Tag Archives: Aristotle

red white blue bar

Too Big to Succeed?

Models, Problem Practices, , , , , , , , , , , ,

It is worth considering the idea that large nations may be too big to fail, but also too big to thrive as open societies.

A phrase frequently heard during the financial meltdown of 2008 was that certain banks were “too big to fail.”  It is often the case that we equate the control of vast spaces or resources as a sign of an institution’s preeminence in the culture. We can’t do without them. But when looking at sovereign nations, I’m beginning to think that the reverse is true.  The vast Soviet state with 11 time zones and 15 republics failed in part because its leaders could not effectively govern all of the diverse factions bridging Europe and Asia. Vladivostok, located in the Russian Far East, is over 5500 miles from Moscow. Similarly, before the United States gave it new reasons to care, Canada had struggled to unify its vast provinces and native groups to form a coherent nation. The U.S. has inadvertently helped Canadian citizens unify against their sour neighbor to the south. Ditto for China, which needs its rising wealth to keep very different areas like Hong Kong and Tibet under their thumb. Lhasa in Tibet is 3500 miles from Beijing, and holds on to some autonomy. That’s a great distance, but shorter than the space between Honolulu and Washington, D.C. (approximately 5,000 miles). Distance is obviously more easily bridged in the digital age. But as the old Mason-Dixon line reminds us, it is not insignificant as a key variable for achieving a degree of national cohesion.

As a thought experiment, it is worth considering the thesis that large states may appear to be too big to fail, but they may also be too big to thrive as open societies. No one living in one of the geographical giants with huge land masses and understandably diverse populations can call them fully “unified.” This seems so obvious now. Though pollsters caution against assuming that the American population is as polarized as its current politics, it is still clear that regional differences have turned into regional antagonisms that weaken the chances to establish a good society.

Politically, Vermont does not look like Florida.  Among others, Senator Bernie Sanders seems like a natural representative of the Green Mountain State. Some political norms in other northern tier states would hardly be recognized by the government now sitting in southern capitols like Tallahassee. Reproductive freedom for women, control of hiring and curricula in some universities, book banning, official support for child vaccines and social services are vastly different. For example, in terms of money spent per child for K-12 public education, New Jersey and Massachusetts look more like Sweden ($15,000) than some of the southern states. In 2020 New Jersey spent over twice as much per student ($20,600) than Florida ($9,937). This can be taken as only a rough indicator, but it is suggestive of the yawning differences that exist in populations sharing the same national leadership and ostensibly the same values. One expects that Norwegians and Germans less than 800 miles apart do not experience the same span in civil norms as Russia or the U.S., though their citizens have their differences. To put it a different way, nations bridge a vast continent are arguably a long way from whatever we mean by a coherent society.

Aristotle estimated that size of an ideal polity would be the number of people who could know most of their fellow citizens. The city-states in his time numbered from 500 to 5000 citizens. In pre-electric times a community was contiguous rather than dispersed; members could more readily rub shoulders with their fellow citizens. To be sure, size is partly a limitation that belongs to another époque. But, in general terms, a nation that is larger and much more diverse is likely to see less opportunities for social cohesion: even more so in the era of newly fragmented media. For example, in 2006 less than half of American young adults could identify Ohio on a national map.

Questioning Ethnic Variety in the Same Sovereign State 

Based on recent elections, even tolerant Scandinavians seem to be coming to the belief that multiculturalism has its limits. And there are fewer states that are anything like the monoculture of Japan. That may be a good thing, building on the countervailing idea that synergies created by different cultural traditions enrich a culture. But smaller European states are collectively agonizing over when immigration undermines their cornerstone values. However it manages, we now understand how lucky a nation is to have leaders and systems that can hold on to strong diversity as a foundational idea. The way things are going, the French may want their harbor statue back.

The United States is again (always?) in an era when even core values are disputed, when subcultures with distinct norms become alien and hostile to each other. Consider again additional north-south differences.  Northern residents are sometimes reminded that they get less federal money than they contribute in taxes. In the case of New Jersey, 91 cents on every tax dollar goes to federal coffers. By comparison some southern states may receive over two dollars in aid for every dollar sent.  As to specific issues, members of the dominant GOP in many of the southern states see real dangers in the presence of undocumented immigrants, most of whom who are reliable workers doing jobs in their communities that no one else wants. As indicated in the chart below, by a wide margin most in the GOP do not want an amnesty extended to them, with brutal ICE arrests as one consequence.

Polarization Research Lab, 2025, Accessed 8/31/25

With regard to gun ownership and its corollary of gun deaths, there is again a sharp regional difference, with most of the states with the lowest rates of gun ownership and gun deaths not so coincidently in a contiguous corner of the east coast. The deadliest areas per capita include Wyoming and Alaska, but otherwise stretch along the southern tier of the nation. Again, attitudes on some Issues generally align with particular regions.

Violence Policy Center

We are obviously describing big entities that must include scores of exceptions, such as the anomaly of blue cities in red states. And there is the natural variability of individual attitudes everywhere; no two people think or act alike. But the overall point still has merit. Sovereign regions would seem to have a better chance of converting themselves into successful civil societies than those which lack the will to build bridges to citizens considered social outliers.

red bar graphic

Eroding Norms Require a Revival of Timeless Ideas

Models, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It used to be harder to fake competence; now its easier.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ Frank Bruni recounted an article from a historian of education who mentioned a recent Columbia University graduate who shamelessly boasted about his ability to skate through his years mostly using A.I. The original conversation was recalled by James Walsh and mentioned in an article entitled, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.” At the same time another higher education expert told Bruni that “in the minds of our students, [college] has become highly instrumental and transactional.”  When Walsh asked the student why he bothered with the Ivy League “only to offload all of the learning to a robot,” he answered that Columbia was an optimal place to meet the co-founder of a start-up and find a wife.

Obviously, as a representation of some students in higher education, this is disheartening. Are our best institutions producing graduates with a moral sensitivity that is as low as our President’s? Shouldn’t they know that the capability to copy and paste someone else’s thoughts is a long way from owning those ideas and being able to act on them?

Useful knowledge is precious. It can become part of the “equipment for living” that thinkers promise for any language of action. But lifting ideas from others is not the same as owning them. For example, I could take most A.I. descriptions of the key term “credibility” and sound like I know what I’m talking about. An A.I. definition at least superficially signals knowledge and awareness, but does not necessarily indicate real mental processes that give the idea life. Hence the definition that it “refers to the quality or characteristic of being trusted and believed”  is a harmless statement, but is not the same thing as the rigorous mental work of testing and detailed cross-referencing to understand a source’s credibility. In short, using A.I. descriptions is not the same as acting on its specific processes.

Imagine another case. I might make a guess that Canada is ripping off the U.S. in some sort of trade arrangement, but I can’t truly accept that claim if it has come from a source that has labored under the view that this is also true of every other nation. This is the unmoored thinking of Donald Trump.  As our defacto Minister of Slights, his faith in tariffs comes with a long held-bias that every nation is suspect and probably a worthy target of retribution. Those psychological motives are surely real, but beyond actual circumstances on the ground that could be assessed by a fair-minded expert. Thus, “credibility” is the result of considered judgment and knowledge, not something that just comes, a-priori, from a twisted set of norms.

black bar

Full and complete competence has to be earned, but seems to be more easily elluded if an A.I. substitute can be passed off as one’s own cognitive work. 

What is intriguing about all of this is that it represents the nature of high competence that classical thinkers sought to understand.  Their preferred words like “wisdom,” “aréte,” (excellence), or high “quality.” In Aristotelian and Platonic ideals, a person of evident “virtue” was worthy of belief. There should be no false front in the presentation of one’s own character. There should be no unearned pretensions. In plain language, an expert is worthy of attention when the “high ethos” of their character aligns with real knowledge and ethical intentions.

All of these indicators of “excellence” are what motivated Robert Pirsig in his well-known quest laid out in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). In the guise of a memoir of travel across the West he drifts into an interior monologue that keeps showing up. He compulsively revisits moments when his study of classical thought left him troubled by the lack of practical wisdom in the people he encountered. Consider his description of two uninvolved and distracted mechanics who were asked to diagnose a problem with his old motorcycle.

The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast, and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, “Oh yeah. Tappets.”

Pirsig eventually paid a $140.00 repair bill for services that failed to remedy the engine problem. He later discovered that the noisy piston was caused by a damaged twenty-five cent pin accidentally sheared off by another careless mechanic. “Why,” he wondered, “did they butcher it so?” What evidence did they provide that indicated they were less than fully competent mechanics?

The radio was the clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.

Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way. . . .

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There is no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 PM or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job.

The book does not have much more to say about motorcycles, but it is full of the thoughts of a man on a quest to understand what “quality” and “aréte” can mean when applied to our own lives. I’m afraid he would be troubled by the intimations of excellence represented by the clueless student who thought he pulled off a perfect deception. The student may have deceived Columbia, but soon enough the rest of us must deal with more like him who have credentials but not competance.