Toward a Theory of Moral Change and Constancy

A moral action is a right action in the right circumstances for the right reason. It has a narrative structure. Like language, it has a grammar. A subject acts on or in relation to an object. Specifically, a character acts in relation to another person. This is related to the idea of virtue ethics, where one develops one’s character by always aiming at the beautiful/good(to kalon). From this character (ethos), one acts to achieve certain goals. One’s ethos affects what goals one wishes to achieve, but it cannot necessarily tell you how to achieve that goal. That is where the science of praxeology comes in. Praxeology tells us what actions to take to achieve our goals, no matter what our goals may be. One uses one’s character to judge whether the actions are themselves good (the ends do not justify the means). Thus, for there to be a fully moral action, a person of good character must engage in a good action capable of achieving the desired goal, which itself should be good. If you do this, what you have done is good. If you fail to choose the right action, what you have done is bad (we would not tell an architect who built a bad bridge out of ignorance that he was, nevertheless, a good architect because he meant well). If you have a bad goal, and you use the right action to achieve it, then what you did is evil. If you are of bad character, but you engage in good action that results in a good outcome, then what you have done is what was described by Bernard Mandeville in his The Fable of the Bees. It turns out a considerable amount of good can come from this latter structure, but since I am talking about morality in its fullest expression, we will leave that aside. However, if spontaneous orders are beautiful, or at least potentially so, then we have an idea of what virtue should aim at. This will bring us back to the issues of the varieties of economies. As I have pointed out before, moral instincts --> moral spontaneous order --> moral reasoning. That is morality in a nutshell.

The idea of “personhood” is central to my theory of morality. But so is the fact that we have moral instincts, which are part of our repertoire of instincts, or cultural universals.  In the same way that we do not have a choice but to language when we are surrounded by language users, because we have a language instinct, and in the same way the particular language spoken by those around us is what determines what language we use, even if we can learn more languages later in life and, with some of the greatest poets, introduce elements of other languages into the mother language, morality is similarly both universal and learned. That is, we all have a moral instinct much like we have a language instinct. The fact that there is variation of moral expression is no more an argument against the existence of this instinct than is the presence of variation among languages an argument against the existence of an instinct. The fact that we can identify grammatically-structured sounds as a language certainly suggests that there must be some commonality among the languages to make them identifiable as being the same thing. The same would be true of morality. We can identify the moral codes of a given culture. How, unless there were commonalities with other moral codes that make them identifiable as such? Further, there are gene variations that can derail language learning, in much the same way there are gene variations that can derail moral learning.

The bottom line is that there is an inherited moral sense. Or senses. They become developed as they are expressed due to the moral environment in which the person in question is raised. The Westermarck effect, which is expressed more strongly in girls than in boys, and which is expressed toward those with whom one has been raised up to about the age of 6, results in the moral prohibitions against incest. There are variations on this, with cousin marriages prohibited in some places, but not in others, for example. But this prohibition against marrying cousins is a pretty recent development, and is a considerable extension of the incest avoidance principle. There are those who may object that there have been societies that allowed or even outright encouraged incest, such as the tradition of alternate generations of ancient Egyptian rulers marrying their sisters, but if we look closely, we can discover how these are not in fact violations, but demonstrate the variety of ways we define “personhood.”

Egyptian rulers were not considered persons, but were rather considered divine. This divinity was reinforced through the alternating generations of brother-sister marriages, which both reinforced the ruling line and reflected Egyptian mythology, which included stories of divine incest. This is why society did not object, and in fact thought it right. Insofar as brothers and sisters are raised apart, no Westermarck effect can develop. But if they are raised together, we should expect to see less fertility in such unions. Historically, when we see these kinds of incestuous marriages, these are the patterns we see. Incest only “feels wrong” when the Westermarck effect can properly develop. Thus, these so-called “exceptions” are shown to not really be exceptions. Sexual morality evolves, but within clear parameters.

Another example is murder. What is murder? Murder is the purposeful killing of a person. A person is anyone considered to be equal to you insofar as they are a “fellow human being.” Different societies have different definitions of what constitutes a person. In some societies, women, children (especially female children), deformed children, slaves, members of other tribes, members of other religions, people who have the wrong ideology, unborn children, and/or criminals are not considered to be persons. Darwin suggested that our morality increased as our notion of who is in our tribe expanded. You could, over the centuries, go from all male members of the tribe to all members of the tribe to slaves (at which point slavery becomes immoral) to other tribes to other religions to other ideologies. Eventually we come to those who consider all human beings to be persons. And we see a development of the concept of personhood being applied to animals.

However, we see in a variety of cultures rituals that make certain individuals no longer considered to be persons. To perform a human sacrifice of a member of your tribe, you first have to perform a ritual to remove them from the tribe. Jews and Muslims have to kill animals as they do because they have to be as kind to the animals as possible. This suggests a certain concept of animal personhood, since a ritual must be performed to kill the animal for food. And in places with capital punishment, a ritual (court proceedings) is performed that removes the human being on trial from society and strips him of his personhood so that he can be killed. Those who oppose the death penalty essentially disagree that this ritual performs this function. Those who oppose abortion essentially extend personhood back to conception (in the most extreme cases). The disagreements in these areas involve both definitions of personhood and whether or not certain rituals can in fact remove someone’s personhood. And this is also extended to a variety of violent acts we can make toward each other. The more developed our sense of the other’s personhood, the less violence we can justify to ourselves we can do to them. This would expand to rape as well, as this is a violation of an individual’s personhood in denying them a choice in sexual matters.

From our evolved sense of property rights is where our opposition to theft emerges. Out of our instinct for property emerges individualism itself and ritual. Thus, we need to understand our evolutionary relationship to territory/property rights to understand our morality and our artistic expressions, which develop out of ritual. As we have seen, too, ritual performs certain social realities, including whether or not someone is considered a person, or a full person (as adulthood rituals perform into becoming). Ritual then also points to how we may facilitate more people’s inclusion into our societies, encouraging us and them to consider more and more people to be persons.

But there are more subtle morals, manners, etc. Kenrick et al gives us the dynamic mechanism by which even the most subtle variations in morality can emerge from a universal core. I cannot recommend his two articles on this topic. More work needs to be done in this promising area.

If morality is the right action in the right circumstances, then moral action is the right action for and in the right economy. Consider the following:

Gift economy

What makes one a good artist? What makes one a bad artist?

What makes one a good scientist? What makes one a bad scientist?

What makes one a good philanthropist? What makes one a bad philanthropist?

That is, what constitutes good action within the gift economy?

Market economy

What makes one a good entrepreneur? What makes one a bad entrepreneur?

What makes one a good salesman? What makes one a bad salesman?

What makes one a good capitalist? What makes one a bad capitalist?

What makes one a good financier? What makes one a bad financier?

What makes one a good banker? What makes one a bad banker?

That is, what constitutes good action within the market economy?

Political economy

What makes good governance? What makes bad governance?

What makes one a good governor/executive? What makes one a bad governor/executive?

What makes one a good legislator? What makes one a bad legislator?

What makes one a good judge? What makes one a bad judge?

What makes one a good citizen? What makes one a bad citizen?

That is, what constitutes good action in the political economy?

Divine economy

What makes one a good pastor/religious leader? What makes one a bad pastor/religious leader?

What makes one a good believer? What makes one a bad believer?

What makes one good? What makes one bad? What makes one evil?

That is, what constitutes good action in the divine economy?

Each has actions that are good within that economy. However, what is good action in one economy is not good action in another economy.

And I haven't even brought up the issue of justice, which certainly deserves increased development. Since personhood is central to my theory of morality, I will say we must beware of dehumanizing theories of justice.

And then, this is also all connected to the Gravesean theory of  psychosocial evolution.

I feel a complete model of morality coming about.

Moral Actions in the Economies

Ethics is based on character (ethos); morality is based on action. The ethical person aims at the beautiful/good; the actions one takes to achieve those actions are moral actions.

I have written a series of posts on the different kinds of economies, and the actions one takes to participate in those economies. I previously suggested that "it seems to me that when we confuse these orders and the actions appropriate to them, we may in fact be acting unethically." Given my distinctions above, I would now reword it to state that one would be acting immorally. This would make sense if morality is based on action.

The different economies each have different actions associated with them.

Consider the following scenarios.

If you apply market action (mutual exchange) to:

the political economy, you are bribing

the gift economy, you are buying the scientific or artistic outcome you want, regardless of its truth, goodness, or beauty

the divine economy, you are scamming people

If you apply political action (master-slave) to:

the market economy, you are stealing

the gift economy, you are censoring to prevent the discovery of truth, goodness, or beauty

the divine economy, you are imposing your morals/values

If you apply gift action (love of others) to:

the market economy, you actually place your business in danger of losing profit and, thus, of shutting down and losing people their jobs (this is the situation Milton Friedman famously described when asked if corporations should behave altruistically, and he argued that if they did so, they would be acting unethically)

the political economy, you get the welfare state or socialism

the divine economy, you get outright destruction of the divine economy, or nihilism

If you apply divine action (sacrifice) to:

the market economy, you undermine the profits necessary for your business to survive (similarly to if you try to apply the gift economy to the market economy)

the political economy, you get theocracy

the gift economy, you get self-censorship (of science, one's art, etc.) to avoid offense

This list is a first approximation of the moral issues at play in confusing one's actions and one's economies. Note that it is really the misapplication of the gift economy to the others that creates the problems we see today. This is a surprising outcome, unless one realized the gift economy is the latest one to emerge. It may be that, in its birthing process, a new economy gets overapplied in its actions and values to the other economies.

As I said, this is a first approximation. I am certainly open to suggestions, modifications, etc. This is an idea I am thinking through, and revisions are expected and necessary. So please, critique, comment, suggest!

Bipolar Feedback Prices

According to mainstream (neoclassical) economics, price is determined by the negative feedback of  both supply and demand interacting with one another. As the supply of a good goes up relative to demand, the price goes down; as demand for it goes up relative to supply, the price goes down.

Underlying the supply of a given good, there are producer costs affecting how much will be produced. The law of diminishing returns (negative feedback) says that you will get less and less value out of something over time. You can only get so much work out of people, at incrementally lower levels. You can only get so much work out of a machine. Crops can only be grown at a certain 2-D density.

Underlying the demand for a given good, we have the law of diminishing marginal utility (negative feedback), which affects how much demand one has for a given good at a given time. I will likely pay more for the first apple than for the second. I will probably not buy more apples than I can eat before they rot. Thus, my demand for a given good decreases the more of that good I have.

Again, this is traditional, neoclassical economics. From this we get our supply and demand curves, and from their intersection, we get the market clearing price. This is the equilibrium price.

But this is wrong. This is not how prices come about.

The problem is that with only negative feedback, we have only half the equation. What if there is positive feedback? Let us look at what would happen in a positive feedback-only economy.

The positive feedback version of the law of diminishing returns is the law of increasing returns. How can we have increasing returns? If the marginal cost of producing something decreases with each unit created, we would have increasing returns. Software is a good example of this. So would be e-books (paper books abide by the law of diminishing returns). However, there is another example of this outside of knowledge/information-based products, and that is the agglomeration economies of cities. The existence of spillover effects and mass production creates increasing returns (at least for a while, in the latter case). Thus, increasing urbanization and increasing virtualization result in increased positive feedback.

The positive feedback version of the law of diminishing marginal utility is the law of increasing marginal utility. While it is true that individual consumers must necessarily abide by the law of diminishing marginal utility, groups do not. Fads cause more and more product to get purchased. Of course, there are various mechanisms that can drive a fad, from those that drive fashion fads to those that drive things like housing bubbles. The former may be accurately described by things like Keynes' "animal spirits," but the latter likely have underlying mechanisms more accurately described by Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Whatever the case, if you can get a lot of people buying something, you can get positive feedback.

As pointed out above, negative feedback results in equilibrium. Positive feedback, however, results in boom-bust cycles and multiple equilibria. If you had a positive feedback fire, it would get hotter and hotter over time, until it suddenly became too hot and burned itself out. This is the description of a bubble, be it a housing bubble or a fad.

But note that negative feedback models, which give us the equilibrium theory of prices, is based on viewing people as individuals. The individual producer has diminishing returns; the individual consumer has diminishing marginal utility. However, if we view the economy as being a group of people, producers can have increasing returns and consumers have increasing marginal utility. This can cause one to come to the conclusion that a future of abundance is possible (and if an abundance economy is possible, socialism is possible). Such people would have to ignore the fact that increasing returns are not infinite, and in fact result in not just boom, but bust as well. But one can nevertheless see why they would make such an error.

However, if we understand people as being what they in fact are, both individuals and social, we have to consider both negative and positive feedback processes simultaneously.

With both kinds of feedback, supply is determined by both diminishing and increasing returns, demand is determined by both diminishing and increasing marginal utility. Both interact. Thus, the supply of a good cannot reach an equilibrium point, but must always fluctuate in ways that are incalculable and unpredictable. For the same reason, demand cannot reach an equilibrium, but must always fluctuate in ways that are incalculable and unpredictable. Thus, we would not have the smooth curves we see when we draw supply and demand curves, but lines that would instead look more like the graph for a given stock over time. Worse, these two complex processes then have to interact to create the price of that good. Thus, price is inherently incalculable and unpredictable. Without the ability to calculate what the price "should" be, if there is not any such thing as a market clearing price, dreams of even market socialism must fall away.

Bipolar feedback drives a large number of complex, creative processes. The economy is but one kind of such a process. As we can see, we have bipolar feedback (increasing vs. diminishing returns/marginal utility) underlying both supply and demand, which are themselves bipolar feedback processes. This is complex, creative process on top of complex, creative process. The economy thus becomes increasingly incalculable, the more such processes we realize are part of the economy.

Power is Addictive

The Daily Mail reports that political power is literally addicting:

‎Cocaine works in a similar way, which can have varied effects from increasing alertness, confidence, energy, feelings of well-being and euphoria, but also anxiety, paranoia and restlessness.

Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine leading to more negative effects such as arrogance and impatience.

Power also makes one more aggressive and sexually active (sex scandals, anyone?). But look at this list. Do we really want people in power who are anxious and paranoid? But, as it turns out, getting political power is what makes you anxious and paranoid. If you are confident to the point of arrogance and paranoid, that seems the perfect cocktail for centralizing power. It is perhaps no wonder people with power try to centralize it around them.


Only by decentralizing power, distributing it as widely as possible, can we overcome these deeply primitive drives. If you want to know what politicians are really like, learn about primate dominance behaviors. Power is primitive, it is atavistic. Politics is the least human(e) form of organization.

Storge

When talking about kinds of love, we are familiar with eros, philia, and agape. But it turns out there is also storge. This is defined as "the love of a parent toward a child," but has become in social psychology "the form of love between friends." If storge is familial love and friendship, this frees up philia for object-love (which would include such objects as sophos) and agape for the more inclusive "love of mankind." It would also draw attention to the relationship between friends and family. Still, the fact of overlap shows how complex these different kinds of love are, even in a language like Greek, that has four terms for it.

What We Love and What We Do

I have been thinking more lately on something I posted not long ago on the different kinds of human interactions. I want to expand on what I said there, looking at how these kinds of interactions are related to different kinds of love.

Our social interactions begin at home. We find in the home eros, or sexual love, on which our sexual relationships are founded. I eros my wife. For the rest of the family, there is agape, or familial (brotherly) love, on which our relationships with those we are related to are based. I agape my children. And if we consider friendships as an extension of family, we can then include philia. Philia, however, is also used for the love of things, ideas, etc. "Philosophy" is of course the "love of wisdom," and "philanthropy" is the "love of mankind."

Within the home we find all of the aforeblogged interactions. We gift each other, we engage in any number of exchanges/barters, we sacrifice for each other, and there is even some level of politics at play. Thus we find the gift economy, the political economy, the market economy, and the divine economy all at work in the household -- something which should not be surprising, given "economics" means "rule of the household."

Of course, we are talking about the strongest of our strong bonds in the household. In our extended societies most of our bonds are weak bonds -- some downright ephemeral. Each of the aforementioned economies have developed into their own spontaneous orders, with their own kinds of philia.

Love of mankind give us our gift economies. That love of mankind can be direct, in philanthropy, or indirect, in philosophy, science, the arts, or literature. These economies are based on the development of reputation.

Love of God gives us our divine economies.

And then there are two varieties of love of self:

1.) Love of power gives us our political economies.

2.) Love of gain gives us our market economies.

There are of course moral and immoral versions of each of these. Take the market economy. We get the word "market" and "merchant" from the Roman god Mercury, who was the god of merchants, but also of thieves. Both are certainly ways of improving one's material conditions, even if one is based on force and is zero-sum and the other is based on mutual benefit and is positive-sum. The more theft-like one's exchange interaction, the less moral that behavior is. And it does not matter if you rob the person yourself or have a third party do it for you.

One can do this with each of these. Lying about your accomplishments to gain reputation is how one is unethical in the gift economy (to a degree, this is turning love of others into love of self, which is what makes it unethical, not being in the right economy). Centralized power is less ethical than decentralized power. Sacrificing others is less ethical than sacrificing self. There are of course degrees between these extremes. Further, it seems to me that when we confuse these orders and the actions appropriate to them, we may in fact be acting unethically. Perhaps that is too far -- but it is something that needs to be thought through. As, I would argue, is true of all of the above.

Finally, if the flipside of love is hate, and our inherited tribalism causes us to see an enemy when we have love of one's own, what does this say about people's attitudes toward those orders with which they do not self-identify?

Anti-Ritual Collectivism

It occurs to me that one of the main features of collectivism is that it is anti-ritual. Collectivism is to be differentiated from social individualism by the fact that social animals are simultaneously distinct individuals and engage in interactions with members of their same species, usually those closely related to them. Lobe-finned fish are social individuals; schooling fish like herring are collectivist in nature. The former recognize territory; the latter have no territory. The evolution of territorialism resulted in the evolution of ritual such that territory could be protected while, at the same time, mating could occur. Herring do not engage in rituals -- they merely spawn en masse.

The mating ritual, stemming from the evolution of territory/property, eventually evolved into other interaction rituals, including politics, religion, science, market exchange, etc. Among our rituals are those that can include or exclude others from our group. A notable one is the ritual we engage in so we can kill another human being because they, themselves, engaged in a crime so bad we want them to be removed from our society. There are certainly pro-life, moral, and sociological arguments to be made against capital punishment, but I do have to wonder how many collectivists are against it simply because one has to engage in a ritual for capital punishment to take place.

Please note the list I gave above. Collectivists are typically anti-religion, anti-market, anti-property (the foundation of all rituals), and even anti-politics insofar as they would typically prefer an apolitical ruler/central planner. They typically present their anti-ritual stance as stemming from their rationalism -- however, this rationalism is of the Continental/Cartesian variety rather than the Scottish Enlightenment version. It is perhaps not surprising that the Scottish version of rationality is both not anti-ritual and social individualistic. Collectivists are still pro-science only because science is perceived to be anti-ritual -- so the ignorance of its fundamental ritualistic nature protects it. For now.

We can see, then, that to the extent that lobe-finned fishes evolved from schooling fish, collectivism is more primitive than social individualism. Thus collectivists are hyper-atavists. As is anti-ritualism.

The Intellectual Ritual

Randall Collins applies his idea of interaction rituals specifically to intellectuals. He is of course focusing on philosophers in his work, but the fact of the matter is that this description is equally applicable whether the intellectuals are philosophers, historians, scientists, or artists. In each case, social interactions are vital, and can make the difference between being a major intellectual and a minor one.

This, then, is the intellectual ritual. Intellectuals gather, focus their attention for a time on one of their members, who delivers a sustained discourse. That discourse itself builds on elements from the past, affirming and continuing or negating. Old sacred objects, previously charged up, are recharged with attention, or degraded from their sacredness and expelled from the life of the community; new candidate sacred objects are offered for sanctification. By reference to texts past and texts future, the intellectual community keeps up the consciousness of its projects, transcending all particular occasions on which they were enacted. Hence the peculiar guiding sacred object---truth, wisdom, sometimes also the activity of seeking or research---as both eternal and embodied in the flow of time. (29)

In a real sense intellectuals have taken over the role once exclusively held by priests. The above is certainly what priests of all religions have done and do. The fact that we do these things in different institutions doesn't make a difference. In fact, Collins makes the point that

The entire macro-social structure, of non-intellectuals as well, is anchored on ritual interactions. What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive IRs, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. (29-30)

In other words, institutions matter. They are places where we engage in particular rituals relevant to the creation and participation in particular social orders. Imagine the power of combining the understanding of rituals with institutional analysis and with spontaneous order theory.

This also creates a particular understanding of the individual who is both an individual and a participant in the social order (similar to Hayek's discussion of the individualism of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers):

As individuals move through this grid of encounters, they generate their own histories of ritual participation. We may call this an interaction ritual chain. Each person acquires a personal repertoire of symbols loaded with membership significance. Depending on the degree of cosmopolitanism and social density of the group situations to which they have been exposed, they will have a symbolic repertoire of varying degrees of abstraction and reification, of different generalized and particularized contents. This constitutes their cultural capital." (29)

We are our interaction ritual chains. And participation in the intellectual rituals within intellectual institutions is what makes one an intellectual.

Interaction Rituals

Sociology studies the social interactions of humans (which may be the same as saying sociology studies humans). Sociology is typically understood to be its own area of study, but I am increasingly convinced that sociology ought to be understood to be a metadiscipline that covers disciplines such as economics, the sociology of science, the sociology of artistic production, etc. Another way of looking at it, sociology should be understood to cover the market economy, the gift economies, the political economy, and the divine economy, as well as the interactions of those economies. As such, sociology is the study of spontaneous orders. Or should be.

I believe this is how Randall Collins understands sociology. In The Sociology of Philosophies, Collins points out that when two or more people interact, they engage in what are called "interaction rituals." He points out that

The following are the ingredients of any interaction ritual:

1. a group of at least two people is physically assembled;

2. they focus attention on the same object or action, and each becomes aware that the other is maintaining this focus;

3. they share a common mood or emotion.

4. The mutual focus of attention and the shared mood cumulatively intensify...[until]...participants are temporarily united in a shared reality, and experience a boundary or membrane between that situation and whoever is outside it.

5. As a result, the participants feel they are members of a group, with moral obligations to one another. Their relationship becomes symbolized by whatever they focused on during their ritual interaction.

6. Individuals who participate in IRs are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy "moral force"

These encounters produce an ongoing flow of social motivations, as people come away from each situation with a store of charged symbols (which can be called cultural capital, or CC), and with emotional energies. Persons are attracted to those situations in which they can make the best use of their previously acquired cultural capital and symbolic resources to focus discursive action and thereby generate further solidarity. Individual lives are chains of interaction rituals; the meshing of these chains constitutes everything that is social structure in all its myriad shapes. (22-24)

If each spontaneous order has its own interaction rituals -- as one would expect to be the case if there are different kinds of human interactions -- then one would expect, from Collins' description of IR participants as creating solidarity with others in that group, meaning there is also a sense of exclusion of those not doing so, that our tribalistic instincts will kick in. In other words, those who think of themselves as being in the political economy will have an inclusive attitude toward others in the political economy and an exclusive attitude toward others in the other economies. More, they will seek to bring everyone else into their tribe, whose rituals make sense to them (whereas the rituals of the other "tribes" make no sense and, thus, must be wrong -- even morally wrong).

Consider the implications of this. Those familiar with the rituals of the market economy will want to try to impose them on, say, the political economy. Such people would talk about making the government more efficient or even profitable. Those familiar with the rituals of the gift economy will want to try to make the government act more like philanthropies, helping the poor, supporting the arts and sciences, etc. Those familiar with the rituals of the divine economy will want to try to make the government more theocratic and will use rhetoric like "sacrifice." Equally, those familiar with the interaction rituals of the political economy will want to replace the rituals of the other economies with its own, such as replacing true philanthropy with government subsidy programs.

I think we can now make sense of much of what takes place in society. We can both understand what is going on within a given spontaneous order, why people prefer one spontaneous order over another, and the problems that arise when we try to impose the interaction rituals appropriate to one order on another. We need to understand better the different kinds of interaction rituals and how they give rise to their different spontaneous orders as people engage in interaction chains. This should be the primary job of anyone working in the social sciences.

President Faust on Kickstarter

I have a project -- President Faust - on Kickstarter. Help me write my play!

Illegal Home-Made Food

When I was growing up, my elementary school used to hold various fund raisers. People would bring home baked goods to sell. My mom would make cookies and fudge -- her two most popular treats. Especially her fudge and her chocolate chip cookies.

It would also be common for people to bring home canned green beans, corn, and other vegetables for special school events, to be cooked and served.

All of this is now illegal.

Was it done for the stated excuse, health concerns?

Of course not.

It was done because corporations pushed for that legislation, so that people would have to buy store-bought vegetables and baked goods.

Big government and big business are two sides of the same coin.

How Food Subsidies Make Us Ill

When I gave up grains for Lent, I began to feel much better. I no longer felt bloated, my late-night acid reflux went away, my morning nausea went away. Naturally, come Easter, I ate a pizza. All of those symptoms returned. With a vengeance.

I suspected I was allergic to wheat. It turns out I was right. More specifically, I am allergic to gluten. I have all the symptoms of standard gluten allergy. For someone who loves pasta, this is about as bad as news can get.

It turns out that at least 6% of the population is allergic to wheat. Perhaps more, since I was never diagnosed. It turns out that wheat causes all sorts of digestive problems in laboratory rats, and it may be that practically everyone is negatively affected by wheat. If you have digestive problems, I recommend giving up wheat for a while to find out if that's the problem.

My natural tendency is to think about any social implications of things like this. Like the fact that the U.S. government subsidizing corn-based ethanol drove up corn prices, causing Mexicans to switch from corn to wheat tortillas, causing increased obesity in Mexico.

Corn subsidies have also driven the use of high fructose corn syrup, which is 55% fructose (vs. 50-50 for regular sucrose, or table sugar). High amounts of sugar is bad enough for us (and tends to cover the taste of food rather than emphasize it), but fructose does not trigger the "full" response of your stomach. Thus, you are more likely to ingest more calories for anything with high fructose corn syrup than products with regular sugar.

Sugar subsidies also drive down the price of sugar, making it more readily available for addition to foods to make them more calorie-rich. The result is more type-2 diabetes, which I am sure is under-reported, and thus poorer health.

The pattern of agricultural subsidies in the U.S. creates overly sweet, low-nutrition, weak-tasting food. Europe too subsidizes agriculture, but their patterns of subsidies is different. The French are more likely to subsidize champagne grape farmers in order to maintain the French reputation for producing champagne than to subsidize mega-agribusiness -- though they are equally guilty of this. Subsidies more often than not create bad food that create poor health.

But don't worry about that, the same government that created the bad food that contributed to your bad health are trying to provide your health care now.

Epidemics and Economies -- Network Theory, Constructal Theory, and Spontaneous Order Theory

Epidemiology studies the way diseases spread. Insofar as this spread can be understood through scale-free network theory and, thus, through constructal theory, there is really not much difference among understanding the spread of disease and the spread of ideas, whether technological, scientific, or artistic, and the spread of goods through an economy.

The flows of diseases, ideas, good, traffic, money, immigrants, etc. are all described using constructal theory, which underlies network theory. All give rise to the same network structures, with power law distributions. If you understand the structure of flows, you can understand much in the social sciences, psychology, the biological sciences, and even the physical sciences. Diseases, ideas, goods, etc. all do in fact flow like rivers. The fact that they are rivers layers on top of rivers does not mean the basic structures differ -- the only difference is in the complexity created from the overlaps and nested hierarchies. Yes, it matters which kinds of networks one is looking at, be it hierarchical or scale-free (all the ones mentioned above are scale-free), but many of the principles are the same.

Hierarchical networks are embedded in the scale-free networks, and have to be understood as such. If you mistake a scale-free network for a hierarchical network, you can make errors in judgement that can in fact kill people. If you understand the economy as being a hierarchical network rather than a scale-free network, you will make the mistake of thinking central planning (as one finds in firms) for an economy possible. Can one plan an epidemic? Of course not. But the same thing that will stop an epidemic will collapse an economy -- destruction of the most-connected nodes (in the case of an epidemic, targeting the most connected nodes/people with medicine to stop the spread). The person who understands spontaneous orders understands epidemics as well.

Egalitarian Psychology and Society

I have had several discussions of late on the egalitarian level of Gravesean psychology. In the past I have talked about Gravesean psychology from a political perspective, particularly focusing on the evolution toward bleeding-heart libertarianism, but there seems to be considerable confusion when it comes to the relations among the dominant political views, particularly within the egalitarian level.

The Renaissance gave rise to the Enlightenment and, thus, to Modernism (the Entrepreneurial level of Gravesean psychology). The Enlightenment was itself divided into two camps, which one could very loosely divide into "left" and "right." The "left" -- which did in fact evolve into the egalitarian left -- was represented by the continental thinkers, like Descartes and Voltaire. They believed in constructivist rationalism -- they believed that they could reconstruct the world into something more rational. To us, they would be considered quite libertarian overall, however. We would also consider the "right" to be quite libertarian -- and not the least reason being that it includes such people as the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (Locke, Adam Smith, Hume, etc.) and Burke (more typically viewed as "conservative"). However, they differ in their view of reason and society. They believed that reason was not the end-all-be-all, that emotions underlay them. Further, they did not believe that one could rationally construct a society; rather, society evolved organically. It was, to use Hayek's term, a spontaneous order that slowly evolved in relation to tradition. Darwin was influenced by this tradition, and it underlies his theory of natural selection.

There was a reaction to the Age of Reason, and that was Romanticism. Out of Romanticism, particularly philosophical Romanticism, we get postmodernism. Both are part of egalitarian psychology. Rousseau is the foundational thinker, and we are still reaping the consequences of his ideas on education and society. For Rousseau, man was good, but was corrupted by society. Hegel viewed human relations as a master-slave dialectic and, thus, as power relations. He viewed Romanticism and the State as where all the world was evolving. Marx disagreed that the State was the end-point, but otherwise agreed with Rousseau and Hegel -- proposing a post-state communist utopia that would shed the shackles of society. The dialectic would conclude with the slaves (the proletariat) overthrowing the masters (the bourgeoisie), thus power and mastery over themselves. Communist anarchy would work because, after all, men were good, just corrupted by society (and property). This is the direct path toward what we understand as leftism.

Nietzsche reacted against these ideas, but did so within that world view (at least for a while), even pointing out that he himself was a Romantic. He thus came up with a right-wing version of Romantic/egalitarian thinking. Existentialism developed out of Nietzsche's ideas -- both those they understood (more or less, pre-Zarathustra), and a version of those they misunderstood (from Zarathustra, on). With Heidegger, we get an explicitly right-wing version of the egalitarian world view, which gets developed more by Leo Strauss and by others of the postmodern right into neoconservatism. Like the left, neoconservatives are concerned primarily with democracy and the spread of democracy. Their almost exclusively political concerns (and view of everything through a political lens) derives from the fact that postmodernists view everything as power relations.

What we typically understand as postmodern philosophy -- which is really only the final stage of postmodern/egalitarian psychology -- developed out of the synthesis of both left and right egalitarianism. Contemporary progressivism and neoconservatism both come out of this perspective. Indeed, one sees very little difference between the two world views, regardless of the sound and fury signifying nothing coming out of both camps about the other. If Obama were a Republican, would any of the neoconservatives complain about a single thing he has done? If Bush 43 were a Democrat, would any of the postmodern progressives have complained about anything he did (expanding Medicare to include medication, No Child Left Behind, etc.)? Both sides see democratic government as a force for good, as being good in and of itself. Anything wanted by a democratic government is thus good -- thus the complaints from right and left about an "unelected judiciary" deciding whether or not a given piece of legislation is Constitutional. If the people/representatives decide to do something, it is legal in this view. What matters is who has the most power.

I suppose the average person would see my description as being negative, but I have in fact only described the psychosocial situation. From left to right, communism, socialism, the welfare state, and neoconservatism are all potential directions egalitarian psychology can go. All evolved out of the constructivist rationalism of continental Enlightenment thinkers. To a certain degree, contemporary libertarianism is the version of egalitarian psychology which evolved out of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, particularly among the anarcho-capitalists. What matters is if one is fundamentally at an egalitarian level of psychology -- regardless of how one thinks egalitarianism can come about (socialism, welfare, or free markets). However, given that the egalitarian level is simultaneously radically individualistic and collectivist (rather than seeing humans as social individuals, which is a completely different way of understanding humans) simultaneously, we should not be surprised if we find few true libertarians (and no classical liberals, who are at the Enlightenment/Entrepreneurial level of psychology) at this level.

What we would expect to see, then, is social evolution into experiments in society -- communism, socialism, progressivism, welfare statism -- i.e., discontinuous change being pushed constantly. We would expect a society that pushes change for the sake of change, a constant overturning, identity politics emerging out of a concern for expressing one's authentic self, and a desire to expand social democracy throughout the world -- where democracy is determined less by the structure of the government than by the outcomes. We should not be surprised if this sounds like contemporary Europe and the direction in which the United States is heading.

Pragmatarianism

I have been invited to review the idea of Pragmatarianism. What is pragmatarianism? It is a tax idea, that people should be able to direct their taxes to whatever government programs they want. That way, taxes are less forced on us, and we have at least the appearance of voluntarism.

Let us assume for a moment the legitimacy of taxation as currently practiced. Under pragmatarianism, I could donate all my money to, say, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Certainly this would force people to literally put their money where their mouths are. Those who think the NEH and/or NEA should receive greater funding would be able to direct their money to those programs. Other than expose the rank hypocrisy of most NEA supporters (who want to spend YOUR money, not THEIR money), would this in fact increase NEA funding? How many people do in fact want to support the NEA?

I have heard about this idea before. I have heard it argued that military spending would go down, suggesting we would defund future wars, but I find that improbable. A significant portion (about 1/3) of the population is conservative and, thus, pro-military. These people are more likely to support the military with their tax dollars, at the expense of welfare. But don't worry, because another third of the population is liberal, and would direct their money to welfare programs. One has to wonder what difference any of this would make. Perhaps the individual taxpayer feels better about where their money is going, but I also see how this can result in much deeper divisions in the country, where people become resentful that their neighbors are not supporting their pet projects.

Also, consider the potential for corruption. An agriculture company receiving subsidies would of course want to support the Ag Dept so that much of the taxes they donated would return back to them. Of course, only corporations could do this, so they would be able to reduce their tax burden considerably through such methods. Further, one could imagine corporations approaching wealthy people, paying them to donate their tax dollars to the departments that hand out their subsidies. The net effect of something like this would be to effectively reduce the taxes of the wealthiest people. The poor and middle class would not be approaches simply because there are so many with so little.

A better approach would be to have a program like pragmatarianism, except private donations are 100% tax deductible. This would effectively privatize most government activities, and it is well established that the private sector does better with money than does the government. This would have the effect of reducing the size of government not just because it is starved of money, but because its duties have in fact been privatized. This would be a pragmatarianism I could sign up with wholeheartedly.

Review of Literature and the Economics of Liberty

My The Freeman review of Literature and the Economics of Liberty is online!

Competing Our Way to Socialism

The Supreme Court is hearing testimony about the health insurance law that requires everyone to buy insurance. It would seem likely SCOTUS will strike the law down because it is completely unprecedented as federal law. However, other courts have upheld its constitutionality (may this be because most states require their residents to buy car insurance, meaning having a government require people to buy something is not entirely without precedent?), so it is hard to say what will happen.

But there are real consequences to the mandate being upheld. If SCOTUS upholds the mandate, the Congress can mandate people to buy anything (silly arguments that health insurance is a unique market notwithstanding -- all markets are unique). It is the consequences of that which nobody has really talked about, though.

One of the things the government has done is to offer its own health insurance as part of the law. Since the federal government can subsidize their insurance (with your tax money, of course), they can offer it cheaper than can private companies. Since the government is forcing everyone to buy insurance, this will be an attractive option.

More, since the government is forcing everyone to buy insurance, this will drive up insurance prices in the private industry. I know we have heard many argue that it will drive down prices, because the healthy, uninsured young will be paying in, thus subsidizing the older and sicker, but the fact is that prices are brought down by competition -- and insurance is having to compete against "nothing," which costs exactly $0. This keeps rates down. If you don't have to compete with "nothing," prices will go up.

As prices go up, the government-provided insurance will become even more attractive. Thus, more people will buy the government insurance, until we end up with everyone "choosing" a single-payer system. The federal government will have nationalized the entire industry by default.

It occurs to me that this may have been the plan all along. The American people will not put up with outright nationalization of an entire industry (we were wary of the government taking over GM and Chrysler, even with promises they were going to privatize them again once they were on their feet), but what if an industry were nationalized without anyone noticing? What if it were nationalized by people choosing the government option?

If SCOTUS upholds the mandate, there will then be a precedent for forcing the American people to buy something. As a result, you may rest assured that insurance won't be the last thing Congress forces us to buy. And you may equally rest assured that the government will be sure to provide their "cheaper" option for everyone to buy. The government could easily nationalize practically every industry this way, driving out competition with their lower prices, made lower through its own subsidies.

All in all, it's a rather brilliant, quite elegant idea. It's the only way our federal government could ever get the American people to agree to nationalize an industry -- by giving the appearance that the American people are voluntarily, individually choosing the government option, until there is nothing but that option left.

The Constructal Law

What connects network , chaos, bios, complexity, self-organization, and spontaneous order theory? The constructal law.

The constructal law describes how things flow. If you have slow and fast flow together, you get a branchy pattern (which looks like a tree, a river delta, lightning, lung bronchea, the brain's neural network, the neurons themselves, etc.) that facilitates both kinds of flows. The fast flows act as engines, the slow flows act as brakes. In a river, the water is the fast flow, the soil the slow flow. More, within the branchy pattern, the slow flows are short, the fast flows are long. Further, the slow flows are smooth, the fast flows are turbulent (herein comes the element of chaos theory). Slow, smooth, short streams flow into faster, more turbulent longer streams, which flow into faster, more turbulent, longer rivers. Areas flow into points, and points flow into areas. Roots flow into the trunk, the trunk flows into the limbs.

Further, the history of the evolution of flow is toward greater and greater freedom. This is true whether the flows are physical, biological, psychological, or social. This agrees with the work of J.T. Fraser and of Clare Graves. It agrees with my own ideas in Diaphysics. Little did I know I was always already writing about flows. The constructal law fills in the last little bit, clarifying why I have been obsessed with networks, chaos theory, bios theory, complexity, self-organization, and evolution. These are all about flows. Further, it explains why I am an Austrian economist -- it too is all about flows.

If you contribute to the improvement of flow, you are participating in the natural evolution of the universe. If you work to block flow, you are working against the natural evolution of the universe. But as with any other law of nature, you cannot violate it for long without consequences. Nature will have its way. You can either work with it and live a good life, or work against it and be crushed by it over time.

"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." -- Francis Bacon

According to the constructal law, social orders are also nature. If you want to live in a good society, it must maps onto nature, being nature. Societies must be free to find their own improved flows. Damming a river won't improve its flow any more than restrictive regulations that act as barriers to entry improve the economy. The movement of water, the movement of people, the movement of ideas, the movement of money, the movement of goods -- all must be free to flow.

A Summary of the History of the Cosmological Evoluton of Complexity

Information gives rise to self-organization which gives rise to emergent properties. To have self-organization, you must have information communication, networks through which that information can flow, and paradoxical relations that create tensions which drive complex interactions.

1. Energy -- foundational information leading to self-organization and the emergence of structure

2. Quantum Physics
-- free particle-waves
-- atoms

3. Chemistry
-- fluid dynamics
-- solid-state
-- complex systems (interface of solid and fluid, giving rise to flows, networks, etc.)

4. Biology
-- monocellular (archaebacteria, eubacteria, eukaryotes)
-- polycellular
-- multicellular (combining features of monocellular and polycellular)
-- social (requiring interspecies and intraspecies communication)

5. Human Psychology/Sociology (Tier 1 in Gravesean psychology)
-- Tribal
-- Heroic
-- Authoritative
-- Entrepreneurial
-- Egalitarian

6. Metahuman Psychology/Sociology (Tier 2 in Gravesean psychology)
-- Integrative (view the world in an interdisciplinary way)
-- Holistic (view the world as fully integrated set of networks)
-- Transpersonal (begin to personally identify with the whole of creation)
-- ?
-- ?
-- ?

7. ?

etc.

As suggested, this evolution is an open ended process, with no given endpoint. However, we should be able to see patterns emerging. For example, each larger emergent process has a number of subprocesses that lead up to the next emergent process. As a level of complexity becomes "full," a new level of complexity emerges to create new environments in which to evolve.

Here I combine J.T. Fraser's umwelt theory of time with Clare Graves' psychosocial emergent complexity theory of mental/social evolution. Both thinkers argue paradox is what drives the emergence of new levels of complexity, with each new level of complexity creating its own paradoxes which then get "resolved" (but not really, as their maintenance is necessary to maintain the level of complexity supporting the one which resolves the paradoxes of that previous level) in the next level.

Political Evolution to Bleeding Heart Libertarianism

At a recent conference I attended, we were talking about people who were either conservatives or liberals and who later became libertarians. However, someone asked about whether or not there were a lot of “apostates” to the libertarian movement, and we were able to come up with several names of those who have moved to the left. I don’t want to name names (this isn’t a meeting of the Unlibertarian Activities Committee), but rather discuss the very phenomenon of moving from one ideology to another – and relate it to the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism. Specifically, I want to look at political ideology through the lens of Gravesean psychology.
Clare Graves, whose psychological theory was developed more by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics, advanced Piaget’s theory of psychological development into adult psychology. Graves noted that people seem to develop through different psychological levels – and that when a society has a large enough number of people with a given psychology, there is a change in society itself. His theory is that people’s psychological states change in response to changing social conditions, and that they alternate between individualist and collectivist world views as their psychologies become more complex. One can envision such a combination of alternation and increase as a spiral, which is why the theory is called “spiral dynamics.” Among the elements affected by one’s psychological level are epistemological beliefs (how one thinks people learn best), social ideology, political ideology, and economic ideology. As one can imagine, then, this affects one’s overall ideology, and how one’s ideologies evolve. First, though, let me summarize the theory.

Graves identifies two tiers of psychological development, with six levels in the first, and two (so far) in the second. Let us start with the first tier.

The first level is the one humans share with chimpanzees, and is described by Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics. The second level is the first truly human level. It is the tribal level where safety, security, nepotism, and paternalism are most important. The politics of this level involve kinship and lineage and constitute clan councils. The economics at this level is barter and mutual reciprocity, with the chief distributing everything according to need.

The third level is the heroic level, typified by all of the male characters in The Iliad. Power, action, egocentrism, and exploitation are important values to this level. The politics is typified by powerful people who rule by whim, and the economy is one of feudal distribution in which rich elites get richer off the work of those under them. However, if you have a society that is dominated by this psychology, you do have a political system emerge that is able to allow all the powerful, egocentric individuals to have a say: democracy. Indeed, this is why Athenian democracy arose, and why it had the features it had.

The fourth level is the authoritative level. The values promoted by this level include stability, having a purposeful life, Truth, Beauty, and Good and Evil, and absolutism. Good must be rewarded and evil punished, and the good are those who follow the rules and traditions of society. Doing one’s duty gives life meaning. They prefer governments with one party rule (monarchy), and believe economic benefits should go to those who work hard, are disciplined, and save their money. If this sounds like conservatism, that’s because it is. This is the source of the values of social conservatives, including religious fundamentalists (of any religion). Medieval Europe is an example of a society in which this psychological level is dominant.

The fifth level is the entrepreneurial level. Material success, autonomy, competition, and reason are central values. With the dominance of this psychological level, we saw the Age of Reason, the development of modern science, and the development of capitalism. Politics at this level becomes pluralistic, with checks and balances, strategic alliances, and bills of rights. The economic system supported is, as already noted, free market capitalism. Your average libertarian – and Objectivist – will find all of this quite familiar.

The sixth and final level of tier one is the egalitarian level. Egalitarians are communitarian and support equality of outcome, equal rights, human rights, social justice, and redistribution and reciprocity. They are relativistic, sociocentric, and want to get along and feel accepted by their peers (meaning, other people who think exactly like they do). They believe sharing and participating is much more important than competing. Their politics tend toward consensus-building social democracy, and their economics are socialist, or at the very least supporting of a welfare state and community-based distribution.

This wraps up the first tier of human psychological development. I will note several things about each level. First, each level is exclusionary of the others – thus the tribalism inherent in our foundations are realized at each level. However, in reality higher levels contain lower levels, though some may be more suppressed than others. Someone who is at the egalitarian level, yet has a strong element of the heroic level may express a great deal of concern with victims and oppressed groups. One moves from one level into the next when life conditions change. One cannot skip levels, meaning we go through them all, and society will always have representatives of older levels. Psychological changes drive social changes, which drive psychological changes. This accelerates the more densely and interconnected societies – and the world – become(s).

We can now also make sense of many of the political divisions we see in this country. Conservatives like Pat Buchanan are solidly authoritative conservatives. The typical American conservative is a social authoritative and economic entrepreneurial. The typical American liberal is an egalitarian with a great deal of residual entrepreneurial level. Many of the left-libertarians would also fall into the latter group, though the emphases may be different.

So where does that put bleeding heart libertarians? In fact, I haven’t gotten to them yet, because I haven’t talked about the second tier yet.

Second tier psychology is exponentially more complex than those that came before. Tribalist thinking is rejected, and all of the component psychological levels are recognized and more fully integrated. There are to date two levels which have emerged in the second tier: the Integrative and the Holistic levels.
For the integrative level, systemic processes, quality, responsibility, and information are central values. They believe the world order consists of different realities of different complexities (quantum physics to chemical to biological to psychological to social; different psychosocial levels). Politically, they tend to be pragmatic, supporting whatever will work for whatever a given psychological or social level needs. Economically, they tend to support free markets as the system which best benefits everyone, regardless of level.

Holistic thinkers value broad synthesis, renewal, experiences, and spiritual bonds. They view the world in holistic terms, seeing universal forces permeating life and society. The world is a cosmos, full of complex whole-Earth networks. There is a renewed concern for eternal truths, the good, the beautiful, and meaning – though these are more cosmological, more natural classical (to use a term coined by Frederick Turner). Knowledge is a very important value, and much emphasis is put on ensuring information is well-distributed.

I would argue that bleeding heart libertarians are most likely to fall into one of these two levels. There is a recognition by those in the second tier that free markets are transformative complex adaptive systems – spontaneous orders – which cannot be controlled and should not be meddled with too much, except on the margins. The world is best understood from an interdisciplinary perspective. More, the world is understood as nested sets of self-organizing networks. This means information must be able to be communicated as easily and broadly as possible. This attitude may explain the difference between libertarian supporters of intellectual property rights (the entrepreneurial level) and opponents of intellectual property rights (the integrative and holistic levels) – and explain why neither group can really persuade the other.

If we understand that people evolve psychologically through these levels, we can make sense of many social problems and many of our political and economic differences. For those in the first tier, people with less complex psychologies are evil, while those with more complex psychologies are incomprehensible. For those in the second tier, all levels need to be integrated and made more harmonious. When I see those who recognize themselves as bleeding heart libertarians discuss practically anything, I see them trying to integrate and make harmonious, to try to understand the opposition and explain in their terms why they are wrong – thus helping guide them “up the spiral.” If we know what it is we are doing, if we are more conscious of what we are doing, we can be more successful. That’s why I think it’s important we understand Clare Graves’ contribution to psychology. It will help us reach our goals.

On the Different Kinds of Human Interactions and the Economies to Which They Give Rise

In “Creating a Culture of Gift” in Conversations on Philanthropy, vol. II, Frederick Turner argues that there are four basic kinds of human economies: market, gift, political, and divine. Each of these has evolved over time, with the market economy evolving through various kinds of systems up through varieties of serfdom to mercantilism to capitalism, the political economy evolving from tribal structures to empires to monarchies to democratic republics, the divine economy evolving from polytheism to monotheism (and for some, to deism and atheism), and the gift economy evolving from intertribal giving to potlatch to alms-giving to philanthropy to the welfare state. That there is an evolution is no indication that the last thing to evolve is the best thing to evolve. Rather, the different stages reflect the different stages of psychosocial development discovered by Clare Graves (and whose research was pursued by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics).

Each of these economies also reflects a different kind of human interactions –with themselves, with others, and with things. Love for the gift economy; sacrifice for the divine economy; master-slave for the political economy; economic exchange for the market economy. The first three have historically been vertical in nature, but each of these three has become increasingly horizontal due, in no small part, to the inherently horizontal nature of economic exchange.

Take the gift economy, for example. In the gift economy, one pursues the true, the good, and/or the beautiful. One does so out of love. There can be love of oneself, love of another, or love of some object or process. Love makes you want to dedicate yourself to the object of one’s love. Of course, in an economy, what is at issue is exchange, meaning there needs to be another involved. There cannot be an economy of oneself. But I love my wife, and I love writing poetry and plays – thus is there an economy set up between my wife and I and between my creative writing and I. In the latter case, part of the purpose of creating art is to share it with others. The artist is bestowing a gift on humanity. So, too, the scientist who, out of love of knowledge, bestows a gift of knowledge on humanity through his discoveries. So, too, the ethicist who, out of love of virtue, bestows a gift of clarifying or expanding ethical principles on humanity. Each is a kind of philanthropist. And the philanthropist commonly understood too is doing what he does out of love of humanities – philanthropy literally means “love of man.”

The love one feels for one’s wife, parents, children, family and friends are all a sort of horizontal exchange – the love flows bidirectionally. Philanthropy, though, is typically unidirectional. There is the giver and the recipient. This creates a vertical exchange. With horizontal love, the point of love given is love received. With vertical love, however, the point is to develop a reputation. The scientist, to continue to work as a scientist, has to have a good reputation as a scientist. The same, too, for an artist. And would you donate to any philanthropic organization that did not have a good reputation? Of course not. Reputation is central to the gift economy. However, this is also its danger. Reputation-seeking can get out of control, as it did in the potlatches held by the Native Americans in the Northwest. In the potlatches, the more one gave, the stronger one’s reputation, and the more status one had. Indeed, one can see each of these economies as different kinds of status-seeking behavior. A result, though, was that chiefs would give away so much they would impoverish themselves just to have higher status. This of course was harmful to both themselves and their tribes’ well-being.

In the divine economy, the form of interaction is sacrifice. This is how we trade with the divine. Almost by definition, this is a vertical exchange. Most religious traditions, though, do see this as a mutual kind of exchange. We sacrifice to the divine in order to receive gifts from the divine. If you want God’s blessings, you have to tithe. The kinds of sacrifice have evolved over time, from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to other kinds of property, including money. The story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac is a story of the replacement of human sacrifice with a combination of animal sacrifice and circumcision. The story of Jesus on the cross is a story of a one-time return to human sacrifice (or, technically, divine sacrifice) in order to replace animal sacrifice and circumcision with the sacrifice of nonliving material goods. Sacrifices are done to things one considers to be “higher” than oneself. Thus people sacrifice themselves to ideals, such as liberty or nationalism. Of course, those who sacrifice the most end up having the highest status. Thus the high status of Abraham and Jesus, or of people like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. In the last two, their high status is also due to their participation in the gift economy, in their pursuit of the good.

In the political economy, the form of interaction is master-slave. Even elected officials have power positions over those who elected them (in many ways, the bureaucrats even more so), and that is a master-slave relationship. In Western Culture at the American Crossroads (2011), Pontynen and Miller summarize Hegel’s (Phenomenology of Mind, 1807) master and slave mentalities as “The master lives off the slave’s labor, but it is the slave who transforms reality vial labor. The master, who consumes, destroys, whereas the slave, in working, creates. He slave fears death at the hands of the master, and that fear of death results in creative production, which constitutes civilization” (197). This sums up the political economy quite well, no matter what form it takes. This also sums up the postmodernist view of all human interactions as power relations. If you have a power relation, you have a master-slave interaction. This is why everything in our postmodern age is politicized. For the postmodernist, everything is politics. This is also what drives the increasing centralization and government takeover of every aspect of life. If you believe everything is power relations, meaning every interaction is master-slave, then everything is always already politicized.

Finally, there is the market economy, in which economic exchange is how humans interact. All economic interactions are mutual, or else both parties would not agree to the exchange. As such, economic exchanges (facilitated by money), are the most radically egalitarian of any of these forms of interaction. There are scale free network effects in market exchange, though, such that those who engage in these forms of exchange the most accumulate the most money, in a rich-get-richer effect. However, just because the rich get richer, that does not mean the poor get poorer. Quite the contrary. Both parties in an economic exchange are better off, meaning the poor get richer too. The difference between a rich and a poor person in the market economy is the number of economic exchanges one has participated in. But money is always circulating, and both parties are better off for having engaged in economic exchange. The same cannot be said of other forms of exchange. One hopes the divine reciprocates; one has to be wealthy to give; in the master-slave relationship, money moves one way only, meaning the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

It is important to understand these differences and distinctions, because muddling them has caused a lot of terrible problems in our world.

Marx (and other postmodernists) mistakenly believed the master-slave interaction to represent the market economy as well as the political economy, which is one reason Marx rejected the market as well as the political economy (he does call for political anarchy, after all), thinking both could be turned into some sort of rationally constructed gift economy. However, it is the market economy in which egalitarian relationships truly exist, not the gift economy. More, the “anarchy of production” Marx so hated was and is anything but – complex self-organization is the rule in/of the market. So it is not surprising Hegel’s dialectic results in the state as its endpoint – which is also why Nietzsche rejected Hegel’s teleology and argued the tensions never disappeared, as those tensions are what drives processes.

The politician asks us to sacrifice (divine economy) to help others (gift economy). But they never outright ask you to give them power over you (political economy), even though that is really what they want. At the same time, businesses and the rich (market economy) are often vilified by both left and right. As pointed out above, the divine, political, and gift economies are typically vertical relationships, while the market economy is a horizontal relationship. A politician wants to hide the power/master-slave interaction they desire to have behind the rhetoric and masks of the non-power-based vertical divine and gift economies. The gift economy is vertical to the extent that there is a giver and a recipient – the exchange is not mutually beneficent in the same way as is an economic exchange. However, gifts can be exchanged, so the giver-recipient hierarchy is reversible in a way divine and political exchange cannot be. I will note, though, that with increasing democratization, political exchange becomes increasingly horizontal.

Let us next look at some of the implications of these divisions.

We have divided human interactions into love, sacrifice, master-slave, and economic exchanges. Sex plus love is romance; sex plus sacrifice can still be found in various cults (in ancient times, the temple prostitutes); sex plus slavery to one’s desires is promiscuity (sex plus slavery is, well, sex slavery); sex plus economic exchange is prostitution. With love one aims to benefit the other; with economic exchange one benefits the other as one benefits oneself; with sacrifice one trades with the divine; with slavery, one benefits oneself at the expense of another.

Philanthropy is done out of love. Alms are given in divine sacrifice to help the poor. In government welfare programs, you have a combination of economic exchange (bureaucrats) and slavery (taxpayers), facilitated by legislators (masters) using the language of sacrifice. Elected officials do what they do to maintain power, and a power-relationship (vs. a love of economic relationship) is essentially a master-slave relationship.

If one paints out of love, one is an artist. Medieval churches are full of art made as sacrifice by the artists; the ancient Greek idea of being visited by the Muses makes artistic creation a divine exchange. Is one an artist if one paints due to compulsive behavior (to which one is a slave), or if one is forced by a government to include certain content and censor other content? Is one an artist if one paints only for money, but would immediately stop painting if the money stopped rolling in? We should not be surprised if the last two are so rare as to sound absurd. They indeed sound perverse to us. Why is this? It is because the arts are naturally part of the gift economy, perhaps even of the divine economy, and do not belong in the political or market economies (in regards to the latter, why then sell your paintings? – the patron pays to show appreciation, while the artist sells because, after all, one does have to have a place to live and to eat and to have the supplies to make more art!). The artist creates out of love of beauty; the scientist works out of love of truth; the ethicist works out of love of the good; the philanthropist works out of a love of any of these, or some combination of all three. To politicize these things is to pervert them. To turn them into economic changes is to (ironically) devalue them. But we can turn this around, too, as what ought to be part of the market economy is destroyed or devalued by politicization and/or trying to make it a part of the gift economy.

Each of these economies are based on different kinds of human interactions. These different economies – which can and do have different kinds of spontaneous orders within them – have different roles, different purposes. They are not entirely separable at times, but when we confuse them, or try to make everything part of one kind of economy, we create problems. It may be that we want to combine the gift economy with the political economy for certain things, such as in the creation of the welfare state. Or perhaps, doing so was a mistake. I think the arguments will be improved if we understand, in any case, these different kinds of human interactions, and the implications behind them and the consequences of them.

Prostitution and the Alienation of Wage Labor

Do most people only ever do things out of love? Must that be the immediate cause of everything we do?

I have been trying to figure out the Marxist arguments against wage employment, which they claim alienates a person from their work and what that work produces. With this as their ultimate argument, this is what has to be addressed -- economic arguments are ultimately irrelevant to them.

I think I have figured out the answer. It came a few nights ago in a discussion my wife and I were having about prostitution after watching John Stossel on Fox News. The issue was not whether or not prostitution should be legal -- we both agree it should -- but rather whether or not it should be considered acceptable. My argument was that if one considers having sex without love acceptable, then whether or not there is a money transaction is irrelevant. Anyone who believes one should never have sex without love is being consistent in their opposition to prostitution; anyone who believes sex without love is acceptable is being inconsistent if they then persist in opposing prostitution. Why is having sex with a different person every night for free better than having sex with a person every night for money? Is it because we consider sex to be a gift?

A startling conclusion! Yet, it fits into our attitudes regarding gifts and the gift economy. Suppose you offered someone a gift, and they offered to pay you for it? Would you not feel offended? The person who does something out of love -- who creates gifts -- feels morally superior to those who do something out of a profit motive. We consider the gift-giver to have higher status than the profit-maker ; the gift-giver, too, is in fact doing what they are doing for status. This is inherent in the fact that the gift economy is precisely about gaining status; this is its currency -- and its danger. The danger lies in the development of the potlatch, where the participants try to outdo each other, even at their own detriment. Promiscuous men and women have high status -- they are popular -- and are participants in a kind of sexual potlatch. This occurs when the gift-giving is separated from love. Yet, that original motivation is often assumed, so the gift-giver gains status despite the lack of love.

We see this attitude at work in all areas of the gift economy. We respect poets who publish for free in literary journals, but not those who work for Hallmark. We respect (and trust) university scientists over corporate scientists. The philanthropic organization (or even the government in its role in the gift economy) is considered purer in purpose than corporate givers. Those who (at least appear to) create and give out of love are believed superior to those who create and give out of a desire for profit. Many consider charity-givers to be better than job-givers, though it is only the latter that creation wealth.

This brings me back to the alienation argument. The Marxist believes all work out to be in the gift economy. All work ought to be out of love. And if it's not, it's alienating. To the Marxist, all age labor is prostitution, and ought to have the same stigma attached to it. Thus they declare wage labor to be immoral and something which ought to be prohibited -- for the wage laborer's own good. Indeed, this is the most common justification for keeping prostitution illegal: that it is for the prostitutes' own good. Further, you often hear arguments that prostitution is "alienating," etc. for the prostitutes -- the same arguments Marxists make against wage labor, prostitution opponents make against prostitution.

Ultimately, if you agree that prostitution is "alienating" for the prostitute, you agree with the Marxist analysis of wage labor. But if wage labor is not alienating, then neither is prostitution. Ultimately, those who oppose prostitution believe sex should be freely given away, as though that transaction is good in and of itself, but making it a money transaction sullies it. The question those who oppose prostitution and/or wage labor need to answer is: what is it about money that makes its use (in making transactions easier and more rational) immoral? With the understanding that the first preference is a loving relationship, if that's an option, why would people prefer their daughters (or sons) to be poor sluts rather than rich prostitutes? Why is it better to not be paid to do what I love than to be paid? And why should I not be allowed to be paid to do things I don't love?

The ultimate question, then, is: must everything we do necessarily be done out of love? Is that the only legitimate motivation? Or, specifically, the only legitimate immediate motivation? I think mistaking the immediate for the ultimate is where the problems lie.

I write poems and plays and do scholarly work because I do have an immediate love for doing those things; however, I want a job in which I earn a wage because I have an ultimate love for my wife and children, and I care for their (and my own) material comforts. My love for my family and for myself (self-preservation) drives my desire for working for a wage so I can provide for those I love. I do not need to love everything I do to earn that wage (it would probably be best if I did not hate what I do; but I could be neutral, which would include some balance of liking and not liking) for me to have a fulfilling life. My life and work is alienated only if I work only (or primarily) for unknown others rather than for my loved ones. If most of my wages are taxed away so others may benefit, that would cause me to feel alienated from my wage labor. The same is not true if I reap all the benefits for my loved ones. Ironically, then, Marx's heavily graduated income tax (in The Communist Manifesto) would in fact create alienation among the workers, not their wage labor.

It is a lovely idea to think that everyone ought to be able to do only what they love. But that is what those in the gift economy do. And not everyone could or should be in the gift economy. Even in the poorest places, gift economies exist -- but it is only when there is widespread wealth that the gift economy can come into full fruition and spread its benefits. Science, the arts, and philanthropy find their fullest fruition in wealthy countries. And the wealthiest countries are those with the freest economies. Wealth-creating profit-making is the foundation for a healthy, robust gift economy. But the two are not the same thing, and should not be considered the same thing. Wage labor is not alienating just because it's not in the gift economy. It's not supposed to be. We are judging market activities with foreign values, and when we judge one system with the values of another, we are prone to make mistakes in judgment.

In the end, Marxists want people to have nothing but personal, loving relationships, to all be as close as we all, as a species, once were in primitive tribal conditions. But that's not a realistic option in such a complex society as ours. Thus, spontaneous orders emerge which allow us to interact with a wide variety of unknown others in such a way that we are able to coordinate, cooperate, and otherwise get along. Those who hate the market in fact hate the social relationships which both cause and emerge in spontaneous orders. We cannot all love each other; sometimes, we just have to tolerate each other. Not all of our relationships can be personal; sometimes we have to cooperate on a single project, then part. The Marxist dream that we will all know each other in a personal fashion is impossible.

The Last 1 1/2 Weeks

As one can probably imagine from my last posting, I have been too busy to post much of late. It did not help that I attended, last weekend, a Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders conference on higher education.

Having three children is chaos. Utter chaos. Daniel is having a hard time of it. I had to take him out on a father-son date to help him feel better. A little time, just him and me, at Starbucks, playing with cars on a table. It seemed to raise his spirits for a few days.

At the FSSO conference, we basically concluded that revolutionary change is both unlikely and counterproductive, that any changes will likely be marginal, and that probably most students are getting what they want, anyway. This is what happens when you believe in social change on the margins, keeping tradition in consideration at all times. Of course, not all traditions are good, and that is why change is sometimes necessary. But what happens when the professors have a different concept of what education is than most of the students? And what if many professors prefer the students' attitudes, because that means far less work for them?

The good news is that the new baby sleeps well, wakes up to eat every 3 hrs, like clockwork, and is not fussy at all. In other words, Anna and I can actually get some sleep. This differentiates Dylan considerably from both Melina and Daniel when they were his age. With them, we did not get sleep for about 8 weeks.

Now that the FSSO conference is over, on to the next round of projects. I have a book review to get done asap, and a paper on the Basic Income Guarantee vs. the Negative Income Tax, which is due in June. Those are of immediate importance. I also need to work on my paper "Why Economists Ought to Go to the Theater" and I am thinking about a paper on the relationship of higher education to the various spontaneous orders. The latter was, of course, inspired by the FSSO conference.

This is my life right now: alternating between domestic life and a life of the mind. I read philosophy, economics, and literature, and Dr. Seuss, Biscuit phonics, and princess stories. I attend conferences and play with trucks. All I need now is a job, and my life will be perfect.

Dylan Francisco Camplin

Today, at 1:30 pm, Dylan Francisco Camplin was born.

And there was much rejoicing. (Yea!)

He is #3, and he will be the last.

Thoughts on the Evolution of Social Complexity in Humans

Whenever I engage in discussions with people who object to evolutionary explanations of human behavior, I discover the same underlying misconceptions of evolution.

First, we need to realize that the presence of a trait does not mean it was necessarily selected for or 100% adaptive. Evolution is not teleological. You can have traits that are adaptive, traits that are neutral, and even traits that are slightly maladaptive, so long as it is not overly harmful. Those of the latter two kinds can act as sort of “preadaptations” for different future conditions, if they end up being neutral in the original environment, but adaptive in a later one. Also, one can have the evolution of a trait that is both adaptive and maladaptive. The dropping of the larynx, for example, is necessary for speech – but dropping it also makes human susceptible to choking. The latter is clearly maladaptive, especially since it does kill some people, but it is also clear that language was so beneficial, that it over-rode the slightly maladaptive element to the adaptation.

Another example of this is our having adapted a hypersensitivity to the presence of intentionality. Those who were able to detect intention – which is to say, those able to see an orderer behind any order – were more likely to survive in a world full of other tribes who were more likely to spear first, ask questions later. It was better to mistakenly see intention than to miss it, so those who overapplied the presence of intention were more likely to survive. Combine that with the unifying elements of ritual and storytelling, and you have religion. This too is adaptive insofar as it enhances social cohesion. Hypersensitivity to intentionality only becomes maladaptive if, once people reject religion, they continue to believe that for there to be order there must be an orderer, and they then go on to adopt socialist ideals. This indeed, was Marx’s objection to capitalism, that it was chaotic. He could not even see the order in it, though it is an exemplary example of self-organization and the patterns associated with such processes.

This sets us up to deal with the specific objection, which is that it makes no sense for people to be so social that they will accept others from other tribes into their own. As it turns out, Darwin himself dealt with this issue – and dealt with it in the way that most evolutionary moral theorists have come around to themselves – which is the “expanding tribe” theory of increasing moral behavior. Insofar as one is dealing with related individuals, altruism is pretty easy to explain. But how do you know who is related to you? This is easy enough if you are a member of a tribe – everyone in the tribe is your relative. However, chimpanzee females leave their troop for other troops once they reach sexual maturity. Humans do the same thing. Both are driven by the Westermarck effect – an evolutionary adaptation that reduces significantly incest. One of the results is that other troops/tribes end up having your relatives in them. For chimpanzees, this is not an issue – if you are a member of another troop, too bad for you. However, bonobos do not go to war with each other. Humans are about halfway in between in behavior. This, in combination with the presence of language, which can act as a marker for relatedness, can tie together a number of tribes. Especially those tribes that used to be united, but divided because of environmental conditions. Religion can also act as a social marker in this sense. Thus, those who speak the same language and practice the same religion could remain closely connected. This was strengthened by trade between such tribes. Bonobos engage in a primitive kind of trading, but human trade is much more complex. It is one of the main drivers of social cohesion, and can even override significant social differences, such as language and religion. In a species which over-applies behaviors, it should not be surprising to find trade being extended to even non-related tribes over time.

There are two things that are distinct to humans: language and trade. I believe both can be explained quite handily using evolutionary theory. One would have to argue that both language and trade are a divine dispensation – that God gave us both language and market activity – as both are sufficient to explain the expanding tribe theory. Social signaling is sufficient – if we can communicate with others we are members of the same expanded tribe, then we are accepted.

I do not believe any of this necessarily denies the existence of God. I would have to wonder at the kind of God who could not create a universe that did not need his constant intervention for things to go right. If you want to believe in that pathetic little moron, by all means do so -- it's just not a God for me. Further, it may be that we are all evolving toward God, emerging toward the ultimate emergence.

And that brings me to the problem of the concept of emergence. Too many people are still rejecting this concept, acting as though all scientific explanation is necessarily reductionist. That is an impoverished science. And it misses half the universe -- the evolving, complexifying half. What is the relation, then between the brain and mind (which is really what I've been talking about, above)? Well, to amino acids, the cell is an emergent phenomenon. And it is, in relation to its constituent biomolecules. It has emergent behaviors, and the existence of the cell affects the kinds of chemical activities that take place, when and where they take place, to a certain degree. Similarly, the (inter)actions of the neurons in the embodied brain in their minding processes give rise to the mind, an emergent process. This mental order in turn is able to affect the underlying neural activity to a certain degree. The economy, for example, is a complex emergent process created by the interactions of a variety of embodied minds. The mind is a complex emergent process created by the interactions of a variety of neurons. A cell is a complex emergent process created by the interactions of a variety of biomolecules. Atoms and their ability to engage in chemical reactions are complex emergent processes created by the interactions of a variety of subatomic particle-waves. You can call this reductionist if you want, but if you only engage in reductionism, and ignore emergent properties, you won’t have the foggiest idea what is really going on. In this sense, Darwinian evolution is not reductionist, and nobody is reducing a thing by invoking it as a proper explanation of biological activities.

Rationalities

Mario Rizzo on rationality. I recommend paying attention to Peter Lewin's first comment, too.

A few thoughts:

Reason is contextual.

Reason is not what you think the person should do, but has to do with the person in question having good reasons given what they know.

Reason cannot assume perfect knowledge.

A rational decision is not monological. For example, I may know that if I want to accomplish X, I must do Y. But I do not want to do Y for moral reasons. Thus, it is rational for me not to do Y, even if it will accomplish X for me, even if someone else does not find doing Y immoral.

Institutions matter. What is rational in one institutional context may be irrational in another.

Perhaps spontaneous order matter as well. That's an idea that needs to be developed more.

Beginning the Marginal Revolution (if I could)

I was asked what I would do if I could begin to make changes in the political economy of the United States. Of course, being a Hayekian and spontaneous order scholar, I understand that the changes that need to take place have to be marginal changes. You have to keep in mind the fact that all changes have to take place within the context of the rules that already exist.

Thus, one has to consider what the elimination of a given regulation will cause to happen. The last thing you want to do is deregulate in such a way that you end up with people demanding to reregulate, because other regulations on the books are now causing different problems. We have to remember that when the government "solves" a problem, it creates regulations that in turn cause their own problems, that the government then blames the market so they can put on more regulations, etc. in a vicious circle. That being the case, one has to be careful, because simply removing the last regulation put in place may result in the problems the layer of regulations preceding it caused. To the extent possible, an analysis of regulatory cause-and-effect would have to be done to figure out how to dismantle the regulations in such a way that few problems would occur.

At the very least, it seems to me that we need to do away with socializing loss. This allows companies to justify taking much greater risks than they would otherwise take, since the profit will be theirs, but the loss will be spread out among the citizens of the country. I suspect a lot of regulations can go once we do this.

Another thing we could do right away is get rid of corporate welfare. There should be no subsidies. Subsidies distort the market, and they go to the already-established as it is.

Remove barriers to entry to allow competition. All federal barriers to entry could be removed, and the states would then be in a position of either adopting them themselves or letting the barriers go away. With competition among the states, there would likely be fewer barriers over time. Indeed, simply de-federalizing most legislation would allow for spontaneous order marginal changes to take place, since competition among the states for both businesses and workers would likely encourage moves toward market reforms, since free markets are most productive.

I would implement a simple flat tax. That would reduce the tax bureaucracy considerably and release a lot of tax lawyers and accountants to do something that creates economic wealth and value.

I would replace all welfare programs, including social security, with a basic income guarantee.

I would begin procedures to decentralize our banking system with the goal of the creation of a free banking system. With local banking responding to local conditions, monetary recessions and depressions would become a thing of the past (except insofar as the rest of the world continues to have central monetary planning, that is -- still, much of that would be considerably moderated by the ability of local banks to react to local conditions).

Cutting military spending and getting us out of everyplace on earth would go a long way to paying down the debt, as would the economic boom that would take place as people were freed to pursue their economic interests and create more new businesses and, thus, jobs. This would help bring interest rates in line with the natural interest rate of interest, too. Having true free trade with the rest of the world (regardless of what they do) would also benefit our economy considerably, as lower prices benefit everyone.

I would also defederalize the drug war.

This all seems like a lot, but in fact much of it really is just tinkering around the edges. There is much more that would have to be done. But simply de-federalizing much of what we do would make a huge difference. Our government should have a power-law distribution of power, like every other natural self-organizing process. The more we move away from such a distribution, the less natural our government and economy become -- and the weaker and less wealthy we all become.