Beauty and Theory -- The Example of Spontaneous Orders

Francis Hutcheson, who was a teacher of Adam Smith, defined something as being beautiful if "there is Uniformity amidst Variety" (An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 28). He applied this definition not only to objects, including music and the other arts, but to theories as well. He argues that theory (unity) makes observations (variety) beautiful; accumulating observations makes us uneasy, until we can make sense of it all with a unifying theory (37). Darwin's theory of natural selection is such a theory, as he developed it to make sense of the variety of observations he had made.

Further, Hutcheson argues that a theorem is beautiful "When one Theorem contains a vast Multitude of Corollaries equally deducible from it" (38). I would argue that spontaneous order theory is precisely such a kind of theory. Spontaneous order theory posits the same basic rules will give rise to a variety of different orders. Status equality among participants, freedom of entry and exit, freedom of participants to pursue their own goals within the given order, the order being the result of human action but are not of human design, the participants following abstract procedural rules (which themselves emerge in the realization of the order itself). Spontaneous orders coordinate those attempting to realize the same basic kinds of goals -- increase in economic value in the catallaxy, increase in scientific knowledge in science, etc.

Thus, spontaneous order theory is a beautiful theory precisely because it allows us to explain a variety of social orders without having to eliminate their individual characteristics. The theory allows us to understand the commonalities as well as the differences.

And it is extremely important to understand the differences among the orders -- and to understand those orders as pure orders. If we do not try to understand those orders as pure orders, we will not be able to properly understand the interactions among those orders. A holistic-only approach to understanding culture/civil society can lead us very easily into mistaking what can happen in one order for what can happen in another. We can confuse, for example, economic actions for political actions, and vice versa. Only by understanding the parts can we understand how those parts interact to create the whole.

Consider the history of medicine. When the body was considered only as a whole, we had doctors performing things like bleedings, which often killed patients. Phrenology made sense if the body is holistic-only. But unity by itself is unbeautiful. And such a collectivist view does not accurately represent reality. The body is made up of parts. When we began to study the parts of the body, we began to understand their proper relations to each other. While it is certainly true that the next stage of understanding what it means to be healthy requires re-integration, that re-integration will be a unity-in-variety kind of integration. We must understand both. But we must understand how the parts work separately before we understand how they work together. That is the history of the development of knowledge and understanding.

The social sciences are in many ways no different, even if the "parts" are themselves extremely complex. What we think of as the market economy is in fact made up of a variety of spontaneous orders: money/finance, catallaxy, and technology. Many of the failures of economics as a science has come about in no small part because of the failure to understand these divisions -- and that these are the constituent elements of the market economy. Only by understanding first that these divisions exist in the market economy, then understanding how these spontaneous orders work as independent orders, then understanding how they interact to create the market economy will we understand the market economy itself. More, we then need to understand other spontaneous orders/economies in order to understand their natures and how they interact.

One can consider the gift economy in both their individual orders -- the sciences (hard, social, and math), philanthropy, philosophy, and the arts -- and in their interactions. By doing so, not only will we come to understand them in their pure forms -- we might also come to understand phenomena that emerge in their overlaps.

Surely, too, much can be learned from the arguments that will arise in regards to whether philosophy should be properly understood as being in the gift economy or in the divine economy. The same is true of the divisions among the orders I have proposed and developed over the past several months regarding the relations among the orders. And we need to figure out, too, what to do with "outliers" like the moral order and culture (including whether culture is, as Hayek argues, spillover from the spontaneous orders).

But only if we understand each order as a pure order can we understand their relations and interactions. This is a project I would love to undertake, given the time and money.

The German University System, Mandarins, and the Welfare State

"In the United States, the university reform was begun in the late 1870s and 1880s by sojourners importing the model from Germany" (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 645).

"Prussia had already pioneered in state-mandated elementary schooling; bureaucratic centralization also was moving toward formalizing credential requirements and hierarchizing the competing segments of the older educational system. In 1770 an examination was established for employment in the Prussian bureaucracy, placing a premium on university legal training. Nobles, however, were exempt at first, and university degrees were not absolutely essential. In 1804 this regulation was strengthened to require three years of study at a Prussian university for all higher offices. With the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 and an accompanying series of official examinations, university legal study became a rigorous requirement for government employment. Prussia thus became the first society in the West to establish anything like the Chinese imperial examination system." (642)

Megan McArdle, in The Daily Beast, argues that America has a Mandarin class who generally rule. Given the fact that the United States has the German University system structure, which was designed to train exactly such a class, we should not be surprised by this fact. I will also note that the welfare state of Bismarck's Second Reich followed this university reform -- and that progressivism and support for the welfare state arose shortly after the U.S. adopted the German university system.

Institutions matter.

I Love Being Right, But . . .

In my dissertation, I argued that meaningful words in texts follow patterns. A new analysis of Genesis supports my thesis. This is also supported by this work.

Further, my recent post on empathy-creation in fiction receives support from Jonathan Gottshall.

A few years ago, digital analysis discovered author's fingerprints in their works.

I need to get my ideas out there more, before they're all discovered by other people.

Scholars; 1770s and Now

provincial universities were mere shells with few students, places to purchase quick degrees on the cheap.

The publishing market did not encourage intellectuals to pursue autonomous concerns on a high level of abstraction; the attraction was toward partisan polemic, literary style, and topical public issues. The anti-metaphysical and in general anti-philosophical tone which characterized the writings from these secular bases of intellectual production was a result.

...the philosopher (or specialist in abstract ideas) now tended also to become the writer of literary entertainments and the political partisan. 

Does this sound familiar? Does this not sound like our current situation? Does the first not sound like the criticisms we hear of for-profit universities? Is the second and third not what we hear about the influence of the internet on intellectual production? Indeed, do we not see much more polemics and topical public issues?

Yet, what we see above is Randall Collins' description of the situation in France and Germany in the 1770s.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Or, similar social conditions give rise to similar social structures. Those who are appalled at the rise of for-profit online universities ought to familiarize themselves with Adam Smith's arguments about the quality of teaching from for-profit professors vs. those paid by the university. Of course, given the fact that many of these for-profit universities are part of the ever-inflating education bubble, drive by student loans, there's quite another argument one can make against them. When the education bubble pops, assuming we don't use re-inflate it with cheap money, what is left over will be worth having.

Why I Do Not Like Non-Fiction Stories

In his Poetics, Aristotle declared mythos (fiction) to be more philosophical than history because history merely tells you what happened, while fiction tells you what could and should have happened.

This is certainly an element of why it is that I love fiction, but (increasingly) dislike . . . not history, per se, but non-fiction stories. Non-fiction stories are, of course, "history" in the literal sense. They are biographies or autobiographies, the latter sometimes in memoirs, the former often in a variety of "true story" genres, from more formal biographies to things like "48 Hours" on T.V. I will happily watch something "based on a true story," but I have no interest in the "true story" itself. More, I actively dislike it (which doesn't prevent me from sometimes watching such things if they are on -- much as a rubbernecker looks on in morbid fascination, wishing to look away, but somehow unable to do so).

Why is this? To say I prefer fiction because I am a fiction writer is getting cause and effect backwards. Perhaps I write fiction because I prefer fiction. Which only brings us back to square one. Why would anyone prefer fictional stories over nonfictional stories?

Aristotle's answer is actually but part of a larger answer. Fiction takes place in a safe play-space, whereas non-fiction stories are things that really happened to someone. In a work of fiction, it is possible to empathize with every character in the work -- antagonist and protagonist alike. This is an important element of fiction. Further, we know that, being fiction, everyone in the work is safe. We are not left concerned about their well-being once we are finished reading. We had all the benefits of being worried, but we were worried for a character's safety in much the same way we are worried about our own safety when riding a roller coaster. We get to be worried or frightened or even happy in a safe play space that we can leave behind, retaining the benefits of the empathy created in us through the reading and through stepping into the shoes of the various characters while leaving behind the worries, etc. But of course, we don't really leave those emotions behind; rather, we have trained up those emotions and learned how to deal with them better. Fiction helps to put us in control of our emotions by allowing us to play with them, to experience them when there is nothing at stake.

Non-fiction stories, however, really did happen to someone. More often than not we are put in the position of only empathizing with one party in the story. It thus builds up the us-them dichotomy rather than dissolving it through empathy. Further, since we are reading non-fiction, we know that the people in the story are not safe. People may be physically harmed, or even dead, and there is plenty of emotional and psychological suffering to go around that is really going around, reverberating through real people, through real lives, in real neighborhoods. We thus remain concerned about those we read or watched or heard about. Rather than training up our emotions, our emotions get raised, then rubbed raw. The characters are real and thus are not in a safe play space. They are not playing, and it's not safe. A roller coaster heading toward a pole you know you will miss because the track curves is fun; a car heading toward a pole you may or may not miss because you may or may not turn the wheel in time is not. The former trains us to control our fear; the latter makes us more fearful.

In the end, the answer is that fiction makes us better people, whereas nonfiction stories can at best have a neutral effect (much as reading a classroom history book may have), or at worst they can have a harmful effect, perhaps even making us worse people.

This is why non-fiction stories get under my skin. I can feel myself being manipulated by the storyteller to have empathy for one party, and to reject empathy for another party in the story. This is much more obvious in non-fiction than in even polemical fiction. One loses all the philosophical benefits of fiction (e.g., empathy, ambiguity, and balance) that contribute to the growth of a person, but in non-fiction emphasis is put on division and choosing sides and judgmentalism in even the most seemingly benign non-fiction stories. Fiction is full of paradoxical tensions, which drive complexity and growth. Non-fiction is full of Manichean dichotomies, which force one to choose one side or the other (with it being pretty clear what side you're supposed to choose). One is complexifying, the other is simplifying. And the good is that which complexifies (not complicates), while the bad is that which simplifies (often through complication).

Please note that what I described is non-fiction stories -- biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, "true crime" stories such as we see on T.V., etc. -- and not history, philosophy, the sciences, or even intellectual biographies (which in many ways most biographies of famous people really are, the sordid details of their lives being glossed over more often than not). It is the "sordid details" that, in non-fiction stories, are degrading to the soul, whereas these same details, in a fiction story, are what build it up. This is why history (broadly speaking) leaves them out, allowing one to look on disinterestedly.

This, then, is why I feel lifted up and rejuvenated after a work of fiction, but feel more than a little dirty and exhausted after a work of non-fiction. I prefer fiction because I want to reap its philosophical and psychological benefits, to grow in empathy and beauty.

Crowding Out

When governments provide a service or product, others providing that service or product often get crowded out. But how, exactly, does that crowding out take place? There are a variety of ways this can happen.

The first and most obvious is the government can declare itself as having a monopoly on that service or product and make it illegal for others to provide that product or service. The Post Office is -- or, was -- a good example of this.

A second way is for the government to subsidize its products or services with tax money, thus allowing them to undercut the prices of any potential competitors. This is what we can expect to see in the "public option" of Obamacare.

However, a less obvious way is by affecting the psychology of the citizens. If the government starts providing a service -- a philanthropic service, for example -- then in many people's minds that problem is being taken care of. More, it is being taken care of with their tax money. That being the case, there is no real reason to make private donations to private providers of that service. Thus, donations decrease and fewer institutions provide that service. Welfare is a good example of this -- as government poverty relief has increased, charitable donations to those who traditionally provided such relief decreased, and the burden increasingly shifted toward government-provided welfare.

This latter is perhaps the most insidious, as it results in competition going away in such a way as to be less obvious -- and in such a way as to make it possible for the government to argue that if they did not provide the service, it would not get provided.

How Stories Spread

In the paper "Population structure and cultural geography of a folktale in Europe" the authors discover that the rate of cultural transmission of a certain kind of folk tale is slower than the rate of genetic drift. At first glance, it seems surprising that cultural transmission of a folktale is slower than the rate of genetic drift; however, if we consider both the way folktales are transmitted and the way genes are spread in a population, I find this result less surprising.

We must first ask ourselves how it is that folktales spread. In most cases, folktales are spread from mother to children. If we consider the fact that women tend to be more geographically stationary than men, and given the fact that most folktales such as the one you used as a model are spread from mother to children, the relative geographical stability of folktales is what one would expect. On the other hand, men, who are far less likely to spread folktales, are far more likely to range far and wide, spreading their DNA as they go.

It thus seems to me that an interesting comparison would be the spread of mitochondrial DNA vs. Y-chromosomal DNA vs. spread of folktales. I would not be surprised if one were to find the rate of transmission of mitochondrial DNA across geographical space would be very close to that of folktales, while the spread of the Y-chromosomal DNA would be much faster.

I find this kind of work very exciting. If one were in fact to find a gender-specific correlation such as I suggest, one might find the spread of say, folk songs, correlating more with general genetic drift, if not correlating more with Y drift.

Your Place in the Universe

When it comes to size, knowing your place in the universe is truly humbling. But when it comes to complexity, knowing your place in the universe as the most complex thing it has ever created (to the best of our knowledge), is anything but.

Chakras and Spiral Dynamics

A potentially interesting way to think about Spiral Dynamics is by looking at the chakra system. The patterns map very well onto each other.

1. Root Chakra -- Beige Level (survival basics)
2. Sacral Chakra -- Purple Level (accepting others/tribal level)
3. Solar Plexus Chakra -- Red Level (confidence and control)
4. Heart Chakra -- Blue Level (Love and inner peace/authoritative)
5. Throat Chakra -- Orange Level (Communication/Science and entrepreneurship)
6. Third Eye Chakra -- Green Level (Big picture, intuition, imagination/egalitarian)
7. Crown Charka -- opening of Second Tier (Inner and outer beauty)

With the opening of the Second Tier, we return to the Root Chakra, opening it further, as Yellow is the "survival" level of the second tier and Turquoise is the "sense of abundance" level of the second tier.

 In Spiral Dynamics, one goes from individualistic (odd numbers) to communitarian (even numbers). The chakras alternate between masculine (odd numbers) to feminine (even numbers). Each needs to be balanced in a yin-yang paradoxical fashion.

I have little doubt that this is more than coincidence. Whether one believes in the kinds of energies associated with the chakra system, it is certainly not impossible that the chakra system was a kind of intuitive realization of the emergentist process psychosocial model of Spiral Dynamics. And if you do believe in the chakra system, this is a potentially powerful synthesis.

Writing Resources

Common Writing Mistakes
Common Avoidable Errors
7 Common Mistakes
20 Common Grammar Mistakes That Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
Humorous Reminders

50 Rhetorical Devices for Rational Writing
Rhetorical Devices
Using Rhetorical Strategies for Persuasion
Rhetorical Strategies for Essay Writing

Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies
OWL Grammar
Run-ons

More Wisdom About Wisdom from Frederick Turner's Book Epic

Turner, in Epic, again makes clear why I classify the arts, religion, and philosophy together in the wisdom tradition:

One good way of defining the purpose of epic is that it is to imbue wisdom. It is a wisdom that comes from an intuitive and symbolic knowledge of how we became human in the first place. [...]

It may seem that this definition of the purpose of epic begs the question, what is wisdom? The point here is that wisdom is what epic imbues. Our earliest conceptions of wisdom derive from narratives; it is no coincidence that Greek philosophers, Plato especially, referred to Homer when trying to explain some virtue of concept, that Vedic wisdom literature illustrates its ideas by means of the Mahabharata, and that Biblical wisdom theory emerges from the epic stories of Genesis and Exodus. It is a little beside the point to try to define the precise mixture of cognitive, moral, emotional, psychological, and experiential elements in wisdom, since those concepts themselves came along after the story-based category of wisdom itself, and partly sprang from it. (276)

Indeed, consider the fact that what we would consider the more "religious" elements of the Bible only come after the epic portion, in Genesis and Exodus. And the fact that both Jewish and Christian philosophy only emerge after the religious order developed.

Stories are pure wisdom, look at the big picture, see how things are interrelated and integrated. This is what makes it part of wisdom. But they create their wisdom through the particulars of the given story. We move to ever-greater abstraction with the move from stories to religion to philosophy.

What we try to do through the wisdom tradition -- both the pure and the practical (social sciences, governance, philanthropy) -- is try to understand and interact with(in) those emergent processes that are more complex than ourselves. What we try to do through the knowledge tradition (markets and science) is understand and interact with(in) those processes that are less complex than ourselves. By understanding it this way, we can understand why I place the social sciences not in the sciences, but in the wisdom tradition.

Spiral Dynamics at The Freeman

I have a new article out on Spiral Dynamics at The Freeman in which I argue that Gravesean psychology demonstrates a general tendency toward more libertarian thinking.

Sacrifice, Meaning, and the Spontaneous Orders

There is much to think through in the divisions among the spontaneous orders I have proposed -- and it helps when you find someone making similar divisions, and discussing the differences among them. For example, in Epic, Frederick Turner observes that "sacrifice is the meaning of meaning. What this implies is that the death of sacrifice is the death of meaning." From this he then goes on to observe that

Fact is bonded to theory in science by the costly and sacrificial work of experiment. Price is bonded to utility in economics by the hard knocks of the marketplace. Good intentions are welded to actions by the sacrificial submission of the donor to the real needs and wants of the recipient. Lofty artistic conceptions are realized as beauty in paint or words or stone or sound by the exacting and even agonizing ordeal of learning and exercising the craft. When the pain of the commutative process is denied, the bond is broken.

And when the bond breaks, it leads usually to some catastrophic bubble or inflationary explosion either in the realm of the signifier, or of the signified, or both. Science goes wrong when theory and data get separated—what follows is a proliferation of meaningless data-gathering or an arms-race of empty theorizing, or both. When morality goes wrong we get either brutal expediency (unprincipled action), or hypocrisy (principles not being matched by actions). When law goes wrong we get excuses for bad behavior or cruel legalism. When religion goes wrong we get idolatry or puritanical iconoclasm: too many things chasing too few few ideas, or too many ideas chasing too few things. When philosophy goes wrong we get know-nothingism or sophism. When our economy goes wrong we get hedonistic materialism or the fantastical escalation and inflation of utterly immaterial derivatives and complex but bloodless financial instruments. When art goes wrong we get a philistine welter of empty prettiness or an arid desert of conceptualism. (217-218)

 Turner mentions both the health and illness of different orders -- the health of the scientific order, the philanthropic order, and the artistic orders; the illness of the scientific order, the moral order, the legal order, the philosophical order, the economic order, and the artistic orders.Turner also observes here that our bonds -- which are necessary for spontaneous orders to exist -- are necessarily commutative. To get what one wants, one has to give up something one has. This makes even mutual exchange a kind of sacrifice. Yes, it is something of less value for something of more value, but just because something is valued less, that hardly means it is not valued. Turner observes that when this understanding breaks down, the orders they create break down. We get unhealthy versions. We need to understand spontaneous orders in their fullness, in the kinds of bonds that can emerge, and which in turn affect the kind of order which emerges.

I am a Shaman

I am a shaman.

I have often told my wife that in another time or place, I would have been a shaman. But the fact is, I do not have to be in another time or place. I am a shaman, here and now.

In his book Epic, Frederick Turner observes that

the basic elements of shamanic practice are found everywhere---the vocation of shaman, the shaman's call, the suffering or illness of the initiate, the use of drugs from alcohol to psychedelics, the shamanic musical instrument, rhythmic chanting or drumming, rites of passage including ritual death, the trance, the spirit guide (animal, human, or divine), the shamanic journey (usually both through the air and under the ground), the conversation with the dead ancestors, the shaman's power over and acquaintance with natural spirits, the use of a talisman, the shaman's social role as diviner, seer, moral judge, storyteller, and myth archive, and the shaman's subjective experience of flight, ecstasy, and sparagmos, or fragmentation. (181)

As Wittgenstein observes, if there is a family resemblance, then you you have the same thing. Do I have to have all of these to be a shaman? No. But there does have to be enough to tip one over into the category.

I will let the reader decide if I have the vocation. But I have definitely felt the call, I have suffered (both psychologically and physically), the drug use has been minimal (but not nonexistent), I am a poet who writes in rhythmic verse (rhythmic chanting), I have experienced a ritual death and came out a different person (a poet, a shaman), I have experienced trances, I have a spirit guide (and a very strict one at that!), I have experienced the shamanic journey (to the underworld, in the ritualistic death and rebirth), I am in constant conversation with dead ancestors (Nietzsche won't leave me alone -- and neither will Goethe! -- but I talk too to Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Hayek, etc.), I am certainly acquainted with natural spirits, I perform the social roles of moral judge, storyteller, and myth archive at the very least, and I have most definitely experienced ecstasy and sparagmos.

No musical instrument. And no talisman (perhaps my clipboard, on which I have written all my poems, plays, etc.?). Their lack is hardly enough to keep me out of the club, I would think.

Now, I know that in rationalistic times like these, my claim of being a shaman is puzzling, shocking, easily dismissed. But, as Hamlet observed, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And there will be those who do not realize that their priest or pastor is in fact a shaman -- who will dismiss my claim for entirely different reasons. But the fact is that the world remains full of shamans. We have just failed to recognize them. Was Jim Morrison, as the movie The Doors, claims, a shaman? I think so. And so was Nietzsche, I think. I am sure, given the above definition of Turner's, we could identify many more shamans. Not all are as prominent and dominant as Morrison and Nietzsche were, in their own ways. But prominence does not a shaman make. Many are perhaps not even entirely aware they are shamans.

Historically, shamans have had teachers in established shamans. Sadly, the contemporary world does not provide many opportunities to receive worldly guidance outside of theology schools. But shamans are not made in theology schools, even though they may find themselves drawn there. Shamans are born of pain and suffering, created in a voyage to the underworld, and given a gift and a mission and a guide. Your priest may be a shaman; but so, too, may your poet, your playwright, your film maker.

The shaman brings the world a gift -- a gift to the living from the world of the dead. I try to bring it in my poetry, and even here in this blog in my musings on morality and complexity.

I am a shaman.
_______________
It was pointed out to me that I left out the healing aspect of shamanism. That was my omission, not Turner's, as Turner does say that they "heal the body and restore the soul to the body" (181). This is too big a role to leave out, to be sure. Insofar as a given artist's work of art heals, that artist could be a shaman.

HT: Gus diZerega

Knowledge vs. Understanding

Max Weber, Mises, and Hayek all believed that the social sciences were sciences of understanding (verstehen), not sciences of knowledge. This fits my recategorization of the social sciences into the wisdom tradition (wisdom is understanding, not knowledge).

In this light, consider this from Frederick Turner's brilliant new book Epic:

Scientific method, excellent in many respects, is in some ways inferior to the storytelling system, as its reductive, deductive, and analytical procedure virtually dictates that a single cause with a single effect can be identified as the answer. (152)

Does this not sum up all the problems with mainstream economics? Anyone who proposes a single cause with a single effect as the answer to anything in economics ought to be laughed right out of the room. Any yet, how many economists do just that?

Rather, the social sciences should be closer to storytelling and philosophy, with their emergentist, inductive, and synthetic procedures, as these are what create verstehen. The scientific method does not. All it creates is knowledge. And knowledge is not understanding. Indeed, the knowledge we do have in the social sciences create such a wide variety of "understandings" that it's pretty clear that very little is being understood at all.

The Theater of Tensions

My latest academic publication, The Theater of Tensions, can now be found at Studies in Emergent Order. It's a study of how theaters, as organizations, negotiate the various values of the spontaneous orders theaters necessarily overlap.

Applying Economic Insights to other Social Processes

Allan Waldstad applies economic reasoning to understanding the process of science. The great thing about Austrian economics is that it treats the economy as a social science, meaning what it says about the economy is equally applicable to other social processes -- like science, or even literary production. Quite frankly, I think it can help one to see how silly certain ideas in economics are if we apply them to other processes. Consider wealth redistribution. The same processes that result in the patterns of wealth distribution also result in the emergence of identical patterns of reputation in science and in the arts. Is it fair that Don DeLillo has a better literary reputation than I do? Shouldn't we redistribute some of his reputation my way, since I am reputationally impoverished compared to him? Or would that just destroy reputation? Now, if what I said about reputation sounds downright stupid, you now know how you sound to me if you advocate wealth redistribution.

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible

My book review of Lisa Zunshine's Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible is now out at Consciousness, Literature and the Arts.

Pure Wisdom and Practical Wisdom Mediated by the Moral Order

What connects the pure wisdom orders (philosophy, religion, and the arts) to the practical wisdom orders (the social sciences, governance, and philanthropy) is the moral order. In many ways, the orders of pure wisdom (like the orders of pure knowledge -- mathematics, the physical sciences, and their technologies) are specialist orders. One has to achieve a certain level of expertise to participate in them at the highest levels. There remains freedom of entry and exit -- a necessary requirement for any social order to be a spontaneous order -- but one does have to learn some pretty complex rules of the game to participate at such a level that one becomes well known throughout posterity.

However, in truth, we each have our own philosophies, our own religious beliefs, and our own artistic views. In the arts, we have all doodled, written a few lines of bad poetry. But more, we have participated by viewing art (architecture is all around us, as are any number of examples of the visual arts outside of museums and galleries), by watching fictional shows on T.V. and at the movies, and by watching plays and reading poetry, short stories and novels (at least in high school). We all have our own philosophical and religious beliefs, which we at the very least share with our friends and family. We thus are all participating in each of these spontaneous orders. And who was Nietzsche (or any of the great, well-known philosophers) influenced by that nobody ever heard of, but who he knew growing up, and whose ideas influenced him -- perhaps even without his conscious knowledge? What great storyteller in Shakespeare's youth, whose name will never be known by anyone else, sparked his imagination? And who have each of these influenced, whose names we'll never know, who influenced yet others?

This is the structure of spontaneous orders. Our ethics are molded in the philosophical, religious, and artistic orders; our morals are developed in the moral order, and find their expression in the social science, governance, and philanthropic orders. The moral order connects the three orders of pure wisdom to the three orders of practical wisdom. Thus, it perhaps would help us to understand the moral order.

What happens when our passions run amok? Sexual desire becomes rape. Acquisition becomes theft. Enmity becomes murder. What happens when we castrate those passions completely with the sword of morality? We become unsexed, without love We become satisfied in our poverty (or romanticize it in others!). We are desensitized to every offense, to every injustice, and go along to get along. We thus need moderation (how Aristotlean! how Nietzschean . . .) -- perhaps a tangent to moralization, in spiritualization:

"The spiritualization of sensuality is called love" (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 53). The spiritualization of acquisition is called mutual trade. "A further triumph is our spiritualization of enmity. It consists in profoundly grasping the value of having enemies" (TI, 53).

Nietzsche argues that the moralist in fact simply wants everyone to be just like him (TI, 56). Let us admit he is right. Even those who recognize they sometimes fall short morally have an ideal,which is theirs and their alone, to which they expect everyone to rise. And thus, when I discuss morals, I too cannot escape this fact. For example, to discuss an expanding realm of morals is to assume the very morality of such an expansion. There are others who consider such an expansion to be an acceptance of immoral behavior, and thus evidence of our becoming less moral.

One is thus tempted to try to trace out a neutral position -- but each attempt to do so seems to slip away. If I discuss empathy creation, there is implied a claim that creating empathy is good. And it is I who thinks it's good -- and, perhaps, you do too -- and thinking this, I want others to believe as I believe. We wish others to see as we see, to think as we think, to feel as we feel. We do this because we have a theory of mind -- yet our access to our mind is our only source of what a mind is like. Thus, I posit your mind is like my mind. And when your mind is not like my mind, the differences are wrong -- you are wrong. And even if we develop greater empathy, we only ever move from "I do not understand you; therefore, you are wrong" to "I understand you, but you are wrong." At best we change the borders of our tribal lands, including some, excluding others -- but tribal we remain.

Poets, playwrights, fiction writers write their minds. Religious writers write their minds. Philosophers write their minds. We read them, agree and disagree, understand and fail to understand, and learn to empathize more and more the more of them we read. This is the way a liberal education is a moral education. We learn to humanize more people, to see their points of view, to understand their thoughts. We'll find allies and people we would like to be; we'll find villains and yet understand their villainy.

But we must understand that understanding is not to be mistaken for agreement or approval. To understand is not to defend -- though one must admit that understanding allows the injustice of mercy to slip in. True justice must be balanced on the scale with mercy -- it can't be behind a veil.

And thus does the sun of empathy rise, spreading more and more light, so we can see more people are actually like us -- more like us than we ever imagined, because in our exposure to more minds through literature, religion, and philosophy, we are now more like them. Thus does the moral order evolve. And those morals find their expression in our philanthropy, in how we choose to govern (or have ourselves and others governed), and in our desire to come to a higher understanding of our social orders through the social sciences. Wisdom becomes practice through the moral order, and practice in turn informs the ways we will one day be wise.

Education Bubble

An increasing number of us are realizing that there is a higher education bubble. What this means is something I intend to investigate in the near future. One thing the author of the linked piece mentions is textbook prices. Of course that's part of the bubble!

Poetry Moralizes by Weirding

If the arts are concrete forms of pure wisdom, they moralize. How do they moralize? By making you weird. Specifically, you learn to empathize. You learn to empathize not just with characters in literature, but with objects and places, plants and animals. Thus one enters into a wide variety of others, seeing the world in new perspectives. This is disrupting to the way we view things, opening up the imagination, bringing forth new moral possibilities.

The lessons learned from the processes of the spontaneous orders of pure wisdom find their realization in the world in the spontaneous orders of practical wisdom. This is how "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (Percy Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry").

Discovery vs. Processing.

The realms of pure knowledge and pure wisdom are realms of discovery -- the discovery of what is always already there. The realms of practical knowledge and practical wisdom are realms of processing -- processing the discovered knowledge and wisdom. There are of course good and bad ways to process knowledge and wisdom -- just as there are good and bad modes of discovery.

How can we learn which is which? Won't we need to know what is a good mode of discovery to discover a good mode of discovery? Or at least, stumble upon a good mode. But then, how would we know it is good? Or bad? The same problems arise with modes of processing. Are we facing infinite regress in either case? Or do we just take a leap of faith, at least for a while? Is this what happens with accepted paradigms and paradigm shifts?

 In any case, surely we can understand that discovery and processing are different sorts of things. We know the purpose of discovery: new knowledge, new wisdom. But what is the purpose of processing? What is the outcome? More process? I think so. Which is why it's a mistake to consider the economy as being able to ever have a goal. It is a process.

Catallactic Trade vs. Reciprocity

Vernon Smith observes that social exchange is a trait humans share with chimpanzees. Does this mean that I was wrong when I claimed technology preceded trade?

If we understand that social exchange for chimpanzees is in fact reciprocity that much more resembles human philanthropy and familial interchange, then no. Human trade is not among family members, but among nonfamily, including strangers. This is an expansion of troupe/tribal social exchange, but it's not trade in the same sense as catallactic trade.

Even from this perspective, it seems that concrete philanthropy/reciprocity precedes catallactic trade. And technology in the form of tools can certainly be found among chimpanzees -- and not just among chimpanzees. As with any of our distinctively human actions, the foundations of catallactic trade can be found in chimpanzees, even if the actual action in the sense in which humans engage in the action cannot.

I would argue that without some degree of specialization, no real catallactic trade will take place. And that kind of specialization is human. Vernon Smith certainly shows us the foundations for catallactic trade in chimpanzees, much like in my dissertation I demonstrated that chimpanzees have all the foundational attributes for the emergence of language -- but in the end, chimpanzees simply do not have language any more than they have catallactic trade.

HT on the Smith piece: Sarah Skwire

The Postmodern Anti-Market Mentality

Anti-market thinking takes a variety of forms. For many economists, the most obvious one is economic planning -- an idea which grabbed the imagination of economists in the first half of the 20th century in particular. Yet this is hardly the only kind of anti-market thinking, let alone the most common one in more recent years.

A large number of anti-market thinkers are the postmodernists, starting with Heidegger (who I know is not a postmodernist, but the pomos are impossible without him). Heidegger was anti-science and anti-market, but also anti-central planning (which makes sense given his opposition to science). He saw national socialism/fascism as the corrective to both the free market and central planning. Postmodernist thinkers are anti-market, but also not necessarily for central planning. Their "socialism" isn't central planning socialism -- a fact which suggests that they don't even know what it is they really support. They are just anti-science, anti-market, anti-epistemology, anti-foundationalists. I personally see the logic of being both anti-science and anti-market, even as there is an anti-market, pro-science group as well. Some of the latter are planners; some of them, though, are just afraid that pro-market people will defund science.

For many outside of economics today, socialism isn't necessarily associated with central planning. That is associated with communism. If you asked most non-economists what socialism was, most would perhaps say that it's the government owning the businesses. This is of course possible without explicit central planning. All one would need is the kind of planning one would find in any monopoly business. It would not occur to them that one would have to actually have central planning if the government did in fact own and run all the businesses, since it would make little sense for two government-run businesses to bid for something made by another government-run business. 

In the end, most people today who are anti-market simply think the government ought to regulate the economy very strictly and fund the arts and sciences and make sure people have enough money to live and are able to get whatever health care they need. They have no clear understanding of economics or economic principles, they have no clue that there was even a socialist calculation debate or what that could possibly mean, and they have no really solid ideology to even speak of. Most just have a vague primatological sense that someone ought to be in charge, that money corrupts, and that the government is the arbiter of morals. In the end, most anti-market people don't want central planning so much as they want fascism. They just want the non-ideological, kinder, gentler postmodernist version of it. When one fights the anti-market mentality today, that's what one really has to fight.

Finance and Art -- An Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Interdisciplinary work, at its best, highlights commonalities among disciplines one may not have noticed were there and sheds light on each of the disciplines used. Rachel Cohen's piece in The Believer, "Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering," comparing art with finance is one such.

Cohen suggests that artistic depictions of time, from permanence/eternity to increasing contingency from time's passage, parallel developments in finance, from more "permanent" and grounded to more transient and ungrounded (perhaps one could go a step further, and bring in a Hiedeggerian critique of "groundedness" as such). She notes that finance has developed to a point where there is pure finance -- or finance for the sake of finance. As I have noted in my article The Spontaneous Orders of the Arts, spontaneous orders develop a "pure center" so to speak. In the literary order, there is literature about literature. In painting, there are paintings about painting. In the economy there are businesses about business. In finance, there is finance about finance. Each are "ungrounded" and seemingly separated off from the rest of civil society. They do not interact with the other orders. This means both great potential for civil society -- but also great potential for abuse and very negative side-effects. The financial machinations involved in what led to the housing bubble bursting to create the current recession certainly qualifies as a negative side-effect.

But what can we glean from the fact that I recently classified the arts as being concrete pure wisdom and finance/money as being abstract practical knowledge? This would seem to suggest the two are literally opposites.

Given Cohen's insights regarding the relationships between finance and art, though, we can see considerable parallels. Is this inherent in the fact that "opposites attract"? Or that humans feel a need to be in balance -- if they are involved in one element of life a great deal, they will seek out the opposite to (at least occasionally) keep in balance? Or is this simply a reflection of the deep, fundamental similarities among all the spontaneous orders -- including their development over time?

Proper Divisions, Understanding, and the Spontaneous Orders

In my last post, I discussed how certain kinds of spontaneous orders could be separated. I propose these divisions because I think understanding these relations will help us to understand their relationships to each other in the larger civil society.

I have recently been working on developing the divisions Frederick Turner proposed: the market economy, the gift economy, the divine economy, and the political economy. In each, I propose inclusion of the following spontaneous orders:

The market economy – money, the catallaxy (trade), and technology for living

The gift economy – the sciences (the True), philanthropy (the Good), and the arts (the Beautiful)

The divine economy – morality, religion, and philosophy

The political economy – democracy and common law

Understanding what orders were in the gift economy and what the gift economy was has helped me to understand the nature of the orders in that economy – and what I personally needed to do to succeed in a gift economy spontaneous order. Understanding I was a participant in the gift economy helped me to understand that I would have to give work away in order to successfully transition into the market economy with my skills. Which is in fact what happened when I landed a writing consultant position with the George Bush Center.

However, the relations among the orders seemed to me incomplete, even as helpful as they were. For example, I have been working with Euel Elliott at UTD on a paper on technology, and in doing so, I discovered that there was a strong relation among the technological order, the catallaxy, and the scientific order. I have also been reading Randall Collins’ fantastic book “The Sociology of Philosophies,” in which he discusses the fact that a mathematical revolution preceded the Scientific Revolution, and both involved the development of technologies specific to mathematical and scientific discoveries – all of which led to what Collins terms “rapid discovery science,” in which there is a moving front of discovery with rapid consensus reached, which keeps discoveries happening very quickly. This suggested a relationship among these orders, as well as the fact that there are two distinct kinds of technological orders: one for mathematical/scientific discovery, and one for practical living. Of course, there are overlaps. Lenses for glasses led to lenses for first telescopes, then microscopes. Computers, invented for mathematics, are now used for practical living. Yet, the fact remains that there are distinct developments that should be apparent to pretty much anyone.

I came to realize that if one could loosely group together math, science, technology, and the economic orders into one grouping and loosely group together government, philanthropy, philosophy, religion, and the arts into another, that we 1) have C.P. Snow’s divisions, and 2) we have an explanation why so many who are anti-market are also anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-math, yet pro-art, pro-government, and pro-philosophy (equally, one can see why so many scientists are dismissive of philosophy, religion, and the arts). And then I thought about the fact that Hayek considers economics to be a “knowledge problem” that the catallaxy solves. This resulted in my thinking through these classifications and developing the matrix in my last posting. However, since then, I have developed the classification schema further.

I had divided things into the True, the Practical, the Good, and Wisdom. However, better, more accurate labels would be:

Practical Knowledge – money – catallaxy – technology for living

Pure Knowledge (facts) – math – physical science – technology for math and science

Practical Wisdom (the Good) – social sciences – government – philanthropy

Pure Wisdom (the True) – philosophy – religion – the arts

We still have a continuum of abstraction (on the left) to the concrete (on the right). I will also note that historically, we see the development of the concrete into the mixed into the more abstract. Technology is developed before trade, which is developed before money. The arts (like storytelling) likely evolved before religion, which preceded philosophy. As Collins points out in his discussion of philosophy, high levels of creativity and development are associated with increasing abstraction.

But let us return to the issue of knowledge and wisdom. I want to make it quite clear what I mean when I talk about knowledge. I particularly want to make a distinction between facts and truth. In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche discusses the statement that a camel is a mammal, saying that this is a truth of a sort, but one of limited value. These truths of “limited value” are what I would like to call “facts.” Facts are in the realm of knowledge, and are in many ways defined by the language. It is a fact that a camel is a mammal. A mammal is defined as an animal which is warm-blooded, has hair, and feeds milk to its young. Since a camel does/has all of these things, we classify camels as mammals. It fits into this arbitrary conceptual category we have created so we can better study, understand, and talk about them. For all things we could talk about in this manner, I prefer using the word “fact” to discuss them, since these are knowledge-statements. To use another example, let us say I filled my car with gas. One would typically say it is true that I filled my car with gas. I would rather say it is a fact that I filled my car with gas. This use of the word “fact” is supported by its etymology: “fact” comes from the Latin factum, for “done,” the neuter past participle of facere, “to do.” An action of some sort is needed for something to be a fact. That action is our hierarchical categorizing of objects. “All knowledge originates from separation, delimitation, and restriction; there is no absolute knowledge of the whole” (Nietzsche, PT, 109, pg. 39). So “all explaining and knowing is nothing but categorizing” (PT, 141, pg. 47). With facts, we end up with a plurality made up of pluralities. To be reductionist or deconstructionist is to be concerned only with the facts. On the other hand, those against knowledge, who believe we cannot know anything, are those who cannot find fulfillment in knowledge alone. What they seek is wisdom. Knowledge is indeed not enough. But that is hardly reason enough to abandon knowledge any more than the connection of wisdom to religion was sufficient reason, despite the decline of religion in the West, to abandon wisdom. If we abandon knowledge, we will only find ourselves doubly absent – of knowledge and of wisdom. Instead, we need to return to wisdom, to replace what is truly missing.

In the same essay referred to above, Nietzsche says that art “speaks the truth quite generally in the form of lies” (TL, 96). Nietzsche is here talking about truth as facts. Art does not need facts, it gives us everything as illusion. One can have art that is blatantly non-factual, yet still have wisdom-truth in this sense. So works of art and literature act as one of the primary sources of wisdom, as the source of truth in this sense. “The term sophos, which means ‘wise (man)’, originally referred to skill in any part, and particularly in the art of poetry” (Charles Kahn, 9). The artist is the wise man. But this wisdom may or may not even be connected to facts as such. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does not really believe someone can be so beautiful they can literally contradict the law of gravity and shoot up into the air. With magical realism we have “fact-statements” coming into conflict with “truth-statements.” One way of creating meaning is through repetition. Another way is to create an image so amazing one cannot forget it. This latter approach is the soul of magical realism and of such surrealist painters as Dali and Magritte. How can one forget the scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude where Remedios the Beauty she shot into the heavens because was so beautiful? Or when José Arcadio shot himself and

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

"Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted. (129-130)

This blood is going places and doing things blood should not be able to do, but that does not matter here. What matters is the truth uncovered by this scene, and that, because it is so strange, we remember it. Meaning is tied to memory (and Memory, in Greek mythology, is the mother of the Muses). We remember things that are repeated (patterned repetition is doubly repetitious, and thus more meaningful to us), and we remember things that are as amazing as these images – the “shock of the new” the Modernists were so enamored with. It is evolutionarily important to be surprised at, shocked by, and thus remember new things, since new, unknown things could potentially be dangerous – and it is good to remember surprising things so we are not continually surprised at the new thing with each subsequent encounter with it. We give meaning to those things we remember. We see this connection too in the Greek word for truth, aletheia. Lethe is the river of forgetting, the river dead souls must drink from before rebirth. Letheia is thus forgetting. A-letheia is not- or un-forgetting. Thus truth, aletheia, is unforgetting, remembering. Art speaks the truth precisely because it, as Kundera says, uncovers aspects of existence we have forgotten. Great art speaks aletheia what we are continually letheia, even after we have experienced the work of art. Art does this through lies precisely because every uncovering of physis/logos is a covering, as “physis kryptesthai philei” (Heraclitus, K. X), “Nature loves to hide.” This is how we understand, if not on a completely logical, rational level of explanation, what Marquez means about a woman being that beautiful, or a murdered man’s blood returning home. We understand these a-rational truths, a-rational because they are true without being factual. Marquez manages to highlight and make beautiful this element, of the potential separation between truth and fact – a separation which is the soul of religious mythology.

Gyorgy Doczi says wisdom is seeing the world as one, unified. This is a legitimate definition of wisdom and of truth. The words truth and betrothed are related, through the Old English treowth, meaning “good faith,” which gives us the words “truth” and “troth.” To betroth is to marry, meaning truth can be seen as a betrothal of facts, the unifying or marrying of facts. “Men who love wisdom must be good inquirers into many things indeed” (Heraclitus, K. IX). Truth as wisdom is unifying.

Wisdom is a generalization tending towards the universal codified into a proverb. The process of cognition begins with noting, observing the particular and then working out what is general from the particular. From the general, a regulating principle, a law, emerges which can take the form of the universal. The universal, the law, and the general are then tested against the ground of particularity in practice. Practice is both the starting point and the testing ground of our conceptualization of the world. What is needed is not so much the recovery of practical philosophy as the recovery of the philosophy of practice. (Wa Thiong’o 26)

Since to practice is both to learn to do something, and to do something (as in to practice medicine), we can see that wisdom needs practice, or doing, for it to be valid. We have already seen that “fact” comes from “to do.” Wa Thiong’o is calling for a unification similar to what I am suggesting. One could see wisdom as understanding the scalar nature of the world, seeing the world as a fractal whole, and knowledge as seeing the world in its constituent parts. As we will see in more detail later, in discussing Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Will to Power, truth(s) would act as the strange attractors pulling the world-system together. By combining knowledge and wisdom, we get a more knowledgeable wisdom, or a wiser knowledge, that sees the world as scalar with emergent properties derived from its constituent parts. Since bringing together knowledge and wisdom creates variety in unity, it would show the world as beautiful. Knowledge alone is not enough; nor is wisdom alone. “Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one, and from one thing all” (Heraclitus, K. CXXIV). The unity of knowledge and wisdom is beauty. The interdisciplinarian is thus the scholar of beauty.

Finally, I want to make a quick note about my division of science into the physical sciences and the social sciences. The physical sciences are divided into what one could term a Great Chain of Being, with physics being the least complex entities one can study, molecules being the next in complexity, living organisms being the next in complexity, and neurobiology being the next in complexity. However, we then get a proliferation of social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, history, political science, etc. These all certainly fit together as being in the next level of complexity – yet there is also a great proliferation at this level (one can say the same of, say, chemistry – one can learn organic and inorganic, quantum chemistry, etc. – but all chemists will learn some of each of these, while an economics student can easily avoid all the other social sciences, suggesting the divisions somehow differ). These divisions have emerged over time, and I do not believe them to be arbitrary. They represent something real in the world.

Thus I do not believe the social sciences – which one could also call, according to the above classification, and returning to an old terminology that was perhaps more accurate, the moral sciences – should be considered to be in the same category as the physical sciences. The methodologies of each should thus be very different. One will note that the moral sciences become classified as being practical, like government and philanthropy, but also part of the wisdom tradition, along with philosophy, religion, and the arts. Thus, it would seem that methods used in the wisdom tradition – those commonly used in philosophy, for example – would be more appropriate than those methods used for factual knowledge. As noted above, there is a world of difference between truth and facts. The facts of historicism can get in the way of understanding the truth about how an economy works, for example.

Note, too, that the practical wisdom of the social sciences are used to help us understand governance, the religious order, the artistic orders, the philosophical orders, the philanthropic order, the scientific order, the mathematical order, the technological orders, and of course the economic orders. Further, the pure wisdom of philosophy, religion, and the arts give each of us our moral education, resulting in the moral evolution of the moral order, which finds its expression in the practical wisdom orders of philanthropy, governance, and the moral sciences. One sees a similar relationship between the pure and practical knowledge orders.

Finally, one should note that there are some more foundational orders that do not fit into this schema. The language order, for example. Also, the moral order seems to negotiate between pure wisdom (truth) and practical wisdom (good). But not all orders have to fit into this structure, as the structure is hardly all-inclusive. Nor should it be understood as being intended as such. Further, not all things are spontaneous orders. Sports, for example, are things we do which are not spontaneous orders. Neither are families spontaneous orders. Nor are businesses – even though they are obviously found in the market economy. One could go on and on. But this should suffice to demonstrate that just because there are many social structures that are spontaneous orders, there are many others that are not. I am here not interested in hierarchical networks, only scale-free, self-organizing networks. The value of this particular organizational structure for these particular orders is that they are in fact related to each other in these ways. Understanding their relations to each other, and how they interact (or fail to interact) helps us understand the even more complex structure of civil society. 

Reconsidering the Relations Among the Spontaneous Orders

I have recently been thinking about the relations among the different spontaneous orders. I have typically been thinking of them according to Fred Turner's divisions into economies: market, political, gift, and divine. The market economy contains the catallaxy (exchange spontaneous order) and the monetary order and technology. The gift economy contains the scientific order, the artistic orders, and the philanthropic order. The political economy would contain government, including the democratic order. The divine economy contains religion and the religious order.

However, I have come to realize that one can also divide the orders into the good/morality, the true, wisdom, and practical living. There are spontaneous orders in each. And these orders can be divided into abstract, concrete, and mixed. Consider:

                      Abstract              Mixed                          Concrete
The True:   Math                     Natural Science      Science & math tech
The Good: Social Sciences  Governance            Philanthropy
Wisdom:    Philosophy           Religion                   The Arts
Practical:   Money                   Catallaxy                 Technology for living

All spontaneous orders overlap to some degree. All influence each other. However it is interesting to note that the True and the Practical are very closely connected (computers developed for the True are now used extensively in the Practical). And the Good and Wisdom are closely related. One could even argue that the Wisdom orders affect the moral order, which then finds its expression in the orders of the Good.

Note, too, that I divided the sciences. The social sciences are in fact moral sciences, and properly belong in the Good, not the True. This is not to say that the social sciences are not concerned with learning what is true-- only that that is not their primary function. This matters for how these science are properly understood and done. It also points to the fact that they are somewhere between Wisdom and the True.

If there is any idea I would love to get a great deal of feedback on, it's this.

Free Rider Problem? Increase Competition.

Given the free rider problem, why do species cooperate? As it turns out, free riders succeed only under monopoly conditions, while cooperators succeed under competitive conditions. When there is competition, the free riders are far less successful, and the number of cooperators increases.

To say this has significant implications for economics is an understatement. There is in economics the "free rider problem." How does one get rid of free riders? Well, the answer seems to be to create the social conditions in which competition is maximized and monopolies are minimized. Our governments are often monopolistic in nature. The result is the creation of more free riders. More decentralization of the government, from a central government to states and, preferably, counties and cities/towns, would result in competitive polities, reducing free riders on government.

The same is true in the economy. Freedom of entry and exit help create the conditions for increased competition. Under competitive conditions, there will be fewer free riders in the economy itself.

We should be on the lookout for where we can learn things. Yeast and bacteria growing together, it turns out, can be quite informative to those who want to understand human economies.

Human Brotherhood, Race, Essentialism, and W. E. B. Du Bois

Work, culture, liberty---all these we need, not singly but together, not successively together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt of other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. -- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

I have been reading Lisa Zunshine's strange concepts and the stories they make possible, in which she discusses at length the fact that we humans ave a default essentialist reading of human beings and other living things. We view humans as having essences, and this includes not just each individual (I am essentially "Troy Camplin" ten years ago and today as far as everyone is concerned -- and that is why people are surprised when I have changed my mind about something, as much as they are surprise when you have changed your mind about something, as that seems to violate one having an essence) but group membership as well.

Zunshine cites the following story told in Susan A. Gelman's The Essential Child about one of Gelman's colleagues, Francisco Gil-White, who was having a conversation with a group of Kazax men in Mongolia:

Gil-White asked the following: "If I stayed here, and learned Kazax, and Kazax customs, married a Kazax girl, and became a Muslim, would I not be a Kazax?" The respondent's reply was: "Even if you do everything like a Kazax, and everybody says you are a Kazax, you still aren't a real Kazax because your parents are not Kazax. You are different inside."

We thus essentialize our group membership as well -- especially any we are born into. And it runs deep. After reading the above, I proposed to my Hispanic wife that I was going to become Hispanic. The look she gave me was one of extreme confusion. Her first response was to ask me if I was just going to start marking "Hispanic" on forms -- and how was that going to work out? It is not at all surprising that her first thought went to perhaps the most superficial "meaning" of my statement. Essentialism is so deeply ingrained in our thinking that superficial readings of proclamations that one is going to violate that essentialism are the most likely response.

If we then consider Du Bois' statement above, perhaps we can make sense of it, as it seems to be contradictory. How is it that one can gain "the ideal of human brotherhood . . . through the unifying ideal of race"? After all, the ideal of human brotherhood is achievable only insofar as we accept each and every person on earth as equally and fully human. However, group membership -- including racial identity -- tends to create an us-them mindset. And when there is an us-them mindset, there is an Othering which all to easily leads to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, etc. Thus, it seems that Du Bois is arguing that only if people feel unified by their racial identity will we achieve the ideal of human brotherhood.

One can make sense of this in a number of ways. Given Du Bois' education in sociology, it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to argue that he is perhaps making the argument that one state of collectivist thinking leads to another. Insofar as racial identity is essentially collectivist in nature -- one is, in part, one's race -- and the idea of human brotherhood is collectivist in nature (it doesn't have to be, but it is perhaps not much of a stretch to believe Du Bois considered it such), then racial identity is a stepping stone to human brotherhood. One form of collectivism leads to another.

In Du Bois' conception of racial identity, though, he sees each race as equal, and as being in a position to equally educate each other. In this sense, he would oppose the current conception of multiculturalism that treats all other cultures as equal, while degrading Western culture. Du Bois clearly loves Western culture, and believes it can teach the other races much, just as he believes the other races have much to teach the white race. This co-equal collectivism leads to treating others as being part of a human brotherhood -- as co-teachers of each other.

A  more individualistic (in the Scottish Enlighenment sense) interpretation of Du  Bois would see individuals as being in part informed by their group membership(s) -- cultural, ethic/racial, ideological, etc. -- with the understanding that all groups are equal and have something to teach each other. For Du Bois, this attitude that we are equal and much learn from and teach each other is what unifies us into a human brotherhood. We thus learn to be more human and more humane. Not by rejecting our group memberships, but by simultaneously embracing them and not just tolerating, but appreciating others in different groups, with different ideas, and different world views.

But is Du Bois right to recommend this? Given the fact that we are essentializing creatures, perhaps Du Bois' formula is the best we can accomplish. But note well that Du Bois rejects such notions as cultural imperialism or cultural appropriation. He wants us to appropriate. He wants us to learn from and teach each other. In this sense, perhaps Du Bois would embrace what Frederick Turner termed "natural classicism," in which artists learn from other cultures as much as they learn from their own, to create a new world art.

As every fiction writer is taught, you do not write universal stories by being vague and abstract -- you write universal stories by being detailed and specific. Some nondescript guy doing something somewhere is not universalizing -- but a red-headed Scotsman taking care of his family in the Scottish highlands is. When you see him taking care of his family, interacting with his family, one comes to understand, "Hey, he's a lot like me. My family does similar things." Thus does one come to empathize with the unknown other, to embody that character and thus come to know the subtile differences through the deep similarities. Thus do stories unify us into a human brotherhood -- by showing us that no matter what our differences, we are all brothers. That we are all, esssentially, human.

Some Advice to the GOP

I am going to offer the Republicans some advice. I don't expect them to listen to me, and I don't even expect any to happen across my blog. As with voting, this is just one person feebly expressing his opinion, hoping what is right will prevail.

1. Drop the opposition to gay marriage. There is in fact a conservative argument for gay marriage. Conservatives favor strengthening social bonds. Allowing more people to get married will allow for the creation of more and stronger social bonds. And more than half the population believe gays should be able to marry -- and those numbers are growing.
2. Drop the anti-immigration rhetoric. George W. Bush did it, and he was elected twice. It may be too much to ask the GOP to adopt an open borders, free movement of people stance, but can we at least come up with a way to make it easier for people to come here and work?  I am talking about a work visa that can be attained on this side of the border, so people don't have to deal with the corrupt system at home just to get here to work. Do that, and the socially conservative Hispanic population will start to come your way.
3. Drop the pro-war rhetoric. There is nothing conservative about imposing change on others. There is nothing conservative about offensive wars. Our military should be defensive in nature. We can still use our navy to fight off pirates -- now, how many ships do we need off Somalia to accomplish that? Concerned that the world won't remain at peace without a strong American military presence? Well, if you are actually concerned with maintaining peaceful relations with other countries, history has shown over and over and over that the best way to do that is to . . .
4. Drop the trade war rhetoric. Drop trade barriers of all sorts. Promote nothing but free trade between America and every other country. When a Democratic candidate such as Obama complains about Americans having access to cheap Chinese tires, the answer should not be "I agree with my opponent." It should be, "Seriously? You oppose the American people being able to buy cheap tires so they can have that money to buy other things?"

If you just do these things, the GOP will start winning Presidential elections again. If you keep doing what you're doing, if you keep nominating the same exact guy each and every time, you won't.