game theory, naval warfare, and Derek Walcott

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I am in Washington, DC but remembering our winter vacation in Les Saintes, near Guadeloupe, because I am reading Derek Walcott’s astoundingly good epic, Omeros.

In the channel with three islets christened “Les Saintes”
in a mild sunrise the ninth ship of the French line
flashed fire at The Marlborough, but swift pennants

from Rodney’s flagship resignalled his set design
to break from the classic pattern … (XV)

Walcott is referring here to a major naval battle in 1782. When we saw the dioramas of the battle in the local history museum, I wondered why the “classic pattern” was for enemy fleets to form neat parallel lines and blast away at each other.

BattleOfVirginiaCapes

Was this some kind of courtly custom of the Baroque era? (Walcott writes, “the young midshipman … thought there was no war  /as courtly as a sea-battle.”) I think game theory offers a better explanation. The opposing players chose the best available strategies, each on the assumption that his opponent would make the best choice for him–which is what game theorists call a Nash Equilibrium.

Recall that sailing vessels cannot maneuver with perfect control because they are driven by the wind. Most of their lethal fire is directed from their sides. If they independently choose their own courses during a battle, they can easily get in each others’ way. In principle, each could be given complex directions from some central point, but inter-ship communication was badly limited before radio. It therefore made the most sense to set one simple rule that would guarantee coordination. The inflexible rule of the Royal Navy was to form a line of evenly spaced vessels.

Lord Howe’s Explanatory Instructions (1799) explained, “The chief purposes for which a fleet is formed in line of battle are: that the ships may be able to assist and support each other in action; that they may not be exposed to the fire of the enemy’s ships greater in number than themselves; and that every ship may be able to fire on the enemy without risk of firing into the ships of her own fleet.”

If one fleet had a good reason to form a line of evenly spaced ships, so did its opponent. Both wanted to sail in front of the other’s line, or “cross the T,” so as to be able to rake the enemy’s ships without receiving fire in return. But if two fleets are both trying to cross in front of each other, what you get is a pair of parallel lines.

The result of such a battle was pretty predictable, a function of the number of guns on each side. That meant that a clearly smaller fleet had a strong incentive to avoid battle or, if forced into it, to break the line and take a chance at prevailing in a chaotic melee. A melee could also develop by accident as a result of weather conditions, geographical obstacles, or sheer chaos. At the Battle of the Saintes (1782), the lines got mixed up. Walcott says this was Admiral Rodney’s plan, his “set design.” Wikipedia says the reason was a gusty wind that broke up the lines. Whether by chance or design, the Royal Navy ended up killing 8,000 French to their own losses of just 243 men.

Trafalgar (1805) was another famous counterexample. Nelson deliberately swooped in to break the enemy line, despite the grave risk of being raked by their broadsides, because he had a much greater incentive than the Franco-Spanish fleet to achieve a decisive result that day and was willing to take his chances. Nelson played the chicken game and didn’t swerve, for which he paid with his life but gets to stand on top of a huge column in central London to this day.

In 1913, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill faced the accusation that he had impugned the traditions of the Royal Navy. He replied: “And what are they? Rum, sodomy and the lash.” Maybe he should have said, ” … and the Nash.”

See also the gift economy of Beowulf and some thoughts about game theory.

Registration Open for Frontiers of Democracy, Jun. 23-25

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In addition to our upcoming 2016 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, we want our members to remember that the 2016 Frontiers of Democracy conference is coming up later this year. Frontiers has become a staple gathering of our field, and it is taking place this year from June 23rd – 25th at Tufts University in Boston.

Registration is now open, and the regular rate is $250 (but it’s free if you’re an alum of the Civic Studies Institute), but space is limited so make sure to register soon!

The theme of this year’s conference is The Politics of Discontent. Here’s how the organizers have framed the gathering:

Tisch College at Tufts University is proud to sponsor this annual conference in partnership with The Democracy Imperative and Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Frontiers of Democracy draws scholars and practitioners who strive to understand and improve people’s engagement with government, with communities, and with each other.

We aim to explore the circumstances of democracy today and a breadth of civic practices that include deliberative democracy, civil and human rights, social justice, community organizing and development, civic learning and political engagement, the role of higher education in democracy, Civic Studies, media reform and citizen media production, civic technology, civic environmentalism, and common pool resource management. This year, the theme of the conference is “the politics of discontent,” which we define broadly and view in a global perspective.

 

As always, most of Frontiers’ interactive sessions take the form of “learning exchanges” rather than presentations or panels, and proposals are welcomed. You can find the proposal submission form by clicking here.

You can find more information about the Frontiers of Democracy conference – including info about the featured speakers – on the conference webpage at http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/frontiers. We hope to see many of you there!

The Nature of Technology

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I recently finished reading W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology, which explores what technology is and how it evolves.

Evolves is an intentional word here; the concept is at the core of Arthur’s argument. Technology is not a passive thing which only grows in spurts of genius inspiration – it is a complex system which is continuously growing, changing, and – indeed – evolving.

Arthur writes that he means the term evolution literally – technology builds itself from itself, growing and improving through the novel combination of existing tools – but he is clear that the process of evolution does not imply that technology is alive.

“…To say that technology creates itself does not imply it has any consciousness, or that it uses humans somehow in some sinister way for its own purposes,” he writes. “The collective of technology builds itself from itself with the agency of human inventors and developers much as a coral reef builds itself from the activities of small organisms.”

Borrowing from Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela, Arthur describes this process as autopoiesis, self-creating.

This is a bold claim.

To consider technology as self-creating changes our relationship with the phenomenon. It is not some disparate set of tools which occasionally benefits from the contributions of our best thinkers; it is a  growing body of interconnected skills and knowledge which can be infinitely combined and recombined into increasingly complex approaches.

The idea may also be surprising. An iPhone 6 may clearly have evolved from an earlier model, which in turn may owe its heritage to previous computer technology – but what relationship does a modern cell phone have with our earliest tools of rocks and fire?

In Arthur’s reckoning, with a complete inventory of technological innovations one could fully reconstruct a technological evolutionary tree – showing just how each innovation emerged by connecting its predecessors.

This concept may seem odd, but Arthur makes a compelling case for it – outlining several examples of engineering problem solving which essentially boil down to applying existing solutions to novel problems.

Furthermore, Arthur explains that this technological innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum – not only does it require the constant input of human agency, it grows from humanity’s continual “capturing” of physical phenomena.

“At the very start of technological time, we directly picked up and used phenomena: the heat of fire, the sharpness of flaked obsidian, the momentum of a stone in motion. All that we have achieved since comes from harnessing these and other phenomena, and combining the pieces that result,” Arthur argues.

Through this process of exploring our environment and iteratively using the tools we discover to further explore our environment, technology evolves and builds on itself.

Arthur concludes that “this account of the self-creation of technology should give us a different feeling about technology.” He explains:

“We begin to get a feeling of ancestry, of a vast body of things that give rise to things, of things that add to the collection and disappear from it. The process by which this happens is neither uniform not smooth; it shows bursts of accretion and avalanches of replacement. It continually explores into the unknown, continually uncovers novel phenomena, continually creates novelty. And it is organic: the new layers form on top of the old, and creations and replacements overlap in time. In its collective sense, technology is not nearly a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities – and further needs. And we should not forget that needs drive the evolution of technology every bit as much as the possibilities for fresh combination and the unearthing of phenomena. Without the presence of unmet needs, nothing novel would appear in technology.”

In the end, I suppose we should not be surprised by the idea of technology’s evolution. It is a human-generated system; as complex and dynamic as any social system. It is vast, ever-changing, and at times unpredictable – but ultimately, at its core, technology is very human.

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What Is Democracy?

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In her last blog in our conversation in Education Week, Deborah Meier explored ways the schools she founded in New York and Boston sought to implement democratic decision making. These are important questions, but I'd argue that voting and other decision structures are tools -- and when they work well, symbols for democracy. They're not the essence of democracy.

So, "what is democracy?" And related, why, in the American context, did democracy have overtones of immensity? "A word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in Democratic Vistas.

Democracy means agency, citizen power, capacity of people to act to build a common life. In a time of bitter electoral division, when tools replace substance, remembering the larger meaning is crucial.
This brings me back to the "Citizenship Education Program," CEP, in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King's organization which I worked for from 1963 to 1965.

CEP organized "citizenship schools" across the south, informal learning sites drawing from Danish folk school traditions. Myles Horton, co-founder of Highlander Folk School which birthed the citizenship school movement, travelled through Denmark and was inspired by the folk school philosophy, "education for life." N.F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish philosopher of folk schools, saw them as sites for "the fostering of all our vital efforts." Grundtvig emphasized individual awakening and the potential of all occupations to contribute to a flourishing society.

Citizenship schools, like Meier's schools, were based on respect for the intelligence and other talents of everyday citizens. They included, of course, tools like elections for struggle against segregation. Restrictive voting disempowered people. More broadly they emphasized developing agency, capacity of people of all backgrounds for action on collective problems of all kinds (at one point a group of poor whites led by "Preacher Red" attended the Dorchester training center in Georgia, as Dorothy Cotton, SCLC's CEP director, describes in her book If Your Back's Not Bent).

Thus citizenship schools taught nonviolence, community organizing skills, literacy to help people overcome restrictive voting procedures. They were full of singing. Like Grundtvig, they conveyed love of country built through the labors of ordinary people, strange to postmodern, cynical ears ("We love our land, America!"), while also identifying with freedom struggles around the world. They described figures in black history who made people proud. Overall, the curriculum stressed the potential of people to act. I have the SCLC Citizenship Handbook from 1964 and look at it often.

Septima Clark, an early teacher and philosopher of citizenship schools, said that the purpose was "To broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship." Here, the citizen is a co-creator of an empowering democratic way of life.

Dorothy Cotton sings a song which conveys this idea: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Everyone has potential. There is no outside savior. Education is about "freeing the powers," a phrase of Jane Addams. Citizenship schools are "freedom schools."

Democracy as agency is radically different than the shriveled sense of "democracy" in today's public discussion, where tools substitute for substance. The larger meaning is hollowed out. The collapse of content feeds a diminished view of human potential, a mood of scarcity, a sense that we're in a dog-eat-dog fight for shares of a shrinking pie. All the candidates for president on both sides define democracy as elections, though there are hints at something more -- Bernie Sanders' "political revolution," John Kasich's reminder that Republicans and Democrats are neighbors.

It's helpful to go back to the Greeks. According to Josiah Ober, the Greek classicist, the Greeks saw democracy as agency, the capacity to act (Ober's book, Democracy and Knowledge, is one of my favorites). In his essay "The Original Meaning of 'Democracy': Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule" (Constellations 2008) Ober analyzes the roots of "democracy," demos, whole people, and kratia, power.

In modern usage, observes Ober, power is assumed to mean "a voting rule for determining the will of the majority." But he shows that for the Greeks "demokratia ...more capaciously, means 'the empowered demos ... collective strength and ability to act...and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through action."

We are the ones we've been waiting for. Peter Levine, a leader in our movement called "civic studies," based on agency and citizens as co-creators, has a book from Oxford by this title.

It will be great to see schools integrate democratic decision making into cultures and practices which have agency-building as their aim. What might schools - and societies - look like with a view of democracy that means human potentialities for action? And work to realize it.

Where we vote affects how we vote. So where should we vote?

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According to a summary article by Ben Pryor in The Conversation/Scientific American, people’s votes are affected by the voting location. Voting in a church “prime[s] significantly higher conservative attitudes—and negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians.” On the other hand, “individuals voting in Arizona schools were more likely to support a ballot measure that increased the state’s sale tax to finance education.”

Pryor draws the conclusion that we should vote by mail–which, for most people, would mean voting at home. One objection is that home isn’t a neutral place. It will bring its own biases. I don’t know whether voting at home has been experimentally compared to voting at (say) a school, but let’s imagine that being home makes people more resistant to taxes. Why is that the most authentic, or most rational, or most autonomous perspective? To prefer the home seems to assume a rather contentious view of the relation between the public and private sphere. In political theorists’ terms, it’s a hyper-liberal view as opposed to a republican or communitarian one. Arguably, you should vote where you are primed to think about other people.

But isn’t it problematic that a church, for instance–with all the deliberate persuasive power of its iconography and architecture–should be the required context for voting in a secular republic? Well, maybe. But I don’t accept the view that citizens can be or should be disembodied and culture-free. The Progressive movement that achieved the secret ballot envisioned the ideal voter as a rational calculator of best interests (either his own interests or the nation’s). Progressive voting reforms were probably helpful, on the whole, but the guiding ideal seems both naive and a little unattractive. What, after all, is in our interests once we strip away values and group-memberships?

The opposite view–just for the sake of argument–is that we construct communities that are redolent of values. That’s why they are full of religious buildings, public structures with inscriptions and allusive architectural styles, businesses that promise various versions of the good life, and even natural spaces that we interpret as having moral significance. Communities govern themselves by making decisions, and a vote is one important moment for decision-making. Each person’s vote is profoundly influenced by the community context. Yet individuals push back. While the average voter may be influenced in a conservative direction by voting in a church, some are probably alienated by the context and pushed in the opposite way.

On every day, not just on Election Day, the community changes as people build, alter, and decorate its physical spaces and communicate in more ephemeral ways. For instance, the church in which a polling place may be located was built by people who wanted to change  local values and commitments. They were not satisfied with whatever religious structures and institutions already existed, but chose to make a new one. That was part of an endless process of community-formation. The material with which we reason and choose is given to us by the community so far, but we can change it one piece at a time. The real me doesn’t emerge when I am inside the home that my family has privately decorated. I am really “me” everywhere I go, and that means that I am always being shaped by my context and often pushing back.

See also: on voting by mail and voting and punishment: Foucault, biopower, and modern elections.