An Equal Measure of Order and Tolerance

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. -- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Societies compete with eachother for resources and territory. In the most extreme, intolerance is war because one cannot tolerate the triumph of a certain point of view. With the extreme intolerance of a civil or international war on one end, to the passive acceptance of just about anything on the other end, where are the guidelines to say where we need to put our foot down. What is worth fighting for? What is better to put up with that to fight ?

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose starts (source: my father... hmm. what is the real source?)

Society advances by the addition of new behaviours. Behaviours which adversely affect the ability of its practitioners to metabolize and reproduce will die out. Those that provide an advantage will spread through a population. Some ideas are so obviously helpful, that they spread within a single generation. Some of those obviously helpful ideas are wrong, but in subtle ways that it takes longer to sort out. It is difficult to follow the latest innovations and be consistently correct. There is a bleeding edge in innovation no matter which is the field of endeavour.

The principle of the "survival of the fittest answer" (see previous entry) is that the most competitive groups will generate the most answers possible, and let the incorrect answers fall under their own weight, leaving the correct answers to survive. It is difficult to establish what the right answer will be a priori, and when we try to guess, we often get it wrong, so it is probably best to make as few overt choices as possible.

Our environment is changing. Two thousand years ago, the world was very different from what it was two hundred years ago, and very different from the world today. Lately, the rate of change is accellerating as science has started creating new behaviours far more quickly than at any time in history. Humans' strength is their ability to adapt to changing environments, and to adopt improved social behaviours (or ideas, science and technology are examples of such behaviours) which can confer evolutionary advantage much more quickly than normal biological evolution, and also modifies the environments in which future competition occurs.

If we compare societies where there was relative freedom versus rigid orthodoxy, we can see many cases where the orthodoxy resulted in the decline of that society. Contrast arab Spain, a cultural and scientific magnet during the middle ages (king of the three religions), with the time after Fernando and Isabel, when rigid orthodoxy was enforced and the Inquisition terrorised society. Contrast Holland with most of the rest of europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, one can contrast Europe with the arab world. Real discussion of the points above is left to a future entry. For now, I will only say that the contrast in wealth generation, and societal advancement as expressed through scientific discoveries is dramatic.

Limits on liberty, naturally enough, involve actions which constrain other people. By imposing punishment for behaviours on others, we are reducing the number of solutions that will be proposed, and that may have an effect on the competitiveness of the society as a whole. One must value liberty up until such liberty is used to restrain the liberty of others in thought or action.

Simply put: The society should seek the widest variety of behaviour and interests in its population, in order to generate the most answers (discarding all the wrong ones), which are improvements in that society. The ability to generate correct answers means the society will advance, and likely out-compete other societies where less liberty is afforded.

A second important aspect of a society, in addition to openness, there must be objective means of determining the right answer from a group of behaviours. One very direct method of keeping a certain form of score has been the univeral acceptance of currency in human societies. The now ubiquitous use of currency is something which has only really become commonplace in the twentieth century. Another fairly direct method is clearly the opinion poll, to see how many have come to believe in a certain meme. Just as in comparing the fitness of a species to it's environment, one can chart changes its range and make deductions about its adaptedness to a particular niche. Similarly societal solutions can take the form of movements, be they politico-ideological (political parties, movements, and probably religions), commercial (corporations, consortia, companies of all sizes), technological (open source development methods are technological without being commercial),

A word of caution. These comparisons are fraught with variables that we cannot control for, and are very difficult to experiment with. Our confidence in any hypothesis should be directly proportional to the amount of evidence to support it. There is not a lot of reproducible experiment behind these ideas, although they seem to fit the data rather nicely so far. Confidence in these formulations must be tempered by humility before our true level of ignorance. Still, it is helpful to form a coherent view on which to build predictive experiments.

So we don't know what behaviours will improve things for society, and need to be careful to give people the maximum scope for variation in behaviour. On the other hand, there are some behaviours which we are pretty sure are destructive. When they are destructive to others, such as criminal behaviour, we need methods of limiting the damage to society as a whole. This is just a matter of extending the tit-for-tat behaviour discussed in "Do unto others" into proxies (police) who try to take care of the tat, given someone who engaged in tit. That every society has such enforcement proxies is a clear indication of an evolutionarily stable behavioural innovation (reducing the burden on individuals by handing defense off to proxies, allowing greater specialization in individuals.)

There is clearly an inherent tension between this use of proxy defense, and consequent enforcement of limits on behaviour, and the need to encourage maximum scope of behaviour to encourage innovation. That is the fundamental balance which a society needs to address carefully, to ensure it's competitive development. Too much regimentation reduces the ability to innovate, too much chaos also reduces the freedom to innovate. Too little innovation means other societies will compete better.

There is a goldilocks problem here. In light of this formulation it becomes unsurprising that societies, over time oscillate around the correct answer occasionally being too stiff, and occasionally too loose. Exactly the same principle applies in science: Keep your mind open enough to accept new ideas, but not so open that your brain falls out. The key to making a more competitive (more quickly advancing) society is to reduce the stroke of that pendulum to get closer to the ideal balance on a consistent basis.

Further reading:

• http://www.ernaparis.com/works/enddays.htm -- Tolerance, Tyranny, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Shows one entire swing of the pendulum in one instance in history.
  
• The Story of Spain Mark Williams, 1990, a readable, reasonably concise overview of Spanish history, show the nascent local democracy which was effectively suppressed and replaced by centralized totalitarianim by the end of the reconquest.