"The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing..."
--Archilochus, adapted as the central metaphor of the essay by Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"
Before making my argument, let me mention two books both by leftist scholars, one an anthropologist, and the other a political scientist, that are central to this diary:
Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, Goran Hyden
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott
This diary is a reaction to another diary posted today, that takes a contrary view, and this diary started out as a comment in the other diary.
The problem with diaries that criticize "incrementalism" is that generally such diaries fundamentally do not understand what incrementalism is, why some people believe it works, or what the epistemology of incrementalism is.
First, I think a more accurate term would be pragmatism or empiricism, which has been one of the dominant philosophies behind American liberalism since the time of John Dewey.
Many critics of pragmatism can't even imagine that pragmatists have good motives or any underlying coherent theory. Here's how another diarist puts it:
Let's start with this premise: incrementalism is the belief that "real change" will be made as an accumulation of small, incremental changes to the existing society. The idea behind incrementalism appears to be that the "good things" we're all doing can somehow "add up" to some sort of "better world" envisioned by the incrementalists.
Well, that's not the "belief" that underlies pragmatism or empiricism. One way of understanding the difference between empiricism and the other diarist's way of thinking is by reference to Isaiah Berlin.
The other diarist is a hedgehog. Most progressive policy makers are foxes. The critics of pragmatism are usually "rationalists," while pragmatists and incrementalists are generally "empiricists":
Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes (only or primarily) via sensory experience as opposed to rationalism which asserts that knowledge comes (also) from pure thinking.
Most critics of empiricism, especially self styled "revolutionary" critics, or critics who are only satisfied with "fundamental change" have a THEORY of how the world works, and how the world should work if such theorist were its benevolent dictator or if he could only convince the far less astute leaders of the progressive movement and Democratic Party of the brilliance and infallibility of his THEORY.
This THEORY has been worked out, without the theorist actually having been a policy maker, without his having gained "sensory experience" in a policy making position trying to "make change," without having experienced the political forces arrayed against change nor the relative popularity of "rapid fundamental" change within the democratic electorate.
Because these critics Have It All Worked Out, the only issue is how to get The Solution To Our Problems adopted by the rest of society. This is how hedgehogs think. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We need our share of hedgehogs, who know One Big Thing, which is, as mentioned The Solution To Our Problems.
But often The Grand Theory turns out not to work, precisely because it was worked out through "pure reason" without experimentation, data and, yes, incremental steps. This is the point of James Scott's book. It is a brilliant explanation of how Big Solutions proposed by both the right and the left in power have led to catastrophic results. Scott is arguing for being foxy, obviously.
By contrast, empiricism, pragmatisim, incrementalism and similar liberal epistemologies grew out of both the tremendous strides made by science using the scientific method in the late 19th and early 20th century, and to a certain extent out of Marx, who famously turned Hegel on his head and created a theory of history that relied on looking at how people interact with the material world, rather than how Great Ideas or Great Men shape history.
Hedgehogs think that foxes, empiricists, or pragmatists have no values or no theory.
What they don’t understand is that empiricism is itself a theory and a value. It’s how we learn about the world and make progress. It assumes that we don’t have The Solution To Our Problems all worked out from our college dorm rooms, without probing the problem with tentative steps, gathering data, adopting what works and rejecting what doesn’t work. The reason that empiricists don’t start with one big solution to particular problems is that under the scientific method, it’s not likely that anyone can think up such a brilliant Solution without experimentation and data.
(If you were a biologist at the dawn of cell theory and had just received your first powerful microscope, you would not first "work out" how cells are organized and how organelles operate and only then look at them under the microscope.)
Some of us are old enough and fortunate enough to have lived in societies governed by leaders who thought they had The Solution based on the Big Theory and/or have lived through revolutions. Both situations are useful for tempering enthusiasm for The Solution.
Even those of us who didn't live through such experiences have lived long enough to see many countries adopt Big Solutions or foxy empiricist incrementalist approaches and prosper or fail. We've followed dozens of experiments in economic organization and planning in African countries. We've seen what happened to central planning in Russia and Eastern Europe. We've seen Russia adopt a Big Bang type rationalist (market fundamentalist) approach to change, and we've seen China adopt an incrementalist approach to building market socialism. We've seen Lula da Silva adopt empiricist anti-poverty approaches in Brazil, and we've seen Salvador Allende overthrown and killed by the forces of reaction. We've seen the apartheid government of South Africa try to build a perfect society, and we've seen the ANC muddle through, creating a middle class and building 1 million houses for the poor.
One of the most tragic examples of a well meaning Big Solution was the experience of Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere. This is the theme of the book, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania by the Norwegian socialist and political scientist of Africa, Goran Hyden. It had a big influence in African studies when it came out in the 1980s and really should be better known outside the field.
Most people who don’t study Africa probably think that all of the post colonial leaders were brutal or corrupt dictators. The experience was actually very varied, and there were some leaders who really were great people with noble motives. One of them was Julius Nyerere. He was incorruptible and with the exception of one bad episode (more later) never brutal.
Nyerere was very popular, a kind of African Gandhi and Nehru rolled into one. He wrote convincingly that a country as underdeveloped and poor as Tanzania was at independence needed to pursue a socialist path to development, and in particular an African socialist path. He called his program Ujamaa. Among other things, he wanted to change the way rural Tanzanians worked and lived in their environment. They were too spread out to efficiently receive services like health and education, and there were some other more technical issues relating to how rural farms operate when people are too spread out. He tried to create Ujamaa villages.
No one accuses Nyerere of being a bad person, but when his big idea was imposed on Tanzania, the results were disastrous. Rather than being dissuaded, the government doubled down and eventually even forcibly moved people into Ujamaa villages against their will. Eventually agriculture collapsed and the government admitted failure and gave up, and allowed people to return to their preferred way of living.
This was an example of a Big Idea failing. It was worked out before the people implementing it had "sensory experience" of changing African peasant farmers.
We might agree that the goal in Tanzania was delivering education and health services and helping farmers operate more efficiently. We could even agree that the goal in Tanzania is, or was, or should have been African Socialism.
But a Big Idea approach of the Ujamaa scheme was to work everything out based on The Theory.
An empiricist, incrementalist approach would be to try an experiment. Perhaps in one village or one African socialist agricultural experiment. Or perhaps just setting up incrementalist programs in education to see what would be the best way to deliver this service. The next step would be to gather data about how various experiments worked. Then the experiments that worked would be multiplied, and the experiments that didn’t work would be abandoned.
This in fact is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt built the New Deal. He was notorious for having no over arching ideology, no big picture for where he was headed, and being willing to listen to all sorts of people with ideas on how to address the Depression. He was ruthless in abandoning whatever didn’t work.
Many modern Big Idea people think that the New Deal was a single big New Idea and we need a new Big Idea, but that’s now how the New Deal society and safety net were built. That's also, by the way, not how Martin Luther King built the Civil Rights Movement, how Thurgood Marshall shaped the law, or how Johnson built the New Society, which was full of experiments and failures.
The creation of the New Deal was much more like the way the new health care system is being built under the Obama administration’s health care law. It is incomplete, without over arching ideology, but it allows states like California and Vermont to experiment, and other states to look at what works and what doesn’t.
That’s why many of us support the administration’s incrementalist approach.
We're foxes.
UPDATE: Since this is on the Community Spotlight, I fixed some grammatical stuff, typos and repetitions.