was: How is this helping? Is this going to achieve anything? I usually concluded that it wouldn’t.
I’m an incremental-change kind of person, and I am in favor of protesting because sufficiently pervasive and persistent protest can function as pressure on those with power to make the right kind of incremental change.
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I’ve noticed that the most outspoken advocates of social justice tend to believe the world to be much worse than it actually is.
Just the other day, I read a social justice post claiming that race relations in America are at an “all-time low”. Meaning: Worse than the Watts Riots? Worse than the Freedom Rides? Worse than chattel slavery and the Indian genocide?! Even if we accept this person as an exceptionally stupid outlier, the cluster is still there; you can see it in the tendency to reblog obviously false rape statistics, or hyperbolic claims about the likelihood of various marginalized groups being murdered in the street, etc.
Does irrational pessimism lead to calls for revolution, or the other way around? Is it the headline effect? Confirmation bias? Probably a bit of both. I’ve noticed the same tendency among evangelical Christians of my acquaintance (the world is sinful, therefore it must be horrible).
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Uh, Scott of slatestarcodex posted a very similar statement, that in the wake of Ferguson American race relations had reached “historic lows.” Scott is hardly a SJW type, and even though he’s said some things I think are pretty silly, I certainly wouldn’t describe him as “exceptionally stupid.” It seems likely that this is just part of the general tendency of people to exaggerate the significance of whatever situation they happen to be talking about.
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The counter-argument is that the desirable society we want to live in can’t be walked to; that capitalism is stable and resilient enough that we can’t change it into socialism or whatever by a steady, iterative process.
To take a comparison, suppose we decided that the ideal form of government was constitutional monarchy with a largely hereditary upper house and an elected lower house and we wanted to bring it about in America. It’s certainly not obvious that such a result is achievable through the process of slow, iterative reform, with each step involving an incremental boost to the quality of government. And even if it were, it might take hundreds of years.
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Reblogged this on YBoris.
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I was tracking a facebook discussion re: this post, and there was significant disagreement as to the intended thesis of this post. It says “in praise of reformism”, but it really seems to mean “against violent revolution”. In which case, MLK’s protests count as “reformism” because they were peaceful.
On the other hand, you say that lots of social-justice types are in favor of The Revolution, but in my experience very few are in favor of violent revolution. Furthermore, the “dancing” link goes to what looks like a typical peaceful protest. So that’s just confusing.
It seems to me that there is a vast space between incrementalism and violent revolution. Dichotomizing the spectrum and identifying each half with a prototypical example may not be the best method of analysis.
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Fixating on ‘The Revolution’ seems like it’s self-handicapping.
Picking achievable goals gives me an obligation to do work. They also mean that I could fail.
Declaring myself a revolutionary is a lot safer. I’m not too lazy or disinterested to do mundane work — I’m unwilling to compromise my ideals. And revolutions are hard, so my failure doesn’t reflect on me.
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This is slightly off to the side, but I feel like one thing that happens here is that, sometimes entirely orthogonally to what-you-should-actionably-do*, some people feel better coming at things with ‘we need radical change’ and some people feel better coming at things with ‘reformism’. Similarly, some people take on more harm by ‘stay in the system so you can try to work on it, at the cost of contributing to its damage’, so they are best suited to ‘divest as much as you can’ approaches, and some people are the other way around. Much like for instance some people find ‘you are morally obliged to do X’ helpful and some find it harmful, even if they have the same ideas about behaviors etc. they do and to not like.
Both (that’s an oversimplification, there’s clearly more than two) groups can contribute important things – like, radical-side tend to be the ones who call out stuff like ‘let’s throw the even more marginalized people under the bus so people like us better’. But, beyond that, both kinds of people exist, and they’re just not going to do well with the approach that doesn’t work for them.
(*I tend to consider myself radical but not revolution-oriented, but I very much see space for current-helping-people-action in revolution-oriented approaches too. Like ‘if we don’t start practicing/working through things now, how do we expect to be able to suddenly do that post revolution’ and like ‘doing helping-people things builds the revolution’).
I also tend to think of a lot of revolution rhetoric as messianic. Like, the problem is that the world is full of awful things and we don’t *know* how to make it all better. Like, ‘walking’ can feel like it’s just never going to be enough, etc, and it can get very hopeless. So having a ‘one thing can make it all better’ idea can, in my opinion, sometimes be a pretty important psychological coping mechanism for people (this is the case whether or not is is also true). It does sometimes lead to problems – like ‘messianic spirals’ where people refuse to do anything to help things because they’re too busy waiting for the One Thing. But that’s really not limited to the left, and most approaches have some form of their own local risk, and like I said I feel like it is very possible for people to do good things with whatever approach they’ve found works best for them, so facilitating people doing that tends to be what I support.
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