Why *Four* Dimensions?
Because time matters.
Long time no post! Before you get judgy, my reasons are good. I officially finished a draft of the book that is now sitting on an editor’s desk, awaiting judgment. It was a big lift, but worth it to get a rough draft out the door. That meant, of course, that for the entirety of September and part of October, there was very little time for blogging (or much of anything else).
Now that the book is drafted, I can go back to first principles for a bit and think more about tightening the theoretical framework for radical moderation. In recent days, I’ve had a few conversations with friends and colleagues (and friends who are colleagues) about the book/blog and one question (or set of questions) a few have asked is “why four dimensions? Isn’t what you’re really trying to do accomplished in three? If the goal is to destroy our polarized binaries, why not just add a dimension and be done with it?”
Those questions made me realize that what was clear in my head was not terribly clear to the reader. I’ve discussed the fourth dimension of radical moderation in a few different places on the blog (here and here) but I don’t think I’ve provided a consistent or in-depth discussion. So here it is!
Why Four Dimensions?
The main gist of my argument is that time moderates (radically) our social, moral, and political debates, in radical ways. There are a few ways it does this:
History frames modern political debates. It would be impossible, as just one current example, to understand the current three dimensional situation in Israel and Gaza without understanding the deep roots of that conflict. As I discussed with a colleague earlier this week, the historical point at which you choose to start affects the entire narrative. Whether you start in 1967 or 1948 or 570 or 0 or 2000 BCE matters a lot for how you think about the current conflict over a tiny strip of land. Without an appreciation for social, political, and moral time and time’s past tense history we lose important parts of the explanatory puzzle. Unfortunately, time complicates things, which is one reason a lot of people like to pretend it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter for modern political, moral and social debates. History doesn’t always moderate things, of course, as the case of Israel makes clear. But complicating things has implications for moderation, so it’s an important connection nonetheless.
Time changes individual human beings. Our values when we’re 20 are not the same values as when we’re 40. I have greater (and different) perspective now than I did 20 years ago and I expect that change to continue. Humans develop over time and space. This is just as true for societies as it is for individual humans. But in the individual case we know that the human lifespan changes how we think about our shared landscape. Our values, goals, attitudes, and tactics change as we get older. We become more moderate as we age, in part because we have more to lose if the system changes. We have property and roots and families and jobs and it’s harder to argue for the overthrow of everything when you have things you want and need to protect. But that moderation comes with tradeoffs. It’s harder (and more morally dubious) to give up everything and travel the world when other people rely on you for their own development (and basic needs). Time locks us in, in both good and bad ways.
Time moderates utopian extremes. Whether you’re a Marxian revolutionary or a libertarian anarchist or some kind of conservative nostalgic utopian a la Patrick Dineen, time is going to slow you down and it’s going to slow you down hard. The main reason is #1 above, which is that human political, social, moral and cultural practices are a weird amalgam of innovation and long entrenched practices. Like tree roots they’re very hard to dig up and they typically don’t transplant well in other places. Often (though not always) the longer they exist, the stickier they are. There are some really great scholars like Ryan Muldoon and Christina Bichierri doing work on social norms and how and when they change and they do find that a leopard can change his spots if the circumstances are just right. But we also know from the weight of a long history that really radical social change has to start pretty small to be safe for human beings. A large proportion of the death toll of the 20th century can be attributed to people who tried to change things too fast. It was a century of Icaruses. And hundreds of millions of people suffered and died as a result.
Time limits 3D change. As an extension of #3, time affects how and how much we can change our shared landscape. Serious moral, political, and social debates that may seem to require immediate and radical reform are hampered because such reform always takes time. And the more time they take, the more people lose interest, get tired, or their values and goals change over time. Black Americans might have felt hopeful on April 1, 1865: people who had been enslaved the year before were now free and political movement had begun to protect their civil rights, even in an unfriendly South. I’m not sure how many at the time would have predicted that it wouldn’t be until more than 100 years later until anything close to real legal protections were in place. What reformers realized quickly was that many things can happen across the course of time that change the shape of our landscape and our own political and social goals. For Black Americans, unforeseeable events like the assassination of Lincoln, the internal implosion of the Republican party, and the rise of the KKK and other terrorist groups, were signs that other people were pushing to maintain the existing moral landscape and doing so in powerful ways. The longer the fight went on, in some ways the harder it got. White allies drifted and some Black Americans gave up. What had seemed almost a guarantee of freedom in 1865 went on for another (at least) 100 years.
The past, present, and future moderate each other. The Irish-British statesman Edmund Burke described what he called the “intergenerational compact,” an idea that has had an enduring effect on me since I first heard about it in graduate school. Burke argues that the social contract theorists who ignore the fourth dimension misunderstand the nature of of human society. Burke argues instead, “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” This seems to me to be a powerful truth at the same time that it’s very hard to know precisely how to understand it in any given moment. But it’s true both individually and societally that human reproduction and the practical result of that reproduction moderates everyone along the way. The balancing required by different generations with different values living side-by-side is compounded by the reality that we’re tethered in powerful ways to the traditions of those who are long gone at the same time that we do feel a weight of obligation toward those who aren’t even here yet. The past and future weigh - powerfully - on the present.
Human nature is written - in part - in our genes, a deep history that we struggle to escape. Much of radical moderation - or at least how I think about it, anyway - is an attempt to balance the good parts of human nature against the bad. We want to encourage our incredible innovation and our wonderful prosocial empathy at the same time that we limit our capacity for nepotism and tribalism and reduce the opportunities for conflict and violence. Our shared human nature is at least partly (if not largely) genetic and it’s that long and deep fourth dimensional genetic legacy that forces moderation on us the most.
The Fourth Dimension Matters, Deeply
I harp on time a lot because time moderates - radically - the present. It reminds us that the world is not really ours to make anew. We are constantly - and sometimes awfully - burdened by the deep roots of the past. Our current landscape bears the scars of past conflicts and sometimes our only option is to work around those scars because we’re unable to eliminate them with our existing tools. But it also bears the fruit of the many people before us who have built bridges, planted fruit trees, and generally made our landscape a better place to live.
Time also reminds us that we have duties to those who exist only in theory. Not just our existing children, for whom we would like to build a better landscape, but also for their children and grandchildren. The precise nature of those duties and how far they extend is an ongoing political and social conversation and one that is affected by our present political and social locations.
More broadly, any conversation about how to remodel our existing three dimensions will have to take into account how those changes will play out over time and how future generations will think about them and interact with them, at the same time as we take into account the weight of the past - traditions, values, expectations, and conflicts - that colors our present.
Whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective, but it’s with us whether we like it or not. Everything we do in our 3D landscape happens in 4D. And what we do with that time really matters.
As always, let me know what you think by leaving a comment. And please, if you like what you read, subscribe and share!