I'm putting this on Flame, but I'm not intending to strike a partisan pose here. I would like to talk a little bit about metapolitcs, or how the problems and opportunities confronting a society translate themselves into action and policy.

We have two basic approaches to governance in this country, and we see plenty of discussion on the relative merits of the two on this forum all the time. But just what is it that we really know about the appropriate way to respond to our challenges, and how do we marshall our resources and convert them to policy. What do we really know, and how do we know what we know? Pick any issue you like and you will find a suite of responses adopted by the various political factions and philosophies. Many, if not most of these, are contradictory, if not mutually inconsistent. But is there a right and a wrong way to do things? Is it not a question of perhaps we don't know what's best, indeed, we cannot know?

The USA, and the world, are highly complex systems, do we really have any justification to say we know how they work and what to do to properly manage them? Instead of striving for the truth, perhaps we should recognize that none of us is capable of knowing the truth. In fact, it may very well be that there is no truth, since any action we take tends to alter the entire situation. I submit that the administrative metabolism of world civilization, even of the American piece of it which interfaces with it, is simply unknowable, that it is is so chaotic and interconnected that there is no way of evaluating the consequence of an action until much later, when conditions have changed completely. We seem to have evolved two antithetical approaches to dealing with this: do as little as possible because we really don't know what we're doing, or alternatively, we must adopt an activist approach and seize control of the chaos and make changes to solve problems or institute solutions while they are still amenable to intervention and before they have become institutionalized and developed a constituency that will resist change and improvement. We call these the conservative and liberal approaches, respectively.

How much of the events that affect us are due to blind forces and abstract principles (like the laws of physics) and how much are driven by agendas, special interests, and self-indulgent constituencies? It seems that a reasonable way to model this is to accept that both processes are at work here, and neither dominates. But is it even possible to tell where one ends and the other begins? In almost every issue that confronts us we see valid points and cogent observations by both sides, yet we also see both sides doing everything possible to discredt the other and further its own program.

I don't pretend to be able to see through this fog of contradictions and see some inner truth, I have my opinions and I have reasons for holding them, but I also recognize they are subjective ones and, when pressed, I can do little more to convince others that they are right than to argue my own personal vision articulately. I cannot prove any fundamental truth, because the truths are either too complex for any man to see, or perhaps even because their is no fundamental truth. Shit just happens.

I once had a conversation on this type of problem solving with a man I highly respect, a successful and influential naval architect. We were discussing the mental process he went through in resolving the many compromises which must be negotiated when designing a seaworthy and commercially viable sailing yacht. His answer was that there was not one single characteristic of his boats that was not carefully thought out, every decision was calculated and considered, whether it was objective or subjective. And he understood the difference between the two, and the difficulty of actually discerning that difference. The design was meant to meet a vision, to serve a purpose, and whether or not that purpose was achieved, or even if it were the right one, was only determined by the model's success on the water and in the marketplace. This man may very well be one of the leading naval architects in the world, but every line he drew and calculation he made was a gamble.