I think Timothy Burke from Swarthmore is one of the best and smartest old-school academic bloggers around. He doesn’t post all that often, but he reliably posts thoughtful stuff– even when I don’t agree with him, he always makes me think.

Such as, for example, in yesterday’s post about the limits of a reductionist approach to “social problems.” I have a lot of sympathy for this view, and I agree that there are many cases where attempting to apply single-factor social-science methods to complex problems is a waste of time at best, and counterproductive at worst. This is only partly because a lot of social science with obvious applications to policy matters is garbage– in many cases, I think he’s right that the whole approach is flawed.

At the same time, though, I think there are problems with the more holistic academic-style approach he’s advocating. There are things to learn from taking a broader look at context, and so on, but that approach runs a very real risk of collapsing into a certain kind of paralysis.

It’s not a big risk for the specific topic of social media effects that is the proximate cause of his post, but it gets worse as the bigger. Putting current problems in social and historical context is a good and useful thing to do, but too much of that is a problem. The obvious failure mode is, essentially, the procrastinatory event horizon that every writer flirts with and fears crossing, where you get so wrapped up in trying to understand the context that you lose track of what you were supposed to be doing in the first place.

Less directly, context-seeking can also lead to a kind of pit trap of despair, where the current issue at hand becomes seen as the result of vast implacable societal forces that can’t possibly be overcome. When you start blaming the electoral weakness of Democrats entirely on the systematic racism baked into society, you can end up in a place where regaining control of the legislature seems to require Solving the Problem of Race in America, at which point it’s tempting to give up and go hide in a blanket fort in the basement.

This is one of the things that I think is refreshing about the survivors of the Parkland school shooting: gun control is an issue where a sort of sense of futility set in long ago for a lot of folks on the Democratic side. There’s a kind of cynical narrative that takes hold, that takes the routine cycle of brief outrage fading in the face of massive infusions of cash from the NRA is an inevitable part of the context of America, and nothing can really be done. Those kids are impressive because they’re shaking that off in a way that a lot of people who’ve been watching this for much longer can’t.

Both of these traps have the same issue at the core: losing sight of the fact that the point of the process is making policy in the here and now. I’m all in favor of a somewhat more deliberative process than we’ve all too often had, one that takes broader issues into account. At the same time, though, there isn’t time for endless noodling around: decisions need to be made, resources need to be allocated, progress (or lack thereof) needs to be assessed.

And for all the flaws of the reductionist and technocratic approach, that’s the one thing they’re good at: they identify a specific course of action, justified by some relatively public reasoning, and they go after that immediate goal. There are unquestionably flaws in this process– the justifications can be cherry-picked from a vast pool of dubious and self-contradictory research, and there’s a temptation to choose the most easily implementable course of action rather than an optimal course that’s harder to achieve– but the folks on the technocratic side are always aware that concrete decisions need to be made in a timely manner.

The solution to this policy-making problem can’t just be pointing out where the technocratic process fails, it has to include putting forth better options to enable better decisions. Because, again, decisions need to be made and resources need to be allocated, and those things need to be done now.

This also means promoting specific short-term policies that have a chance of being implemented in the near-ish future. One of the most infuriating strategies of academics and some online activists in policy debates is to define a grand, big-context goal– we need to abolish the Electoral College, or repeal the second amendment– without any hint of a plan for how we might get from here to there. Grand reforms are a great long-term goal, but you get there by a series of short-term steps, and spelling those out is an essential part of the process.

This kind of soaring vagueness is sometimes merely a matter of a kind of political naivete, a disconnection from the details of politics and policy. At times, though, it seems more corrosively cynical, a play that allows people to advocate for grand changes that are unquestionably Good an Just, while keeping their distance from any specific policy proposal that might fail in the real world and compromise their standing.

This game where you set grand goals but remain aloof from actual policy-making is everywhere in academia, and it’s one of the most infuriating parts of academic politics. Every faculty has That Professor (sometimes several of them), the one who excels at denouncing whatever course of action is on the table, and demanding that Something Else be done, but somehow never ends up on the committee that has to hash out the Something Else. And when the next proposal comes up for debate, That Professor is right there to poke holes in it and loudly demand better.

This is also a pathology that I see in a lot of left-wing politics, particularly the online sort– the declaring of grand and long-term goals, while simultaneously disdaining the messy and compromising work of coming up with sort-term steps. This is, I think, one of the reasons why right-wing groups have had so much more success than progressive ones over the last decade or two. There’s a lot to hate about the Tea Party, but I have to give them credit for both defining grand transformative policy goals and identifying concrete candidates to vote for and laws to promote. I hate both their long-term goals and their specific candidates, but they played the game very well, far better than most of the people I actually agree with politically.

I think there’s a sense in which the current political moment is forcing that to change, mostly by bringing people into the process from outside the rarefied debates that have been running for years in liberal politics. There’s a lot of on-the-ground political energy at the moment from people who are less invested in long-term transformation than they are in stopping or reversing specific policies right now. That’s probably the most hopeful development of the first year of the Trump Administration, and I hope those people can bring the concrete action– however imperfect it may be– that we need to move us, incrementally, toward the lofty goals that many have long been advocating but not implementing.

So, yes, I agree that policymakers ought to step back a little from quick-fix technocratic solutions, and take a broader and more deliberative look at a lot of the problems we’re facing in proper context. At the same time, I think a lot of deliberative academics and progressives need to get into the game and commit to backing more concrete and specific policy actions. The ultimate goal is good policy, and getting there will require not only that technocrats be a little more academic, but also that academics be a little more technocratic.