From Good and Bad to Good and Evil -- On Moral Emergence

One of the most famous stories is that of Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and being thrown out of the garden. Most interpretations of this story argue that Adam and Eve rebelled against God in doing so. However, we have to face a real problem in the fact that Adam and Eve could not have known that what they were doing was evil before they ate from the Tree, given the fact that they were in fact in a state of ignorance. If you do something out of ignorance, you are not rebelling. Your actions may be bad, but they are bad insofar as they will not gain what you think your actions will gain you. You are simply wrong, ignorant.

This understanding of the fact that there is a difference between bad and evil, and that the bad is done out of ignorance, while the evil is done out of knowledge and is thus an act of rebellion, should in fact help us understand the meaning of the story.

If, as Plato argued, people do bad things out of ignorance of the good, we can begin to see what happened in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are in a state of ignorance about good and evil. This is necessarily true, as they have yet to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. If you are without knowledge, you are ignorant, by definition. Now, God told them the consequences of eating from the Tree -- that they would die. However, the serpent told them that if they ate from the Tree, they would not die. They are given two pieces of information, but do not have the knowledge of which is in fact true. They made a choice out of their ignorance, listening first to the first Being to tell them something, then listening to the second to tell them something, acting on that information each time. When they eat of the Tree, that is when they in fact gain knowledge. From here on out, they have knowledge, meaning ignoring what they know and acting against that knowledge is an act of evil. Adam and Eve have thus moved from good vs bad to good vs evil.

What we see in this story is a metaphor for the process of moral growth. We go through life doing things that are bad out of ignorance that what we are doing is bad. Then a moral teacher comes along and teaches us that what we are doing is bad. Once we agree that what we were doing was bad, we move from the state of good vs bad to the state of good vs evil. A person who is a racist because of ignorance and residual tribalist ethics is a bad person; a person who is a racist even though he knows racism is bad is an evil person. A person who advocates a minimum wage out of ignorance of the economic effects is someone advocating a bad policy; a person who advocates a minimum wage even though he knows the economic effects is someone advocating an evil policy.

From this we can see that moral teachers come from a variety of places: religion, philosophy, the social sciences, perhaps even on occasion government. The social scientist is included because the social scientist discovers what are good and bad institutions, structures, and policies. They thus educate us out of ignorance (the realm of good and bad) and into knowledge (the realm of good and evil). These ethical orders do not create ethics in a clean, clear-cut fashion. It is a complex, messy process. And it takes time for a society to fully adopt new morals. This should suggest to us that we need to be a little more patient with people who are still in a state of ignorance, as they have yet to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil for the particular virtue we wish to actively promote. At the same time, we do have to encourage them to eat. For innocence, ignorance, and simplicity is not virtue. It is painful to be thrown out of the Garden, but we are better (more interesting and more complex) people for it when it happens.

Literature Improves Theory of Mind

I have argued previously and elsewhere that literature makes us more empathetic. This is supported by the work of Jonathan Gottschall. This is important because empathy underlies certain moral judgments. If you want to be more moral, more empathetic, and thus more able to live in an increasingly connected, highly pluralist world, read more literature.

But wait! There's more!

There is now evidence that reading specifically literary fiction improves the reader's theory of mind. This is tied to the complexity of the texts. Literature exercises our minds. Of course, if one's theory of mind is improved, one's empathy must of necessity be improved as well. The more mind I attribute to you, the more empathy I feel toward you.

If we combine this with the fact that poetry moralizes by weirding and the fact that surrealist literature makes our thinking more complex, and we can begin to see how important literature of all kinds is to our moral development.

And theater, because it draws people together, makes us want to work more together to solve social problems, according to Russell Berman.

Combine all of this with my arguments in The Spontaneous Orders of the Arts, and we can see that literature makes us more moral by complexifying our thinking in general, fine-tuning our theory of mind and expanding our empathy, and even moving us to act.

Imagine what literature classes would be like if we taught them using this knowledge.

Humans Did Not Evolve to Understand the World As It Truly Is

Almost everything discovered by quantum physicists goes counter to what reality seems ogvious to be. It seems obvious we touch things, but in truth electromagnetic repulsion between atoms makes touching anything literally impossible. It seems obvious objects are solid, but in truth, they are over 99% empty space -- with the rest made up of probablistic waves. It seems obvious that everything has a local habitation, but in truth, everything is everywhere in the universe at once, with only a certain (high) probablity of being localized.

Humans engage in essentialist thinking, meaning we are programmed to believe species have an (eternal) essence, that racial and ethnic categories are essential categories, and that each individual remains essentially the same over time (the latter allows us to accuse people of being wishy-washy when they change their minds over time). The truth is that we change constantly over time, that species come and go, that evolution is the true reality, whether it be species, individuals, or societies.

As a social species, we evolved to believe all social networks must be hierarchical. This is the structure of all interspecies social networks. This is why we support powerful leaders and attempts to impose hierarchical structures on social order. It is practically impossible for us to see and understand scale-free networks, which is the structure of ecosystems (intraspecies networks) and large-scale social orders (division of labor networks).

Humans also evolved to expect there to be an orderer whenever we find order. This is why self-organization theories -- whether biological (evolution) or social (e.g., free markets) -- are widely rejected. Biological self-organization is rejected not only by physical creationists, but by secular leftists who reject any and all evolutionary explanations that are inconvenient to their ideologies. Social self-organization is rejected primarily by the left when it comes to the economy, but is also rejected by the right when it comes to culture.

The last three in particular affect our political views. Acceptance of our evolved sense of social reality and rejection of what we have learned to be our actual social reality affects left and right alike -- and altogether too many libertarians as well (those who embrace conspiracy theory explanations of the order seen in the world). Overcoming our evolved sense of how the world works and embracing how it really works is very difficult. But it must be done if we are going to best deal with reality.

Lecturer of English

My career has been very slow to take off. I graduated with my Ph.D. in 2004 from UT-Dallas. I initially thought it would be a good idea to publish a book. So I wrote Diaphysics and got it off to a publisher. I probably should have concentrated more on writing academic papers and getting my poems published. I also made the mistake of thinking that doing adjunct work would create teaching experience that would eventually lead to a tenure-track position. Of course, I have since learned that doing adjunct work will do absolultely nothing for your career.

That may seem odd to say given the fact that I am now a lecturer at the University of North Texas at Dallas, where I was an adjunct just last year. It seems obvious that doing the adjunct work is what got me the lecturer job. However, not every adjunct was given a lecturer position. Why, then, did I get one?

While I was adjuncting, I also published quite a bit of work. Being an interdisciplinarian, it was mostly interdisciplinary work, and mostly on spontaneous order theory. I also have quite a few creative publications, and a few editorships, and some experience in theater. Also, I consulted on a book for Dr. Eric Bing at the Bush Center here in Dallas. It was this latter which seems to have led to someone deciding to offer me the developmental writing class, and later a few projects, including the development of a non-course competency-based option for developmental writing/reading. Their need for a specialist in developmental writing to teach this and the original course then led them to creating the lecturer position, which I applied for and got.

Yes, the adjunct position did get me in the door in this particular case -- but it was my other work that led to my current position.

And now that I have this lecturer position, I have been asked to develop a Writing for Performance class, based on my experience in theater. And there is some discussion of creating a student journal of some sort, based on my editor experience. These are the things that have gotten me where I am, not teaching experience.

Those of us in academia have heard the phrase "publish or perish." I am convinced it is true. Publish and participate in a variety of social activities. Otherwise you will perish on the island of adjuncts.

The Revenge Order

What is the real purpose of government? Why do we think we need one? We do not need government to engage in mutual trade. We do not need government to create money. We do not need government to create technology. We do not need government to discover scientific facts. We do not need government to discover mathematical truths. We do not need government to create art and literature. We do not need government to have religion. We do not need government to have philosophy. We do not need government to be philanthropic and charitable. Indeed, government more often than not gets in the way of all of these things. So what is government for?

Revenge.

Government cannot really be around for self-defense in the literal sense. If you are attacked, it is pretty much up to you to defend yourself then and there. But if you cannot defend yourself? If someone robs, rapes, assaults, kidnaps, cheats, or murders you? The government can then come in and exact revenge on your behalf, or on the behalf of your friends and relatives (if you've been murdered). The threat of exacting revenge is the closest to self-defense a government can engage in.

But revenge is corrupting. Revenge makes us into what we are seeking vengeance against. We know that on some level, and thus seek to create governments so we can outsource our vengeance, keeping ourselves morally clean in the meantime. This is why the areas of government most directly engaged in the exacting of vengeance tend to be the most corrupt. We sacrifice the moral lives of our police and military to keep our own moral lives clean.

Governments thus are not spontaneous orders of justice; it is when we act justly toward each other that a spontaneous order of justice emerges -- the common law. Governments, rather, respond to injustice with vengeance.

Given the fact that government is created so we can outsource our vengeance to keep ourselves morally clean, we can begin to see why governments have taken on certain roles. The envious, for example, seek vengeance against those whom they envy. This is the source of much of our class warfare/welfare state rhetoric and policies. Progressive income taxes do not bring in nearly the amount of money as other kinds of taxation; the reason we nevertheless have such a tax system is because the envious are enacting vengeance against those whom they envy with such a tax system. Indeed, the vengeance of the envious is precisely what drives all redistributionist policies. And it is why we find the government engaging in such policies. Redistributionist policies and progressive income taxes are forms of vengeance and, thus, appropriate for the government to engage in. This assumes, of course, that one thinks the envious enacting vengeance is itself just behavior. Game theory has demonstrated, unfortunately, that envy is a deep primatological trait.

Libertarians are distinct in the fact that they apply individual morality to the actions governments. If private individuals cannot rob, rape, assault, kidnap, cheat, or murder, then neither can an individual if they are associated with the government. However, if one is going to enact vengeance, then one is likely to engage in any one of these. A fine is robbery; one is assaulted and kidnapped when one is arrested; one can be killed while being arrested, if not given the death penalty. However, these are things we have the government do to those who have proven themselves unjust in their actions against others. That is, they are acts of vengeance.

If we are going to remain untouched by the corruption inherent in vengeance, we are going to have to continue to outsource our vengeance. But that means the creation of institutions which are inherently corrupting. The best we can do, perhaps, is narrow down as much as possible those activities for which we think vengeance ought to be exacted. If government must necessarily be corrupting, then we should give it as few tasks as humanly possible.

Bridging the Two Cultures

My latest at The Pope Center is on why the humanities need the sciences.

Update: Steven Pinker on why and how the sciences are not the enemy of the humanities.

Virtue and/as the Golden Mean

The more philosophy I read, the more I find virtue described as a golden mean -- or moderate position -- between two vices. Lao Tzu does so in the Tao Te Ching. Aristotle does so in the Nichmachean ethics. And Francist Bacon in his Novum Organum repeats Aristotle's views, as does Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols.

Aristotle argues that virtues are means between two vices -- extremes at either end. Cowardice (extreme caution) and rashness (extreme lack of caution) are vices, with courage being the virtuous mean. Murder (purposeful killing of a fellow human being) and refusing to even defend oneself and one's family are vices, with self-defense (or the willingness to engage in self-defense) being the virtuous mean.

Bacon argues that those who overspecialize and with their hammer treat all things as nails are one extreme, while those who are too broadly interdisciplinary but only have a shallow knowledge are another extreme, with both depth and breadth being the mean (one thinks of F.A. Hayek's observation that economists ought to be interdisciplinarians -- they should have a deep knowledge of something, in this case economics, and a broad knowledge of other things, so their economics isn't stupid). Bacon also observes that "There are found in some minds given to an extreme admiration of antiquity, others to an extreme love and appetite for novelty; but few so duly tempered that they can hold the mean, neither carping at what has been well laid down by the ancients, nor despising what is well introduced by the moderns." (I think, again, of Hayek and his advocating of evolutionary traditionalism -- or, spontaneous order.)

Nietzsche argues that the two extremes are giving in to the passions and negation of the passions. Always giving in to sex is rape, but pure negation denies a real aspect of human life and thus a rejection of life; the mean is what Nietzsche calls the spiritualization of the passions -- in the case of sex, love and marriage. One can either be a glutton or fast to death, or find the spiritualization of eating and eat enough for one's constitution and enjoy eating, to boot. With his idea of spiritualization, we see a mechanism for turning the vice of excess into the golden mean virtue.

Sadly, many who claim to have been influenced by Nietzsche have managed to fail to notice is advocacy for the mean as virtue -- even though he ended his career with this idea, above, and began his career with the argument that the highest form of art was tragedy, which was the mean of the extremes of Apollonian and Dionysian drives and art. It would not be a bad idea for us to return to the insights of Lao Tzu, Aristotle, Bacon, and Nietzsche.

Creative Intelligence and Being an Artist

In Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum lays out what he calls the five competencies of creative intelligence:

1. Knowledge Mining
2. Framing
3. Playing
4.Making
5. Pivoting

The last one is the movement from creating to making, which emphasizes the fact that having a great idea isn't enough. You have to follow up on that great idea and actually make something.

All of these are features of every great artist who has ever existed. Great poets have read the great poets, and even memorized many of their poems. All artists engage in framing. Art is play (a nonserious thing done seriously). And the artist has to move from conception to making, and actually make the work.

One could make the argument that every team whose purpose is to be creative really needs a poet, a playwright, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, etc. on their team to keep the team thinking as truly creative people think, and to keep the moving on to turning the ideas into things.

I will note in particular that Nussbaum's "framing" is something people involved in theater ought to find of interest. Nussbaum says there are three kinds of framing:

1. Narrative Framing, or "how we interpret the world" (35)
2. Engagement Framing, or "how we interact with each other" (35)
3. What-If Framing, or "how we imagine the unthinkable to innovate beyond our wildest dreams" (35)

The first, Narrative Framing, should be of obvious interest to people involved in theater. However, plays are staged, and thus, how people interact with each other is also vitally important. How many playwrights leave those decisions to the director and/or actors? How much could/should playwrights think about their Engagement Framing? And finally, one of the primary roles of any artist, playwright included, is the creation of What-If scenarios. What else is narrative art but What-If scenarios, designed to teach us how to behave (or not behave) in a variety of situations (Engagements).

In a sense, these are all things every artist understands -- but it is sometimes beneficial to have such things made explicit, to think about what it is we are really doing as artists.

Time and Austrian Economics

One of the distinguishing features of the Austrian school of economics is that it takes time seriously. Much mainstream economics could be described as taking place on an atemporal pin-tip. Because Austrian economists view the economy as an unfolding process, time is necessarily central to their theorizing. 

Since time is such an important element to any economic theory that views the economy as an unfolding process, we have to face the question, “What is time”? The person who has perhaps investigated this idea the fullest is Julius T. Fraser, whose theory that as the universe becomes more complex, those new entities experience time in new ways, is also a theory of the emergence of freedom.

J.T. Fraser argued in books like Time: The Familiar Stranger and Time, Conflict, and Human Values that time is experienced by different levels of complexity in different ways, and that those complex levels emerged from previous levels. That experience, he termed umwelts. He posited that there are six umwelts: atemporal, prototemporal, eotemporal, biotemporal, nootemporal, and sociotemporal. Each of the later, more complex experiences of time also contain the less complex experiences. But let us look at each.

Atemporal – The time experience of the pure, chaotic energy at the moment of the Big Bang (or inside a black hole) is that of no time passing, or atemporality.

Prototemporal – This is the probabilistic, fragmented time experience of the particle-waves of quantum physics.

Eotemporality – This is the deterministic time experience of macro-objects, the physicists’ time “t”.  Events at this level are countable and orderable, but have no preferred time direction.

Biotemporality – Living organisms have a past, present, and future in a way nonliving things do not. At this level, life-serving goals and intentions emerge. This is, of course, the beginning of a time experience which makes the most sense to us, as living things.

Nootemporality – Humans have much longer temporal horizons than do other living things. As mature adults, we are aware not just of our own births and imminent deaths, but of a time before we existed, and of a future in which we will no longer exist. Here our intentionality is aimed at concrete and symbolic goals.

Sociotemporality – Fraser points out that this level is mostly theoretical, and difficult to distinguish from the nootemporal, since it is, after all, made up of humans. It is hard to theorize because we are viewing it from the inside. With nootemporality, we can understand it through introspection. The other four, we can understand through scientific research. But the patterns of society, and the temporal experience of society, cannot be so thoroughly understood as the rest. The best we can do is understand it as any particular culture’s collective understanding of the nature of time.

Each of the above levels of time experience also represents the emergence of a new physical level of reality, each exponentially more complex than the level before. The first thing we should note is that the scientific view of time is primarily that of eotemporality, or Newtonian time. It is unfortunately applied to the biological, human, and social sciences as well. But we should be able to see that we have fundamentally different processes at each of these levels – fundamentally different processes that need to be understood on their own terms, using methods appropriate to those levels of complexity. 

But there are issues that concern libertarians that go beyond appropriate scientific methods. With Fraser’s model, we can see, too, how freedom unfolds in the universe. New levels emerge from the bottom-up, as elements of that lower level interact, creating new rules of interaction, that become solidified at the next level. As rules emerge from these bottom-up interactions, a new, freer level emerges. The universe becomes more complex – and more free – over time, self-organizing and emerging into freer and freer entities. And this freedom emerges in no small part because more and more time can be experienced. 

With each new level of complexity, the constituent parts are organized both by their interactions and by the emergent new order. Interacting biochemicals give rise to the living cell which in turn orders those biochemicals; interacting neurons give rise to the mind which in turn orders those neurons; interacting people give rise to social orders such as cultures, economies, governments, money, technological innovation, etc. which in turn order those people. New rules emerge at each new level; the most successful rules survive and are passed on. And those rules that provide the most freedom are the ones that have always survived. Thus, the universe has become freer over time. 

We can see, then, that the universe has self-organized from the bottom-up, with the chaos of pure energy giving rise to the probabilistic experience of particle-waves giving rise to the deterministic experience of chemistry and macrophysical objects giving rise to the life-serving goals and intentions of life itself giving rise to the concrete and symbolic goals of humans giving rise to social temporal experience. Although there is a certain amount of fee-through of time experience – given that we humans experience chaos, probability, determinism, and life-serving goals as well as concrete and symbolic goals – if one were to try to impose a less complex level of time experience on a more complex level, you would destroy that more complex level, while if one were to try to impose a more complex level of time experience on a less complex level, you would crush that less complex level. To reduce a living thing to eotemporality, you have to kill it. If you reduce sociotemporality to human concrete and symbolic goals, you will kill that society. 

This latter has, of course, been covered extensively by the Austrian economists in their ongoing fights against central planning. You cannot give society – including the economy – a goal. Doing so reduces that society’s or spontaneous order’s complexity, causing it to collapse. We humans are goal-oriented, but that does not mean spontaneous orders are or should be. With Fraser’s model of the temporal experiences of new levels of complex processes, we can see why. More, with Fraser’s model, we can see that the natural tendency of the universe is to, through bottom-up emergent processes, become freer over time. Libertarians can take great comfort in the fact that, in a real sense, cosmological history is on our side.

What It Is That I Do (as an interdisciplinarian)

As an interdisciplinarian, I reject reductionist world views. I  reject 19th century scientism (the attempt to reduce everything to simple physics), postmodernist reduction of everything to power, the tendency (left and right) to reduce everything to politics and government, the tendency of too many libertarians to reduce everything to market interactions, reduction of everything to psychology, to language, to religion, to philosophy, to aesthetics, etc. This tendency toward reductionism on the part of, perhaps, most people, makes these people tend to accuse everyone of reductionism if they have the audacity to argue from a different perspective from that person.

The world is made up of a variety of spontaneous orders, and thus of a variety of ways of understanding human social interactions (there being different kinds, they should be understood differently). There is reductionist science and emergentist science -- each requires different ways of understanding, and when the emergentist science reaches the level of human psychology and social interactions, the differences are so wide that the equation of the social sciences with the physical sciences almost appears bizarre. The physical sciences require knowledge; the social sciences require understanding. Knowledge and understanding are quite different things. The social sciences thus come much closer to philosophy and literary theory than the kinds of things we find in the physical sciences -- even as the physical sciences are finally starting to produce theories, such as the constructal law and self-organizing complexity and strange attractors and network theory, that are increasingly applicable to the social science. Still, these theories of emergent complexity require more understanding than simple knowledge.

If there are a variety of spontaneous orders in which we necessarily interact -- math, the physical sciences, technology, money/finance, the economy, the social sciences, democratic government (or the non-spontaneous order versions of government), philanthropy, philosophy, religion, and the arts -- there are a variety of ways of understanding the world, all of which are right and all of which are wrong. They are right, when taken together with the rest; they are wrong when used as the only lens through which to interpret the world. Of course, reductionism is simple and easy; understanding our complex social reality as a set of interacting spontaneous orders and organizations is, well, complex and difficult. It is far easier to be a reductionist of some kind than to even acknowledge the true complexity of the world.

Of course, those of us who are interdisciplinarians have to live with the fact that we are going to be misunderstood by the reductionists, who are always going to accuse us of reductionism when we provide evidence from an other other than the one they most prefer. The libertarian reductionist of all to market economics is going to look on me with distrust when I suggest there are political economies and gift economies as well as market economies. The postmodernist power reductionist who politicizes everything (in the worst sense of the term) can make no sense of my objection that not everything is power. They are also not too keen on scientific explanations. And the scientific reductionists, who reduce everything to math and physics, don't really think emergentist science is in fact real science. And philosophers, who are the ultimate in pursuing understanding, are the most stringent in rejecting knowledge-based science. Sadly, they equally misunderstand the social sciences, which are forms of understanding and, thus, more similar to philosophy than to the physical sciences.

All of this makes one-on-one conservations difficult for an interdisciplinarian. We are going to draw on evidence and understanding from a variety of disciplines and areas of life, and those who view things through one or even a few narrow perspectives are always going to object to those outside their perspectives and accuse the interdisciplinarian of having a narrow perspective when they do not, just because they offer arguments from outside the reductionists' perspective. The interdisciplinarian does somewhat better in writing, where they can bring scientific knowledge and philosophical understanding and mathematical idealism and real world evidence and artistic presentation together into a single work more easily. This, however, does not prevent some people from objecting that they simply don't know what it is that you do.

Criticisms of Libertarianism

If the powers-that-be feel the need to attack you, that's probably a good thing. After all, they will only attack you if they think you are strong enough to challenge them. This bodes well for libertarianism as a movement.

Of course, there are going to be criticisms that range from ridiculous smear pieces long on accusations and short on direct proof to more legitimate criticisms, as outlined by Jacob Levy. Yes, there are subsets of stupid ideas in libertarianism, broadly understood. There are Confederate apologists and conspiracy theorists, but probably no more than one would find among conservatives or leftists, respectively (they seem larger in such a small movement).

To my mind, you cannot be a libertarian and believe in either the rightness of the Confederacy or conspiracy theories. The former accepts the equation between oppression and agricultural socialism, and liberalism -- as though those can ever be reconciled. The latter accepts that order is created by powerful elites (in this they agree with the socialists), only they don't want the socialists' order. I say this latter is un-libertarian because libertarianism argues that social order emerges naturally from human social interactions. To argue otherwise is un-libertarian, un-liberal.

There also seems to be a notion that libertarianism has only been around since the early 1970s. In the contemporary American parlance, this is technically true. This is what allows people like the one I linked to in the first link to claim that if Rothbard was a racist, and Rothbard helped found libertarianism, therefore libertarianism was founded by a racists and, thus, in racist ideas. I don't want to get into whether or not "Rothbard was a racist" is in fact a truth statement; rather, I want to get into the foundations of libertarianism. While it is true that one can point to a literal date for the foundation of the Libertarian Party and, thus, make an argument that this is the foundation for libertarianism, doing so ignores the fact that libertarianism has its true foundations in classical liberalism -- in the ideas of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, et al. Classical liberalism generally opposed aristocratic government and supported democratic self-governance, opposed government interference in people's lives, including the economy, and supported the liberation of women, slaves, and other oppressed peoples. This carried over into the foundations of libertarianism, because in a real sense, libertarianism is a postmodern continuation of classical liberalism (this fact may in fact be the problem with it).

Let me make it clear what it is libertarians support.

Libertarians support the free movement of people -- we do not think people should be condemned by the accident of their birth to economic destitution and oppression. Thus, libertarians support open borders and free immigration. It should be difficult to argue that this is a racist policy. It is support for immigration restrictions which is racist and unjust.

Libertarians support drug legalization and ending the War on Drugs. Given that the War on Drugs grossly disproportionately targets minorities (despite the fact that whites are no less likely to use them), libertarians are supporting a policy that will overwhelmingly benefit those minorities being targeted by our legal system. It is support for the War on Drugs which is racist and unjust.

Libertarians support equality under the law and the rule of law. Special privileges for any group is a violation of both of these and leads to group conflict. Favoring one group over another is unjust. And if the groups are racial groups, it's racist; if the groups are men and women, it's sexist; if the groups are one economic group or another, it's cronyist. In all cases, we see collectivism at work. Racism and sexism are forms of collectivism, and libertarianism opposes collectivism. Libertarians think each person should be judged on their own merits.

Libertarians support eliminating the minimum wage, an idea originally developed by progressives because it would result in the unemployment of minorities. It continues to disproportionately affect minorities and teens. One result is that teens have a harder time finding employment, leaving them bored. Bored teenagers is a recipe for trouble.

The progressives may have abandoned the racist reasons progressives originally gave for their social policies, including support for the minimum wage, but they have not given up the social policies whose original intentions were to harm racial minorities and others progressives considered to be "undesirable" (eugenics was also a progressivist idea, and was only abandoned after their policy was adopted by Hitler, who demonstrated to the world what the eugenicists really wanted). It should be obvious to everyone that the libertarian opposition to government interference in people's lives would extend to racial, gender, and reproductive choices. There is nothing more un-libertarian than eugenics. Indeed, the early progressives' support for eugenics was an integral part of their opposition to classical liberalism in general, and free markets in particular.

I would also like to address the absurd dualism proposed by opponents of classical liberalism/libertarianism -- individualism vs. collectivism. Opponents of liberalism argue that if you support individualism, you oppose all forms of social living. This is reasonable if the only choices are individualism or collectivism. But this is simply not true. Yet, this is perhaps where a real division occurs between classical liberals and libertarians. Classical liberals reject the radical individualism that leads to collectivism of Rousseau and the progressives and postmodernists whose ideas derive from his. However, the libertarians are in fact rational constructivists, just like the progressives and neoconservatives. Rational constructivism can in fact lead one to support for free markets (Ayn Rand), fascism (Heidegger), or communism (Saretre). However, Hayek demonstrated the weakness of this position for classical liberalism. The strain of classical liberalism that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers sees people as social individuals -- we are always already a social species, and our individualism emerges out of our social interactions.

Classical liberals believe humans are social mammals and that collectivism in fact undermines society in all its aspects. Where classical liberals support the peaceful co-existence of the economy, democratic self-governance, religion, science, technological innovation, the arts, philosophy, philanthropy, etc., both neoconservatives and progressives seek to reduce all social interactions to the solitary collectivism of government control. All of the different orders listed are to be subsumed into the government -- with some of those orders utterly destroyed if necessary (i.e., the anti-religious tendency in progressivism or the anti-science tendency in neoconservatism -- and progressivism, when the science is inconvenient to their ideology). Too many libertarians, following this logic, tend to subsume everything into the market economy. They tend equally toward reductionism, only into the market order rather than the democratic one.

If we return to the issue of the Confederacy, we can see the problems with libertarians supporting it if we take a Gravesean view. The southern states were not liberal, but rather were aristocratic in nature. Thus their recreation of serfdom in slavery. This would put their psychosocial level as authoritative (4th level, or blue, for those who know the patterns), whereas classical liberalism would be 5th level (orange), and libertarianism/progressivism/neoconservatism/Existentialism/postmodernism would be egalitarian (6th level, green). I have argued before that the integrationist (2nd tier, 1st level; yellow) level is where you find bleeding heart libertarianism.

To return to the topic at hand, the aristocratic (and, thus, anti-liberal) south took on liberal rhetoric in order to try to make a case for their position (much the same way the progressives, to mask their support for racist policies, adopted the term "liberal" and much liberal rhetoric). Some of the collectivist arguments of the authoritative level are in fact attractive to those in the egalitarian level (thus, much neoconservative thought), and this is true of the postmodernist libertarians as well (the postmodernist element of libertarianism is why they have a tendency toward conspiracy theories, vs. classical liberals and bleeding heart libertarians, who reject such notions). This is no doubt why we can find supporters for neo-Confederacy ideas within libertarian circles.

This hardly means that, because one can find a few kooks in a movement that everyone in the movement are kooks. I mean, communists and socialists have hardly considered Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al as black stains on their ideas and movement. They even proudly wear shirts with the image of a sociopathic mass murderer and racist -- Che Guevara -- without a second thought. This is not a defense of our kooks; rather, it is to point out the utter hypocrisy of libertarianism's leftist opponents. Libertarians would do well to reject the kooks. I myself reject the idea of a "big tent" if by "big tent" that means welcoming apologists for the Confederacy and conspiracy theorists. Those people should not be welcome. Those people harm the movement and prevent it from being taken seriously by many more people. I would like to argue that those people aren't even libertarians. In the case of Confederacy apologists, I would argue they are not. Sadly, the conspiracy theorists -- a group we share with the postmodern left and neoconservatism -- are, as least in the postmodernist sense, libertarians. But they are not classical liberals -- nor bleeding heart libertarians. If I am any of the above, I would consider myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Or, perhaps, more complex than that -- a complexity realist.

A Few Observations on Misanthropy

How many ideologies, world views, philosophies, theologies have some element of misanthropy underlying them? Why is that? Why is it so common? This element of so much thought is the source of so much evil in the world. Why does it constantly recur?

There was a time when socialists truly believed that socialism was a more efficient way of organizing the economy. However, since it was definitively proven otherwise, socialists no longer use economic arguments, and rather use arguments of fairness. More, they insist that everyone conform to their values. They think that people who have made free choices are nevertheless exploited. This suggests that these people are stupid, dupes. Anyone who thinks others are victims when they are in the position they are in due to their own free choices has a low opinion of those people. That is misanthropy.

Regulators -- including those who favor minimum wage laws -- think that people are otherwise too stupid, too rotten, too gullible to be left to their own devices. That is misanthropy.

Welfare statists think that unless the government takes care of you, you will die in the streets, so stupid, selfish, and incompetent you are. That is misanthropy.

Regulators of personal behavior -- formerly only associated with social conservatives, but increasingly associated with progressives as well -- think that you cannot make good choices for yourself, in your own private life. You have to have someone to make you live right, or else you will only ever do evil. That is misanthropy.

Anyone who thinks that without legislation, we will only ever do evil to each other, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks that people are basically evil is a misanthropist. 

Anyone who "loves mankind," but then hates particular people because they never meet that person's ideals, is a misanthropist.

Anyone who thinks others to be incompetent, evil, or needing to be reformed just because they don't share their particular values or value rankings is a misanthropist.

Anyone who wants to control some one or some group holds that person or people in contempt. They are misanthropists. If you support government regulation, you want to control people. When you support welfare, you think people incompetent to live their lives and make good choices. You want to regulate people into supporting your values. That is dehumanizing, tribalistic, misanthropic. 
 

If you want to reform humanity, if you want to try to make everyone conform to your world view, if you want to re-educate people to fit your mold, if you want to "improve" mankind, then you hate mankind -- you are a misanthropist.

If you think your group is better than another group, you are a misanthropists. Indeed, this is the true source of misanthropy -- tribalism drives it -- tribalists see their group as good, human the other as evil, subhuman. In our global humanity, collectivism of this sort, derived from tribalism, is the source of misanthropy. This is the source of the idea that there ought to be a rule of the best -- aristocracy -- to rule those who cannot rule themselves. Of course, if you think others cannot rule themselves, you hold those people to be lower than you, you pity them. You only pity those you hold in contempt. Pity and compassion/sympathy are quite different. Pity is aristocratic and misanthropic; compassion/sympathy is equalitarian and philanthropic. 

The true philanthropist loves people for who they are, respects people for who they are, believes people to be competent to act and decide for themselves, embraces people in their true diversity -- even while rejecting misanthropy and misanthropic ideologies, world views, and philosophies.

I Find It Odd . . .

I find it odd that when I argue that nobody -- including me -- can know enough to control the economy, or even to create regulations the true outcomes of which we can know, that the people who think they can have such knowledge accuse me of arrogance.

I find it odd that there are people who really think that if you give people power and weapons that they won't use them against you, to force you to live as they wish, and become corrupt.

I find it odd that there are people who think that what is immoral/unjust for one person to do is moral/just for a group of people to do, so long as that group of people call themselves a government.

I find it odd that there are people who simultaneously think everyone ought to conform to their values and think they in any way support diversity.

I find it odd that people who support creationism in biology and cosmology often support evolution in economics, while many who support evolution in biology and cosmology often support creationism or intelligent design in economics and other areas of society.

I find it odd that support of an evolutionary, self-organizing network process view of society is seen as ideological and utopian, but an evolutionary, self-organizing network process of nature is seen by the same people as scientific.

Empathy, Moral Judgment, and Utilitarianism

There is more evidence that empathy plays a key role in making non-utilitarian moral judgments. This would seem to have two implications. One is that the more empathy one has, the lower one's utilitarian judgment, which may explain some aspects of libertarian vs. non-libertarian moral judgments, with libertarians tending to be more economically-literate utilitarians. (On the other side is Peter Singer's leftist utilitarianism -- with all the (in)famous conclusions that stem from it, which all become abundantly clear once you see how low in empathy he must be to be a utilitarian.) But it also explains why those who read a great deal of literature tend toward less utilitarian conclusions, even faced with economic facts.

I have argued that we should read more literature to become more empathetic to become more moral. It may seem odd, then, for a libertarian like myself to argue we need to read more literature. The above would seem to argue against reading literature and for reading economics books. However, as useful as utilitarianism is in economics, it's pretty much useless for face-to-face morality. How I should treat other people is not a utilitarian calculation. It's a moral judgment. And the more literature we read, the more kinds of people we learn to empathize with, and the better our moral judgments. We need both to live in the complex civil society in which we live.

Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today?

Econ Journal Watch asks Why Is There No Milton Friedman Today? That is, why are there no superstars of economics? One could perhaps ask the same things of a number of a number of fields. The sciences, including the social sciences, go through periods of "normal science" and periods of "revolutionary science." Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Paul Samuelson, J.M. Keynes, Mises, et al were of the generation of economics' revolutionary period. We have perhaps settled into the "normal science" era of economics.

We see this same thing in philosophy, with times of revolutionary creativity followed by scholasticism. We are clearly in the latter period in philosophy as well. And the same thing takes place in the arts. We went from the creativity of high modernism to the relative stagnation of postmodernism.

In each case, we see a transition from relative stability, as people work on the well-established problems, working out the details on the margins. But when people reach a certain point, where the models are no longer working to describe the world well, we get revolutionary periods, during which time we get the giants of the field. Milton Friedman was one such person, born and working at the right time.

Basically, this is a network effect. We expect this kind of punctuated equilibrium when there is a network.

References to My Work in Other Works

My article on "Egypt's Revolution and Higher Education" has been cited in a scholarly article, Daniel LaGraffe's "The Youth Bulge in Egypt: An Intersection of Demographics, Security, and the Arab Spring" in the Journal of Strategic Security. It has also been cited in Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East by Asef Bayat.

My more recent Pope Center piece, "Scientists and Engineers Need Literature" has been reposted at FreeThinkU.

"From Trivium to Trivality" was cited and commented upon at Community College Spotlight and ArmyEdSpace.

I'm still waiting to see my actual academic papers cited in academic papers, but I can't complain about my Pope Center pieces being so cited.

Spontaneous Orders are Naturally Occurring Processes

Humans discover far more than they invent. When we participate in spontaneous social orders, we participate in the discovery of knowledge, morals, and wisdom. But it very much goes against our arrogance as a species to admit that we are less inventors than discoverers. Humans did not invent property rights, markets, language, or morals. Rather, we have instincts for those things, which socially evolve in spontaneous orders.

As entrepreneurs, humans discover new ways of doing things that are more efficient and less expensive.

As scientists, humans discover the laws of science.

As participants in common law, we discover new laws (as legislators, humans invent legislation -- much of which is in direct violation of discovered common law). It is notable that discovered law abides by rule of law and equality under the law.

As participants in the moral order, we discover new morals. Indeed, morals are rooted in our sentiments (they are instinctual); at the same time, it is evidence our morals evolve over time. One can thus argue that morality is a discovery process, that we discover new morals, and, thus, expand our moral worlds.

We could not learn morals if we did not have a moral instinct. We could not teach morals if those we taught did not have a moral instinct. (Sociopaths are evidence of this.) If we did not have moral instincts (built in empathy and sympathy and a sense of justice), we could not have invented them. How would we know to? How would we know that the good is good to have?

The same is true of common law -- built as it is on our instinctual sense of justice and fairness. Legislation is merely the rigidification of law. It is legislators coming along and taking credit for what has already been discovered through common law (that is, for just legislation -- there is plenty of cronyist legislation which violates common law, equality under the law, and rule of law).

Free market economies are naturally occurring systems emergent from natural human interactions. The same is true of science, most of our institutions (property rights, family, etc.), morals, philosophy, religion, the arts and literature, technological innovation (the specific technologies are invented, but we have an instinct to invent, and we have a social order that rewards invention -- and not just economically), money, etc. The opposition to spontaneous social orders like market economies comes form the same psychological source as opposition to biological evolution and cosmological evolution. Humans evolved to associate order with an orderer. Theological creationists and intelligent designers think this is true of cosmological and biological evolution; social creationists and intelligent designers (who are oddly often a-theological) think this is true of social evolution.

Order requires a hands-on orderer, according to standard human psychology. This is why the fight to get widespread acceptance for evolutionary processes -- whether physical, biological, psychological, or social -- is ongoing.

Weak Bonds Make Spontaneous Orders Possible

In order for a spontaneous order to emerge, there has to be a predominance of weak social links over strong social links (of family, tribe, etc.). Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies notes that studies show

that creative persons have a strong desire to make their own judgments; this in turn is typically related to childhood opportunities for independence and novel experience. Often too there is a period of physical or social isolation in which these young persons become introduced to a vicarious community of the mind. Their IR [Interaction Ritual] chains become detached from the local circulation of mundane culture and from its pressures for local conformity. The lowering of ritual density is a prerequisite for innovation; but it must also be linked to the intermittent support of the rituals of intellectual communities to give it content and energy. (34)

 That is, the creation of weak links allow one to participate in a particular spontaneous order. Much of what Collins says above could be equally applied to participation in a number of other spontaneous orders, from philosophy to technology, from markets to art. Naturally, different emotional energies, cultural capital, and interaction rituals are at play in other orders -- but that's precisely why we need to understand each kind in its own terms.

Society Does Not Decide

One often hears the phrase "society decides," but among metaphors, this has to be one of the worst -- and most damaging. The reason for this is that "society" is not capable of making a decision. To be able to make a decision, you have to be able to choose among options, and society cannot choose any more than it can decide. To be able to choose and decide, one has to be able to have goals. That means the chooser/decider has to be a teleological entity. This would include any living being, with those having complex neural structures being able to make more complex choices and decisions. Humans, having the most complex neutral networks, are able to make the most complex choices and decisions.

"Society," however, is not a teleological entity. Social processes are ateleological. They do not have goals, make decisions, or choose anything. In this sense it is utter nonsense to say that "society decides" anything.

The reason this is important is that ideas like "market failure" are premised on the idea that the market is failing to provide something that "society decides" is important, but which no individual would be willing to pay for. Thus, the market is not acting optimally (according to equilibrium theory). The argument is that since such sub-optimal products exist which people need, but which nobody would pay for, government needs to step in and provide what "society decides" it, as a whole, needs. This gets us closer to understanding what is really meant when someone says "society decides" something.

What is really meant by "society decides" is "a democratic majority agrees" about a certain outcome. But democratic decision-making is hardly appropriate for a variety of social processes. If by "society," one means a democratic majority, then any number of market products produced for a minority market would be sub-optimal. After all, the raw materials that go into a product produced for a minority market could have gone into another being produced for a majority market. And competition for raw materials drives up prices, meaning products produced for minority markets drive up the price of products for majority markets.

But what is suboptimal at one time may be optimal at another, later, time -- when prices drop. Cell phones are a good example. "Society" did not want cell phones in the 1980s, when they first came out and were extremely expensive, but "society" certainly does now that they are cheap (and are literally tiny pocket computers). But "society" would not have had the cell phones we have now if "optimality" was at all at play at the level of society. The last thing we need to be worried about is optimal outcomes for society -- especially given the fact that real economies are not at equilibrium, but are in far-from-equilibrium states.

Markets do not fail, because 1) market failure is premised on the fact that an unrealistic equilibrium model does not match the far-from-equilibrium economic reality, and 2) society cannot decide anything. Even if we accept "society" meaning "majority," the market is not a democratic process in that way -- it is far, far better insofar as minorities are able to get what they want every bit as much as can the majorities in society. When "society decides," it is minorities of every imaginable kind who suffer. This is true even though society does not and cannot ever decide anything; it is true so long as people continue to believe that society does and can decide, because the same kinds of bad decisions are being made based on the belief that it can. Who is it making those decisions? Since it cannot be society, it has to be some self-appointed spokesman, who inevitably finds that society always decides whatever HE would decide.

Morals as Spontaneous Order

Morality is a spontaneous order. As such, we should expect it to have a variety of features found in self-organizing processes. One of these would be paradoxical tensions giving rise to complex rules:

Popular writers prefer to simplify things by describing the lives of chimpanzees either in Hobbesian terms, as nasty and brutish, or by stressing their friendly side, but in fact it's never one or the other. It's always both. If people ask how chimpanzees can possibly be called empathic, knowing that they sometimes kill one another, my return question is always whether by the same token we shouldn't abandon the whole notion of human empathy as well.

This duality is crucial. Morality would be superfluous if we were universally nice. What would there be to worry about if all that humans ever did was show sympathy for one another, and never steal, never stab someone in the back, never covet another's wife? This is clearly not how we are, and it explains the need for moral rules. On the other hand, we could design a zillion rules to promote respect and care for others, but they'd come to naught if we didn't already lean in that direction. They would be like seeds dropped onto a glass plate: without a chance of taking root. What permits us to tell right from wrong is our ability to be both good and bad. (Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist, 27)

In order for our complex moral rules to have evolved, we had to have already been both good and bad in our potential interactions.

We would also expect our morals to have emerged from the bottom-up:

The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover ultimately comes from religion. It doesn't really matter whether it is God, human, reason, or science that formulates these laws. All of these approaches share a top-down orientation, their chief premise being that humans don't know how to behave and that someone must tell them. But what if morality is created in day-to-day social interaction, not at some abstract mental level? (de Waal, 23)

 Hume argues that our morals emerge from our sentiments. I and de Waal agree. From this instinctual foundation, our moral systems are further developed in our daily social interactions with others. It is only after the fact, after these interactions have given rise to our moral orders and the institutions of those orders, that moral philosophers come along and theorize morality into higher levels of abstraction. This then works as eminent criticism of the moral order -- it thus has an effect, but it's not what truly drives the emergence of our complex moral rules.

Finally (for this post, at least), one would expect there to be a power law distribution of moral rules. Some moral rules are more important than others. We could probably place first degree murder at the very top as being the one worst thing one could do to another person. At the bottom, so to speak, would be all the various rules of etiquette -- there are many, and the worst reaction you will get from an incursion against them is a disapproving look from whoever noticed. I'm not going to proceed to give a power law ranking of all the other moral rules, as they are going to vary to a certain degree from place to place and from time to time. But we can probably get a general idea of the general rankings by considering all of the moral incursions that could have gotten you the death penalty vs. the fact that in places like the U.S., the only thing that can still get you the death penalty is first degree murder (and often it has to be accompanied by other crimes).

All of these elements suggest morality is a spontaneous order. Clearly more work needs to be done on this, but this seems a good place to start.

Status Prestige

The Edge has a new piece by Joseph Henrich on How Culture Drove Human Evolution. Given my interest in human social structures leading to social spontaneous orders, his comments on status are of particular interest:

Early work on human status just took humans to have a kind of status that stems from non-human status. Chimps, other primates, have dominant status. The assumption for a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status, but if you apply this gene-culture co-evolutionary thinking, the idea that culture is one of the major selection pressures in human evolution, you come up with this idea that there might be a second kind of status. We call this status prestige.

This is the kind of status you get from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area, and the reason it's a kind of status is because once animals, humans in this case, can learn from each other, they can possess resources. You have information resources that can be tapped, and then you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future. This causes you to focus on those individuals, differentially attend to them, preferentially listen to them and give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back, for copying opportunities in the future.

From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige, and these have quite different ethologies. Dominance [ethology] is about physical posture, of size (large expanded chest the way you'd see in apes). Subordinates in dominance hierarchies are afraid. They back away. They look away, whereas prestige hierarchies are quite the opposite. You're attracted to prestigious individuals. You want to be near them. You want to look at them, watch them, listen to them, and interact with them. We've done a bunch of experimental work here at UBC and shown that that pattern is consistent, and it leads to more imitation. There may be even specific hormonal profiles with the two kinds of status.

 The evolution of status prestige explains the emergence and roles of the shaman -- which itself evolved into priests, poets, singers, actors, etc. -- alongside the dominant status alphas. If we include good hunters, innovators of various sorts, entrepreneurs, etc., we can see an ever-expanding number of those who are able to gain status prestige. Further, as prestige status has come to dominate in humans, the dominance status individuals have had to learn to act more and more like status prestige individuals. This is where the cult of personality comes from in politics. And it is where the tension between a political (or business) leader both needing the people under him to both love and fear him comes from. Chimpanzee alphas who only have dominant status only need to ensure fear.

The dominance of prestige over dominance status is what makes complex spontaneous social orders possible. While there can be only one dominant alpha, one can gain prestige in one narrow area of life, and thus not have to compete with others for that prestige. Perhaps prestige status drove specialization; specialization, in turn, drove the emergence of ever more complex social structures. The emergence of this kind of prestige thus allowed humans to interact in increasingly complex ways with more and more people, until our spontaneous social orders emerged.

Read the entire piece. He provides support for spontaneous orders in general, free markets in particular, and why rule of law is important (and emerges). Of particular note is this observation about markets:

Markets require a great deal of trust and a great deal of cooperation to work. Sometimes you get the impression from economics that markets are for self-interested individuals. They're actually the opposite. Self-interested individuals don't specialize, and they don't take it [to market], because there's all this trust and fairness that are required to make markets run with impersonal others.

This is the argument supporters of free markets need to make.