As I hope is by now known to readers, The American Interest is embarked on an evaluation of the health of basic American institutions, notably those below the line of political sight, where our nation’s future mostly lies. The origins of this project rest in the comforting ministrations of those who told us after November 2016 that everything would be all right despite the insurgent occupant of the Oval Office, because basic American institutions are healthy. We thought it better to examine that premise than to accept it uncritically.

And we are doing it the way we are doing it because politics is the tip of the social iceberg, and cannot exist without that which floats below. This doesn’t mean that political institutions don’t have their own dynamics and histories; they obviously do. It is a cardinal error to assume a lock-step relationship between economic, social, and political domains, and it is an even greater error to underestimate the damage that bad governments can do even to good societies. So we do not ignore the dysfunctionality of the Congress, the Supreme Court, the party and electoral systems, the workings of American federalism, the budget process, and the rest.

Besides, there is inevitable and obvious overlap: We cannot evaluate the health of our judicial and penal institutions at the Federal and sub-Federal levels, for example, without discussing the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and now their decisions interact with law enforcement and courts at large. We cannot discuss the health of our agricultural and nutritional circumstances without discussing the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and other bureaus and agencies of both the Executive Branch and the relevant congressional oversight apparatus. We cannot analyze the challenge to the American health care system without taking on an array of institutions—some of them governmental, like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and some of them non-governmental, such as the American Medical Association, the nation’s preeminent university medical centers, and of course the major health care insurers. And so on for all thirteen of the institutional “baskets” in our purview.

We have already run seminal essays on medicine, labor, infrastructure, banking and finance, and other of the thirteen baskets. Most recently we have featured an essay, by William Bonvillian and Peter Singer, on the promise of advanced manufacturing as a potential generator of good middle-class sustaining jobs—arguably the greatest challenge before us in an age of continuing if more diversified outsourcing and waxing automation. But as the authors prove, part of the problem we have saddled ourselves with bears less on corporate greed and mindless techno-optimism than on intellectual confusion: namely, generic errors of mainstream economists as they have affected public policy now for decades. It is a sobering but ultimately a hopeful read.

Which brings me back to the subject of my previous editor’s note to the TAI print edition—about our greatest bane being not so much ignorance but excessive confidence in false knowledge.

It’s almost too easy to criticize economists, for much of what they have gotten wrong isn’t even really their fault. It’s more the fault of the artificial disciplinary definitions within which they labor, a problem whose origins go back roughly 80 years ago to the destruction of what used to be called political economy into economics as a supposed positive science and what has optimistically been called all these years political science. This severing, as well as the division of political thought from philosophy, has impoverished our capacity to think synoptically about these subjects because it has disorganized our inherited stock of knowledge into a pile of ill-fitting disciplinary shards.

Besides, there’s no reason to pick on economists above so many others. It is fair to describe economics as an institution, as shorthand for an example of a “stable, valued, recurrent pattern of collective behavior” organized for some necessary or desirable purpose, and that persists whatever individuals may come and go within its aegis.

All academic disciplines fit that description, those of the hard sciences as well as the social sciences. And it most pointedly includes, for purposes of understanding and making public policy, those that live at the juncture of the two, which we might call the “hard human sciences”: genetics, neurobiology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and primatology, to name obvious examples. These disciplines are more like the hard sciences than the social sciences in their methods, rules of evidence, and the material objects of observation, which can often if not always be observed in controlled laboratory conditions; but they are like the social sciences in that they concern human beings, and thus their generation of questions and findings invariably elides on moral and affective domains. In other words, we care in a different way about the answers.

Why raise this seeming esoterica here? Because it provides a tentative unified field theory for TAI’s project of evaluating the health of American institutions. Let’s see how.

Institutions are by nature conservative. They are resistant to change, because change is a burden from a sociological point of view. This has always been true, and as a result post hoc embarrassment in the sciences has been prolific.

Thanks to Thomas Kuhn, everyone knows about the resistance of Ptolemaic astronomers to Copernicus.

Everyone knows how many years, and how many unnecessary premature corpses, it took for the medical profession to accept the germ theory of disease.

Many know that until fairly recently, most geneticists believed that there had been no change in the human genome over the past 10,000 years; though why a process underway for eons should come to a stop just for our emotional convenience never made any sense.

Few know much about what once was the great debate between preformationism and epigenesis, possibly the longest lasting and most embarrassing scientific detour of all time—and one that furnishes the critical contextual backdrop for one of the most revolutionary developments in history: the transformation of gender conceptions still playing out before our eyes.

But here is the rub: None of these and hundreds of other embarrassments had much impact on public policy in days gone by for two reasons: the ambit of public policy was limited before the advent of welfare state ambitions; and the technological extensions of basic science were relatively few and slow to develop, so also few and slow to manifest impact on social and political affairs. Impact still happened, of course, for innovation never slowed to zero, even in the so-called European Dark Ages; anyone who has studied military history, for example, knows that. But the Industrial Revolution sharply accelerated the rate of innovation, in two phases: first the revolutionary harnessing of steam power to an array of applications, thanks initially to the Watt steam governor; and then the harnessing of innovation to basic science, which depended on no particular “thing” or gadget but rather on critical innovation in institutional design.

Ever since, the societies that have pioneered (or adapted) the scientific-technical revolution have been running a string of uncontrolled social science experiments on themselves, with decidedly mixed but hardly marginal results. The whirlwind of change, whether on balance positive, negative, or indeterminate, has rocked societies, and those societies have often found their political equipoise, such as it ever was, battered or even shattered as a consequence. The effects were not limited to national borders either. Three hegemonic wars—two hot, one cold—since the Industrial Revolution (Napoleonic, World, and Cold) in turn reshaped national politics in many ways. In the interstices of these wars the world recovered its social and political ballast only intermittently and, it now seems looking back from the current precipice, fleetingly.

Let’s keep the point as simple as possible: The changes wrought by scientific-technical innovation are far outrunning the capacity of our temperamentally conservative social and political institutions to keep up with them. And the cybernetic revolution, like the harvesting of steam power before it, is not a simple innovation but a generative one that is affecting virtually everything humans do. The Industrial Revolution in its essence substituted machine power for human labor; the cybernetic revolution is substituting forms of machine power for human thought, as contemporary anxiety about the implications of artificial intelligence illustrate. The difference is not trivial, and we frankly have no idea what it means, except that the error rate of public policy through sins of commission and omission both are bound to increase as the distance between our reliable stock of remedies and both the volume and the novelty of the challenges we must face grows.

In short, when it comes to effective public policy making, the smart money is on the proposition that we are bound to look, and to actually get, stupider and stupider as time passes—at least for a good while longer. In America at least, we will probably recover in due course, as we have before. But until we do, fairly or not, the broad social reputation of both science and government—and the elites associated with both—is going to suffer. John Wayne is famous for the remark “you can’t fix stupid.” In a way, the question before us is, just how expansively right was he?

It would be risible to blame Donald Trump for any of this. His political ascendance is clearly a symptom of ambient distress in American society, not the cause of it. His backward-looking mentality stands to make everything worse, of course, but that’s another story for another day. Besides, maybe things need to get worse, possibly much worse, before the American political class will find the courage to confront the yawning obsolescence of our institutional order, whose ossification and decay now gallop before our very eyes. That, of course, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, TAI will continue its own special kind of long march through the institutions. Stick around, please; it promises to be a great ride.