> Consequences of societal change are inherently unknowable, which is why revolutions usually end in tragedy. The sane approach is to change society incrementally, see what happens, and adjust and learn as you go.
> The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.
Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.
> If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.
"People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.
To use your example, last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.
My personal opinion is that individual jurisdictions should experiment more at a small scale. Maybe SF abolishes the police, and Minneapolis increases funding for social work, and the Chicago police install robocops at every corner, and Nashville provides benefits only to families which stay intact. Then after two years it will be obvious which policies _really_ don't work, and after five years there will be a good handle on the set of policies that might work, and after fourty years most of the magnitudes of the possible second- and third-order effects will be understood, at least as well as it is possible to know them.
But it is impossible to have local experiments when the popular call is for immediate action on the national level. Alas, one is left with digging through the archves of history and trying to see where natural experiments have been done, and what confounding variables there were.
> "People are suffering now" is not a good blanket argument for rapid change. First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.
It's a necessary and important argument, but not sufficient by itself. I agree that decisions must be analyzed closely.
At the same time, that approach is used to create endless delays by people who are unmotivated for or opposed to change. Police reforms have been delayed for generations. It's not credible to either say 'people are suffering' or 'we must think it over'. Analysis can happen quickly.
> last summer many people were arguing for quickly defunding the police. While that would certainly solve the problem of children suffering under the legal system, it might also result in vigilante groups stepping up to enforce the law, or in increased urban gang activity, or in increased domestic violence, any of which might end up with increased overall victimization of children.
A bit tangential: 'Defund the police' didn't mean defund the services, just shift them between departments. The idea is to move many services to other government agencies. As a simple example, move response to mental health crises from police to mental health agencies. For a long time, police have (reasonably) complained that they are somehow expected to solve all of society's problems.
> First, it needs to be shown that the changes proposed will not be worse than the original condition.
I'm not sure this is always true. Or at least, it is important to specify what confidence you demand here. If you demand an infinite regress of dissertations before taking any action, you can perform a denial of service attack on all progress. Almost any policy change can have chaotic and unpredictable effects and demanding flawless prediction of the outcome is demanding the impossible.
And further, "some bad outcome will come from this change" should not be sufficient to stop progress. You cannot make perfect be the enemy of good, and net progress can be achieved even if there are some things that regress with a new policy.
At almost every step of major social progress, agitators were told that they were unruly and moving too fast. In hindsight, can we really say that women's liberation or civil rights or gay rights movements actually moved too quickly? We can even have a historical example of aggression being more effective than respectability politics. Women's rights movements largely failed in the late 19th century and it wasn't until the "disrespectful" suffragette movement ("suffragette" was a derogatory term to contrast with the more respectful activists of the prior generation) that real progress was made.
> The educated reader may notice that 1+2 is pretty much the sane version of Conservatism.
Incremental slow change sounds good if you are reasonably happy with the current situation. If you children are getting killed, beaten, and imprisoned by the legal system, and have no access to good education, you might want to move a little quicker.