When I mention that The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) is the most impactful book I've ever read, people often ask me to summarize the book.
But the BoI is a dense book. Given the interconnectedness of its ideas, a summary would be as long as the book.
Instead of a quick summary, this post provides one idea that can be fully understood in a short post (Choices) and a quick introduction to another idea I found impactful (The Evolution of Culture).
An overarching idea of the book is that:
1. Problems are inevitable.
2. Problems are soluble.
Deutsch writes:
It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally important truth about people and the physical world is that problems are soluble . By ‘soluble’ I mean that the right knowledge would solve them. It is not, of course, that we can possess knowledge just by wishing for it; but it is in principle accessible to us...
Neither the human condition in particular nor our explanatory knowledge in general will ever be perfect, nor even approximately perfect. We shall always be at the beginning of infinity. (pp. 64-65)
We progress by solving problems.
People often talk about Arrow's impossibility theorem as an interesting scientific finding. Before reading BoI I have not heard of anyone convincingly criticizing a commonly shared understanding of Arrow's theorem as "elections are always unfair." Deutsch convincingly criticizes that interpretation.
Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that it's impossible to simultaneously satisfy these five assumptions:
Based on Arrow's theorem, "it seems to follow that a group of people jointly making decisions is necessarily irrational in one way or another... So there is no such thing as ‘the will of the people’. There is no way to regard ‘society’ as a decision-maker with self-consistent preferences" (pp. 337-38).
Deutsch writes:
Virtually all commentators have responded to these paradoxes and no-go theorems in a mistaken and rather revealing way: they regret them. This illustrates the confusion to which I am referring. They wish that these theorems of pure mathematics were false. If only mathematics permitted it, they complain, we human beings could set up a just society that makes its decisions rationally. But, faced with the impossibility of that, there is nothing left for us to do but to decide which injustices and irrationalities we like best, and to enshrine them in law. As Webster wrote, of the apportionment problem, 'That which cannot be done perfectly must be done in a manner as near perfection as can be. If exactness cannot, from the nature of things, be attained, then the nearest practicable approach to exactness ought to be made.'
But what sort of 'perfection' is a logical contradiction? A logical contradiction is nonsense. The truth is simpler: if your conception of justice conflicts with the demand of logic or rationality then it is unjust. If your conception of rationality conflicts with a mathematical theorem (or, in this case, with many theorems) then your conception of rationality is irrational. To stick stubbornly to logically impossible values not only guarantees failure in the narrow sense that one can never meet them, it also forces one to reject optimism ('every evil is due to lack of knowledge'), and so deprives one of the means to make progress. Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for. (bold text is my emphasis) (pp. 343-44)
Given the impossibility of creating a voting system which reflects "the will of the people," Deutsch turns to Popper's criterion:
Ideas have consequences, and the ‘who should rule?’ approach to political philosophy is not just a mistake of academic analysis: it has been part of practically every bad political doctrine in history. If the political process is seen as an engine for putting the right rulers in power, then it justifies violence, for until that right system is in place, no ruler is legitimate; and once it is in place, and its designated rulers are ruling, opposition to them is opposition to rightness. The problem then becomes how to thwart anyone who is working against the rulers or their policies. By the same logic, everyone who thinks that existing rulers or policies are bad must infer that the ‘who should rule?’ question has been answered wrongly, and therefore that the power of the rulers is not legitimate, and that opposing it is legitimate, by force if necessary. Thus the very question ‘Who should rule?’ begs for violent, authoritarian answers, and has often received them. It leads those in power into tyranny, and to the entrenchment of bad rulers and bad policies; it leads their opponents to violent destructiveness and revolution.
Advocates of violence usually have in mind that none of those things need happen if only everyone agreed on who should rule. But that means agreeing about what is right, and, given agreement on that, rulers would then have nothing to do. And, in any case, such agreement is neither possible nor desirable: people are different, and have unique ideas; problems are inevitable, and progress consists of solving them.
Popper therefore applies his basic ‘how can we detect and eliminate errors?’ to political philosophy in the form how can we rid ourselves of bad governments without violence? (pp. 210-11)
With Popper's criterion in mind, Deutsch defends plurality voting systems.
[Proportional electoral systems] assign disproportionate power in the legislature to the third-largest party, and often to even smaller parties. It works like this. It is rare (in any system) for a single party to receive an overall majority of votes. Hence, if votes are reflected proportionately in the legislature, no legislation can be passed unless some of the parties cooperate to pass it, and no government can be formed unless some of them form a coalition. Sometimes the two largest parties manage to do this, but the most common outcome is that the leader of the third-largest party holds the 'balance of power' and decides which of the two largest parties shall join it in government, and which shall be sidelined, and for how long. That means that it is correspondingly harder for the electorate to decide which party, and which policies will be removed from power.
In Germany (formerly West Germany) between 1949 and 1998, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was the third largest. Though it never received more than 12.8 per cent of the vote, and usually much less, the country’s proportional-representation system gave it power that was insensitive to changes in the voters’ opinions. On several occasions it chose which of the two largest parties would govern, twice changing sides and three times choosing to put the less popular of the two (as measured by votes) into power. The FDP’s leader was usually made a cabinet minister as part of the coalition deal, with the result that for the last twenty-nine years of that period Germany had only two weeks without an FDP foreign minister. In 1998, when the FDP was pushed into fourth place by the Green Party, it was immediately ousted from government, and the Greens assumed the mantle of kingmakers. And they took charge of the Foreign Ministry as well. This disproportionate power that proportional representation gives the third-largest party is an embarrassing feature of a system whose whole raison d’être, and supposed moral justification, is to allocate political influence proportionately. (pp. 339-40)
A few pages later Deutsch explain why the plurality voting system is better than proportional electoral systems:
Proportional representation is often defended on the grounds that it leads to coalition governments and compromise policies. But compromises - amalgams of the policies of the contributors - have an undeservedly high reputation. Though they are certainly better than immediate violence, they are generally, as I have explained, bad policies. If a policy is no one's idea of what will work, then why should it work? But that is not the worst of it. The key defect of compromise policies is that when one of them is implemented and fails, no one learns anything because no one ever agreed with it. Thus compromise policies shield the underlying explanations which do at least seem good to some faction from being criticized and abandoned.
The system used to elect members of the legislatures of most countries in the British political tradition is that each district (or 'constituency') in the country is entitled to one seat in the legislature, and that seat goes to the candidate with the largest number of votes in that district. This is called the plurality voting system. ('plurality' meaning 'largest number of votes') - often called the 'first-past-the-post' system, because there is no prize for any runner-up, and no second round of voting (both of which feature in other electoral systems for the sake of increasing the proportionality of the outcomes). Plurality voting typically 'over-represents' the two largest parties, compared with the proportion of votes they receive. Moreover, is it not guaranteed to avoid the population paradox, and is even capable of bringing one party to power when another has received far more votes in total.
These features are often cited as arguments against plurality voting and in favour of a more proportional system – either literal proportional representation or other schemes such as transferable-vote systems and run-off systems which have the effect of making the representation of voters in the legislature more proportional. However, under Popper’s criterion [good political instituions are those that make it as easy as possible to detect whether a ruler or policy is a mistake, and to remove rules or policies without violence when they are], that is all insignificant in comparison with the greater effectiveness of plurality voting at removing bad governments and policies.
Let me trace the mechanism of that advantage more explicitly. Following a plurality-voting election, the usual outcome is that the party with the largest total number of votes has an overall majority in the legislature, and therefore takes sole charge. All the losing parties are removed entirely from power. This is rare under proportional representation, because some of the parties in the old coalition are usually needed in the new one. Consequently, the logic of plurality is that politicians and political parties have little chance of gaining any share in power unless they can persuade a substantial proportion of the population to vote for them. That gives all parties the incentive to find better explanations, or at least to convince more people of their existing ones, for if they fail they will be relegated to powerlessness at the next election.
In the plurality system, the winning explanations are then exposed to criticism and testing, because they can be implemented without mixing them with the most important claims of opposing agendas. Similarly, the winning politicians are solely responsible for the choices they make, so they have the least possible scope for making excuses later if those are deemed to have been bad choices. If, by the time of the next election, they are less convincing to the voters than they were, there is usually no scope for deals that will keep them in power regardless.
Under a proportional system, small changes in public opinion seldom count for anything, and power can easily shift in the opposite direction to public opinion. What counts most is changes in the opinion of the leader of the third-largest party. This shields not only that leader but most of the incumbent politicians and policies from being removed from power through voting. They are more often removed by losing support within their own party, or by shifting alliances between parties. So in that respect the system badly fails Popper’s criterion. Under plurality voting, it is the other way round. The all-or-nothing nature of the constituency elections, and the consequent low representation of small parties, makes the overall outcome sensitive to small changes in opinion. When there is a small shift in opinion away from the ruling party, it is usually in real danger of losing power completely.
Under proportional representation, there are strong incentives for the system’s characteristic unfairnesses to persist, or to become worse, over time. For example, if a small faction defects from a large party, it may then end up with more chance of having its policies tried out than it would if its supporters had remained within the original party. This results in a proliferation of small parties in the legislature, which in turn increases the necessity for coalitions – including coalitions with the smaller parties, which further increases their disproportionate power. In Israel, the country with the world’s most proportional electoral system, this effect has been so severe that, at the time of writing, even the two largest parties combined cannot muster an overall majority. And yet, under that system – which has sacrificed all other considerations in favour of the supposed fairness of proportionality – even proportionality itself is not always achieved: in the election of 1992, the right-wing parties as a whole received a majority of the popular vote, but the left-wing ones had a majority of the seats. (That was because a greater proportion of the fringe parties that failed to reach the threshold for receiving even one seat were right-wing.)
In contrast, the error-correcting attributes of the plurality voting system have a tendency to avoid the paradoxes to which the system is theoretically prone, and quickly to undo them when they do happen, because all those incentives are the other way round. For instance, in the Canadian province of Manitoba in 1926, the Conservative Party received more than twice as many votes as any other party, but won none of the seventeen seats allocated to that province. As a result it lost power in the national Parliament despite having received the most votes nationally too. And yet, even in that rare, extreme case, the disproportionateness between the two main parties’ representations in Parliament was not that great: the average Liberal voter received 1.31 times as many members of Parliament as the average Conservative one. And what happened next? In the following election the Conservative Party again had the largest number of votes nationally, but this time that gave it an overall majority in Parliament. Its vote had increased by 3 per cent of the electorate, but its representation had increased by 17 per cent of the total number of seats, bringing the parties’ shares of seats back into rough proportionality and satisfying Popper’s criterion with flying colours.
This is partly due to yet another beneficial feature of the plurality system, namely that elections are often very close, in terms of votes as well as in the sense that all members of the government are at serious risk of being removed. In proportional systems, elections are rarely close in either sense. What is the point of giving the party with the most votes the most seats, if the party with the third-largest number of seats can then put the second-largest party in power regardless – there to enact a compromise platform that absolutely no one voted for? The plurality voting system almost always produces situations in which a small change in the vote produces a relatively large change (in the same direction!) in who forms a government. The more proportional a system is, the less sensitive the content of the resulting government and its policies are to changes in votes. (pp. 346-49)
The plurality voting system is best in the case of advanced political cultures.
While Deutsch's argument for plurality voting is impactful and oft-mentioned publicly, the most brain-rewiring idea from the BoI is of dynamic vs. static societies. To understand the distinction we first need to understand memes.
Deutsch writes:
A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour...
The world’s major cultures – including nations, languages, philosophical and artistic movements, social traditions and religions – have been created incrementally over hundreds or even thousands of years. Most of the ideas that define them, including the inexplicit ones, have a long history of being passed from one person to another. That makes these ideas memes – ideas that are replicators. (p. 369)
Later in the chapter, Deutsch says:
To be a meme, an idea has to contain quite sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do at least two independent things: assimilate the meme faithfully, and enact it. (p. 378)
Since a person can enact and transmit a meme soon after receiving it, a meme generation can be much shorter than a human generation. And many cycles of variation and selection can take place inside the minds concerned even during one meme generation. Also, memes can be passed to people other than the holders’ biological descendants. Those factors make meme evolution enormously faster than gene evolution, which partly explains how memes can contain so much knowledge. Hence the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes. (pp. 379-380)
Deutsch defines static societies as "societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants." (p. 380)
In particular:
Static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo. However, that alone could not suppress change. First, no enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation. It is infeasible to specify every aspect of acceptable behaviour with perfect precision. Second, it is impossible to tell in advance which small deviations from traditional behaviour would initiate further changes. Third, once a variant idea has begun to spread to even one more person – which means that people are preferring it – preventing it from being transmitted further is extremely difficult. Therefore no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once they have been created. That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place...
Not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes. (pp. 381-82)
Static societies are dominated by anti-rational memes - ideas that rely on disabling the recipients' critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated. Static societies stifle progress.
On the other hand, dynamic societies are dominated by rational memes - ideas that rely on the recipients' critical faculties to cause themselves to be replicated.
The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths... A true, deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods. For instance, Newton’s laws are useful for building better cathedrals, but also for building better bridges and designing better artillery. Because of this reach, they get themselves remembered and enacted by all sorts of people, many of them vehemently opposed to each other’s objectives, over many generations. This is the kind of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society.
In fact such memes are not merely capable of surviving under rapidly changing criteria of criticism, they positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication. Unprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people’s critical faculties, they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fare worse, and are not enacted. In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded. (p. 388)
The very existence of dynamic societies is a threat to static societies. This point is exemplified in another chapter where Deutsch writes an imaginary conversation involving Socrates. Think of Athens as an exemplary dynamic society and Sparta as an exemplary static society.
SOCRATES: The very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta’s stasis. And therefore, in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta (which means its continued existence, as they see it) is the destruction of progress in Athens (which from our perspective would constitute the destruction of Athens).
CHAEREPHON: I still do not see specifically what the threat is.
SOCRATES: Well, suppose that in future both cities were to continue to succeed with their overarching concerns. The Spartans would stay exactly as they are now. But we Athenians are already the envy of other Greeks with our wealth and diverse achievements. What will happen when we improve further, and begin to outshine everyone in the world at everything? Spartans seldom travel or interact with foreigners, but they cannot keep themselves entirely in ignorance of developments elsewhere. Even going to war gives them some inkling of what life is like in other cities that are wealthier, and freer, than they. One day, some Spartan youths visiting Delphi will find that it is the Athenians who have the better ‘moves’ and the greater skill. And what if, in a generation or two, Athenian warriors have developed some better ‘moves’ on the battlefield?
PLATO: But, Socrates, even if this is true, the Spartans are unaware of it! So how can they fear it?
SOCRATES: They need no prescience. Do you think that a Spartan messenger, on reaching Athens, does not gasp in admiration like everyone else when he sees what stands on our Acropolis? And, however much he may mutter (perhaps justly) about our hubris and irresponsibility, do you think that he does not reflect, on his way home, that his city can never and will never attract that sort of admiration from anyone? Do you think that the Spartan elders are not at this very moment worrying about the growing reputation of democracy in many cities, including some of their allies? (pp. 249-250)
Our very own society is in an unstable transition period from a static society to a dynamic society.
Even in the West, the Enlightenment today is nowhere near complete. It is relatively advanced in a few, vital areas: the physical sciences and Western political and economic institutions are prime examples. In those areas ideas are now fairly open to criticism and experimentation, and to choice and change. But in many other areas memes are still replicated in the old manner, by means that suppress the recipients’ critical faculties and ignore their preferences. (p. 391)
As one of the examples of elements of static societies, Deutsch discusses our current system of education:
Present-day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static-society predecessors. Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by rote and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education, even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory. Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken for granted, in practice, that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully. One consequence is that people are acquiring scientific knowledge in an anaemic and instrumental way. Without a critical, discriminating approach to what they are learning, most of them are not effectively replicating the memes of science and reason into their minds. (p. 393)
We need to purge our lives of anti-rational memes. As an example:
The presence of the conditions for anti-rational meme evolution, such as deference to authority, static subcultures and so on [should make us suspicious]. Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking. We should examine and criticize laws, customs and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve. Avoiding such conditions is the essence of Popper’s criterion. (pp. 395-96)
As Brett Hall concisely expressed, we should "not destroy the means of error correction." There should be no dogma that "you shall not ask this question." People should be free to pursue research they deem interesting.
The preservation of the means of error correction does not just come from laws (although they are a prerequisite for the freedom of inquiry); culture also plays an important role. If a tenured college professor living in a small college town gets socially ostracized by all other professors because of their research interests, they are less likely to pursue controversial research. In other words, the freedom of inquiry can theoretically exist. But social dogmas can raise the costs of pursuing controversial inquiries. One economics paper suggests that even when economics and finance professors get tenure, they don't tend to branch into new subject areas. If only agreeable professors can make it through the tenure process, it lowers controversial inquiries in academia.
Dynamic societies and progress associated with them result from a proliferation of rational memes. And rational memes demand an absence or minimization of the influence of anti-rational memes.
The BoI is not a book you can read and fully understand in a week. Truly internalizing the book takes months.
I hope you'll take this jump and allow your brain the opportunity to grapple with Deutsch's ideas.
Brett Hall's chapter-by-chapter explanation podcast is an incredible resource for understanding Deutsch's ideas.
Thanks to Mark Kagach for feedback on an earlier draft of this post.