Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Well-Run Machine
How often do you really think about how your car works? I’m guessing not that often.
Perhaps you have a dim recollection of 4-stroke engine operation from a high school textbook. At any rate, you know that gasoline goes in, the car goes forward, and you are a wretched sinner for polluting the atmosphere in the process. You will also be late for work if it should fail to operate properly, or if that jerk in the left lane doing 50 in a 65 zone doesn’t get the heck over! If you think about it more you should remember that the combustion of the gasoline happens with pistons. But do you think about the details beyond that? Again, I would guess the odds are against it, unless you’ve had recent compelling need to do so, or are a gearhead.
Yet it would be worth your while to grab an engine repair manual sometime, not necessarily with the intention of being able to name each individual part, but with an eye towards marveling at the complexity. You see, every part in that engine has a 
purpose, every part was put there by design to perform some job, every part had a designer, and every function performed by every part is a reaction to some other function. The engine itself ostensibly performs a very simple function, the conversion of chemical energy (gasoline and oxygen) into mechanical energy and heat, but the process for controlling that conversion is complex and full of nuance. When even small components fail the results can range from simple irritations to lethal failures.
Let’s start with the gas tank. You put in the fuel, but what happens next? The fuel must travel along a line to the engine, but how? Gravity? It would be amusing to contemplate vehicles with roof-mounted gas tanks like the old high-wall toilet tanks, but the real solution is to use a pump to draw the gas from the tank and shove it towards the engine.
So do we just throw the gas at the engine? Is it poured directly into the piston cylinders? No, you’ve got to turn it into a spray (atomize) so it mixes with the air, then you’ve got to somehow get the fuel and air mix into the cylinders. How is that done? Older engines used carburetors to mix the fuel and air, and that mix would be sucked down through a series of pipes towards the cylinders. The cylinders have valves that open just in time to draw in the mix. The valves snap shut, the spark plug triggers a detonation sending the piston speeding downward, imparting rotation to the crank shaft by way of a linkage on a pivot.
Already we can see the variety of mechanisms in play, and we must assume that each of the parts mentioned above has other more subtle interplays with further components. I said that the valves open, and shut-this implies some mechanisms for doing so, as well as other governing mechanisms ensuring that the openings and closings occur at the right moments. What makes the spark plug spark, much less what makes it spark at the right moment? How does the piston connect to the crank shaft? That explosion of fuel must generate some heat, what keeps that heat under control? Presumably the moving metal parts generate friction too; how do we reduce or compensate for it?
Systems and subsystems abound, even in the simplest of engines, yet they work. In the past thirty years, spurred on by rising gas prices, competition for fickle customers, and, yes, even regulatory pressure, engineers have made tremendous improvements in efficiency, strength, power, and safety, and the vast majority of these improvements have all been in the nuances of the subsystems. The fundamental operation of the engine, however, has not changed-we are still converting, by way of combustion — rapid oxidation really — the energy of the chemical bonds in gasoline into the energy of movement.
My grandfather, a mechanic who passed away in 1984, would certainly be astounded at the engine advances. Yet he would also find many things still very familiar. The pistons, though far advanced, would still be there; the camshaft and pushrods would still be there; the oil pump and radiator would still be there. There are only so many conceivable ways of burning a fuel-air mixture and capturing that energy, and we know them well. The main alternatives to piston engines-the jet turbine, the rocket, and the Wankel Rotary, are all old technologies themselves. Click here for a great view of other types.
Society as An Engine
American society is much like that engine, with a myriad of components, sub assemblies, regulating mechanisms, intakes, outputs, and waste products, but the complexity is at a level far beyond our mere motor. Our fundamental “motor” since 1787 has been our Constitution, which is not a very long or complicated document. Like an early motor, it is simple in concept, but with an implied complexity of regulating mechanisms ranging from taxing structures (the “fuel supply” to stretch this analogy), balancers, timing mechanisms, and exhaust systems. Yet the core mechanism — like our 4-stroke gas engine — has remained unchanged in over two centuries.
We have certainly added complexity to our systems. Sometimes, just as the smog and environmental regulations of the 1970s sapped the horsepower of the engines of that time, the regulations and arbitrary limits we impose on ourselves derange and compromise our government, yet still our system chugs along. But there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so indefinitely. Capricious and ill-thought law changes have nearly killed the 4-stroke engine as we know it, and capricious or ill-thought law changes could end the government system we have enjoyed.
The peril from ill-thought change is great. Automotive history is full of questionable design flaws, from the maligned Corvair to the fiery Pinto, from the junky Fiat Spyder to the ugly Edsel. Of course the marketplace weeded these out over time, but removing dangerous modifications from our government is far harder. Modifications can, of course, improve the performance, but they can also upset the delicate balance that kept the apparatus working.
Worse still, the extreme left, the Socialists and Progressives — or whatever they’re calling themselves this week — actually want to break our motor and replace it with something else. They think they’ve discovered a new concept, a newer cleaner society, more efficient and more controlled, with fewer moving parts and better self-regulation. Yet they fail to see that the totalitarian model, in whatever guise imaginable, is old beyond recorded history. Within that history, its flaws are well documented from The Book of Kings, the records of the Pharaohs, or the archives of the Soviet Union. Just as the 4-stroke engine’s fundamentals have been constant from the 1800s to today, so too are the fundamentals of absolute rulers, regardless of modern bells and whistles.
And for the anarchists, no engine ever assembled itself. No human society of any complexity ever self-ordered. Some strong visionary individual, or some strong group of power holders always established the order, even if that initial order were nothing more than a sworn band of warriors dividing their spoils. Our society was designed.
Our civilization has many flaws, inefficiencies, unnecessary waste, misdirected energies, and design weaknesses not anticipated by its designers. Yet still it works.From time to time it needs a major overhaul (we’re past due for one right now). It may even need a total teardown and rebuild to root out the damage and wear, but still it runs, in many cases far better than the competing designs out there. Yet when mechanisms start to wear out, when ill-conceived tinkering throws the system out of balance, or when revolutionaries attempt to gut the entire system, we run the terrible risk of it all flying apart.
Cover image: Shutterstock user Oliver Sved.
Published in General
I repair games for a living.
About two years ago, my boss came to me after looking at an invoice for a new machine and asked, “How long would it take you to build one of these?”
I told him “By myself? About a year.”
It’s amazing what technology brings to us and more amazing that we use it without fully understanding how things work.
It makes me shiver when I think about how many people have no clue how our government works yet are absolutely positive they know how to fix it.
Analogizing a car engine to government breaks down pretty quick.
Going back to de Tocqueville and his Democracy in America, he described an old America that was governed very lightly, and that much of how things got done were through private associations (such as volunteer fire departments and charities). These “subsystems” weren’t designed to work with government, nor was government designed to work with them.
They preceded the U.S. Constitution.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter that much how you design a government. Even the Soviet Union’s constitution played lip service to human rights, and it had a legislative body whose members were “elected.” Without a culture (how do you design that?) with strong values any governmental safeguards you put in place will be useless.
Look at how the Supreme Court has been subverted, with some of the Justices openly advocating the interpretation of laws based on international norms above and beyond the Constitution. One reason they get away with this, is the people let them.
When I want to eke out some extra horses from an engine, I think of it as an air pump, so I look at ways to increase airflow. Our government on the other hand is rather like…wait, err, never mind.
Neat analogy, Skip. People who build things – or repair them, which means understanding what came before, and rebuilding it – have a grounded view of how things work. I can’t picture our current Pres building anything. Honestly, if I saw a picture of him with a power tool in his hands I’d know it was photoshopped.
This is an example of a pet peeve of mine. It is improper to assert the left to be principled. The left does not support a principle of considering international norms, just like they hardly support any principle. They only cynically assert some principle when it supports their position (or when they can lie about it supporting their position). How about that international norm against same sex marriage?
The left asserts a principle only as a cover for their caprice.
One of my wildcat dreams is to design and manufacture modern interpretations of the offenhauser racing engine. With 2 aesthetic packages, the large 4 era, and the turbo era.
I have drawn (in visio because I cannot afford autocad) nearly every single part necessary to do this (poorly).
I am thinking about making casting kits that can be finish machined by competent engine builders.
Some of the small parts may be tricky though.
“No human society of any complexity ever self-ordered. Some strong visionary individual, or some strong group of power holders always established the order, even if that initial order were nothing more than a sworn band of warriors dividing their spoils. Our society was designed.”
Not so much. It evolved. That’s a very different process. Religious beliefs aside, no-one designs, say, a forest. It self-orders. That’s not to say that birds don’t build nests, but no one builds the entire thing, in the way an organization builds an engine.
Similarly, if you go back and look at the scope of, say, English history, please find the designers. Most Kings spent a lot of time reacting, and very little time building. Certainly the British institutions were in many ways accumulations of tradition. Even Magna Carta was a reaction to a King exerting too much power for his subjects to tolerate.
This is a fine example, I think, of why engineers and scientists tend to over-estimate their own ability to order society. And you don’t need to be an “anarchist” to think this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_order
“Spontaneous orders are to be distinguished from organizations. Spontaneous orders are distinguished by being scale-free networks, while organizations are hierarchical networks. Further, organizations can be and often are a part of spontaneous social orders, but the reverse is not true. Further, while organizations are created and controlled by humans, spontaneous orders are created, controlled, and controllable by no one…. In economics and the social sciences, spontaneous order is defined as “the result of human actions, not of human design.””
The truth is that political cultures and civilizations are organic, they grow, change, adapt, evolve. They’re , in essence , living things. One cannot design and construct an organism. This was (is?) the flaw of “scientific socialism” and it’s offshoots and descendants including progressivism.
This post is about SSM, right?
I thought it was engine envy. The differences between what Skipsul has in his C3 is such a faint cry from the scope of the Vette engine at the beginning of his post. It is like comparing a catapult to a 16″ gun on a battle ship, they both throw things.
Much of what is in any design consists of ad-hoc or on-the-fly changes in reactions to circumstances, yet the changes and modifications do not alter the core function of the design without the design becoming something else. In a basic electrical circuit with a power source, a load, and a switch a designer may need to add diodes to mitigate a mis-wiring, capacitors to filter out noise, surge suppression to handle faults in the power supply, clamp circuits to protect the supply from faults in the load, and more load branches to handle more demand. The basic circuit is still a source, load, and switch, whatever other complexity gets added.
So it is too with monarchy – at its core an all-powerful strong man (while the original monarch may not have considered himself a designer, he was still creating an order). Feudalism, Magna Carta, councils, reeves – all of these were certainly ad hoc creations, but they did not just appear. Someone somewhere had to add these to the system, and their additions did come with a great deal of thought. Again, their originators may not have considered themselves “designers” in our sense of the term, but they were designing and engineering.
Sometimes a cigar is just tobacco.
To be sure the engine analogy can be stretched too far (it is an analogy, not a model), but so too can the assertion that civilizations are organic. The latter error assigns too much of naturalistic determinism to human behavior, as if we’re helpless to affect how we interact with each other and mere beasts. Our Founders explicitly designed our current system of government, they could have chosen differently in their designs and it would have affected our national character in ways we cannot easily imagine.
They are still both V-8 engines. It’s more like comparing a Winchester ’73 with an M16 – sure they’re both repeating rifles, sure they both use metallic center-fire cartridges, but their materials, handling, and efficiencies are generations apart.
I have rebuilt several of the V-8 from the 60’s/70;s vintage and a few 4’s from the british isles, relatively straight forward and simple, but I shudder at the thought of cracking into the inline 6’s made in the middle/late 00″s from Bavaria…The variable valve timing mechanism and sensor system along make me perspire.
One of my customers repairs old pinball machines. He came to us to design some solid-state components to mimic the functions of the old 60s and 70s parts, otherwise the pinball games were beyond repair. It was an interesting challenge for our engineers to revisit those older circuits.
Efficiency is not a desirable trait in either a legislative nor a judicial system.
An efficient legislative system ends up facilitating the process of passing legislation. (After all, what other measure of efficiency is there than the speed at which legislation is passed?) It does not foster effective legislation, That requires deliberation, compromise, input from minority positions, and the messy stuff which makes legislation analogous to sausage-making. In very few cases (a declaration of war, for example) does speed improve legislation.
Similarly, judicial system’s primary focus is justice, not efficiency. The common law fosters an inefficient process to achieve justice. There is a grand jury which determines whether a crime is committed. It is separate from the petite jury that decides the facts of the case and the judge that oversees the trial. “Efficiency” which rears its head in the form of prosecutorial discretion, plea-bargaining, and expedited trials leads to less justice, not more.
An engine is a machine. A society is not (or rather should not be).
Legislate in haste and repent at leisure. Adjudicate in haste and repent at leisure.
Seawriter
Well, an analogy has a useful life up to a point. You’re right, though, that efficiency should not be the point of government, but it does seem to be what the lefties all want. Deliberation is, for them, a design flaw.
While I’m sure the left imagines that a government or society can operate like a smooth running engine, an engine, or car, is much more like a dictatorship where I am the dictator. All the parts work for me as I go along. All the parts do what I dictate. When a part fails to operate properly or simply wears out (I suppose at the age equiv of 75) I discard it and replace it with a new one.
Skipsul:
Great thoughts, but if Americans were to lift the hood of our awesome Constitutional Chariot V1787 [as modified for street use by 27 amendments]–assuming they could even find the hood release–instead of the magnificent engine designed by our Founders to carry us safely into our future, they would see this:
Well, I see that it still has the brake system and most of the steering in place. I bet it could be sorta controlled on a downhill grade… maybe?
I always say, “Liberals throw sand in the free market gearbox, complain about the performance and demand a new car with a socialist drive train.”
Good post. I rebuilt a Yamaha sport quad engine a few years ago. Fun. But if someone had placed the 6 speed gear assembly in a bag and mixed it up, it wouldn’t be running today.
I don’t care for the analogy, either. The systems that work best are homeostatic: self-regulation through competing independent systems. Think of the free market, the human body, highly adaptive thermostats, ecosystems.
The beauty of the United States and the Constitution is that it sets up a world in which economic, social, theological, political and other actors can all compete with the others as much as possible. Maximum competition enables an adaptive and flexible and creative ecosystem.
Since nothing “just appear”s, I can agree with this without qualification. ;)
But even in a monarchy, much of what goes on happens without leave from the King, or even without his knowledge. It grows organically. The Government of Britain can’t in any sense be said to have a designer, I think. Or even designers.
An engine system is self regulating too, if built properly, otherwise it would fly apart or perpetually stall out. It holds its RPM level where set, it vents waste gasses, its radiator and cooling system maintain safe temperatures, it self-lubricates, it controls ignition timing based on load. Just keep supplying food and air and it will keep running.
I’ve said for a long time that if you can’t explain the way a carburetor works, I don’t want to hear your theories on economics. I also have a draft post on “the incredible gayness of potholes” that you might like.
And a car engine has no knowledge of the driver, the destination, what is playing on the sound system, or the exterior color. The engine has no say in these things, but what of it? It does not need to, just as in the saner monarchies the king does not usually need to know what every peasant is having for dinner. The king operates with the assumption that these other things are done, just as the engine runs without needing to know the color of the floor mats.
In the case of Britain, just because their constitution is not written down does not mean it lacks for designers. Every time a law is passed or repealed someone is tinkering with the operation and interplay of other systems, and they are doing so with deliberate intent. They aim to affect the operation of the society.
As a mechanical engineer I do give it thought every so often, usually while I’m driving. I’m even more amazed at the complexity of a human or mammal. God is the ultimate designer. As to your analogy for society, I don’t think it holds. Society is not designed, but evolves through non-rational decsions. Your piece here though was enjoyable reading.
My C3’s 350 get’s (if I’m lucky and not hot rodding it) maybe, maybe 8 MPG. It’s got a 16 gallon tank. That’s maybe 120 miles to the tank. That’s not a lot of driving. Guessing with its modifications (QFT Slayer carb, headers, Thumpr [sic] camshaft, and sundry other items) I’ve got somewhere in the 300 HP range (will get it on a dyno eventually to verify this).
The newest stock Corvette gets 17 mpg city, 29 highway (assuming you’re just cruising, not going flat out), with a stock 450+ HP. In the early 70s Chevy put out some very rare Corvette’s in that HP range – they were special order items. They got their HP through sheer brute force, burning well over twice the fuel that today’s engine does for the same power. Today’s engine gets more power out of that same fuel by at least double.
The computer controls on the timing, the intake, even on cylinder shutdown, are truly amazing, but the tradeoff is that you can’t easily fix them in your own garage anymore.
Well, as an analogy it does have some limitations.