You’ve seen a low resolution digital picture before, right? You can kind of tell what you’re looking at, but the whole thing is composed of a bunch of ugly, unnatural squares of color. A high quality digital picture is still composed of those same squares of color, but you have to zoom and zoom and zoom before you can detect them. No matter how accurately a digital picture replicates a scene, at the bottom of it are those unnatural squares.
Likewise, human conception never perfectly reflects reality.
Sir Isaac Newton, for example, developed an incredibly accurate understanding of physics, so accurate we still study his theories today. But then Einstein showed up. Newton was completely right as far the human senses can tell, but Einstein was mathematically more right. Newtonian physics is like a video in 720p HD. Einsteinian physics is the same video in 4k.
That is also the relationship between Georg Hegel’s conception of evolution and Charles Darwin’s. Hegel’s thought is closely associated with the famous formula of Thesis confronted by Antitheses results in Synthesis (though he never used those words). And the formula is correct. It’s also low definition. Darwin’s observations about the millions of imperceptible mutations accumulating over millennia to produce the characteristics best adapted to a shifting environment is just millions of theses, antitheses, and syntheses, some large, some small, some synthesizing over decades, some over centuries, some over millennia, constantly, all the time, without end.
In the liberal West, we have a very romantic idea of revolution. We are naturally Hegelians. We look at the world order, the thesis, and imagine that we can design the perfect antithesis that will produce a utopian final synthesis. If you have a low enough resolution picture, it’s easy to see which squares can change to which colors to make the picture look the way you want it to.
Marx was the most famous and explicit Hegelian political thinker. Capitalism overthrown by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat results in Communist Utopia. Wrong. Because capitalism is a massive global phenomenon made up of billions of laws, assumptions, and independent interactions. Therefore the problems of capitalism (and, indeed, their solutions) are distributed between those billions of laws, assumptions, and interactions. Marx could not possibly understand them all. And you cannot fix a problem that you cannot understand.
What we humans often fail to realize is that we don’t see the real world when we look at it. We see a digital picture where the squares of color are undetectable. But when we act on the world, we don’t act on the world as we see it, we act on the world as it is.
Take, for instance, the leaning tower of Pisa. The architects saw a patch of solid ground. And it was a patch of solid ground. Except there was a detail that didn’t appear in the digital picture in their heads: the ground is only solid up until there’s 14,500 metric tons of marble on it. Then it’s soft ground. And even though the architects didn’t see that detail, when they put 14,500 tons of marble on that spot, it became soft anyway.
That’s exactly why political revolution is so dangerous. We are trying to change huge pictures without the ability to see the details as we change them. Almost every idealogical revolution ever undertaken in human history—be it Marxist, liberal, or populist—made things instantly worse for the people it was meant to help. Lenin’s Communists massacred farmers. The French liberals guillotined half the liberals. And Hitler gleefully sent millions of blond-haired blue-eyed Aryans into the meat-grinder for his own self-destructive ends.
That’s what made the American Revolution so revolutionary. The founding fathers won a war and found themselves ruling over an independent nation with 5.3 million people on the far side of the world. What did they do with their absolute power? They kept the same type of government filled with the same politicians, the same type of legal system filled with the same lawyers and judges, and built in ways for their descendants to change and update it slowly over time without violence. They fought a relatively simple, clear, and specific problem and overcame it with the minimum necessary change.
The Canadian Revolution was even more evolutionary. Nearly 100 years after the American Revolution, in 1867 England confederated their new-world colonies, granting Canada self-rule. And not until 100 years after that, 1982, the year Michael Jackson released “Thriller”, did Canada ratify its own independent constitution and assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitled them.
That is what we need to be looking forward to. We don’t need large scale things to be fixed. We need the freedom and opportunity to solve what we can of the small problems that face us personally.
No single entity simply decided to overthrow the agrarian world order to more efficiently feed the world. But over the past 100 years, bare subsistence has almost entirely given way to a few hyper-productive farmers becoming capable of feeding a global population many times larger than when the Green Revolution began.
No global law eradicated smallpox. It took 150 years of experimenting with vaccines, industrializing their production, and convincing individuals across the world of their value and effectiveness.
Things get better slowly over time because individual people have the highest possible resolution digital pictures of our own individual lives. By focusing on the small, specific problems that we personally face, we are able to produce higher quality, more detailed solutions. And because the solutions are more personal, those making the changes are also those who suffer the unintended consequences. And that makes it much easier to back off of bad solutions.
We want change. We need change. Things are not good enough. They never will be. There are always going to be better ideas, better solutions to our problems, waiting to be discovered and implemented. And it’s so sexy to be a revolutionary, to fix all the problems in one swell foop. But if you don’t want sexy, if you’re not concerned with bluster and emotional highs, if what you really want is to make the world a better place, you have to come to terms with the fact that even the right solution takes a long time before it can be effectively implemented.
It’s boring, it’s frustrating, and it’s usually thoroughly unrewarding but it’s the only thing that really works. So ¡Viva la Evolución!
