Arrr... Pirates!

The recent spike in Somali piracy ought to serve as a reminder of what the world begins to look like when there's no one there to play cop. While we're sitting around counting hairs on polar bears looking for signs of global warming or worrying about god-knows-what, we get this fine reminder that the world we know rests on a foundation of systems whose operation is largely unknown to most people. Daily newspapers used to list the ships arriving and departing each day in harbor cities. Agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure used to provide dozens of jobs each for every marketer or middle-management mandarin. Today it is the opposite.

An occasionally-recurring storyline in science fiction is that of a society which relies on ancient technologies they have long since ceased to understand. Such a thing actually happened in Western Europe when the Roman Empire fell--if Roman engineering impresses us today, imagine how an aqueduct looked in 650AD, when they were being pulled down for stone to build meagre huts.

Specialization is inevitable. I work in software and unlike most executives, I still retain a vestigial ability to write code, but I couldn't build a computer from scratch. In the early Renaissance it was still possible for one man to read nearly every book then in existence in his natural lifetime. The warmth, safety, and comfort in which we live have grown in direct proportion to the specialization that makes renaissance man something of an anachronism. I do not worry that most people have no idea how to ride a horse, plant corn, build a barn, and forge iron.

But I do worry about ignorance--ignorance of what it actually takes to keep civilization running on a day-in, day-out basis.

When Barack Obama made an offhand remark about bankrupting coal-fired power plants, I heard the yawp of a community organizer who has no idea how many men it takes to turn on a light bulb. I don't know that this is particularly partisan--I suspect it's more of a social class issue, with the upper 10-20% paying tradesmen and Mexicans to do all or most of the grunt work needed to make all the things in their life run properly.

In this sense it's easy to understand some of the affection (and perhaps antipathy) for Sarah "the Moose Slayer" Palin. In Alaska, everybody either works in the oil fields, on a fishing boat, or for the railroad, how to survive a couple weeks without electricity, butcher a moose, and 10% of adults have a pilot's license. Even if it is a frontier made possible largely by pork from DC, it remains a place where ignorance of the basics is simply not practical.

At heart this is probably an instance of what Jacques Barzun referred to as "primitivism," an atavistic desire to recapture the simplicities and certainties of a long-lost age more golden than our own. But the lights do not stay on by willpower and hope. When borderlands are left unpoliced, pirates appear. I am a conservative because I respect the hard and often dangerous work of the centuries that have led to our moment.