The individual, the community, and seeking balance: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville (Part II)

 Let's just do this today.  As I have said, you know you dig a book when you can't stop thinking about it, and I suppose that means I dig a book when I can't stop writing about it.  Perdido Street Station.  Read it.  I won't rehash the plot, nor world description.  I covered that in last Sunday's post.  This week, let's dig into some political philosophy.  Specifically, that of the garuda of the Cymek.  The garuda are basically bird-men.  Human-sized/human-shaped beings with big-assed wings, beaks, and a few other anatomical differences, but bird-men.  And... bird-women.  The Cymek is a desert in the southern region, and it is unclear how unique the political philosophy of the Cymek's garuda is, but it seems distinct from the garuda living in the city of New Crobuzon, where the novel takes place.  It is also the catalyst for the events of the novel, in many ways.

The garuda of the Cymek have one crime:  choice theft.  To deny another choice.  To steal is to deny another the choice to use that which one steals.  To kill is to deny another the choice to live and all associated choices.  Yagharek commits rape.  It is a clear, horrific, and multidimensional denial of choice, described at the end of the novel by Yagharek's victim.  If we adopt a moral standard built around "consenting adults," anything that we deem immoral can be reframed as a denial of choice, so in some ways, Mieville has constructed a moral and legal philosophy that is merely a shading on a particular philosophy that should be familiar, but one that reconceives every crime as the same crime:  choice theft.  Interesting, right?

At this point, we may note something about Mieville's politics.  As a general rule, a novel should stand or fall on its own.  The author may be the best person ever, or a total shitbag.  The author may be a liberal, a conservative, a communist, a fascist... whatever.  Read the fucking book.  What are your feelings about Alice In Wonderland, again?  Nevertheless, it is sometimes interesting to know, and it can inform your reading.

Mieville is far, far left.  That's not exactly unusual for a science fiction writer, but he's a straight-up socialist.  As in, he has run for office in the UK as a socialist candidate, under the label.  As modern political ideology has developed, what that has come to mean, not only in the US, but in the UK, is a sort of libertine social view, combined with wealth redistribution, and as a socialist, Mieville wants a lot of redistribution, along with policies besides, but we're not getting into definitions of "socialism" today.  Blah, blah, means of production, yadda-yadda-up-against-the-wall.  Instead, we're thinking about the nature of individualism.

As I laid out the Cymek garuda's conception of law and crime, it sounds rather individualist, doesn't it?  And yet Mieville is a commie.  Huh?  This gets interesting.  Messy, but as I said, the sign of a good book is when even the messy stuff is fascinating to ponder.  I'm pretty far from Mieville's commie politics, but I fucking love his books.

So the garuda have one crime:  choice theft.  Moreover, there is a scene at the end where the garuda raped by Yagharek shows up in New Crobuzon to confront Isaac, who had been trying to help Yagharek find a way to fly again, thereby undoing his judgment/penalty.  She tells Isaac what Yagharek did, because Yagharek had never 'fessed up (shocker), and then when Isaac understandably responds by thinking about it in terms of "rape" rather than choice theft, she tears him a rhetorical new one about how he can't put it in his terms, he can't judge their moral/legal system, and so forth.  Basically... moral relativism.

You know how the modern left loves its moral relativism, right?  There it is, right there.  This is Mieville, showing you some of his cards.  Of course, ask any modern lefty about Taliban justice, and whether or not we can pass judgment on that, and watch them fucking squirm.  No.  Our justice is better.  Period.

Mieville is playing a bit of a philosophy game in terms of choice theft because it's really just libertarian social philosophy, reframed linguistically.  Whether or not Isaac should help the rapist, knowing what he did?  OK, moral qualm, after Yagharek saved their asses, but the lecture about how choice theft is different?  That's a word game.  Interesting, but only academically.

Of course, I'm an academic!

But this is where you see Mieville showing you his cards, which is why I'm going on this tangent.  'Cuz it ain't really a tangent.  It is a deeper point about how the garuda philosphy relates to Mieville's politics.  So we come back to this philosophy that seems very libertarian, and a dude who's a fuckin' commie.  And I restate my question:  huh?!

Remember, though.  What makes a cool book is when even the messy stuff is interesting.

The garuda philosphy emphasizes the individual and the rights of the individual, but they make a distinction between a "concrete" individual and an "abstract" individual.  OK, there's a bunch of blather here, where they go on some oh-so-deep, pseudo-moralistic, philosophical blather, using too many words to say something way more simple.  Fuck philosophy.

Oh, did I say that out loud?  (No, I typed it.  I suppose that's worse.  Lasts longer.  Besides, I'm as long-winded as any philosopher, so watch me throw some stones from my glass house!)

Anywho, the issue is as follows.  Do you think only of yourself, or do you recognize that you live within a society, and that you have the capacity to live and act because you live within a society?

Mieville goes on about a "social matrix," 'n shit, and respecting individuality, but the reason he is writing that way is that he's trying to square a circle in the messiest way possible.

The simplest way to square this circle is to say the following:  my rights end when they begin to infringe on your rights.  That fits cleanly and easily with the garuda conceptualization of "choice theft," and it is the libertarian conception of rights and law.  Why doesn't Mieville use it?

Because he's a commie, not a libertarian.  That statement implies no positive obligation.  In fact, the garuda of the Cymek do not have a system in which they can impose obligations on each other.  To do so would be a denial of choice!  Choice theft!

You know what would count as choice theft?  Taxation!  Of course, the garuda don't have anything that we would recognize as government.  Why not?  They don't have a fixed location, stable resources, or anything like that.  They have a fuckin' cool mobile library, which they fly around the desert, but they're nomads without stable resources, and without anything that we'd call stable governance.  They have judicial processes, of a kind, but it's all about avoiding choice theft.

And without anything to steal, that's kind of easy.  At one point, the garuda who visits Isaac even says, we may be poor, but we're morally superior to you because yadda-yadda communist-libertarianism ("we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune!").

Yet Mieville needed to write that positive obligation into the garuda philosophy.  To what extent does it make sense in the Cymek garuda's society?  Not much, or at least, from what is presented, but this becomes a much more important question in non-nomadic, economically developed societies, which is where Mieville actually wants to discuss political and economic philosophy.

So here's the issue.  Here I am on a Sunday morning, typing a blog post about Perdido Street Station.  In order for this to happen, I need the computer equipment, the power grid, the internet, the book, which I ordered from the internet for an e-reader, which..., fuckloads of coffee, shipped from Tanzania (for this morning's beans), brewed in a French press built overseas and shipped on a gigantic fucking boat that was built across multiple continents (probably), and do I need to keep going?  That's before talking about the fact that in order to have the time to do this, I need my basic needs met by a job in the modern world, and... you get the point.

There are plenty-o-critters in the world that live on their own, and do just fine, thank you very much, and Rousseau was a fucking moron who pulled his "state of nature" out of his ass.  It wasn't just that it never existed, although it didn't, it was that it was a total fantasy of what humans are.  Humans are evolutionarily adapted to somethin' else, and if you want modern comfort, that's something that comes from modern society.  Sure, I'd like to minimize my interaction with the unwashed masses, but without a modern economy, and all that, I can't have my books, my glorious, little life of quiet contemplation, far from the maddening crowd (see what I did there?), and neither can you.

Now.  What does that mean?  Who has positive obligations to whom?  Now we're getting into politics and political philosophy.  Mieville wrote the garuda philosophy to open the door to a positive obligation within this type of modern society precisely because we cannot have our creature comforts without modern society.  Yet he did so for a society that didn't have them.

Interesting!

Of course, it does not necessarily follow that those positive obligations exist.  This is at the core of economic theory.  The whole point of Adam Smith's innovation in economics, lo' those centuries ago, was that rational, self-interested economic transactions were positive sum, as long as they were voluntary.

Smith did not account for externalities, nor public goods, to which the conservative economist responds with the Coase theorem.

Huh?  OK, quick lesson in economics.

Perfect competition.  A market is characterized by "perfect competition" when it meets five conditions:  many buyers, many sellers, perfect information, low entry barriers for new firms, and each firm is offering identical goods.  Are these conditions ever met?  No, not truly, but the closer they come to being met, the closer you get to that canonical graph of the upward-sloping supply curve, the downward-sloping demand curve, and an allocation of goods determined by the intersection of the supply and demand curves.  Econ 101.

But shit happens.  One of the ways shit happens is in the form of an externality, which occurs when someone uninvolved with a transaction either benefits from or is hurt by a transaction.  The former is a positive externality, and the latter is a negative externality.  When there are positive externalities, a market will underproduce the good, and when there are negative externalities, the market will overproduce the good.  Those are inefficiencies.  We could do this with graphs, and math, and shit, but I'm just typin' away on a Sunday morning, and my coffee is gone, so I'm gonna try to wrap this up soon.  Take a real econ course, not just a breezy blog post on a China Mieville novel from some schlub of a political scientist.

Anyway, the point is that markets don't always get you an efficient outcome, even if voluntary transactions are positive sum, thank you very much, Adam Smith.  And this is where the critics of markets have room to say, wait, we have positive obligations to each other beyond self-interest.  The question is, how much?  How far do you go?

The New Deal/Great Society American liberal would ask about the costs and benefits of specific regulations on a case-by-case basis, propose a basic social safety net, and so forth.  They don't exist anymore.  The socialist, and more so, the full-on commie, challenges the premise of the market, and the notion that markets should be the mechanism by which goods are allocated.  Mieville is towards that end of things.

The libertarian says, actually, markets have ways of correcting even for externalities.  Enter Ronald Coase.  "The Coase theorem."  This is a tricky one, which boils down to the following.  Hypothetically, let's say there were no such things as transaction costs.  Also, see this wish here?  Horsey!  Horsey!

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Coase.  In a world with no transaction costs, what happens is that money magically compensates those impacted by negative externalities, so everything reverts to efficiency, even without government!  Yay for my magic, magic market, and all you have to do is believe that transaction costs are fictional, but fairies aren't!  Clap!  I said, clap, motherfuckers!

What, did you think they were learning math at the University of Chicago?  No, they're just clapping until fairies get their wings.  Coase did the math to prove that clapping works.

OK, I'm being kinda harsh on Coase, but really, there are some valuable insights to his work about compensation, but the problem is that if you begin with a preference on the structure of a regulatory system and then justify everything in terms of that, your reasoning will suck.

What do we owe each other?  That's, like, a really big and complicated question.  I suck at those.  I have no wisdom for anybody.  I can barely brew a cup of coffee or string a sentence together, and you're asking me for wisdom?  Dude, I just like sci-fi and some weirdo math about politics.

The thing is, Mieville presented first a libertarian conception of law and moral philosophy, while trying to make that compatible with a more expansive system of social obligation that only worked in the context of a society that didn't have much in the way of social obligation, given its economics.  That let him elide the hard problems of balancing individualism with anything communitarian in a way that he cannot in a more economically modern system.

Interesting?  Hell, yes.  He cheated, though.  He totally cheated.  Still, you absolutely need to read Perdido Street Station, and you can be sure I'll get around to the sequels.  Sometime.  I do have an extensive reading list, though, so I have no idea when.

From Monuments To Masses, "(Millions of) Individual Factories," from On Little Known Frequencies.