To caricature, Elite Capture is concerned with how the patterns of activity that present arrangements of human systems (or social orders) enable, or encourage, or permit, tend to concentrate attention, resources, and other goods within elite realms. Crucially, Taiwo wants us to see, progressive movements are not exceptions; they are inevitably flattened into impotent, symbolic distortions of themselves, and are made, in their consequential state, yet more instruments perpetuating the status quo, the present social order.
Taiwo makes his point with ideas from the philosophy of language, and, to my delight, from systems theory. The former involves employing of Stalnaker’s common ground (briefly, the shared set of assumptions that constitute the background of our discursive interactions) to demonstrate how much of the conversation has already happened before any sentence is uttered—in other words, to show how historical forces have structured the present order—understood now as a configuration of the common ground—and how the present order shapes all activity.
Systems theory enters the picture subtly in the form of David Lewis’ game theoretic additions to Stalnaker’s theory, and more explictly via C. Thi Nguyen’s philosophy of games. Games, Taiwo explains, consist of a system of rules and neatly laid out objectives, rewards and punishments. These features of the system encourage certain patterns of activity and discourage others; in time, trends develop, trends such as the accumulation of resources within a particularly advantageously equipped group of actors. We might understand social orders analogously.
Any kind of interactions that take place in this system are subject to the same organising forces. We see now how the vicious form of elite capture that I mentioned earlier is made possible: the games of progressive movements are played within a rigged system.
I was reminded briefly of Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom—that intellectual revolution of an essay. I thought, in particular, of his notion of variety, which he introduces in the detailed examination of cybernetic principles as they appear in politics. Variety, if I recall correctly, is the measure of possible states that one can be in—in a sense, to Beer, this is nothing but a measure of freedom. Systems are structured such that there are links/relationships which attenuate variety—absorb it—and those that amplify it. Amplification enables self-expression—which, generously, we might take to include political expression—and attentuation is the means by which institutions respond to, or negotiate a productive balance between, the varieties of individuals.
I think the notions of attenuation and amplification are interesting, and, as far as I can tell, notoriously understudied. At a future time, I want to consider whether we can understand the co-opting of progressive movements into husks of themselves by well-intentioned actors as an attenuating move—as motivated by the need to manage variety. And if so, what then? Would the cybernetic verdict be to find means of amplification? Could it mean that the means of attenuation need to be altered—the parameters of the system adjusted? Introducing variety takes us from a lower level of abstraction to a higher level of abstraction, but it’s not clear to me yet that it is an explanatorily productive move.