On the Role and Responsibility of the Artists

Models, ideals, heroes are what create great individuals and great citizens. The role of the artist is to provide these models. The sculptures of ancient Athens provided the models for the citizens of Athens to emulate. The heroes of the tragedies and epics provides their models as well.

What models do our artists provide us? What images do our visual artists provide us? What models do our poets (which includes playwrights, novelists, and other storytellers) provide us? Are they ideals toward which we can aim? Or are they distortions? And what happens when you aim at a distortion? What will you hit if your aim is distorted?

Aristotle observed that virtue aims at the beautiful. Art provides models of the beautiful. This is why and how the arts provide us with models -- beautiful models -- at which we ought to aim. And we do. But how high are our models? How heroic? Or are they anti-heroes all too often? What happens when we aim at them?

Do the artists understand how important they are? It's doubtful. Too many artists go around without the least bit of understanding of the responsibility they have for what they are doing. They are providing everyone with models. What will happen to the arts when the artists understand how important they are, what is is that they do?

On the Polity (Or, Our Lack of One)

What kind of government do we find in the United States? Our knee-jerk answer is that we are a democracy. However, we are in fact a republic of democratically-elected  representatives. In a few cases, we are a democracy -- in those few cases where the populace votes on a law or amendment to a state constitution -- but for the most part we are a democracy only in the sense that we vote for our representatives.

And what are those representatives? Lawrence Hatab in A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy argues that they are our version of an "aristocracy." A beg to differ. The word "aristocracy" means "rule of the best," since aristos means "best." There is no evidence whatsoever that any of our elected officials are the best at anything other than pandering and lying. If they are not an aristocracy, what are they?

Rule by a small group of people is known as an oligarcy. We thus have a democratically elected oligarcy. While Aristotle argues that an oligarcy comes from the property owners and aristocracy comes from the educated (and the two are pretty much the same here in the U.S.), we can look to the values of our elected officials to determine if they are oligarchs or aristocrats. Anyone who thinks our elected officials truly support education are fooling themselves and are allowing themselves to be fooled by our elected officials. There is little question that our elected officials support the wealthy -- all of their actions and legislation is designed to protect their cronies from competition.

Aristotle also points out that "The end of democracy is freedom; of oligarchy, wealth; of aristocracy, the maintenance of education and national institutions; of tyranny, the protection of the tyrant."

Let us consider each of these in turn.

There is little question that we try, through our government, to support the creation of more and more freedom. There may be some arguments about what that freedom consists of, and there is little doubt that we have lost many freedoms -- especially economic freedoms and, especially since 9-11, many civil rights -- but we have also gained many, especially among women, minorities, and gays.

I would also argue that support of the wealthy is also very much in evidence. The actions of the government after the 2008 collapse demonstrate the government will go out of its way to protect the already-wealthy, especially direct cronies. Our regulations are all designed to protect the already-wealthy from competition, and to thus increase the accumulation of wealth among a few. Not coincidentally, those few are also the pool for our political candidates.

What we absolutely do not have is an aristocracy. Aristocrats would come from among the most educated, and there are few truly highly educated people in office (many have a great deal of schooling, and much of that schooling is from our elite schools, but schooling is hardly the same as education). This doesn't mean there aren't a few. We have had Ph.D.s in office. But they are rarer than those who are primarily wealthy. This is why we get a lot of lip-service regarding support for education, but no actual support for education (throwing money at a problem, which is an oligarchic solution, doesn't solve it -- it often makes problems worse). The support of change for the sake of change, which is literally the opposite of maintenance of national institutions, also suggests we do not have an aristocracy.

Now, as for tyranny, I think few would argue we have a tyranny. However, we should be concerned at the degree to which our government officials have created rules that are obviously designed to protect the re-election of each and every one of them.

What this suggests is that our government is in fact a democratic oligarchy with slightly tyrannical tendencies.

We should not be surprised, then, that our government, both Democrats and Republicans, seems almost exclusively concerned with the economy. And the existence of a market economy will in turn result in the support for oligarchy as well. That is a feature, not a bug. At the same time, free markets require freedom, meaning the participants in the market ought to support democracy. However, each business owner's self-interest is in the support of oligarchs who in turn support him.

Other spontaneous orders are fundamentally aristocratic in nature. The natural sciences, the social sciences, the arts, philosophy, math, technological innovation are all dependent upon education and healthy institutions. (The free market is also dependent upon healthy institutions, so there ought to be a support for an element of aristocracy as well from those in the market.) At the same time, each of these are most productive when the system has the most freedom, so again there is a need for democracy to keep them most productive. 

All of this suggests that there ought to be a government which is simultaneously democratic, oligarchic, and aristocratic. (We can do without tyranny, which is the most truly self-centered form of government.) Such a mixed government is a polity, which Aristotle saw as superior to a pure democracy. Coincidentally, the House of Representatives was meant to be oligarchic (not in the sense of working to concentrate their own wealth, but in supporting the conditions for wealth creation), while the Senate was supposed to be aristocratic. But with the direct election of Senators, that house of Congress too became an oligarchy (and have become the worst version of it, at that).

Unfortunately, it seems that more and more people are supporters of tyranny. We keep electing the same people, those same people have rigged the game to protect themselves, and we are more ruled by fear and threats than anything else. It is perhaps not coincidental that we keep moving more and more in this direction the more and more we embrace the philosophies of Rousseau and of the Germans, especially such people as Heidegger (a lifelong, unapologetic Nazi), whose ideas laid the groundwork for the Terror of the French Revolution (and the terrors of every emulator of the French Revolution) and for the rise of fascism, respectively. Here in the U.S. we have managed to combine Rousseauian leftism with Heideggerian fascism to create a kind of "liberal facism." Of course, there is absolutely nothing liberal about it, since both left and right are anti-liberal.

Thus we are moving in the wrong direction entirely. Aristotle argued that a polity is superior to a  democracy, an aristocracy is superior to an oligarchy, and a monarchy is superior to a tyranny. Yet, we are more democratic, more oligarchic, and more tyrannical than ever before. And we keep moving in this direction. We need to reverse course and become a polity again, with strong elements of democracy, oligarchy, and aristocracy (it may be too much to ask for our President to be a monarch, meaning wise and just in all decisions, but we should demand such from our Presidential candidates). But that means having a populace who actually values freedom, education, wisdom, and justice.

Law and/vs Legislation

Many arguments boil down to misunderstandings in terminology. It doesn't help that there are words that people treat as synonyms when the two terms really ought to be understood in quite different ways -- especially given certain uses of one of the words.

One such word is "law." It is unfortunate that "law" is so often confused with "legislation." I have gotten into some pretty stupid discussions based on this confusion. Especially when the leap is made from physical laws to legislation-termed-law.

What is the difference between a law and legislation?

A law is a consequence of interactions, what emerges in those interactions, giving rise to predictable regularities. They are the emergent rules. The physical laws certainly qualify. In addition, there are laws of chemistry, laws of biology, and social laws, including the common law and the laws of economics. In the latter case of social laws, they are a product of human action and are not created consciously. They are the emergent rules of the game. Some have absolute regularities because we are humans, because we are apes, because we are primates, because we are social mammals, because we are land vertebrates, and because we are living things. All of these contribute to the kinds of interactions in which humans are likely to engage (given they are relatively normal). The law of marginal utility is a consequence of our being simply alive.

Legislation is a conscious creation, and always has some sort of teleology -- some goal, or end-point. They are crafted by a particular individual or individuals with a certain purpose in mind.

Lawyers and judges are experts in both law and legislation, as not all laws (again, mixing the two terms) that need to be understood and judged are legislation. Common law also sometimes results in conflicts which need to be adjudicated.

In nature, when laws come into conflict, you get paradoxes -- which are in turn resolved by the emergence of new levels of complexity. The paradoxes of physics are resolved in the creation of atoms and ions -- in chemistry. The paradoxes of certain kinds of chemistry (organic) are resolved in the emergence of living organisms. Etc. The laws of society also result in paradoxes, which are resolved in the emergence of new institutions and new (or, at least, greatly clarified) spontaneous orders.

Legislation does not give rise to paradoxes. It gives rise to contradictions. Whereas paradoxes can "live together" and interact to give rise to greater complexity, contradictions cause system collapse and give rise to less complexity. The ideal legislative system would be one that did not have within it contradictions -- including, most importantly, contradictions with naturally emergent laws. Laws can never actually be violated; legislation can. In fact, often legislation must be violated for the society to continue to exist at all. One can only ever attempt to overturn laws; one cannot in fact overturn laws. Just ask the Soviets, who tried to overturn biological and social laws, with horrendous consequences.

The Arts and Humanities as Luxuries

The world is full of luxuries. I am not just talking about diamond rings and emerald broaches. I am talking about air conditioning and refrigeration. Automobiles and airplanes. Novels and paintings.

Yes, the arts and humanities are luxuries. Studying them is a luxury. Learning about them is a luxury. True, they turn you into a better, more moral, more well-rounded person, but those, too, are luxuries. They are luxuries of our incredible wealth. They are, therefore, luxuries created by capitalism.

I'm hardly saying that songs and stories and dancing and other arts are products of capitalism. That would be stupid. The arts have existed for as long as there have been human beings -- with speech came these arts (though dancing goes as far back as territorial fishes). In many ways they are anything but luxuries -- they are always necessarily a part of being human. But in many ways, being human is itself a luxury. Humans have a lot of free time, created by our intelligence, social orders, and ability to speak.

But of course the more free time we have, the more time we have for luxuries. If we are finding ourselves with less time for luxuries -- like the arts and humanities -- this is perhaps an indication that something is wrong with our society, with our economy. Over time we ought to have more time for such luxuries. More people should find themselves in the position to study the arts and humanities. And yet we don't. Those who major in such fields are finding fewer and fewer jobs in their fields.

Ironically, it seems that as those who study the arts and humanities continue to succeed at getting their ideologies realized in American society, the fewer and fewer jobs there are for people who study the arts and humanities, and the fewer and fewer people even go into the arts and humanities.

Is this a case of biting the hand that feeds you? Probably. The more progressive ideas are implemented in our society, the more and more our society becomes a rat race for the vast majority of us. And that leaves less and less time for the arts and humanities. And, I suspect, less and less money to spend on them as well. If you have to spend all of your time working just to fall farther and farther behind, you find less and less time for higher values. Isn't it ironic that those who preach higher values are creating a society in which one cannot pursue them?

Justice as Getting What You're Owed

Justice is getting what is owed for what is done.

This definition of justice makes it active, the result and consequence of action.

If you take from someone -- money, life, etc. -- then you owe what you have taken, plus retribution for engaging in a violent act.

Trade is therefore necessarily just, as you are paying your debt immediately upon receipt of what is given you. More, since no trade takes place unless both parties perceive themselves better off, there is an element of gift in mutual trades that makes it a form of generosity beyond justice. Mutual trade is therefore more than merely just.

You only have to use threats to get a trade if the other party does not perceive themselves as better off from the interaction. Truly just taxation would therefore never require threats; people would voluntarily give if they were persuaded they would be better off from the transaction. If your knee-jerk response is that not enough would donate, that simply means you are too lazy or unintelligent to think of anything other than force.

Working for a wage is therefore just, since you are getting what is owed you for the work you have done for the person. One can make plenty of arguments in favor of worker-owned businesses, but justice is simply not one of them. However, we can see that slavery is always necessarily unjust, since the slave is not given what is owed him for the work being done, by definition.

This definition of justice also means that welfare is not just, since those receiving it are doing so despite having done nothing for it -- or, precisely because they are doing nothing. Arguments for welfare or negative income taxes or basic income guarantees must therefore come from someplace other than a position of justice. There might be plenty of pragmatic reasons for supporting such programs, but justice is, from the above definition, not one of them. You are not owed anything simply for existing. You are owed things only when you have incurred a debt in someone else. We may prefer living in a society in which everyone receives a basic income guarantee (or not), but one cannot make the argument from the position from justice. As for where you get the money from, that of course may involve questions of justice. See above, on taxation.

This definition of justice also connects justice to morality in a way I have not before found. Ought is the past tense of "to owe." Further, "to owe" is related to "own," showing the connection between ownership, owing, and ought. Thus, we see the connection between ownership and justice -- without ownership, there can be no justice. One cannot steal without ownership.

The libertarian idea of self-ownership also then tells you, with this definition, that murder, rape, assault, and slavery are all forms of injustice. Since you are taking what another owns, you owe them. You owe them more than its worth when you use force, because the person would not have made the gains from trade.

None of this negates in the least our instinctual feelings of injustice towards these things. It provides a rational explanation of them, is all. Our feelings that we are being treated unjustly in this or that circumstance stems from an understanding that we are not being given what we owe. Now, that does not mean that just because we feel someone owes us something that that is the case. We can be wrong about what others owe us. People who feel like "the world owes" them something are wrong. Particular people or organizations owe them, if anyone does.

More, nobody owes you more than what you agreed to receive. So, for example, if you get hired someplace at a given wage, and the person hiring you says you will get a raise after a year, then you are owed a raise after that year. The person truly would be acting unjustly if they refused to give you that raise, or if they conveniently found a reason to fire you to avoid paying you more. But if they did not, then you are not owed a raise -- or a promotion, for that matter. The decision by your employer to do so is therefore extra, a gift for doing more than what you had agree to do. But gifts by definition do not require reciprocation, so even if you give more than you said you would, that does not mean the other is necessarily obliged to reciprocate with a raise or promotion. Of course, one should not be surprised if one doesn't retain workers for long with that attitude. No one said there wouldn't be consequences to your actions. But one should not judge those actions as unjust if the gift is not reciprocated -- or just, if the gift is reciprocated.

A gift therefore goes beyond what one is owed. You are not owed technological advances, art, scientific discoveries, or philanthropy. Nor are you owed the social wealth created by the market. Those are gifts above and beyond anything you are owed. Acts of mutual trade are just, because each is getting what is owed; and to the extent that each is getting more, there is also an element of gift involved as well. Mutual trade is thus both just and more than just. All of the advances in science, technology, and wealth creation in our society are therefore  gifts freely given by the invisible hand. In the case of science, art, and technology, from others' obsessions.

These are a few of the implications of this definition of justice. Certainly more needs to be done to tease out the implications of the definition -- and to justify the definition itself.

Will 2020 Be a Major Turning Point?

I keep thinking about Peter Turchin's cliodynamics approach to the study of history and his discovery of two cycles in history, the shorter of which occurs on a 50-year cycle. This shorter cycle is one of political violence, with the last occurring around 1970, and the one before that around 1920. We forget the political violence of 1920 (and 1870, after the Civil War), but the political violence of 1970 is fresher. However, we now have a generation for whom this is ancient history -- if they know of it at all -- meaning they are ignorant enough to repeat history.

History is due for repeating in 2020. And the conditions are here. Turchin argues that political violence arises when there is an overproduction of elites. The problem isn't necessarily that these elites cannot get jobs. Those with college or especially grad school have lower levels of unemployment than do those with only a high school education. However, what unemployment figures don't show are those who graduate from college and attend grad school because they cannot find a job, and they do not show the misallocation of human resources that occurs when a person with a degree in X cannot find a job doing X. Sometimes the thing they do is much more valuable than what they went to school for, but more often that is not the case.

What is worse is more and more jobs require college degrees -- not because anyone needs a college degree to do the job, but because having a college degree allows the employers to discriminate based on intelligence and general abilities. This means that fewer without college degrees can get jobs. Increases in the minimum wage only exacerbate the problem, cutting off the bottom rung of the ladder of success. The only way you can reach the new bottom rungs is if you spend a ton of money getting training (college). Thus, you end up standing on a pile of debt to reach the bottom rung to get employed. You end up worse off, because you have to pay that debt back, and that ends up being a reduction in your income for all practical purposes.

So you have a bunch of people who have college degrees doing things that they know should not require college degrees. This creates resentment among the college educated. And those same people have the education to fully understand what they feel, and they have some sense of who to blame (given how far left the universities lean, guess who that may be?). At the same time, there are more and more doing well -- which seems like a good thing, except that people who are very wealthy tend to get into politics with that money. Thus there is more and more competition for the same number of seats. Even though there is almost no differences in ideology, you get deeper divisions in rhetoric, increased tribalism between the major parties.

The kinds of violence we have seen in the past have been things like terrorist bombings and mass shootings (one or few against many) -- things we have in fact seen on the rise. Prior to the 1970s, there were also lynchings (many against one or a few) -- which we can be thankful are on the wane, and which we can hope remains there. We may also see more riots (many against many) and even assassination attempts (one or few against one or few). We have begun, I think, to see more riots -- mostly in response to police actions against citizens. Police actions are often a reflection of the political environment, and people's opposition to government actions are going to find their expression in conflicts with police first.

Several things are driving these dynamics.

Many places are increasing the minimum wage, which is making it harder and harder for those with low skills to get jobs. This is creating a permanently unemployed underclass with a lot of time on their hands and who are trained by the social workers they deal with to cheat the system (don't qualify? just say x, y, and z and we can qualify you!). People with a lot of free time have time to get into trouble. Add to this a war on drugs, and you have a situation where the police are going to be in constant conflicts with the poorest in society. A group who feels life isn't treating them fairly find themselves abused by the police as well, meaning by the government (who is abusing them at every turn, especially when it tries to help them).

Artificially low interest rates on student loans strongly contributes the the increase in those going to college, which in turn drives up the cost of college, which in turn drives up the need to get a loan to attend. That money doesn't go to university professors, by the way, but to administrators -- to a mandarin class. In fact, more and more university professors are part-timers not making enough to get by. So long as the students side with administrators, these injustices will continue unabated, but what will happen if and when students switch sides, realizing it is the administrators who are the enemy and the professors who are the allies? You never know when that will take place. You just need a tipping point.

We have people who are going to college to get debt, unable then to get the kind of job they expected, and finding their real income is lower than they expected, because of what they owe in college debts (which they cannot get out from under because of federal law). Further, colleges are not designed to produce entrepreneurs who become wealthy as a result, but rather homogenous workers for already-established businesses who remain in the struggling middle class all their lives.

This is all a lot of potential conflict just bubbling under the surface, ready to boil over. Turchin suggests that things can be done to counteract these things. Most of them will be psychological in nature rather than changes that will fix anything. At the same time, I have to wonder.

Student loans consist of over $1 trillion in debt. With an average of $30,000/student. That's a lot of debt. If you are in debt, you are not just a have-not. You have less than zero, in a real sense. Only if you can manage to pay everything off will it have been worth it. But will you?

Health care spending is around $3 trillion. The health care system consists of over 17% of the economy. That's ridiculous and absurd. Health care spending, like university tuition rates, has gone up much, much, much faster than the rate of inflation. Which means both are in bubbles, like housing was in a bubble leading in to the 2008 crash.

Housing bubbles result in recessions and depressions. Investor bubbles result in stock market crashes. Higher education bubbles result in revolution.I have no earthly idea what a health care bubble bursting will look like. But given the size of the economy it has taken (and given that housing is also around 17% of the economy), it can't be good. Meanwhile, we are reinflating housing.

We can further add to Turchin's 50 year cycle the 60 year cycle of Kondratieff, who showed the economy goes through boom-bust cycles (because, again, we don't seem to learn anything). Coincidentally, the depression of the K-cycle ends this time in . . . 2020.

Analogues Between Biological and Cultural Evolution

The question of how and whether culture really evolves in a way similar to organisms is a common one among those who study culture. For some of us, it is obvious that it does; for others, the connection to anything that reeks of biology is enough to reject the idea without further consideration. Those in the latter camp have a strong tendency to assume that those trying to understand culture from an evolutionary perspective are engaging in "Social Darwinism," although there is nothing remotely Darwinian in Social Darwinism (though there is a lot of Progressivism in it).

There are likely others who reject the connection because they mistakenly think an evolutionary perspective is necessarily reductionist in nature. But this is hardly the case. Evolution has created more and more complex organisms; why wouldn't it also give rise to more and more complex -- or at least changing -- cultures as well? And why wouldn't it give rise to something (humans) that could change even faster than biological evolution could manage, if doing so were an adaptive advantage? Evolution involves change based on a variety of changes of the original -- those changes can be random "errors," changes in regulatory regions, recombinations, etc. We can understand these things in biological/genetic or human terms. In either case, something changes in the information held and communicated. It doesn't matter if that information is held in DNA or brain structures.

We are familiar with DNA mutations -- and the fact that our DNA has mechanisms to fix most errors. But DNA can change in a large variety of ways. Genes can jump around. Stretches of DNA can be copied over and over and over and reinserted. Chromosomes can be recombined. Regulatory regions can receive changes -- methyl groups added to cytosine, sometimes adenine -- to turn genes on and off. Etc. All of these affect how information is communicated in the cell, how it is expressed, and how it affects not just the cell, but the entire organism in multicellular organisms.

But humans do the same exact thing. That is the point of this article, and of an article I coauthored with Euel Elliott.We know that humans make errors when they process information. No matter how well an author communicates, no matter how clearly an author writes, there will always be people who misunderstand what they are saying. We have all read books, talked to others about them, and wondered if they read the same thing we did. And there is little doubt the author would wonder if we read the book they wrote. These errors result in discussions, refinements, new things being written, etc. The history of philosophy is likely the history of these kinds of errors taking place.

Elliott and I focus in our paper on recombinations -- or, in Matt Ridley's words, "ideas having sex." Most technological innovations are attempts to recombine different things. Sometimes they result from errors (many scientific discoveries involve errors -- like the discovery of penicillin). Sometimes it just involves an increase in "regulation" -- production -- such as mass production. (The evolution of the human brain seemed to be mostly driven by increased production of certain brain proteins, meaning the change was a regulatory one.)

Thus, we can readily find analogues between biological evolution and cultural evolution.

Awe, Altruism, Guilt, and Tragedy

There is more evidence for the connection between the feeling of awe and the development of altruism. I already discussed this here and here.

The new article points out that we feel awe in the presence of religion, art, and music. I discussed the role of tragedy (which was religious musical art) in creating awe, and Nietzsche discussed the role of music in tragedy. Tragedy was no doubt part of the reason Athens was such a unified society. Athens was also likely one of the first authoritative societies, something we would see in the Roman Empire and most fully in Medieval Christian Europe (also in places like Confucian China). Awe was created in different ways in each society -- the Emperor in Imperial Rome and Confucian China, God in Medieval Europe, and perhaps with the tragedies in Athens -- but its centrality was an important aspect of each.

This also implies that guilt is an important aspect of the awe-altruism connection. I have already discussed the role of tragedy in the emergence of guilt. 

If You Want to Learn, Read and Visit, But Do Not Study or Go to School

According to this study from 2001, if you want to do well in school, school itself is not going to help you that much. What will help you? Overwhelmingly, reading. Reading is the most strongly correlated with your ability to engage in letter-word comprehension, passage comprehension, applied problems, and calculation. The same is true of visiting, market work, and church attendance, though to a much lesser degree. Market work, though, is strongest of the three. And eating together as a family is strongly correlated with doing better in all four areas as well.

Having a hobby and doing art are positively correlated with strong letter-word comprehension and passage comprehension. Playing sports is positively correlated with applied problem solving. Conversation is correlated with passage comprehension and, oddly, calculation. There is a slight negative correlation between conversation and letter-word comprehension, but that might simply be because talkers won't shut up long enough to read anything.

I think it should bother everyone that attending church makes you better able to do all of these things than does attending school.

Attending school and studying seem to have only slightly positive, but almost negligible effects. 

And don't worry too much about T.V. But do worry that your kids aren't getting enough sleep. 

What does this all say? 

This suggests to me that if one had a school setting in which reading for comprehension (rather than words per minute, which is a stupid criterium) was encouraged, in which visiting and conversation were encouraged, students were encouraged to do art and hobbies, and in which students were encouraged to work and play sports, you would have an ideal learning environment.

Wait? Isn't that the Montessori method I just described?

If Having a Loving Family is an Unfair Advantage...

There are some things that are so incredibly wrong-headed, it's bizarre that the thought ever crossed anyone's mind. Such is almost every premise underlying the article Is Having a Loving Family an Unfair Advantage?

The title should tell you everything. While I do think there are some advantages to asking truly fundamental questions such  as "are families really necessary?" at the same time, the reason for the reasoning is questionable at best. The philosophers think that having a good family provides you with unfair advantages in life. Of course, if you think that, I think you have a pretty perverse sense of both "unfair" and "advantage." While the authors do come to the conclusion that the dissolution of the family would do more social harm than good (thank goodness they're not complete morons!), they still make the basic argument that if you are doing things like reading to your children at bedtime, then you are conferring an unfair advantage to your children -- about which you should be concerned!

The assumption is that we ought to try to hobble ourselves and our children. If there weren't family dynamics benefits to reading at bedtime, they would welcome its abolition because of the social advantages it confers. They have read "Harrison Bergeron" and decided it was a how-to story rather than a criticism of their fundamentally evil motives.

The primary advantage to reading the article is to find out what we all ought to support. We all ought to be reading to our children every night, and we all ought to send our children to private schools. The common sense thing to do is to find out what these contemptible idiots think confer "unfair" advantages, and try to bring it to everyone. They would raze the forest rather than see a single tree rise above the canopy.

The problem with education is America’s contempt for teachers

Yesterday I had an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, Troy Earl Camplin: The problem with education is America’s contempt for teachers. The response has been phenomenal. Almost thirty emails from around the country. Sixty comments online. Can't want to see if there are any letters to the editor.

The vast majority of responses have been positive. Many people thanking me for saying what they were thinking, what was a sort of vague notion, or were afraid to say. Of course, this attitude arose for a variety of reasons, and the problems with education are more varied than this one thing, but I think this is a major component, and it's something nobody else has brought up. 

Those Who Defend the Rules

The vast majority of human activities can be understood as games. Games have rules and they have fields of play (game boards, etc.). This is why game theory is useful in understanding social interactions, including economics. Still, much work needs to be done on how actual rules result in actual actions in actual social situations, including how different combinations of rules give rise to different outcomes.

Different rules give rise to different games. Chess and checkers are both played on the same board, meaning there is a degree of rule similarity between the two games. However, different pieces and different rules create considerably different games, with chess being an unsolvable game, while checkers has already been solved. It is possible to change the rules of chess to make is solvable, but that would simplify the game and make it a less interesting game.

I have made the argument that chess is a "better" game than checkers precisely because the former is more complex and unsolvable. Yet, I have had checkers players insist checkers is better. Of course, in a certain sense chess is hardly better than checkers, since we are really comparing two different games with different rules. Both are good games, as demonstrated by the popularity of each.

The insistence of checkers players who don't know how to play chess that checkers is a better game points to a fact about human nature. People who have mastered a game will defend that game. They will defend that game against any kind of rule change that might "improve" the game.

Given this fact, we should never expect politicians to favor political reforms that affect how they play the game -- unless they think the rule changes will benefit themselves, of course. Currently elected politicians are good at playing the game as it stands -- they have proven themselves effective at getting elected and at getting things done. Along these lines, we shouldn't expect those who run large businesses to favor rules changes that much affect how their game is played. They will favor whatever game keeps them playing, and they will favor rule changes that improve the game for them.

We can take this to pretty much any social game. Take our universities. Those who are successful at playing the game of getting tenured or tenure-track positions will defend the system they have proven to be successful at playing. I have actually seen people who challenge the economic and political rules because of the injustices created by those rules turn around and defend equally unjust university rules. Their insights into human nature and the problems with institutions when it comes to political economy suddenly dissolve when making the same analysis for the university system in which they have been successful.

One can only conclude that they are defending the system in which they have succeeded because that is simply what all people who play a particular game tend to do. We defend the rules of whatever game at which we find ourselves successful. We cannot expect reform to come from such people. Reforms must always come from outside.

Some Thoughts on Injustice

My daughter likes to say that "It's not fair!" when we tell her to do something and we don't make the same demand on the 5 and 3 year old. Like many people, she equates "fair" with "equal" in the absolute sense. She fails to recognize (being 8, she has an excuse) that different abilities results in different expectations. She can do more than the other two, so we expect more from her. And when each of the boys are 8, we will expect them to do what we expected her to do at 8. Of course, she'll be 11 when Daniel is 8, and 13 when Dylan is 8, so we'll expect yet more from her than we will her 8 year old brothers.

Of course, since it is her mother and I who are the dispensers of duties and, thus, dispensers of justice, there is at least some sense in her seeking justice from us in our distribution of those duties. It makes less sense for me to complain about the injustice of my own situation, since there is not anyone in particular treating me unjustly.

I have little doubt that many would consider it "unjust" that I spent so much time and money getting a Ph.D., and I have been unable to get a full time job with it -- longer than the 1 year lecturer position I had at UNT-Dallas (where there may have been injustices committed against me, given that particular people were doing particular things against me). It is not unjust that I haven't been able to get a full time position. No one is actively preventing me from getting a full time position, so there is no justice nor injustice involved.

The same is true of others who cannot get jobs or who cannot get the jobs they want. There is no "economic injustice" in someone not being able to get a good job. One has neither a right to a particular job nor a right to any job at all. Thus, an injustice cannot be committed against you if a given job is not offered to you.

Why then do I sometimes feel like my situation is "unjust"? I know intellectually that there is no way that it can be considered unjust, but sometimes I just feel like it is. I feel like I have a great deal to offer, and that I'm being underutilized by society. But of course, society cannot utilize, as it cannot act nor make decisions. Those are the actions of individuals. But those individuals make decisions based on knowledge and understanding they gained socially. Generally held attitudes about people with Ph.D.'s, people with degrees in the humanities, people who unconsciously behave as I do, etc. affect my ability to get a job. The fact I didn't graduate from a top 10 university affects whether or not I even get considered for the handful of academic positions out there -- which is one reason why I abandoned even trying to get an academic position. Is it just that people blindly accept the superiority of those who graduated from Harvard and Yale? It is a cognitive bias, no doubt, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it "unjust" -- even if it is short-sighted, narrow, prejudiced, and homogenizing to our universities.

We need to reserve the term "injustice" for actions individuals perpetuate against individuals. And those actions should involve the violation of a person's right not to be directly harmed. Let's face it, any job will be given to one person and not to many, many others. That doesn't mean that vast majority have been treated unjustly, since what happened to them was incidental to the fact that only one person can get the job. And there are always criteria for getting a job, so one cannot have been treated unjustly if one doesn't meet those criteria (stated and unstated). You cannot but end up in an absurd situation otherwise.

Should and Ought

Any time someone says, "You should...", you should always ask "if?" Every "should" implies an "if." For example, if it is raining out, and you want to go outside, and I say "You should take an umbrella," there is an implied "if you don't want to get wet from the rain." Naturally, if you do want to get wet from the rain, then you should not take an umbrella.

We too often forget that every "should" implies an "if." You should be nice to people. If what? The federal government should (not) raise the minimum wage. If...? What is your goal? Can you meet that goal by doing the "should"? The shoulds of morality always imply a goal one is trying to reach, and one should always know what that goal is and the best way to reach that goal if you are sincere about reaching the goal and not just about looking good to the right people.

Equally, every "ought" implies that you owe someone something. If you "ought" to do X, that implies that you owe someone something for which doing X will pay the debt. You ought to be nice to grandma. Why? What do you owe her? Life, for one. And probably that sweater she gave you for Christmas. Whether you like that sweater or not, she got it for you, and you owe her at least thanks and being nice and gracious to her for thinking of you and trying to get you something nice.

That is a "simple" ought, but it gets to what underlies all oughts. You ought not lie. To whom do you owe not lying? Many of these are social rules, cultural rules. To what do you owe civil society? To what do you owe your culture? The oughts of our cultures and civil societies are what we owe them for the lives and beliefs we have.

What Is My Self?

The continuity of my personality is an illusion created by the interpretations of my memories, which are re-membered in the context of who I am now, by who I am now. The present self is thus always informed by that past self, which is transformed by the present self. This complex feedback loop creates the conditions for the emergence of an integrated personality from the fragments of my past and current selves. All of this is of course built upon genetic tendencies, the relative strength or weakness of memory, the relative and periodic recall of those memories, and one's social context. Different environments can call forth different selves -- as husband, father to each of three children, teacher, friend, employee, etc., I am a different person. A different person, but not unrelated to the others -- what differs is emphasis and the memory resources on which one draws, recalled in the appropriate contexts.

Given that we are the stories we tell ourselves to ourselves, meaning we are always in a position of interpreting and editing our stories about ourselves, it may be appropriate to view our selves as hermeneutic selves. The remembrance of things past is always fragmented and interpreted. How we interpret ourselves to ourselves (and thus present ourselves to others) can either be habitual (they way we have typically done it, which is familiar and comfortable, even if it may not be the best interpretation possible) or consciously chosen. If I tell a story to myself of myself as a loser, I'll act in ways that will fulfill that interpretation. But if I tell a story to myself of myself as someone on the pathway to success, I'll act in ways that will fulfill that interpretation. Confidence matters.

It is unlikely that successful people think or thought of themselves in negative terms. Without a supreme sense of self-confidence, you cannot be successful. Self-confidence is a story you tell yourself about yourself. So, too, is arrogance, self-loathing, depression, courageousness, etc. Each of these are interpretive stances one takes regarding one's self, tying all of the fragments, past and present, together into a whole. We inform our inform selves into a coherent form that flows from moment to moment, context to context, with occasional discontinuities if we have to jump into an atypical situation. Feelings of confusion emerge at such times, when you don't know what situation you are in, or if you are getting contradictory information about how to act or react.

So in a sense the sense that we are a unified self is an illusion, but in another sense, we are a unified sense, because we interpret ourselves into a coherent self. Our interacting fragments give rise to a coherent self in the same way interacting biomolecules give rise to a coherent, living cell. Both are maintained through constant change and through constant interactions with the environments in which they find themselves. We are and are not coherent selves; we are interpreted selves, which brings coherence to the incoherent. Just because something is an illusion -- or, better, virtual -- that hardly means it isn't real.

Punctuated Equilibrium in Language

Language is a spontaneous order.

Punctuated equilibrium is a feature of spontaneous orders. They are characterized by s-curve growth, in which there is a period of equilibrium, then exponential growth, then another period of equilibrium. Different systems of different complexity will have different time periods of equilibrium. At very high complexity, it is possible to witness what appears to be pure exponential growth, when in fact, if we were to look more closely at the data, we would see something more like a stairstep progression. A market economy in a high population density country with the right kinds of institutions is a good example of the latter.

The way our brains learn is a similar process. There are those who learn slowly, with long periods of equilibrium and short periods of exponential growth; there are those who learn quickly, with short periods of equilibrium and long periods of exponential growth; and there are many variations in between. The causes are many, and of course include genetic factors affecting neural development, connection, plasticity, etc. and environmental factors, including social complexity, stress and anxiety, and hope.

We should thus expect to see the same dynamics at work in language. And, indeed, this is exactly what we see. Miagawa hypothesizes that human language emerged rapidly. He developed the Integration Hypothesis after noting that there are words which have syntax. Of course, this dynamic remained once language itself emerged, finding itself repeated in the evolution of and within different languages themselves. In particular, "punctuational bursts of change at the time of language splitting are an important and general process in language evolution and account for 10 to 33% of the total divergence among these languages in their fundamental vocabularies" (Atkinson, et al. 588).

I think it would benefit us a great deal to pay more attention to these kinds of transitions. Not just in biology, the brain, and language, but in our social systems as well.

On Decentralized Approaches to Learning

If you are a libertarian and you are interested in issues of education, you may have noticed that there is very strong support throughout the movement for the Montessori Method. Ayn Rand quite famously came out in favor of the Montessori Method as the best way to educate students.

The reasons why Objectivists and libertarians support the Montessori Method is because of the freedom it provides students to learn by pursuing their own interests. That means education is student-guided, with the teacher providing instruction as the students request and require it. This means education is a bottom-up, emergent process that best reflects how the brain itself works. Brains learn best in environments structurally most like themselves (something suggested by Hayek, and argued by Stuart Kauffman). Among the things this would do would be to prepare us, psychologically, for life in civil society, which is made up of a variety of bottom-up, complex, self-organizing, scale-free network processes -- spontaneous orders. An education that emulated free markets, democracy, the scientific order, philosophical networks, the artistic orders, technological innovation networks, etc. would prepare students for living in them, and in creating such familiarity, help them learn to appreciate living in such orders and thus support them.

The top-down educational system we have now prepares us for working in organizations. We learn how to act and interact in firms, bureaucracies, and other organizations, all of which are top-down hierarchies. The problem primarily arises when people mistakenly believe that society itself ought to resemble an organization, which pretty much every leftist really believes in, no matter their rhetoric to the contrary. Religious conservatives tend to more openly support religious-type hierarchies (like we found in the Medieval world), and they tend to more consistently support maintaining the current structures of education. Ironically, these current structures are a result of progressive reforms to make people better able to live and work in organizational hierarchies.

Libertarians of all stripes favor radical decentralization at the social level. This is true of anarchists, who take it there with governance, and this is true of Objectivists, who are far more wary of bringing it to government. But both believe in applying it to educational methods. For the youngest students, that would be via the Montessori Method; for older students, it would take on more Socratic methods approaches. But both of these are decentralized, self-discovery methods. Such methods not only foster comfort in the spontaneous orders, but create more entrepreneurial students, since students are rewarded for their acts of discovery and learning what they need to learn to master their interests. And such methods also foster minds that ask "why?" and which question authority.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that libertarians favor such approaches to education. Decentralized educational methods help to create more libertarian souls. It is perhaps no wonder that progressives and conservatives continue to favor our current system, since that system is designed to create people who will live in the bureaucratic society they wish to create.

Gaining New Words: Learning vs. Acquiring

When we come to understand the difference between learning and acquiring, we can come to understand the apparent and relative ease of learning some things over others.

For example, almost everyone believes physics and chemistry are more difficult than literature and philosophy. But that would depend on what we mean by "difficult." If we are talking about the complexity of a subject, literature and philosophy are by far the more difficult. But if we are talking about gaining the vocabulary needed to understand the subject, it is physics and chemistry which are the more difficult subjects. The reason is that much of the vocabulary of literature and philosophy are acquired, whereas the vocabulary of chemistry and physics are learned.

A word is acquired when you hear it in context and understand what it means. You acquire most of your vocabulary before you hit puberty -- which is the prime time to learn languages. Some of these words we acquire in the context of school -- the word "plot," for example -- and some of these we acquire at home, etc. When do we acquire the word "mind," for example? How often do we hear phrases like "change your mind" or "mind your manners"? When we get around to learning the word's psychological or philosophical meanings, we already have an understanding of what the word means. We adjust that meaning to the new context, which is easier than learning a new word and its meaning/referent.

You learn a word when you are simultaneously given the context for it. It is unlikely you heard of the word methionine (if you have heard of it) prior to learning its chemical structure and the fact that it is an amino acid with the following chemical formula: HO₂CCHCH₂CH₂SCH₃

It is difficult to remember all of the amino acids and their chemical structures. More difficult, at least, than is adapting your understanding of the word "mind" to psychology and philosophy. When we are taught new vocabulary words in elementary school, not only did we have to learn the dictionary definition, but we also had to use the word in a sentence. We did the latter to ensure we created a context for the word. It's even better if we read the word in the context of a story or short essay. Learning occurs best if you can manage to create a context in which acquiring takes place.  

Since in physics and chemistry most of the vocabulary must be learned -- and it must be learned at the same time as the referents are learned -- we experience learning physics and chemistry as difficult. But since we have already acquired much of the vocabulary of literature and philosophy, we experience learning literature and philosophy as easy, even though they are far more complex forms of knowledge than are chemistry and physics. 

But supposed you had someone who acquired much of the vocabulary of the hard sciences when he or she were young. One would expect areas like chemistry and physics to be easier to learn for them than it would be for others. That would mean they would have to be raised in a social context in which the concepts of chemistry and physics were relatively commonly discussed. While it's unlikely most households are prepared to do that, it's not impossible to have children's shows which discuss the concepts of physics and chemistry. Good stories with good visuals would be able to contextualize ideas from the hard sciences such that they are acquired rather than learned. If we really want students to learn math and science, a cartoon about Captain Einstein would go a long way to actually accomplishing that.

The Politics of Master, Slave, and Higher Spirits

Everyone familiar with Nietzsche knows he considered there to be, broadly, two kinds of moral system -- master morality and slave morality. In this division, master morality sees the world as being divided into good and bad. It is an aristocratic morality that sees weakness, inferiority, cowardice, and dependence as bad, as things which need to be overcome. Strength, courage, opposition, strife, and danger are all considered good. Slave morality, on the other hand, sees the world as being divided into good and evil. It is the moral system of the oppressed and sees weakness, a need to be protected, getting along, peace, and safety as good, and strength, opposition, strife, and danger as evil. While bad can coexist with good, evil must always everywhere be destroyed.

As Lawrence Hatab observes, "Slave morality seeks the simultaneous exaltation of the weak and the incapacitation of the strong; but in doing so, slave types find enhancement not through their own agency but through the debilitation of others" (A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, 26). The slave mentality is found in "the oppressed, the mediocre, and the discontented" (27).

People mistakenly believe that this means Nietzsche favors the master spirit over the slave spirit. However, this does not hold up, given that Nietzsche argued that the master spirit resulted in externalization and made people stupid (GM I, 6-7), while the slave spirit resulted in internalization, depth, and creative culture (GM II, 16). It was the higher types, which paradoxically combined both spirit (creating internal conflict), which Nietzsche in fact favored (BGE 260). Higher types were not just the most creative, they were the great innovators.

But, as Hatab observes, "Innovators are the new object of hatred and resentment (Z III, 12, 26), they are the new "criminals" (TI 9, 45), the new "cruel ones" (BGE 230), the new perpetrators of "war" (GS 283)" (48). Because innovators are disruptive, destructive, etc., they are "evil" to those with slave spirits. This is the true source of leftist's opposition to the creative destruction of capitalism. They embrace the resentment and envy of slave morality, which gets expressed in opposition to capitalism and embracing political correctness. Resentment, envy, and conformism all suppress creativity and growth and ought to be opposed.

Given that Nietzsche describes the master spirit as stupid, brutish, and superficial, one should not make the mistake of thinking we ought to just replace the slave spirit with the master spirit. Consider the following political divisions.

Are American conservatives representative of master or slave morality?

Traditional conservatives, which embrace "traditional values," for the most part represent the slave spirit. They see good and evil everywhere, and seek to create homogenization through elimination of difference (since all difference is evidence of evil). That difference can be in morals, nationality, sex, gender, race, etc., or some combination of these. They tend to embrace the protective functions of government for the sake of safety, and at the same time the support gun rights for self-protection and protection against government.

On the other hand, neoconservatives tend to embrace master morality. They tend to be aristocrats and elitists who believe they know what is best for everyone and that political power is the way to do that. They do not view their opponents as evil, only wrong. When they think them wrong. Neoconservatives have proven themselves to generally support the welfare state, making them in many ways a variety of progressive. Those who oppose their power are simply bad, then, since the ideologies are so similar. They tend to cynically express support for traditional conservatives' social views, but create conditions where passing legislation to actually support those views is difficult or impossible.

Are American progressives representative of master or slave morality?

Since progressives want change, one would think that they primarily represent the master spirit. Their aristocratic attitudes and general arrogance would seem to further support this. They see change as good and tradition as bad (not evil, just bad -- something to be overcome). There is little question that the earliest progressives embraced master morality. They tended to promote eugenics programs, including using the minimum wage for that purpose, in order to eliminate the weak, in order to strengthen society.

However, contemporary progressives have more of a tendency to embrace slave morality. They still see change as good, and they continue to support the same policies as earlier progressives, but they do so with the argument that those programs will in fact help the weak and oppressed. The politically correct left are exemplars of the slave spirit, seeking to tear down and destroy anything resembling strength, courage, etc.

In other words, there is a more complex combination of these two kinds of people within the political left and right.

But what about libertarians?

Classical liberals want to conserve the processes that create change, meaning they see both change and tradition as good. Does this mean classical liberals are those with the higher spirit? For some, no doubt that is the case. But for others, such a claim may be questionable at best.

For example, libertarians in the Randian tradition have a tendency to view things as good and evil. Rand sees businessmen as an oppressed class, and she sees government interference in the economy as an evil that must be eliminated. Resentment is reserved for government actions.

Certainly the conspiracy theory libertarians fully embrace slave morality. Government is seen as an evil entity which must be destroyed, while everyone else belongs to the oppressed groups. They behave in ways identical to the politically correct left. Both are paranoid in their belief in shadowy evil powers ruling everyone behind closed doors. Resentment and envy are directed at those with power, who seem to control everything.

On the other hand, we have libertarians like Hans Herman Hoppe who thoroughly embrace master morality. Hoppe's aristocratic world view drives him to reject democracy and to embrace ideas that many consider "brutish and stupid." In my experience, his supporters do tend to have those traits.

I would argue that Mises seems to represent the higher spirit. We see in his published work strong opposition to socialism -- though his arguments range from socialism being merely a bad idea to socialism being one of the great evils. Equally, his support for capitalism is that it is the best way for the weak and oppressed to become greater and stronger.

Hayek, however, seems to embrace a different kind of moral system entirely. Hayek has a tendency to see good and good -- he viewed his opponents as good people who were simply factually wrong and wrong in their understanding. He thought them to have good intentions, but as being ignorant of how to get there. Now, this sounds like aristocratic good-bad, but Hayek saw the tension as being productive and creative. Good-good is tragic ethics, and Hayek himself argued in favor of a tragic world view.

The bleeding heart libertarians seem to embrace slave morality in their concern with the weak and oppressed, but they also seem to think in more good-bad terms, if not often good-good terms. Or is theirs an aristocratic concern for the poor, seeking to create the conditions for raising the weak up and making them strong? It does seem they argue that we need to help people create agency and that we ought to reject resentment and envy. More higher spirits? A combination of all three moral systems?

The master spirit/morality and the slave spirit/morality are stable, equilibrium conditions (we see their dominance in stable eras and individuals). But higher spirits and tragic spirits are far-from-equilibrium or disequilibrium conditions (renaissance eras and renaissance men and women).

It is possible that the higher spirits could have a variety of moral systems. There could be good-bad-evil, good-good, or even bad-evil. In the latter case, one might view being weak as bad, but being strong as evil, resulting in a hatred of the powerful and contempt for the weak. Are there any bad-evil thinkers? Rousseau? Sade? Zizek? Nihilists? Misanthropes?

I raise these questions to mostly try to get people to think about their moral systems and to think about who they are and why they think what they think and believe what they believe. Are you a master spirit? a slave spirit? a higher spirit?

On Criticism, an observation

My last day teaching at SMU, I spoke to all three of my classes about why they were there. I pointed out that over half of all high school graduates now go to college and that most people were attending college to get credentials to get a job. What, I asked them, was going to happen to those credentials as more and more people got them?

I pointed out that it was true that the credentials they were getting at SMU were probably of more value than those acquired at most other colleges and universities. But why? Was it because they were getting something else at SMU one couldn't get elsewhere? I pointed out that they were taking a class with me, and that I had taught at UT-Dallas, UNT-Dallas, and two community colleges. Were the community colleges getting a SMU education, or were the students at SMU getting a community college education?

This gets into the problems of adjuncting, but I wasn't really talking to them about that, other than to point out that their elite university was teaching them with people who were not researchers or scholars (I was, but not because I had any institutional support for it). No, what I was really pointing out to them was that they were being sold a bill of goods that likely didn't have the value they were told it had. More, the value they were going to get was entirely up to them, and depended on the amount of time they took upon themselves to create the education they really ought to have -- the kind of education universities are supposed to provide, but have ceased to provide as people have begun to treat universities are places to get credentials rather than to build minds and souls.

I talked to them too about the state of the country, about the state of our culture, about the state of our society. I was anything but optimistic. At least, over the short term. I wanted to inspire them to think about what they could do to change things.

So naturally, on one of my student evaluations, I had a student complain that I had been critical of universities and of the country, that I apparently hated America.

In other words, this student interpreted criticism as hatred. I want you to think about what that means. Criticism means hatred. One doesn't criticize because one wants what one loves to be better. No, to criticize means you hate what you are criticizing.

How do you think this student is going to take criticism of his work?