When in the Course of Human Events ...
... they are made to conform to power there is human suffering.
Human beings have ends (objectives) that they pursue by applying resources (means) through various social arrangements (ways). The ends, means, and ways vary greatly across social units (including political ones), both in time and across time.
Here’s a simplified sketch of the major components of means, ways, and ends and of the influences on them:
The ends can be characterized broadly as survival (e.g., the acquisition of food, clothing, shelter and health care) and the attainment of emotional fulfillment. The latter may include such things as sex, a loving marriage, children, wealth, social prominence, and political power — none of which necessarily precludes the pursuit of some or all of the rest (and other desiderata).
The means include availability of resources (their existence and affordability), innate ability (including intelligence and particular skills), knowledge, temperament and psychological fitness (e.g., ambition, social skills), and knowledge and belief (e.g., learning from various sources, ability to sort fact from fiction).
The ways are the the social norms that may constrain and direct action (e.g., an ethic of sharing vs. an ethic of entitlement); the social connections that enable (or hinder) cooperation between persons and social units in the pursuit of ends; and the political (or power) arrangements that shape norms and inhibit or foster social connections (e.g., laissez-faire vs. a plethora of restrictive and prescriptive regulations).
All of those things vary in and across time, both in the scope and scale of their applicability. Many of the changes are the result of experience (feedback and learning), including but far from limited to the experience of failures incurred in the pursuit of ends. Inventions and innovations lead to changes in resources, in methods of production (through economic units, which are social connections), and in the particular ends that are pursued.
Forces outside a particular social unit or polity will affect relations and accomplishments within the unit or polity. Such forces include natural disasters and war, for example. More broadly, there is chance or randomness. Things don’t go according to plan because of lack of knowledge or foresight, an accident, a foreseen disaster that does more damage than expected, etc. Life is full of such events and they have effects that don’t lend themselves to learning or prudent planning. Life sometimes (or often) just happens.
Given all of the many possibilities — in time and across time — that are contained in each of the broad concepts and relationships outlined above, it should be evident that there is no “social science” (a risible term) that can validly explain or predict the course and outcome of human affairs, except perhaps in small, narrowly defined ways. Even then, if immediate effects can be anticipated with some certainty (a bloodied nose as a result of a punch), possible ramifications may be many and unpredictable (e.g., a retaliatory punch, a retaliatory murder, a feud of many years’ duration).
Most “social scientists” would demur. Economists, for example, would say that the “law” of supply and demand is reliable. It may be, but it is reliable only in a general way (and not infallibly): The higher the price of a product or service, the less of it will be demanded by consumers, for example. Something that should be easy to predict, but isn’t, is the change in GDP during the next calendar quarter (e.g., see this). In general, and with respect to climate in particular, modeling of almost any kind that ventures beyond well defined physical phenomena is a fool’s game.
There is however, a way to force human events to follow a certain course, which is the desideratum of those who place deadening certainty against thriving liberty. That way is to gain control of the apparatus of the state, to coerce the subjects of the state to act according to its dictates (through force, censorship, and and to say that whatever follows is “good” and just what the regime intended.
That, in effect, is the direction in which the United States seems to be headed. Regardless of dire outcomes (e.g., general inflation, soaring energy and food prices, the suppression of science that gets the “wrong” answers), the regime presses on with heavy handed regulation, the weaponization of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, the empowerment of private actors (e.g., Big Tech) to suppress the regime’s enemies, and much more.
There is no learning from experience in this regime. Belief — uninformed and ends-driven — rules all. Every failure is met not with an honest reappraisal of policy failures but with the reassertion and expansion of failed policies.
It is the Sovietization of America: the exercise of power for its own sake, justified by the betterment of the people (or some of them), with the effect of impoverishing the people and setting them against one another. Its only “virtue” is the predictability of its results.
Certainty (or something like it) in human affairs is possible only by paying an extremely high price in liberty and prosperity.
Related reading: Glenn Ellmers, “Federal Foes”, The New Criterion, January 2023