"An Immorality" by Ezra Pound

An Immorality

Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,

Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.

When considering the meaning behind this poem by Ezra Pound, we must first consider the fact that the title is "An Immorality." And, if we are not to ascribe the ideas of the poem to the author himself, we have two narrators (one of which is the author,if we do ascribe one level of the ideas to the author). The first narrator is the one who titles the work "An Immorality." If this is the title, then it follows that what follows it is considered by that narrator to be "immoral." Thus, singing a song of "love and idleness" is, to this narrator, immoral. But who is doing the singing? That would, of course, be the second narrator, whose ideas the first narrator considers to be immoral. Clearly the second narrator sees love and idleness to be the highest things in life:

Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.

He is a man who simply wants love and peace (he does NOT want to do high deeds in Hungary). But the first narrator calls this "an immorality." What is immoral about such liberal sentiments? That they are liberal sentiments? If this is an immorality, then the opposite must be morality: action and war.

Next, we must also consider the date of its publication, in 1912, in Ripostes. What was happening around the time Pound likely wrote this poem -- around 1910-11 -- in Hungary? And why are we to contrast it with "love and idleness"?

To begin with, my own quick survey of Hungarian history around this time period uncovered nothing much worth noting. With one exception: serious tension with the Jews living there. Of particular note, one of the main controversies surrounding the Jews involved the issue of language. Whether the Jews learned the Hungarian langauge Magyar or not, they managed to anger somebody living in Hungary. What "high deeds" might Pound have in mind in Hungary? This may be a hint at Pound's antisemitism. Indeed, the implicit identity of action and war with morality in this poem points early on to Pounds incipient fascism -- and certainly to his antiliberalism. Indeed, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1927 book "Liberalism", points to a certain breed of antiliberal thinker who "believe it is through war and war alone that mankind is able to make progress" and that "Man degenerates in time of peace. Only war awakens in him slumbering talents and powers and imbues him with sublime ideals. If war were to be abolished, mankind would decay into indolence and stagnation" (5). Certainly if this is true of war, then a love of peace and idleness is immoral. Who would support stagnation, degeneration, burying our talents and powers and ideals, and indolence (idleness)? This too was an idea later promoted by the fascists, including the Italian Futurists.

One might find here an implicit criticism of a particular theory of culture as well. Pound's mention of "idleness" suggests Thorsten Veblen's thesis in "The Theory of the Leisure Class," published in 1899, where Veblen suggests that only with the emergence of a "leisure class" could artistic culture emerge. But he also argued that this same class held power through coersion and maintaining a monopoly on warfare. For Veblen, idleness is necessary in order to have an artistic culture at all. Did Pound know Veblen's work when he wrote "An Immorality"? Well, he certainly knew it when he wrote his pro-fascist diatribe Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Both were antiliberal, though certainly in different ways, and Pound may have by this point found some things in common with Veblen's ideas. Of course, I do not know for certain that Pound had read Veblen by this point, so both men's antiliberalism may have merely resulted in parallel conclusions -- it would be up to a far more serious Pound scholar than myself to answer the question of what Pound had read by around 1910.

It seems then that the title of the poem acts as a critique of what follows in the body of the poem. If we just take the body of the poem, it seems like a lovely little romantic poem extolling love and idleness. But if we take the title into consideration, we have to understand that the first narrator -- the one giving the title -- sees what follows as immoral. As such, we can see in it the narrator's (Pound's, most likely) antiliberalism.

I suppose that it's not much of an interpretation to find fascism in Pound's work, but what if, in fact, that is all there really is in this poem?

On The Twilight of the Elites

In Time magazine, Christopher Hayes argues that it is The Twilight of the Elites. Not surprisingly, he simultaneously gets things exactly right and completely wrong.

He is right that we are facing an institutional crisis. We are facing crises in our universities, our governments, our megacorporations, our government-run schools, our banks, the Federal Reserve, etc. But what do all of these institutions have in common?

Here is where Hayes fails. He fails to recognize that each of these institutions are planned, "rationally" constructed instutitions. None of them emerged spontaneously as a part of human action, but not of human design. Each of these are designed down to the last detail -- yes, even the megacorporations and banks, which are increasingly centralized, cartelized, and given increasing protection by government. They are all designed -- and run -- from the top-down, with little if any real feedback from the bottom-up. Thus, they are unnatural organizations, both in their organization and in their structures. The government solution to the problems it has caused is to keep doing all the things that caused the problems in the first place -- just harder, faster, more. And the people may not be able to understand it in such a way as to be able to articulate what they understand to be the problem -- but they do understand that more of the same thing is hardly the solution. Only the elites think it is.

Hayes' solution is to include astroturf organizers in these institutions. But that's more of the same. I hate to say it, but the only real solution is going to be the complete collapse of many of our institutions, so that natural ones can arise in their places. Others, such as the Federal Reserve, being purely destructive institutions, should go the way of the dodo.

I have been witnessing the destruction of many of our institutions at the very hands of the elites in charge for a while now. I've seen it coming because I am in the humanities, and the postmodernist elites in the humanities have been actively trying to destroy their own fields. Stanley Fish and others argue that there is no value to what they do, though Fish does observe that the humanities professors he knows are hardly the paragons of the virtues they are supposed to study. This is much like the stupidity of CEOs who fail dismally at being greedy because they follow a corrupt path that leads to their losing everything. We see the same pattern right now with the Democrats in Congress, who are determined to pass a bill that is so unpopular that Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator and there looks to be little hope the Democrats will hold onto power in either house of Congress. The Democrats are so power-hungry and certain of their superiority that they are pushing through something that is going to make them lose power. Regardless of your position on health insurance reform, you have to admit that this is bizarre behavior for elected officials. But this is what happens with constructivist elites in power.

And that is the bottom line: the elites in power in all of these failing institutions are constructivists. They believe they know enough to construct society -- ignoring Hayek's repeated proofs to the contrary. We cannot ever have enough knowledge or information to construct society -- or even the major institutions of society. Those who think otherwise -- which are those that have taken over our institutions -- destroy everything through their ignorance of their ignorance and necessarily uninformed actions.

We like to think that our elites, being so educated, will know enough to be able to run things well. But as Socrates discovered for himself -- and which we desperately need to rediscover today -- is that wisdom is knowing what (and that) you do not know. Wise elites know they do not know enough to run your life. Wise elites will be busy trying to understand the world, to try to help people to make good decisions on their own, for themselves and those closest to them, rather than trying to run the world. They cannot know enough to do so. The world runs itself. And it runs itself most effectively and efficiently if allowed to do so without interruption and interference by those who know nothing and whose arrogance leads them inevitably into corruption.

Robert Frost on How We Make Decisions -- The Road Not Taken

Rereading Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," I noticed something particularly interesting about the poem, which is that Frost seemed to have anticipated what we have since learned about how humans actually make decisions, and the relationship between the stories we tell ourselves about our decisions that in fact come after those decisions and what we decide.

People often misinterpret the poem as being about regretting not having taken the other path, or as being about being brave enough to have taken the "road less traveled by." But Frost himself often commented that people didn't really understand the poem. Let us take a look at the poem, and analyze it stanza by stanza:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Here the narator is faced with a decision and, to try to make that decision, he looks as far into the future as possible, trying to calculate the consequences of that decision. But it is in the next stanza where Frost presents us with his insight into the after-the-fact justification of our decisions research into human decision-making (and morals, for that matter) tell us to be what really happens when we make a decision (including a moral action, with justification afterwards).

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

Here the narrator has clearly made a snap decision to take the other path. We see an immediate justification of the decision: "Because it was grassy and wanted wear," implying that the decision was based on his wanting to take the path fewer people had taken. However, note that in the last line he withdraws that claim by stating that, in all honesty, both paths were worn "really about the same." The narrator doesn't want to admit to himself that his choice was apparently quite arbitrary. Thus, he tells himself a story: that he was chosing a path fewer people had taken. But that is just a story. The truth is that both paths were identical in wear, meaning the same number of people had passed down both paths. The justification for the decision was thus made after the fact, after the narrator had already decided which path to take. We don't like to think there is no reason why we took any given action, so we rationalize -- we create a reason why we took it, placing that reasoning before the decision rather than after, when the reasoning actually took place. The narrator thus tells himself a story of his decision, created after the fact.

We see in the next stanza a continuation of the observation that both paths were (un)trodden equally:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

He even tells himself that he will come back to walk the other one, and then is honest with himself yet again, saying that he doubted he ever would. This then leads us to the final stanza, where he imagines himself in the future:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Here he admits that in the future he will stick to his story he told himself about why he made the decision he made: that it was becasue it was the road less traveled by. Indeed, he will in the future only remember the decision this way: that it was a conscious decision to take a road less traveled by, rather than a gut decision he rationalized after the fact. That is the story of his life he tells himself, and it is the one that he tells because it is the most satisfying (thus the sigh of satisfaction). This observation is quite Nietzschean (Nietzsche observed that we are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and, thus, we can edit them as well). More, it is in agreement with what neuopsychologists agree to be how we actually make decisions -- and what we do after we make those decisions. They also have shown that when we make a snap decision, we are typically more satisfied with that decision than we are with one where we have done a lot of research beforehand. Even if we do research afterwards on the choices we had. Thus, the narrator of the poem is satisfied with his decision -- precisely because it was a snap decision that was rationalized afterwards rather than a reasoned-out decision. What is most amazing is that Frost understood our decision-making processes better than any psychologist for 80 years after the poem was written.

Ae Freislighe for My Love

My love for you ever grows –
A flower beautiful
In the garden never knows
How it is so plentiful.

My life is a paradise
Since I fell in love with you –
I will always bear a price
Unless I make our myth true.

I’m on a tall garden post,
A coiling snake, my dry glove
Slaking off – please pardon most
Metaphors for my love.

Interest Rates Redux

In two separate posts here and here, I talked about the role of artificially low interest rates on the current financial crisis. Here is a working paper by economist John P. Taylor that makes the same argument. Of course, I was only making the same argument as Hayek, whose ideas on interest rates were fairly typical of the other Austrian economists. What? The Austrian economists are right yet again?

The Evolutionary Review

Here's some very exciting news. Joseph Carroll and Alice Andrews are the editors of a new scholarly journal, The Evolutionary Review. The editorial board is a who's who of some of the most important thinkers in evolutionary approaches to the arts and humanities. I'm very excites about it, and I just ordered it, so I can't wait for my first issue.

On "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Re-reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot for a class I'm teaching, I suddenly realized that every analysis I have read of this poem is completely wrong. Most analyses read the poem as Prufrock being uncertain of himself. Others have seen it as Prufrock preparing for a wedding. Neither of these are true. J. Alfred Prufrock is busy trying to seduce a woman of high society, trying to get her to have sex with him. This makes sense if we understand the poem mostly as a series of responses to the woman in question, whose responses are absent in the poem. In a few locations, we have some action, and in others, Prufrock's thoughts. If we add the seduced woman's responses, we can see that Prufrock is in fact a rather clever man, sure of himself and his ability to seduce this woman.

The poem begins with a quote from Dante's Inferno:

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo
fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti
rispondo.

These lines are from a sufferer in Hell, who is saying to the narrator of the Inferno, "If I thought I was talking to someone who might return to earth, this flame would cease; but if what I have heard is true, no one does return; therefore, I can speak to you without fear of infamy."

In the context of the poem, we can imagine Prufrock quoting this to the woman he is trying to seduce. If so, he is telling the woman that because he is talking to her his flame won't cease -- the flame of lust, in this case. Further, he is telling her that he feels like he can tell her what he is going to tell her -- that he wants to have sex with her -- without fear of her telling anyone. This becomes clear over the course of the poem. More, this establishes that Prufrock is an educated man, seeing that he can quote Dante from memory to the woman. More, it shows that she is an educated, high society woman, because she can understand it in Italian. This establishes what is then necessary for a proper seduction to occur. One must be indirect:

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

Here Prufrock (in)directly proposes what he has in mind. Of course, he says it in such a way that it is suggested rather than stated outright. What are you going to do at a "one-night cheap hotel" that would cause your night to be restless? Already, we have a response from her after the ". . ." Here he has been interrupted by her. His repsonse tells us what she asked, which is, "What is it?" He calls her out on her coyness and then is more direct: "Let us go and make our visit."

The couplet that follows is action that interrupts their conversation:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

This shows that they are in a house where some sort of social function is going on. He stops speaking as the women come into the room and leave. The conversation is about Michelangelo, suggesting their education and being members of high society. We then get a description of what it is like outside. This is, after all, turn of the 20th century London, an industrial town. Outside is yellow smog. Soot falls from the sky:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

It is the kind of environment a society woman might object to going out into, perhaps using the excuse that "but will we have enough time to get there and back?":

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Thus does Prufrock answer her objection. Before either can go on, they are interrupted once again:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

He then continues on with his argument against their not having enough time:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”—
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Here he has moved on to argue that if they spend too much time on the question, she will begin to wonder if she dare do this thing. But Prufrock argues that he's getting too old to waste time (thus, the thinning hair and thinning body). It is here where it is believed that Prufrock is wondering if HE should dare disturb the universe. But look at the structure of the sentence. He is telling her that waiting will make it so that there will be time for her to question, "Do I dare?" He interrupts this thought with the description of him getting old, then returns to finish the question he is afraid she will ask "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" But of course, by pointing this out, he is pointing out the absurdity of the question "Do I dare?" He expands "Do I dare go have sex with Mr. Prufrock?" to "Do I dare disturb the universe?" to convince her that such an action as having sex will do nothing of the sort. He ends by pointing out that any decision she makes she may want to revise and reverse in the next, so she may as well stick to a decision that she will likely change her mind about later anyway. He then goes on to argue that he knows all about being cautious and changing one's mind:

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And where has being cautious gotten him? He leaves that as a rhetorical question. Then he asks himself (we know there is a change because of the indentation) how he should presume, which is defined here as "to act or proceed with unwarrantable or impertinent boldness." The fact that the word "presume" is used certainly undermines those interpretations that see Prufrock as indecisive. Rather, he sees himself as proceeding at this point with "impertinent boldness." So how shall he presume? Well, first he argues that she shouldn't be concerned about potential gossip, because he has experience gossip before:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

He argues that gossip shouldn't prevent him -- and, by extension, her -- from doing what they want to do. He goes further, answering her apparent concern at her inexperience by pointing out that he is quite experienced, has felt the embrace of other women:

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

And he is back again, asking how he should presume, and now, how he should truly begin the seduction. And so, he begins:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

Here he further argues his experience at this, suggesting that he can make it a success. He then interrupts himself with a self-congratulating thought:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Here he compares himself to a crab. Crabs walk sideways, of course. He is not taking a direct approach, but approaching things from the side, like a crab. After congratulating himself on his approach, he continues his arugment to her. He first argues that she will feel incredibly relaxed afterwards, but then it seems obvious that he has seen fear on her face or that she has expressed fear about going through with this:

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

He tries to comfort her by pointing out that he, too, has been afraid. But he returns to the issue of time passing and being wasted. He has even seen death, and was afraid. Of course, compared to death, what fear can you have of allowing yourself to be seduced? Here she seems to bring up the issue of others gossiping about them, and he answers:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

He argues here that if people gossip, just smile at them, ignore it. Or, if they continue, brag about it: "I am Lazarus," and "I shall tell you all." The result, he argues, is that those who had been gossiping will in fact be jealous, that they will lie down at night and complain about the fact that they had not had her experience. He then goes on to argue that she most definitely won't regret her decision of going to bed with him:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

He here in fact argues that it would be worth it to have the affair just to make those gossiping women jealous. She next apparently argues that he is a too-important person for her to get involved with, so he responds that he is anything but:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

As she continues to resist, he brings up his age again, and the loss of time:

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

He is portraying himself as a fool again, as a middle-classed man dressing like the young people. Is the woman he is addressing closer to his age, and would thus be horrified at the thought of this gentleman dressing like a youth to try to seduce the young?

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

Again, references to youth and risk. He is asking her not to make him take risks at his age. This is a continuation of the seduction. Does she want to put him in the position of looking like a fool, trying to seduce younger women? He tries to evoke sympathy:

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Indeed, he is aware of the young ladies, with their seductive voices. He has seen them, too:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

But then, alas! it is too late:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

They spent too much time talking, too much time talking about things like the sea and mermaids. Now human voices -- the women speaking of Michaelangelo? -- have interrupted them permanently. They are drowned by those voices, as are their plans. They will no longer be able to sneak off together. It is too late.

This makes the poem very much in the tradition of Donne's The Flea and Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. Once we recognize that there is an absent voice, we see that this is a poem of seduction, well within the tradition of poems of seduction. A more ambiguous poem, needless to say, than the other two -- precisely because of the absent answers of the missing mistress -- but a poem of seduction by a man who is very confident of himself. And it is this latter insight that overturns most interpretations of the poem.

The Missing Goddess

In Athens, land of Athena, I see
The most beautiful goddess is not here –
The one I worship – sacred Anna – know
I will return to you, don’t ever fear.

My Aphrodite, you no longer live
In Greece – how were you reborn in Texas?
Yet your features are just as delicate
And lovely as this ancient Grecian lass.

The Muses, all nine, are now turned to one –
Embodied every one in you – you bring
Inspiration to my thoughts – I create
Everything for you, every song I sing.

You pluck the feathers of all the sirens,
They cannot lure me the way that you do –
Nothing can lure me from the course I’ve set,
To ensure that I will return to you.

Yes, I am your Odysseus – I will
Return to you – I’ll fight off all monsters
And giants – none but you shall ever do –
I’ll return home, defeat all imposters.

Justice and Dehumanizing People

A proposed definition of justice: the equal treatment of fellow human beings.

Another way of putting it: do unto other human beings as you would have them do unto you as a fellow human being.

If justice is indeed equal treatment, then equal outcomes are impossible. To get equal outcomes, you have to have unequal treatment of people. Thus, equal outcome, by the above definition of justice, is unjust.

A government that does anything to promote equality of outcome, including redistribution, is unjust.

Anyone who treats one member of their own society -- that is, those who are considered to be human -- differently than they treat another member acts unjustly. This does not mean that we do not take into consideration people's differences. Quite the contrary. But taking people's differences into consideration doesn't mean you don't treat everyone as a human being.

This is the soul of ethics. In fact, I would argue that any individual cannot treat unethically anyone they see as a fellow human being. The first step in treating someone unethically is to dehumanize them.

For example, murder. To murder is to kill a fellow human being. Traditionally, only those who are a member of your tribe or society are considered to be fellow human beings. As we have globalized, many of us have extended who we consider to be fellow human beings to include everyone. To the extent we do that, we become more ethical.

So how do we make sense of murder? Well, it depends on if you see it from the point of view of the killer or of the society the killer is a member of.

A sociopath doesn't see anyone as being a fellow human being.

If you catch your spouse cheating on you, in that momeny you no longer see that person as a fellow human being -- and the law typically reflects that (you have to kill them in the moment for it to not be 1st degree murder because any time to reflect and plan makes it first degree murder).

The mugger sees you as a mark, not a fellow human being.

The assassin sees you as a job, not a fellow human being.

More, societies have typically had rituals that allow us to remove people from their societies, allowing those societies to kill them.

Thus, it is allowable to kill people in war, because when war is declared, one ritualistically separates out the people one is as war with from yourself and the rest of the world. Things like the Geneva Convention nevertheless ensure we try to keep most of the people in the country we are at war with considered fellow human beings. That is why murder, rape, and theft are much less common in war now than it has been in the past (where it was expected).

Further, we can make sense of human sacrafice because a religious ritual is performed to first remove the person from the society so they can legitimately be killed.

Finally, we can make sense of capital punishment here as well if we consider the trial as a ritual to remove the offender from society so that the person can be legitimately killed.

Now, one may in fact disagree that these rituals actually perform these functions. That is what is really at stake in the opposition to capital punishment, for example. But it helps to know what you are really against: the performance of a ritual to dehumanize a fellow human being.

One can apply this to theft, rape, or lying as well. Well, the latter is a bit more complex than that, as it oftentimes requires that you deeply understand the one you are lying to as a fellow human being to lie to them. The issue with lying may lie more in why one is lying.

Who Poses the Greater Threat

Walter Williams, as usual, gets it right.

On How to Be a Man: A Poem

Son, stand and be a man, responsible
And virtuous and kind. You will not find
A man of worth who’s listless, cold, and cruel,
Who lives a life reptilian, not of mind.

Don’t live an anesthetic life; embrace
The senses, beauty of the world and life
And art; reject the bodiless and soulless,
The hatred of the world in strifeless strife.

A man of action is a man of words;
A man of words will always listen well;
The poetry of thought will see its source
To train you so that you can always tell

The wisest way to walk, traverse the waves,
And fly on falcon wings when you are sure
Your feathers formed, both soft and firm, for both
Are needed if life you will endure.

A man of wisdom is a man of worlds –
The worlds of simplest physics, chemistry –
The complex worlds of life, emergent systems –
All; cultures, art, and true economy.

A healthy man is one of healthy loves
And life; a life of beauty unifies
Diversity, transforms each soul it meets
To light, gives feathered wings so each one flies.

The opposite of manliness is not
The feminine. The feminine is truly
The complement of manliness. The boy,
So irresponsible, unkempt, unruly,

Is the true opposite of manliness.
Embrace the fullness of both sides of life,
The feminine and masculine, and you
Will have the truest virtue, not one rife

With hardness when you really need to show
You flow and bend and, flowing, show your strength,
Nor softness when you must stand firm and show
That you won’t always bend to any length.

Yes, son, to be a man you have to stand
For right and virtue, knowing when to bend
With strength and knowing when to love. Be true
And good, a soul of beauty to the end.

A Tale of Two Inflations

The one thing Keyneseanism is devastatingly, destructively wrong about -- and the thing Keyneseans seem to promote the most -- is inflation. Keynes believed that inflation causes a strong economy, but the fact is that a strong economy causes inflation. And it matters quite a bit which one is true.

1. Natural Inflation

Let us say that we have an economy with 10 objects (X) and 10 objects (Y) in it, that both were in equal demand, and $200 was all the money in the economy. That would make each object worth $10. Now let us say that the consumers in the economy wanted more of X. Competition among consumers would drive up the price of X relative to Y, which would go down in price. Thus, we would see inflation for X. Businesses would then produce more X, redirecting resources and labor toward producing what consumers want. More business would come in to produce more X as well. This would then drive down the price of X. With the same amount of money in the economy and more objects, prices would drop over the long term. Further, we would have more people working, and they would also demand more product, which would drive up prices, leading to a virtuous circle of price increase/decrease that ultimately leads to lower prices for many products. In other words, we would have natural deflation for certain products. Of course, we see exactly that with new technology. Those buying something the first year it comes out pay much more than those in subsequent years, especially if the product is popular.

2. Artificial Inflation

Let us return to our artificial economy of 10 X, 10 Y and $200, with X and Y worth $10 each. Now let us double the money supply by, say, printing it. Now we have 10 X, 10 Y and $400, with X and Y worth $20 each. Companies do not know where the price increases are coming from, and most companies would interpret any price increase as consumer competition for their products, meaning they need to produce more. Established companies would probably notice that their inventory hasn't gone down, but others would see the high prices and definitely interpret that as a signal that they should enter the market to produce more of that object. Thus, there would be money and labor directed toward the production of both X and Y, when there has been no increase in demand for either one. Inventories of X and Y would increase and increase -- especially as the higher prices disocuraged people from buying as much as they had in the past. After a while, companies, faced with large inventories, would stop production. That would mean they would need to lay off people. Now people aren't working, prices are dropping because companies are trying to get rid of inventories (thus, 50% and more off sales), and the economy has entered a recession caused by the economic bubble created by inflation.

3. And Then There Is Interest Rates

I have already discussed the problems created by interest rate manipulation by the Fed. In sum, low interest rates tell (encourage) people to take more risks; high interest rates tell (encourage) people to take fewer risks. When money is cheap, people are more willing to take financial risks. When money is expensive, people are less willing to do so. Further, low interest rates discourage people from putting money into savings accounts. Money in savings accounts is money the bank now has to loan out. High interest rates encourage people to put money into savings accounts. Now, if you have low interest rates, you will have fewer people saving money at the same time you will have more people borrowing. Both savers and borrowers have an effect on interest rates in a natural economy. But when the Federal Reserve artificially drives down interest rates, you have banks lending more money than they have (after all, you also have the Fed guaranteeing the bank's holdings, providing even more incentive for the banks to take risks). A crisis is bound to occur.

4. The Marriage of Artificially Low Interest Rates and Artificial Inflation

To "combat" the current economic downturn, the Fed has printed more money and is continuing to keep interest rates artificially low. (I do not argue the Fed should push interest rates up or reduce the money supply, as those will also have devastating effects on the economy.) Any guesses as to what is bound to happen? If this recession isn't going to take us down, the next one the Fed is creating most definitely will.

The Toyota Show Trial

Especially when it finds itself in real trouble (such as a recession it cannot deficit-spend its way out of), it seems that governments love nothing better than a good show trial. Toyota is a case in point. For no actual purpose than I can discern, the CEOs of Toyota have been called to Washington, D.C. to talk to a bunch of people who know nothing about much of anything at all -- especially the automobile industry -- to explain what happened (to a bunch of people who don't actually care what happened, but only want to look like they care and are doing something). Quite frankly, those in Washington couldn't be happier that this happened with Toyota because it allows them to distract everyone from the fact that they have done nothing at all to improve economic conditions (which of course is true, because no government can do anything to improve economic conditions, but can only do things to harm them -- short of building roads, that is). But while this is typical behavior, there is another backdrop that should concern us, and that is the fact that the U.S. government also happens to own to of Toyota's competitors -- GM and Chrysler. Might there be some ulterior motive for those who own two car companies AND regulate the industry to come down hard on their competitors?

Our Innate Bias Toward Paranoia

Here is an interesting article on the relationship between IQ and liberal/conservative beliefs. The evidence suggests that those with higher IQs are more likely to engage in less typical behaviors, which translates into liberal beliefs. Conservatives, in the cultural sense, have lower IQs.

But this is something I found most interesting:

"religion is a byproduct of humans' tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see "the hands of God" at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. "Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid," says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. "So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists." "

Let us accept this as being true. How do we reconcile this fact with the fact that those with liberal political views "perceive agency and intention" as causes of economic events? Liberals tend to be socialists, and socialists believe the economy is or should be controled, seeing agency and intention behind everything that happens in the economy at large. In the economy, culture, and society, the liberal is the same as the creationist religious believer. Yet, this is not addressed. It should be. Left-Liberals are paranoid about different things, it seems to me. Classical liberals, on the other hand, might fit this model more exactly.

Couplet

The cattle stand upon the hill at night
And moo the moon to milky white delight.

English Learning Needs Reading

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100216142334.htm

Changing Species Change Environments

Scientists have discovered what anyone who understands complex systems already understands: evolution of species affects the environment. I am thrilled that this has been definitely demonstrated, though, as it sets up a solid foundation for understanding how changing organisms change the environment, which changes the organisms. And for a species as flexible as humans, with a highly plastic brain that complexifies in response to a more complex environment, this is even more true. This is a very significant development for understanding both evolution and the environment, including human mental evolution and our human environments. Feedback loops are yet again confirmed.

Theater Article

I have an article on theater in the Dallas Morning News.

Where I've Been

My postings of late have been sporadic at best. Chalk it up to my working three jobs. That's right, three jobs. Two of them have limited relevance to what I do as a scholar and artist, but the third -- working front desk at a hotel -- has nothing to do with much of anything other than my past experience in hotels. Worse, I have less time than ever to do anything other than go to work and grade papers. And almost not the latter.

Oh well. What's a man to do? I have to help support my family. Sadly, much of the money I have to make goes to student loans for an education I'm not able to use.

Neotenous Bonobos

New research shows bonobos act as they do due to neoteny. Why, this sounds like something I might have said in my dissertation.

My Candidate for State Representative, Dist. 112 Video

The Hayek vs. Keynes Rap

Greg Ransom on Kuhn and Membership Selection

Greg Ransom wrote an interesting essay on Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms, attempting to explain the way paradigms emerge. In it he proposes what he called "membership selection", which he defines as follows:

"membership selection is a selective process which selects over individuals for a property of those individuals which either does or does not contribute to a group property, a property which cannot be exhibited alone by a single individual, but which can only be expressed as a group property. Through this process which selects over individuals and for a property these individuals either do or do not contribute to the group, there will be selection for the group property which selected individuals exhibit."

This is to be distinguished from group selection, where one engages in an action that may harm you, the individual, but benefits the group (which contain some of your genes -- in a Daqwkins "selfish gene" way). In group selection, an individual may give a warning call that protects most members of the group, but may draw attention to the individual giving the call. With membership selection, the individual is not harmed at all with the behavior. Ransom gives the example of musk ox keeping wolves at bay by constantly facing the threat and keeping the calves behind them -- this benefits the individual and, when with other musk ox, results in the famous circling behavior that is even more protective. Another example would be herding/schooling behavior.

While this is an excellent theory of biological evolution, there are, as usual, problems with metaphorically extending it to social behavior. Specifically, Ransom tries to say that new paradigms in science are created through membership selection as he describes it. He does so to try to explain that natural selection is insufficient as an explanation for why a particular paradigm will gain members to the exclusion of others. The problem with his metaphor is that people are capable of changing their minds (even if many do not), while genes change from generation to generation. With the emergence of a new paradigm, people are going to choose to accept it or not, for a variety of reasons. Is there a genetic predisposition for believing in Newtonian gravitation vs. Relativistic gravitation? Hardly. But clearly there is a genetic element to circling behavior in musk ox. This is where the metaphor fails. Where it works, however, is when, if I believe something, I am benefitted if others believe it as well. If we add in an ability to convince ourselves and others, the idea of membership selection works for paradigm acceptance. A new paradigm takes over as more members are added to the group that believe in the new paradigm.

But what makes us believe in the new paradigm? Ransom doesn't address this, but there may in fact be an element of natural selection at this level. Kuhn believes that new paradigms are accepted if they "bear fruit." Well, many theories can and do bear fruit, yet are not accepted as a dominant paradigm -- or such theories may be delayed for a while before being accepted. Perhaps it is those that bear the most fruit most quickly, thus demonstrating a selective advantage to those who accept the paradigm and join in with others in using it as a research model. This would explain the selection of a particular paradigm. As it demonstrates its usefulness, more people are convinced, and membership selection takes over. Perhaps if Ransom had added in the theory of memetics, he would have come to such conclusions himself. Catastrophe theory also provides a mathematical model that demonstrates how one moves from one paradigm to the next. He would have also benefitted from such a model.

Now, this works well for the hard sciences -- physics, chemistry, and even biology to an extent. But it hardly works for the soft sciences and the humanities, which do not demonstrate the dominance of a single paradigm, but rather demonstrate the dominance of several paradigms. Of course, this isn't exactly right, either, as the humanities are still dominated by blank slate theories since discarded by practically everyone else -- though there are different sub-paradigms within that theory that make up the majority of humanities scholarship. Anyone with any kind of foundationalism -- including evolution -- or belief in human universals have no place in most humanities programs. But the problem in the humanities and the soft science is that none of them can "bear fruit" in the same way. With the hard sciences, you have to have hard results. But in something like economics, you don't have to have a result that matches the real world for people to accept it. In fact, you can have the opposite result in the real world, and still have supporters (think of Keynesian economics, which was a demonstrable failure in the 70's, yet is making a comeback). The problem is that economics is not really an experimental science. You can observe what happens, and theorize from that, but you cannot conduct experiments to see if your ideas work. The result is and has been a proliferation of theories and models that may or may not have any relevance to the real world, and which may help or may harm. Scientism and mathematicism in economics has thus been quite harmful, because they give the appearance of hard science and precision where none can ever be achieved. Certainly mathematics forms the foundational paradigm of contemporary economics -- but it has been very much to the detriment of economics, as it gives the appearance of hard knowledge where there is none. This is what happens when something is used incorrectly in a field. There is a place for math in economics, of course, but not to the extent that it has been used, where it masks reality and results in false conclusions.

Of course, what I may simply be saying is that economics is really for a paradigm shift. If revolutionary science is when we get a "crisis due to the emergence of some intractable anomaly," then the current economic crisis shows that economics has certainly reached this point. Except in abstract model-building, math has reached its limits in economics. But I predict it will be harder to make the shift, and the transition will be longer, precisely because of the nature of economics as a science.

The humanities are in even worse shape, because the results are even less clear. Nobody is reading the works of humanities scholars anymore, and perhaps that is the expression of the crisis there. But how do the humanities "bear fruit"? Not merely be increased "interest," whatever that may mean. And people in the humanities who dominate are in protected positions in universities, so there are no real consequences for them to hold bad theories. They just keep producing more like them, hiring more like them, protecting those people, and thus perpetuating bad ideas. Membership selection in this case only perpetuates bad behavior and bad ideas. How, then, does one create a paradigm shift on the humanities? If revolutionary science arises because of bad consequences, how can there be revolutionary humanities if bad consequences are protected?

To a limited degree, this problem also exists in the soft sciences. The good news, though, is that as complexity theories and biology begin to dominate, fewer bad ideas can survive. The soft sciences need to be made more scientific through biology and systems science rather than made more like math and physics. That will be the real paradigm shift -- in the soft sciences as well as in the humanities. Unfortunately, it seems that those of us in the humanities who do not believe in postmodernism and rather use evolutionary and systems theories in our work will perhaps find ourselves more at home in social science departments. But those social science departments are going to have to be open to hiring us, which they currently are not -- primarily due to a wrong-headed, tribalist turf protection. If they could get over that and become more interdisciplinary, that would open things up for both the soft sciences and the humanities. Now that would be a major paradigm shift.

Self-Esteem Movement Dehumanizing

It turns out that if you think highly of yourself, that is positively correlated with low frontal cortex activity, and the frontal cortex is, of course, most developed in humans, and is the location of the mental activities that make us distinctly human. The authors observe that, "This region of the frontal lobe is generally associated with reasoning, planning, decision-making and problem-solving." Is it any coincidence that these are the very traits missing in our high school graduates? Isn't it time we got rid of this destructive, dehumanizing program of education?

Quantum Golden Mean

It's fractals all the way down. Specifically, the golden mean ration has just been discovered at the quantum level. This ratio can be found throughout nature, and is common in our art and architecture as well. Part of the diaphysical nature of the universe, it seems.

On Beauty and Feeling at Home in Spontaneous Orders

One of my regulars, Winton Bates, asked me how spontaneous orders and beauty were related, after I observed that in my Fund for Spontaneous Orders conference paper, I argued at the end that understanding beauty would help us to live well in a spontaneous order social system. Since the main part of the paper will appear later (and to which I will make a link when it does appear) in their online journal, and since I cut the entire section on beauty from it, I'm going to just share the section on beauty. It's an idea I want and need to develop further.

Beauty and the Spontaneous Order

Beautiful works of art and literature help us to both understand and live well within spontaneous social orders. Indeed, beauty may be the missing piece that has caused us to feel alienated within these orders. We do not have to feel that way.

In "On Beauty" Elaine Scarry argues that beauty brings us to justice because of beauty’s attention to symmetry, leading us to an understanding of “a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another” (97, quoting John Rawls from "A Theory of Justice"). While symmetry is certainly part of beauty, it is in fact only one half of beauty, the other half being asymmetry. A perfectly symmetrical tree would be a ball on a column – hardly beautiful (equating symmetry with beauty also denies the fact that Japanese works, which focus on asymmetry, are also beautiful). Rather, a beautiful tree is one that has symmetry, yes, but also is ragged around the edges, uneven in its evenness, even in its unevenness. If this is the case, justice may in fact be distributive, as Scarry argues, but it cannot be purely symmetrical, as Scarry implies. Rather, it would exhibit qualities of symmetry and asymmetry simultaneously – as network theory in fact says happens in complex network systems. It seems likely that spontaneous orders are the only systems capable of exhibiting such qualities – and of doing so without prejudice. This claim would be strengthened if it turned out that spontaneous orders were, themselves, beautiful.

One aspect of spontaneous orders is that they allow for equal access to all (which is far different from equal outcome, as outcomes depend on many different things). In a truly spontaneous legal order, for example, there is equality under the law. In a truly spontaneous economic order, there is an equal ability to enter into economic transactions, broadly defined. Scarry observes that “the equality of beauty” in part resides “in its generously being present, widely present, to almost all people at almost all times” (108-9). Beauty is accessible to all, though the more engaged one is with the beautiful object, the more benefits one derives from it, the more beautiful it becomes. The same is also true of participation in spontaneous orders.

We see, using two different ways of defining both beauty and the nature of spontaneous order, a commonality: paradox. A beautiful object must be both symmetrical and asymmetrical. To have a just legal order, one must have equal treatment under the law (laws applying to all people equally), resulting in unequal outcomes. Contrariwise, to get equal outcomes, you must treat people unequally and, as a consequence, unjustly – as Vonnegut brilliantly demonstrated in “Harrison Bergeron.” The affirmation of paradox seems to lie at the heart of both the nature of beauty and of spontaneous orders. Beauty must contain both complexity and simplicity. Simple rules and feedback generate complex spontaneous orders (see diZerega, Hayek, and also Stephen Wolfram’s The Making of a New Science). Indeed, feedback, or reflexivity, is another feature of beauty. Both beautiful objects and spontaneous orders are ordered, evolutionary (changing over time), rule-based, simultaneously digital and analog, generative and creative (as Scarry also argues of beauty), scale-free hierarchies (what Turner calls heterarchies in The Culture of Hope) in structure, patterned/rhythmic, unified in their multiplicity, synergistic, novel, irreducible, unpredictable, and coherent (see Turner’s The Culture of Hope on these qualities of beauty and Christian Fuchs on these qualities of self-organizing systems). It seems, as I note in Diaphysics, that “there is a correlation between self-organizing complex systems and beauty. Each have the same attributes.” More, “all beautiful objects are information-generating systems. And to the extent that something is a self-organizing system, it is beautiful” (84).

If one of the problems with understanding spontaneous orders is that they are more complex than we are, we being nodes within the network, and a less complex entity cannot fully understand a system more complex than itself (Hayek, The Sensory Order, 185), then understanding the relationship between spontaneous orders and the nature of beauty (especially in regards to the internal structures of beautiful things, and how they interact to create the beautiful whole) could help us to understand the nature of spontaneous orders. More, learning to better appreciate and understand beauty – whether in nature or in works of art, music, literature, etc. – should help each of us to learn how to better live within the extended order and positively contribute to its health and growth. This then brings us back to the importance of the liberal arts. Plato saw beauty as a sort of master concept informing all the other concepts (or, ideas, to come closer to the Greek word) (Phaedrus). As we see here, there is much truth to that – and, as Keats reminds us, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”). The truth-seeking orders, such as the scientific order, are more truth-seeking the more they are truly spontaneous orders – which is to say, the more beautiful they are. “Virtue aims at the beautiful” according to Aristotle (Nicomachian Ethics), and more goodness emerges out of the moral order the more it is a truly spontaneous order. And if beauty is fair, and the fair is just (Scarry), the closer the legal and the democratic orders are to being truly spontaneous orders, the more just they and the extended order will be. In fact, if beauty, truth, virtue, and justice are indeed so deeply related, it logically follows that spontaneous social orders, being beautiful, are going to generate people who are truthful, virtuous, and just – and if these are elements not typically associated with the market order, this is a failure as much of the critics of the market order as it is of the economy having yet become a full spontaneous order – or, more, the almost complete failure of money to have become a spontaneous order (which only serves to undermine the catallaxy).

If we come to embrace beauty, which is, as Frederick Turner observes, the “value of values” (Beauty), we can come to feel at home in the extended order. We evolved in the midst of an evolutionary drama – and this is precisely what a spontaneous order is (Turner, 131). We can find beauty in the social spontaneous orders precisely because they have all the qualities of the evolved, evolving natural ecosystem. Ironically, precisely as our social world has become more and more a set of spontaneous orders within the extended order, we have abandoned beauty as a value – thus cutting ourselves off from the very thing that would have helped us know how we fit in. As Roger Scruton says in Beauty, “When we are attracted by the harmony, order, and serenity of nature, so as to feel at home in it and confirmed by it, then we speak of its beauty” (72). While I would argue against the inclusion of “serenity,” certainly the other two, and the list I gave above, equate beauty and spontaneous orders. Educated in beauty, we could learn to feel at home in the universe, including our spontaneous orders.

Is and Ought

John Hasnas argues that "because Hayek was arguing for normative conclusions without recognizing when he was crossing the is-ought barrier, I characterized him as a bad moral philosopher." As one who does not believe in the is-ought barrier, this argument doesn't fly for me any more than it did for Bruce Caldwell.

Michael Polanyi, in "Meaning", argued that the is-ought division comes about due to the rejection of science as being imaginative, meaning it is value-free Specifically, he says,

"Science has most commonly been thought to deal with facts, the humanities with values. But since, in this frame of reference, values must be totally different from facts, the humanities have been thought to deal only with fancies. Values have thus come to be understood to be the product of fancy, not of facts, and so not any part of factual knowledge" (64).

David Barash argues too that imagination is a necessary ingredient for reaching scientific knowledge. Every theory is of course a story explaining a group of facts, out of which come hypotheses that one can test to acquire more facts, which in turn inform the story. But the story is at the center of it all. And, as a story, it is not and cannot be value-free.

Indeed, one may wonder where the is and the ought lie in such a scenario.

Recent work showing the evolutionary origins of ethical behavior also do away with the is-ought barrier. They show that whatever protects the social group in social mammals (and we are a species of social mammal), is considered to be ethical by that species.

I know of course where the is-ought barrier argument comes from. We know, for example, that racism among humans is natural. But does that argue that we ought to therefore be racists? Of course not. But we forget that xenophilia is also natural, and it turns out that xenophilia has the benefit of expanding our social world, making life better for everyone in a xenophilic society than in a xenophobic one. We have a choice between two "is"es -- and knowing what the consequences are of each, which one do you think we ought to take? I would argue for the one that IS going to create more complex, more just, more beautiful society -- meaning, the xenophilic route. Both are two real options available to human beings, but only one of these two behaviors is ethical in modern society.

All in all, I would argue that any ought that cannot map well on what is (regardless of what we think is, which is different than what is), is an ought we ought not to have.

Troy Camplin for Texas State Representative

It's official: I am running for Texas State Representative in District 112 against Angie Chen Button.

Now, here's the fun part: I'm the ONLY person running against her.

I'm going to give it the ol' college try and see if I can win.

The Moral Order

The Cato Unbound discussion of spontaneous order is continuing, with Bruce Caldwell finally chiming in, pointing out that Hayek on ethics was in fact a postmodernist. And, as an antifoundationalist, he most certainly was. He argued that spontaneous orders were separate from our instincts -- something I have argued against at the FSSO conference. I think Hayek was right to a great degree, but I think he went to far in separating one kind of evolutionary system (mind and biology) from another (ethics, economics, etc.). Caldwell's observation that Hayek wasn't so much a bad moral philosopher as a postmodern one caused Hasnas to retract his argument that Hayek was in fact a bad moral philosopher, which I argued against below. Of course, I also argued that Hayek's ideas don't have to remain antifoundational to have a certain validity, that his explanation of morals can easily be mapped onto a naturalistic explanation of morals as moral instincts. More, I still think that moral reasoning, which Hasnas and Sandefur seem to think is foundational, in fact is emergent from the evolutionary logic of the moral spontaneous order.

Thus, the map should be understood as such:

moral instincts --> moral spontaneous order --> moral reasoning

Of course, once moral reasoning emerges, it in turn informs the moral spontaneous order. The moral instincts remain as a tether, keeping the spontaneous order within bounds. It may not be impossible that after a while a moral spontaneous order would affect the moral instincts, as those whose moral instincts allow them to fit well into the order in question might have a selective advantage (and those who do not would of course have a selective disadvantage). In fact, we would expect a changing environment to have a biological, evolutionary effect on those living in and making up the environment. But that's on a longer time scale, of course, meaning slower, and acting as a foundation in relation to the faster-evolving spontaneous order.

The Simple and Complex Sciences

I would like to propose some new defintions:

Rather than "hard" and "soft" science, as we now use, how about "simple" and "complex" sciences?

Simple = physics and chemistry

Complex = biology, ecology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics

This would do a few things. One, it would identify right away what models and mathematics to use. That alone would be great, as we would stop using the wrong kinds of mathematics in fields like economics. Second, it would show how closely related biology actually is to the other complex sciences. Third, it would emphasize complexity rather than imprecise notions like "hard" and "soft," with their negative connotations. In fact, the "soft" sciences are in fact the hardest (most difficult) due to their complexity.

As for the humanities, increasingly philosophy is brought into the complex sciences. My dream is that one day literature will be as well. (Maybe then I will be able to get a job.)

Sandefur on Spontaneous Orders, Again

There comes a point where you wonder if the person one (or others) is arguing with is actually paying attention to any of the actual arguments, or if they are simply starting to get to a place where they are defending their position no matter what. After reading Sandefur's latest response, I cannot come to any other conclusion but that he has reached this point. Most of his points have been definitively answered already, especially by Hasnas in his last response. Sandefur still does not recognize the difference between an entity and an environment (putting him in the same camp as the economic planners Hayek was writing against, who equally could not tell the difference). A person does act based on a wide variety of bases, including rational decision-making, for a variety of goals -- but that does not make the person either a constructed or, certainly, a spontaneous order.A corporation can be defined in a similar way, though a corporation is certainly a constructed order. Such entities ad people and corporations (and non-profits, etc.) do have goals, and work toward realizing those goals, but a social system should not have goals imposed on it. This Hayek does make abundantly clear. The reason why is clear, if we understand, for example, what happens in a corporation.

When we work for a corporation, we align our goals with those of the corporation while we're working for that corporation. When we are at home, we do not have to do so any longer. And if we do not want to align our goals with the corporation, we can quit. The corporation, being in direct competition with other corporations, receives the kind of information that allows it to discover new ways of doing things, and new products to make.

When we are a member of a society, entry and exit are not so easy. Especially when we are talking about large nation-states. What is the "goal" of society? That should be a nonsensical question. But there have been people who have tried to construct society as a corporation -- this is the kind of constructivism Hayek is talking about -- and they have thus tried to give society "goals." When they do that, they have to align the society's members' goals with that of the state. Nobody can be allowed to have their own goals, because that can derail the social constructivist's goals. Thus, a constructed society necessarily is coercive, because there will be people who do not want to align their goals with the constructivist's goals. If you have to align your goals with someone else's goals, and have no way to legally escape it, then you are not free. Indeed, you are a slave. And slavery cannot exist in a true spontaneous order. Indeed, once we understand that only in a true spontaneous order that people are free to pursue their own goals as they see fit (so long as they do not involve coercion), do we see that spontaneous orders are the kinds of social systems that are conducive to liberty.

Sandefur objects that spontaneous order is essentially a non-concept because there is no pure example, that there are mixed systems. Indeed, there are mixed systems. They are called complex adaptive systems. But even if we cannot ever make a true spontaneous order, the concept is worth having because it is the model of complete social liberty. One can posit a kind of continuum from constructed social order to spontaneous order. But in that continuum, we also move from slavery to increasing liberty. What Sandefur claims are examples of spontaneous order arising from the interstices of constructed orders is really features of complex adaptive systems. Self-organizing, where possible> Yes. A spontaneous order as Hayek describes it? No.

I get all this from Hayek, with only some clarification from recent work on complex adaptive systems. I honestly don't know why Sandefur cannot seem to see what to me Hayek clearly says about the relationship between liberty and social spontaneous orders.

Solving Our Budget Problems

There are a few things we could do that would solve our budget problems.

1) zero-baseline budgeting, so nobody will be able to call a spending increase a spending decrease just because it was less of an increase than was built into the system.

2) an amendment to the Constitution making it mandatory for all extra-Constitutional laws to have a 10 year sunset. Thus, every law would have to come up for a revote every 10 years. If a law or program is worth having, it's worth passing again.

3) all bills should be stand-alones -- including pork. No more bundling of bills.

4) there should be transparency for all Congressional procedures not involving national security -- nothing should ever be allowed to be done behind closed doors

5) all bills should require at least 1 day per 50 pages between the bill being finished and it being up for a vote,so legislators can read the bills before voting on them -- then a short quiz should be required of each to see if they understood what they read. When 100% of legislators pass the quiz, the bill can come up for a vote. During this time, the bill should be available online.

In fact, this would go a long way to solving most of our problems whose source lies in our legislatures and in legislation.

On Hasnas' Response to Sandefur's Response to Hasnas

Hasnas does an excellent job responding to Sandefur. Especially in his clarifying the distinction between a spontaneous and a constructed order. His observations have clarified for me that Sandefur seems to think that a spontaneous order must be made up of spontaneous orders to be a spontaneous order -- which makes as much sense as saying that environments must be made of environments to be environments. Not complex orders are spontaneous orders.

There is one thing I disagree with Hasnas -- and that is where he is in agreement with Sandefur -- which is on the issue of the evolution of morals.

As Marc Hauser has demonstrated in "Moral Minds," morals evolved. Frans de Waal talks about ethics among apes in "Good Natured," showing the origins of many of our own morals. So certainly morals evolved. Now, at this biological level, with morals as instincts, that evolution is slow enough to work as a stationary set of grounded moral principles. But it is a set that will likely not make either Hasnas nor Sandefur happy. Nevertheless, such instincts are sufficiently complex -- and often have their own paradoxical opposites -- that they set the groundwork for what Hayek partially (in)correctly understood as the origins of morals, and how they evolved: at the level of culture, tradition, and spontaneous order. Let me give an example.

In our original, tribal state, it is good to love one's tribe and to hate anyone not in one's tribe. Those who thought otherwise about other tribes ended up with spears through their bodies by those who practiced this. However, humans are also xenophilic -- this is likely a result of the kind of outbreeding we see in chimpanzees today, where the females leave their troupe when they become sexually mature, to join another troupe -- which helps prevent inbreeding. So humans are naturally xenophobic and xenophilic. As we developed larger and larger social groups, from small settlements to cities to empires and nation-states, our xenophilic tendencies were more adaptive than were our xenophobic tendencies. Along with this came our morals -- it is not ethical to murder, rape, and steal from one's family and tribe, and those morals were expanded along with the expansion of who we considered to be in our tribe. Those who consider all the world to be in their tribe thus have a hard time stomaching wars of any kind. This kind of expansion of morals is spontaneous, and was not legislated by anyone. Constructed legislation has in fact more often stood in the way of this natural evolution than is has helped. More typically, as I noted before, it follows society to where society has already gotten.

Now, as our morals evolve in this spontaneous fashion, another thing begins to emerge: moral reasoning. This is what we see in Plato and Aristotle, who begin to reason about the morals already present. And to critique them. Hasnas argues that moral reasoning comes first. It does not. It is a recent addition. A welcome one (sometimes), but a fairly recent one. It can only emerge out of the moral spontaneous order. Which is itself rooted in (and cannot become untethered from) our moral instincts.

On Sandefur's Response to Klein

WIth this response by Sandefur, I think I am getting what it is he is missing in his critique of Hayek's spontaneous order theory (in a response to my last posting, Sandefur argued he was not attacking spontaneous order as a concept, only Hayek's conception of it -- though again this response would seem to suggest otherwise). Actually, he is missing two things.

The first thing Sandefur is missing is the fact that Hayek does in fact defend a particular kind of rationality -- the Scottish enlightenment version of rationality, vs. constructivist rationality. Hayek does not reject rationality, as Sandefur suggests, only the constructivist version that arose on the Continent and which led to socialist ideology. If Reason is all-powerful, then those who have Reason should rightly rule and should use that Reason to construct a rational society and economy. This is what Hayek is critiquing. If one has a correct understanding of reason, one will know that one cannot construct a socialist utopia. More, such a rationality will be useful in making proper critiques, in making suggestions, in arguing one's position. Nowhere does Hayek argue that one should not argue one's point, including against tradition. One must also recognize that in challenging tradition, one puts oneself in a precarious position. One has to prove oneself -- and in doing so, one may meet with tragic consequences (this is the story of every work of tragedy). But in doing so, one brings the rest of society in after you.

The incremental changes Hayek suggests are like making a blaze to explore unknown territory. If you want to explore unknown territory, you have to make a mark on the edge of known territory before you venture out. If you want to keep exploring, you make another blaze -- within sight of the old one. Thus, you don't get lost. And new territory is discovered. The constructivist, on the other hand, just runs out ahead, not bothering to make a blaze, unconcerned about the territory he las left behind (it is such a terribly place anyway -- and what is out there, in the unknown, now, that is what's exciting!). The result? He gets lost. When one is in the savannah, jungle, or desert, this means certain death. The same is true of those societies that try to construct something completely different, ignoring tradition, ignoring what works. The constructivist, seeking to make something completely new, ignoring what is, places himself in much danger of getting lost, of getting killed -- or, in the case of a society, getting everyone lost, and killing many of one's citizens. Running ahead without consideration of where you came from, and you become food to predators, get stuck in mud or quicksand, etc. But if you make a blze, and are able to keep in sight of known territory, you can learn of the dangers and avoid them. And you can always find your way back home.

The second thing Sandefur is missing -- and one really cannot fault him for missing this -- is the fact that Hayek, being an Austrian, was culturally in many ways a German. German philosophy was obsessed with the Greeks, and both groups of philosophers believed the world was made of "physis" and "nomos". "Physis" is the natural world, and included all non-human nature. "Nomos" was essentially human culture and tradition. Many Greeks believed that the best society was one in which "nomos" mapped well onto "physis," meaning that the ideal society was a reflection of nature in its deepest tendencies. Indeed, Hayek does use the term "nomos." I would argue that Hayek understood the naturally-occurring, bottom-up spontaneous order as being the social equivalent of the self-organizing systems found in nature (he knew Bertalanffy and certainly knew of his work on biology and general systems theory). Hayek understood the brain to be a self-organizing system, and he thought the best society would be one that most resembled these natural processes. This is a normative thing if you understand the relationship between "physis" and "nomos" as the ancient Greeks and their German followers/imitators did. A constructed order would not be a "nomos," but a "techne," which is not a product of "physis" and does not resemble "physis," thus making it inappropriate as a model of society. If you understand that constructed orders are "techne," while spontaneous orders are "nomos," you begin to understand the real differences between the two. A "techne" is a human construct -- a "nomos" is not, but is rather something which emerges out of voluntary human interactions. A pencil is a "techne" just as much as a corporation is a "techne". Neither are the appropriate models for society.

If you combine both observations, I think it becomes clearer where Hayek is coming from with his concept of spontaneous order. It is not non-rational, and there is a place for the proper kind of rationality within it. In my Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders conference paper, I argue that within each spontaneous order there is a rationality that arises that is relevant to that order, but may be inappropriate for critiquing other orders. Thus, we may in fact have a plurality of rationalities. Does that mean that there is not one rationality to rule them all? Of course not. But I think we need to learn as much as we can about these many rationalities first to learn what they all have in common. Then we may end up having that rationality Sandefur seems to think we already have that will be able to be used to judge from "outside" -- not that we can, in reality, ever get outside of the system we are in. All critiques are always from the inside, meaning we don't know what the outcome will be. We can always only hope for the best.

Hayek and Spontaneous Order at Cato Unbound

following posting is in response to a series of articles discussing the nature of Friedrich von Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order at Cato Unbound. The first article is Four Problems with Spontaneous Order by Timothy Sandefur, with responses by John Hasnas, Daniel Klein, and Bruce Caldwell (the last of whom I met at a Hayek conference this past summer), and then a response to them by Sandefur. I’m going to make comments on each, in order. I am very much in disagreement with Sandefur, but I think some of the defenses of Hayek fall a bit short, which I’ll be taking up. Those who number their points, I’m numbering along with them.

Sandefur

1) The main problem that I see with Sandefur’s argument is that he doesn’t seem to know the difference between a spontaneous order and an organization. If you don’t understand this distinction, of course you think the difference is merely a matter of distance. He is mistaking lions for the savannah ecosystem in which they live. A lion is an entity with goals. An environment or ecosystem cannot have goals – any more than can a spontaneous order, which is a kind of human social ecosystem. His examples of micro- and macroevolution fails because evolution happens at the level of organisms/entities and, as already noted, a spontaneous order is more akin to an environment or ecosystem.

Now when it comes to law, one can argue that law as a whole should have never been considered a spontaneous order by Hayek precisely because it is constructed in legislation. One can nevertheless conclude that social norms of behavior are a spontaneous order. The fact that a spontaneous order can be co-opted and turned into a constructed order is no argument against the existence of spontaneous orders as distinct from constructed orders.

2) In spontaneous orders, we have naturally emerging bonds being made and broken between agents/entities. This results in maximum information flow, as occurs when we have a scale-free network. Interference in that process forces the maintenance of bonds that would have otherwise broken or the breaking or even prevention of making bonds that would have otherwise existed. The result is a rigid hierarchy. These bonds are not as concrete as Sandefur’s example.

If equality under the law is good and the increase of wealth and knowledge are good (meaning, the more rapid the increase, the better), then spontaneous orders are superior to constructed orders. This kind of equality (under the law) is necessary for the creation of a spontaneous order, which in turns increases wealth and knowledge. I suppose if one does not think that more wealth and knowledge are good. Then one would not see spontaneous orders as good, but even dictators pretend to what at least more wealth (though the consistent outcomes of attempts at constructed orders making less wealth, indeed, decreasing wealth, suggests otherwise for current defenders of such systems). A spontaneous order is therefore good because it is good for and good at producing wealth and knowledge. What people do with that wealth and knowledge is outside the realm of the spontaneous order proper, and therefore one should not criticize the spontaneous order for creating these things agents within the system misuse. One should keep one’s criticisms for the agents themselves. Thus, spontaneous orders in this sense are amoral, being ateleological.

3) Sandefur has a point when it comes to Hayek on morals, law, and legislation, but spontaneous orders can be rescued from Hayek’s own arguments of social constructivism with the recognition that humans do have instincts, including moral instincts (see Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds that lay a foundation for behavior and for judgment. More, humans have paradoxical drives that spontaneous orders can emphasize or play down, depending on the order. Sandefur also misses the point that different systems have their own internal logics and, therefore, different criteria for rational behavior. Hayek is warning against importing the rules form one spontaneous order into another just as much as he warns against arbitrary rules. More, the system should be judged by the outcome of the system, not by how some particular elements in the system are doing. This also answers his first paragraph of his response paper.

4) Sandefur does not seem to understand what really happened with his contrary examples. In the case of segregation, laws were on the books in the states to prevent social evolution. Tradition is not stagnant and unchanging, as anthropologist Victor Turner discovered. Our society, by the 1960’s, had evolved to a point where the people themselves as a whole wanted legislative change. The laws in the South were designed to prevent natural interactions from occurring, whether in the economy, socially, etc. The law changed after society did. The fact that the federal laws overturned state and local laws is no argument that the change didn’t begin as a spontaneous order, even if it did end in legislation. This kind of legislation always follows social change – it never leads it. The same is true of his other example, Lawrence v. Texas. Attitudes toward homosexuality had changed so much by then that the laws had to catch up with the prevailing morals. The presence of those who resist any such change is no argument against spontaneous order. In fact, to insist that tradition as Hayek understood it means stagnation is to ignore the fact that spontaneous orders are by definition dynamic. Tradition for Hayek is a touchstone helping keep the system stable – it is not ossification of the system (making it no longer a system). The judges’ behavior in Lawrence v. Texas was rational within the system that had evolved by the time of the decision. It would not have been considered – or considered rational – a hundred years earlier. But the evolution that led to that decision was bottom-up.

Hasnas

1) Hasnas is generally correct in his defense of the idea of spontaneous orders, but he also leaves out the issue of teleology. Organizations are teleological – they have a goal, a purpose. Spontaneous orders are non-teleological – they do not have a goal. When a leader says, “We need to pass X to create more jobs in the economy,” that leader is treating the economy as a teleological organization. Stalin’s infamous five-year plans did the same thing. On the other hand, a leader who says, “We need to pass X so companies will be more productive and make greater profits,” is not thinking of the economy as a made order, but as a spontaneous order in which there are made orders that will react in different ways to the proposed change. That may increase general employment – or it may not. But the rule change does not address the spontaneous order as such, only the elements within it and their interactions.

2) Hasnas does an excellent job refuting Sandefur’s second point, to which I have nothing more to add than what I said above in my initial response.

3 & 4) Hashas is generally correct that Hayek’s judicial and moral philosophizing has much to be desired – however, I think he does lend short shrift to the idea of spontaneous order in these realms. As I argued above, Hayek mistakenly decouples the spontaneous orders from our evolved instincts, and this includes our morals. There is room for ethics to evolve while being rooted in moral instincts. Just as much, moral reasoning evolves in such a system, making us able to critique and criticize. Still, we remain tethered to our evolved morality. We need all three: moral instincts, evolving tradition, and moral reasoning.

Klein

I think Klein gets to be a bit too cute with his idea of Hayek’s “code” – “custom” is not necessarily “liberal principle” (in fact, almost by definition, customs are not liberal in principle, but conservative in fact), “competition” is really economic competition, not freedom per se (though freedom of interaction does allow for and is a necessary foundation for true competition), and “the market” is by definition free of interference. He is correct, however, in identifying “spontaneous” with “free,” as one cannot be spontaneous without the freedom to do so.

His argument falls a bit short when he discusses what Hayek means by order. Certainly he “get it,” but he doesn’t go far enough in explaining what is meant. Critics of the market argue that the market is too “disorderly” and that the government is needed to make it “orderly.” The kind of order they mean, of course, is regular order – the kind of order found in crystals. Hayek argues for a kind of order that lies between “order” and “disorder,” one which creates patterns (of behavior in the case of spontaneous orders) that are not rigidly ordered, but not random, either. A good visual example is the self-organizing fields of rocks in Antarctica.

Caldwell

Caldwell is good to point out we need some historical context. That always helps us to understand what we are reading. However, we need to do better than “I know it when I see it.” That is what we’re trying to do at the Fund for Spontaneous Orders at the conferences and at Studies in Emergent Order.

Sandefur II

In his response, Sandefur continues in his error of thinking a corporation is a spontaneous order, which it clearly is not (nor did Hayek ever claim them to be). In fact, the core of his error in thinking is is not recognizing this difference. A spontaneous order is made up of various agents and organizations, each of which is behaving in a purposeful manner – but these interactions result in a spontaneous order with no goal or purpose. He essentially argues that, because lions are in an ecosystem, and because they interact with various other elements in an ecosystem, one cannot therefore distinguish between a lion and its ecosystem! Both may be complex adaptive systems (CAS), but they are different kinds of CAS’s. A spontaneous order is a very different kind of CAS than is an organization. The fact that both are CAS’s does not mean spontaneous orders cannot be distinguished from other CAS’s. This is essentially the logical error of “All lions are cats,” therefore “All cats are lions.” To Sandefur, house cats are really lions because both are cats.

His example of nationalized health care as appearing to not be a constructed order fails miserably because, apparently, for him, only one person can be involved in construction. There must be a goal in constructing a building, but does that mean only one (or a small group) is involved> Hardly. One could make a list as long as his of people necessary to construct a building – and a building could never arise through spontaneous order. Spontaneous orders just don’t order that way. Many people are coordinating to a common purpose to create a teleological system in nationalized health care. That makes it a constructed order. Next, it is imposed from the top-down. That “top” may be fairly large, but in the end it is a top-down construction. Just because a few bones are thrown to the hoi polloi to settle them down doesn’t mean a bottom-up process was used or in play.

His example of Wal-Mart fails because he fails to recognize that in a corporation, there is a hierarchy. There may be local centers of decision-making, but such a system is not truly decentralized, let alone scale-free. And there is not freedom of entry and exit. Those are decisions made by someone. I can’t just go open up a Wal-Mart because I decided to one day. A spontaneous order has these features; Wal-Mart does not.

In the end, Sandefur cannot even seem to understand the difference between a bottom-up social reformer who tries to persuade people and a top-down social reformer who uses the power of the state to impose his vision on everyone, whether they like it or not, whether it maps well onto human nature of not. The former is part of the spontaneous order; the latter destroys it. If Sandefur cannot understand that basic distinction, of course he cannot see the difference between spontaneous and constructed orders – nor can he tell the difference between freedom and dictatorship.

Spontaneous Orders and Literature

For those who like some reality in their literary studies, I offer you Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox, eds. Naturally, I would have loved to have had a piece in this collection, but I was busy writing my own contribution to the field at the same time that Cantor and Cox were preparing this for publication. Nevertheless, Paul Cantor was kind enough to send me his introductory essay, which I was able to use in my own paper I presented at the Fund for Spontaneous Orders conference Dec. 5. That piece, after revisions, should appear in Studies in Emergent Order early next year.

Neither Path Nor Way to a Noble Peace

He stands upon the fjord, saying, "Peace."
He's granted adulations for the core
The sheep all think he has. He'll have their fleece
While wielding still the rusty blades of war.

Climategate

For several decades now, the postmodernists have been warning us that science is inherently biased and ideological. Well, I suppose when they made that claim, they didn't expect the bias would be clearly exposed as coming from the Left and global warming claims. Looks like postmodernism has come around to biting its own tail, poisoning itself.

I think most scientists were and are and will remain unbiased in their work. However, I also think that postmodernists gave many scientists the green light to become biased and to promote ideological science. Most of the objections to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology fall into that category, as has been the promotion of anthropogenic climate change. This isn't to say that humans don't affect the climate or pollute -- we do, as does every other organism on earth, now or ever. But this scandal has shown that there are people out there willing to put ideology before reality (not a shock -- it just shouldn't happen in science). The big problem here is that this scandal is a huge black eye to science as a whole. Especially those sciences, like biology (or climatology), that are necessarily ambiguous due to the complexity of the things being studied. When a real problem comes about, people are going to be less likely to listen, and then we might have a real problem on our hands.