Equilibrium or Creativity in the Spontaneous Orders

In The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Randall Collins argues the following:

• Paradoxical tensions drive creativity.

• It was the emergence of scientific technology that resulted in rapid-discovery science.

• Mathematics was rejuvenated when it came into contact with philosophy (Newton/Leibniz and Frege/Boole/Russell/Whitehead).

• Philosophy is rejuvenated whenever there is either a change in institutions or it comes into contact with another social order (math, see above; literature, with the French Existentialists and Postmodernists).

With the exception of the point regarding new institutions, each of the last three are in fact specific examples of the first point. Collins discusses the first point in regards to philosophical positions and individuals arguing them, but any time a large enough number from one spontaneous order decide to work in another, creative tensions arise. The natural response of those in the order being entered is to become defensive and to accuse the other of intellectual colonialism -- but this, too, is often a creative response in the end.

We can see this in other orders as well. It was changes in banking that drove the catallaxy of the Medieval economy into becoming mercantilist. It was the combination of technology with the catallaxy that resulted in capitalism and the emergence of the rapid-growth economy (paralleling rapid-discovery science). The three orders interact to keep each other from equilibrating and, thus, ceasing to be creative and wealth-creating. The flat economic growth that lasted to the Renaissance is a perfect example of the catallaxy at equilibrium. The paradoxical tensions the changes in monetary institutions and the emergence of rapid technological innovation provided to the catallaxy threw it into a far-from-equilibrium state, making it more creative and wealth-producing than it had ever been.

How does this happen? As a social system settles down into equilibrium, fewer and fewer opportunities become available (or obvious). Entrepreneurs need gaps to fill, and if everyone is already coordinating perfectly, there is nothing left to do. New products, new institutions, new ways of doing things all create gaps for entrepreneurs to fill. The width of the gap is the amount of profit that can be realized -- and profit is of course payment for fulfilling others' needs and wants. The same is true in any of the intellectual orders. A mathematician can show a philosopher or a social scientist or a natural scientist a gap that nobody may have been able to see, because everyone was settled down into a comfortable equilibrium. Once people realize there is in fact a gap, people begin working to fill it. This disequilibrates the system, creating more gaps -- until there is a creative far-from-equilibrium state.

We also see that the disruption leading to creativity works both ways. New scientific technology drove science, which drove technological innovation. New practical technology drove catallactic growth, which drove technological innovation. New ideas in science and philosophy drove artistic/literary creativity in the 20th century, while those artistic/literary innovations in turn drove creativity in philosophy, giving rise to postmodernism, and the sciences, helping contribute to the emergence of complexity science and chaos theory. This is what happens when two spontaneous orders, each trying to reach an equilibrium if left to their own devices, come into contact with each other. The ecotone is where creativity is driven to exponential heights.

This would suggest that equilibrium models of social processes are helpful, but limited. We have to understand what happens when multiple orders come into contact with each other. At the same time, it shows the danger of equilibrium modellers thinking their models are what the process ought to look like. This can lead to recommendations of how to "fix" the process, to bring it back to equilibrium. However, if we want creative social processes, the last thing we want are for them to be in equilibrium. The desire for social equilibrium is a conservative desire -- a desire which does have it's place in helping to maintain stability, but only insofar as life improvement is not stifled.

The Moral Order

From the first two lines of this article:

Ethics consists of the discipline of identifying, defining, and practicing a code of universal principles that makes individual human happiness possible. Politics consists of the discipline of identifying, defining, and practicing a code of universal principles that makes collective human happiness possible.

The first are developed in the spontaneous orders of philosophy, religion, and the arts and literature. The latter are developed in the spontaneous orders of the social sciences, the political economy, and philanthropy. These two groups are the six spontaneous orders which constitute the moral order.

The Minimum Wage Suppresses Wages

The minimum wage depresses wages.

This counterintuitive conclusion actually makes sense if you think through things using economic reasoning. One of the consequences of the minimum wage is to create unemployment, particularly among unskilled workers. This creates a pool of unemployed workers who are all competing with each other for the minimum wage, driving wages toward the minimum. Of course, these same workers often cannot get those jobs because of their lack of skills, and they cannot gain skills without a job -- a vicious circle they cannot get out of without spending their own money to go to school to get the credentials which act as a key to employment. Given that unemployed people likely do not have money for school, they have to get student loans, putting them in debt from the get-go. Any wages they may get will have loan payments subtracted from them. The net result may be a real income at or below the minimum wage.

A wage of $7.25 (the current minimum wage) gets you $1160 before taxes. The average student loan payment per month is about $250. One would have to make $8.80/hr to match the minimum wage with that loan payment. One would hope one would make much more than that -- but the point is that if people could gain skills through working, they could end up with the same wages and no debt to speak of.

In fact, without a minimum wage, unskilled workers could get hired at a rate that made it worth training them (which is not costless for the business), with the result that they would no longer be unskilled workers (even so-called dead-end jobs give you skills you need to hold down any job whatsoever, something many unskilled workers do not have, and quite frankly will not necessarily gain in school). As workers gained skills, they would bid up wages. Competition among businesses for workers drives up wages; competition among workers drives down wages. When you create a floor for wages, you create people who would rather work for little than for nothing at all. It is the same logic that results in mandatory insurance driving up insurance prices. Businesses competing with zero must have low prices; businesses competing with a wage of zero do not have to bid up wages. The minimum wage creates a zero wage that would not exist in a free market

So that is two ways in which the minimum wage suppresses wages -- directly and indirectly. And that leaves out the fact that it drives up the prices of goods and services (increase costs, and you increase prices) for everyone (including those you have made unemployed through your minimum wages) and protects big businesses from competition against upstarts -- especially those mom-and-pop stores the left love to wax romantic over.

So if you want to keep wages low, create a large pool of unemployed, keep large numbers of people unskilled, put a lot of people into debt, impoverish society as a whole, increase prices, and protect bug business from competition against small upstarts, then minimum wage laws are the laws you ought to support.

Paradox Drives Social Complexity

The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity. (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 787)

This is particularly true in philosophy, mathematics, and the social sciences -- with the danger of this tendency coming from the latter more than the other two, since too often people have tried to apply their wild abstractions back into the real world, primarily through the (in my model) adjacent political economy. Yet, at the same time, the more autonomous an order becomes -- meaning, the more abstract and reflexive it becomes -- the more it contributes to society as a whole (to civil society) as I, working off of Russell Berman's ideas, argued in The Spontaneous Orders of the Arts" (see bottom pg. 3, top pg 4), with the conclusion that "The more alienated literature becomes from society, the more it contributes to society" (4). This of course describes the most concrete of the pure wisdom trinity of spontaneous orders. It is equally true of religion and philosophy, though going back to concretes can be seen to happen repeatedly -- particularly in religions -- under threats. Threats would likely push art into more concrete expression as well, given the inherent concreteness of art works' contents.

What causes the abstraction-reflexivity sequence? Durkheim theorized that a trend toward abstractness and universalism takes place in the collective consciousness as the social division of labor increases. As evidence he cites trends in religion and law In isolated tribal societies, religious symbols are concrete and specific; rules are reified and their violations expiated by punitive ritual. As societies grow, more stratified, organizationally and economically differentiated, the spiritual entities of religion become less localized, expanding in their scope, and eventually leaving the concrete worldly level entirely for a transcendental realm. Still further on this continuum, the "modernism" of Durkheim's day regarded God as a symbol of the universal moral order, and explained the anthropomorphic traits of earlier belief as reification, mistaking a symbol for a concrete entity. (Collins, 790)

Collins then observes that the above describes social evolution of belief over long periods of time (I would argue it describes the evolution of belief in such a way that it maps very well onto a Spiral Dynamics explanation), but that intellectual evolution is much more insulated from society as a whole, creating the conditions for more rapid development.

But what drives abstraction and reflexivity?

Once the argumentative community is constituted, causal dynamics within each sequence work much the same way: oppositions splitting the network within each generation, together the the periodic overcoming of those oppositions on a new level of abstraction. (Collins, 801)

Collins is arguing that what drives creativity in an intellectual community is paradoxical oppositions which, when they become overwhelming, result in the emergence of new, more complex (more abstract) ideas. It is this process which J.T. Fraser argues drives the emergence of complexity in the universe, from pure energy to quantum physics to chemistry/macrophysics to biology to psychology, to social processes. It is this process which Clare Graves argues drives the emergence of complexity in human pyschological and social orders, from chimpanzee-like social structures to tribes to heroic/empires to authoritative to enlightenment to postmodern to integrative to holistic. It is this which, I argue in Diaphysics, in which I combine Graves and Fraser, drives all complexity. Collins demonstrates that this complexifying process is at work in our intellectual communities (which are kinds of spontaneous orders) is driven by the same emergent-paradox-driving-new-emergent-complexity cycle.

Overall, Collins demonstrates that when the philosophical order is most isolated from the other orders, it tends to fall into a stable equilibrium -- known in philosophy as "scholasticism." Collins calls this "the "normal science" of philosophy," arguing that "Scholasticism is the baselines of intellectual life" (799) -- the superstars we all remember are few and far between, kept in check by the law of small numbers. More than that, Collins demonstrates repeatedly that the superstars are those who come into contact with another spontaneous order or orders (be it religion, science, mathematics, the social sciences, the arts, etc) -- which is unsurprising given the fact that each spontaneous order on its own will settle down into equilibrium, while far-from-equilibrium states, or creative states, come about from such overlaps. Technology pushes the catallaxy into a state of constant creativity and wealth-creation. The catallaxy in turn drives continued technological innovation (certainly at the speed at which we have seen such creativity in the last century). All of this comes about from the introduction of paradoxes to the order.

If our social systems at their most creative are driven by the emergence of paradoxes, which in turn drive the emergence of more complex levels, and this is a reflection of how more complex processes emerge in the universe as a whole, then it behooves us to do our best to emulate the universe's processes rather than fighting against them. We need to come to understand these processes and the kinds of networks that drive them and emerge from them. The more creative our social processes, the more complex they become, which means we become wealthier and create more knowledge over time. This is hardly without its dangers. Not all complexity is an improvement. There are such things as perverse orders. And the purifying tendencies of these orders can create sociopathic organizations and outcomes (though, as I observed above in relation to literature, the more sociopathic, the more social contribution it may make). But overall, if we go with the natural flows and processes of emergence and complexity in the universe, the better off we will be both socially and psychologically.

Energizing Creative Outbursts in the Spontaneous Orders

To better understand civil society as a whole, it is necessary to break it down into its constituent economies and spontaneous orders. This allows us to understand each of the orders on their own terms -- simplifying clarifies. However, there is always a danger in doing this in the possibility of overspecialization putting blinders on the researchers and thus failing to understand the complexities of overlaps and interactions among the different orders and economies.

We can see this quite clearly in economics, where economists consider technological innovation to be an "external shock." To the extent that economists only ever study the catallaxy, they are right. But the market economy includes market technologies, money and finance, and technological innovation. Those three spontaneous orders interact to create the market economy as a whole. All of this is missed by the economists studying the catallaxy, the finance and monetary economists studying money and finance, and the sociologists of technology (who are scant few in number compared to those studying the other two orders in the market economy) studying technological innovation. But it seems these three groups never speak to each other.

A result of this is most of those who study the catallaxy do not understand the role money and technology play in their chosen fields of study. This, despite the fact that Schumpeter argued for the inclusion of technology in understanding the market economy.

Another result is the predominance of equilibrium models to study these different orders. An equilibrium model might make sense if the spontaneous order being studied is in pure isolation, but the minute another order comes in contact with it, the steady-state equilibrium system is thrown into a far-from-equilibrium state. (And I am making a generous assumption, given the fact that I do not believe that equilibrium is necessarily the best way to understand any order, given the presence of bipolar feedback in every self-organizing process.)

Certain institutions can act as stabilizing elements in a spontaneous order, providing a predominantly negative feedback environment that will drive the system toward equilibrium. The German-style university system may be precisely such an institution. Indeed, once the initial rounds of creativity which emerged from the university reforms settled down, we have seen what can only be described as a very stable realm of philosophy in the United States, Britain, and Germany for many long decades. The exception has been France, where the German university system was never adopted. The result is that philosophy and literature have overlapped more:

The bases and products of philosophy and of literature have usually been distinct. The networks of these two kinds of intellectuals have touched on occasion; a very small number of individuals have overlapped both networks and produced memorable work in both genres. Most have been successful in only one attention space or the other; nevertheless, something is transmitted structurally, for where the networks of philosophers and literary practitioners have connected, the result has been to energize outbursts of creativity in either field. (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, 755)

 The "something" being transmitted structurally is the far-from-equilibrium state that comes about from two orders coming into contact with each other. Each order has a disequilibrating effect on the other orders, resulting in creative bipolar feedback. The French Existentialist and postmodernist movements are great examples of this sort of thing, since the main players in each were either hybrid writers themselves (Sartre wrote plays, fiction, and poetry as well as philosophy) or were heavily influenced by literature if they were philosophers or philosophy if they were literary writers.

Collins also points out that when philosophers primarily write for a writer's market rather than within universities, they become more political. Part of this is from the demands of the writer's marketplace. Universities promote high levels of abstraction in philosophy, but the popular reading public will not put up with it. Thus philosophers writing for more popular readers tend to deal with more pedestrian topics, like politics. This is why the Existentialists and postmodernists have typically been more radical in their politics than even university political philosophers like Habermas. We can also perhaps begin to see why French philosophy has found a home in American English literature departments (rather than our philosophy departments).

Given all of this, we should expect to see, as universities undergo reform in response to the internet and online universities, a new round of creativity in philosophy (and other fields dominated by the German university system). We should also expect, however, considerable resistance from those who are comfortably entrenched in that system and prefer the stability and predictability of a philosophical system at equilibrium. But this, too, will contribute to creativity, as conservative retrenching has always done in the past.

In the end, there is a role for those who study each of the spontaneous orders in isolation -- but we have to be aware of the dangers, too, of doing so. Economists can mistakenly believe the market economy as a whole is properly studied as a steady-state equilibrium system, meaning they have to consider money to be neutral and technology to be an external shock, when in fact insofar as they are studying the catallaxy in combination with money/finance and technological innovations, what they are studying is a far-from-equilibrium process in which money is non-neutral and technological innovation is an inseparable part of the system. The catallaxy is not the market economy -- it is but a part of it, even if an important part. But it is almost exclusively the catallaxy economists study, and it is almost exclusively the catallaxy economists consider to be the market economy. And even then, it is rarely a catallaxy that takes place in time and space.

The same dangers can come from studying any of the orders in isolation from the others. Yet, this is a danger well worth risking in order to gain understanding of each. The disciplinary scholars are responsible for understanding their own realms; the interdisciplinary scholars are responsible for making the connections among them. More than that, there are dangers of only working within a given order, ignoring the presence of the rest. The artist, writer, philosopher working in isolation is producing work that can only be appreciated by those who also work primarily in those orders -- thus we get art about art, literature about literature, and philosophy about philosophy -- a kind of sociopathy only appreciated by those who also work in those orders, even as those who live more healthy lives, in multiple orders and, thus, in civil society, create works that matter to the rest of civil society.

Want a More Dehumanizing Government? Give It More Power

Power makes people dehumanize others. Which is why power needs to be distributed as much as possible. Which is what spontaneous orders do. If you want to make your government dehumanize you, concentrate more and more power in an ever-more-central government. We will leave aside the fact that such a government will then, in turn, attract more and more sociopaths to it as well.

The Spontaneous Order of Mathematics

I have argued that mathematics is its own spontaneous order, the most abstract spontaneous order of the "practical knowledge" set, which includes the physical sciences and the technologies that have been invented to do science, with the latter two being mixed (abstract and concrete) and concrete, respectively. But math has not always been that way. And math has not always been a spontaneous order.

In fact, as Randall Collins points out,

In the 1700s the field [of mathematics] consisted mostly of analysis, exploring the branches of Leibnizian calculus and their applications in physical science. By around 1780, the belief had become widespread among leading mathematicians that  mathematics had exhausted itself, that there was little left to discover. (697)

Note that this describes a mathematics that is firmly rooted in the physical sciences. It is not its own order. The only mathematics being investigated is math relevant to rapid-discovery science. But then,

Unexpectedly, the following century was the most flamboyant in the history of the field, proliferating new areas and opening the realms of abstract higher mathematics.

The sudden expansion of creativity arose from shifts in the social bases of mathematics. Competition for recognition increased with a large expansion in the numbers of mathematicians. The older bases for full-time professional mathematicians had consisted of the official academies of sciences, notably Paris, along with Berlin, St. Petersburg, and a few others. [...] The [German] university reform extended to mathematics the emphasis on innovative research, as well as giving a distinctive slant toward pure knowledge apart from practical application. The process of disciplinary differentiation split math from physics and astronomy, encouraging the tendency to abstraction. (697)

This is pretty much how I describe how literature and the arts emerged into their own spontaneous orders from religion. With Modernist art and literature, we end up with extremely reflexive, highly abstract works of art and literature. This is a natural consequence of spontaneous orders. We end up with science about science, technology about technology, art about art, business about business within the market economy -- and math about math. This is a necessary consequence of the emergence of differentiated spontaneous orders, even if those orders continue to influence each other in their overlapping ecotones.

Why Aren't Chimpanzees Wealthy?

Why are humans wealthy, but chimpanzees are not? Both engage in trade. Both are tool makers and tool users. Yes, there is a difference in quality and quantity, but one would surely think this similarity to humans would make chimpanzees wealthier than, say, lions, but they're not.

I recently commented on the fact that in social mammals, the entrepreneurs are the subordinates. So entrepreneurship is found in all social mammals -- which does not explain why humans are wealthy. But my musings on the issue do suggest a reason.

In all social mammals, including humans, the dominant alphas can take anything they want any time they want to do anything they want with what they take. Thus, value flows to them. And it flows to them by those alphas breaking network bonds.

Self-organizing networks can only become so complex if the bonds that make up the network are being broken all the time. Value is not increased by trade because most interactions involve value being directed to the alpha, who uses what he or she gets to improve their social position, including rewarding cronies.

In order for these networks to become more complex, you have to weaken the position of the alpha. And this is what we see in humans -- specifically, we see it happening in humans in the last few hundred years. This has allowed our trade networks to create wealth and to complexify over time. Spontaneous orders require equality among participants, freedom of entry and exit, and the rule that you get to keep what you traded. These are the rules of a social species in which the submissives have come to dominate socially.

Redistributionist schemes are thus, to a certain degree, atavistic in nature. They go back to the idea that there should be an alpha who should distribute the goods of the social group as he or she sees fit. Both it and self-organizing, increasingly complex networks are natural. But only one results in human levels of wealth. The other brings us back to the conditions of our ape ancestors.

Hard Cases Make For Bad Laws -- The Case of William Stanley Jevons

William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) is, if you are an economist, a well-known economist; if you are a mathematician, he is a well-known mathematician; if you are a philosopher, he is a well-known philosopher; if you are a computer scientist, he, being the inventor of the Logic Piano, is a well-known early computer scientist. In my model of the relations among the spontaneous orders,this places him simultaneously in the spontaneous orders of the social sciences, math, philosophy, and technology for math and science.

Of course, people can be interested in multiple disciplines, but with Jevons, these are all intimately related to each other. Jevons was a mathematizer of logic and an inventor of a piece of technology that would allow him to mechanically do logical transformations. More, he was part of the British mathematical and logical reformers that included people like Babbage, De Morgan, Cayley, and Boole, among others, and which led to Whitehead and Russell.

Much early British economics has been done primarily by philosophers: Locke, Hume, Smith, Ricardo, and J.S. Mill, to name a few. As a philosopher, Jevons certainly falls into this tradition.

This mixture in Britain had long-term consequences, because, "When the British universities reformed in the 1860's, economics now became academic, meshing with the nearest adjacent disciplines, thus intersecting with both philosophy and mathematics" (Randall Collins, 708). And Jevons, "who developed the marginal utility theory in 1871 to displace the dominant labor theory of value" (708-9) and who "colonized the field [of economics] for mathematical methods" (709), fit right into this intersection.

But this doesn't address the issue of why the mathematicians were philosophers (and, with Whitehead and Russel, the philosophers were mathematicians) and the philosophers were economists. Yet if we take a look at my model of spontaneous orders, we can see that all three areas -- math, philosophy, and the social sciences -- are all abstract orders. It should not surprise us that those attracted to one abstract order should be attracted to other orders as well -- or that they would attempt to "colonize" the other fields. And it happened not just with math doing the colonizing, as it was philosophy which colonized math first by introducing logic to math (with math returning the favor and introducing math to logic).

Thus, Jevons' work in the spontaneous orders in which he participated makes sense. While (apparently) staying out of money/finance (while nevertheless doing social science work about it in his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) and Methods of Social Reform and Investigations in Currency and Finance), Jevons worked in both realms of Abstract Wisdom and one of the two realms of Abstract Knowledge (again, doing social science work about the second). Further, he worked in all three orders of Pure Knowledge -- I already mentioned his being a famous mathematician as well as the inventor of the Logic Piano, but less well known was his work as an assayist (a kind of chemist) when he was a young man. Thus we can see him working along the lines of both Practical Knowledge and the Abstract, which intersect at Math.

Jevons seems to be a hard case, but in fact he helps demonstrate quite well the relations among the spontaneous orders as I have categorized them. We can see the logic of his movements, and the reasons he would have brought math to both philosophy and economics (and the reasons he would have made those choices). We can see, too, why there has been a historical relation among philosophers and economists as well as, later, among philosophers and mathematicians. The fact that all three areas are areas of Abstraction means it is easy to justify bringing those methods over into each other. More, the particularity of knowledge compared to the holism of wisdom makes it more likely that math will be transported into the social sciences and philosophy than the other way around (while philosophical logic did contribute to math, math has contributed far more to logic in return).

The case of Jevons might make us think the spontaneous order divisions I have proposed are nonsense, or that they are somehow artificial since we cannot actually disentangle them from each other and from civil society as a whole. I would argue they are no more artificial divisions than is isolating out the circulatory system from the rest of the body is artificial. There is in fact a circulatory system that does certain things only it does, even as it is vital for the rest of the body. And if we have a problem with it, we would want to go to a cardiologist, not a general practitioner. A focus on the whole only, ignoring the parts, makes for bad medicine and bad medical decisions. The same is true of focusing on civil society as a whole and ignoring the real divisions within it. We cannot understand Jevons as a whole person without understanding all the orders. But as mathematicians or computer technologists or economists or philosophers, we neither want nor need to understand Jevons the whole person. We want and need to understand his contributions to those areas. The fact that he had overlapping interests is no argument against this working in a variety of orders.

Thus we can see that though the orders are separate, they do also overlap and influence each other. But there is also a logic to the movements of people participating in those orders, as the case of Jevons (but hardly only Jevons) demonstrates. Further, we can also make sense of the methodological battle taking place in economics between the neoclassical economists (as started by Jevons and Walras) and the Austrian school (as started by Menger), as the neoclassical economists are more enamored of math, while the Austrian school is more enamored of philosophy. As complexity makes more and more inroads into economics and the other social sciences, we will soon discover that both schools of economics are right. But mathematical complexity makes for a very different kind of economics than that of neoclassical economics. Thus, it is the full complexity synthesis -- synthesizing mathematical and philosophical economics -- for which we are waiting.

The German University System and the Universal Emergence of Idealist Philosophy

Chapter 12 of Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies is a veritable case study in the degree to which institutions matter. The title of the chapter is "Intellectuals Take Control of Their Bases: The German University Revolution," and it covers what happened to philosophy not only in Germany after their university reforms in the late 1700s, but also the practically identical patterns that emerged in every country that in turn adopted the German university system.

Almost immediately after the university reforms that gave rise to the university system as we now know it, German philosophy made a turn toward Idealism. Collins argues that Idealism is a halfway house from religious dominance to complete secularization within the university philosophical faculty. However, as we will see, Idealism may in fact be a consequence of the German university system itself.

Scandinavia adopted the German system in the early 1800's, and immediately underwent an Idealist revolution in philosophy.

England adopted the German system in 1872 -- and Idealism arose in England.

The United States adopted the German system in the 1870s and 1880s, and Idealism arose in the United States (with pragmatism as a halfway house between religion and Idealism, as one would expect in a country as religious as the United States).

As Italy adopted the German system, first in the north, then in the south, Italy developed its own idealist philosophical movement (interestingly, Collins notes that Idealism stayed around longer in Italy than in other places because Fascism was essentially Idealism in politics).

Now, one could simply say that this is a consequence not just of institutions, but of culture, since these were all Western European cultures (ignoring the fact that grouping these together under "Western culture" is a kind of idealistic kitsch) -- except Collins points out that the Japanese too adopted the German system (in the 1870s-1890s), and Japanese philosophy almost immediately became Idealist. And more fascinating still, Idealism in Japan raised up Buddhism in order to have a system to act as a halfway house to secularism. Why?

The Shinto cult promoted at the national level was too particularistic and too artificial a construction to serve as a rationalized philosophy; on the other side, Neo-Confucianism, dominant in the elite schools during the Tokugamwa, was already substantially secularized. Buddhist philosophy made an unexpected comeback because it could most easily take the form of a religion of reason. (686)

The Japanese experience more than the rest demonstrates that it was the institution of the German university system that resulted in the emergence of philosophical Idealism more than anything else. After all, Japan was a completely different culture. And more than that, the philosophers in the new universities actually revitalized Buddhism in Japan just to have "a religion of reason" with which to work our their Idealist philosophy. To switch metaphors, the Japanese actually built the Buddhist island to make an Idealist bridge from it to secularism. If this does not point to the fact that it was the institution which was responsible for the kind of philosophy which emerged, I don't know what does.

Subordinate Apes and Entrepreneurship

In a real sense, entrepreneurs are society's guinea pigs. They face higher risks than the rest of us, and are more likely to fail than succeed at whatever it is they are trying. The entrepreneur may be an artist as much as the potential business person. The risk are big, but when there is a payoff, those risks prove to be worth the risks.

Humans are social mammals, and looking at what takes place in other social species is often quite instructive. As it turns out, in other social species, it is the subordinate animals which act as the guinea pigs, taking the most risks for their social groups, while the dominant (alpha) animals hang back to see how everything turns out.

This sounds exactly like what happens in an economy like ours. The entrepreneur starts off life as a subordinate -- low in the social hierarchy. They take risks, and sometimes they succeed. As their businesses become more successful, they gain dominance, become alphas themselves, and want fewer risks -- thus, they invite regulations into their industries in order to reduce competition from others and, thus, their own risks. The regulators -- people in government who are alpha primates almost by definition -- themselves are risk-adverse, and have set up a system that prevents them from experiencing too much risk.

What we then see is risk-adverse alpha primates both looking down on the risk-taking subordinates for being subordinates, and relying on those risk-taking subordinates for the success of the social group. Does  this not describe the seemingly contradictory attitudes of many anti-market people in government? Obama fits this about as beautifully as one could want. He clearly looks down on risk-takers (who we now know to be perceived by him as subordinates, who of course should be looked down on), but realizes too that he needs them for the protection of his social group.

The free market, then, is the direct promoter of the subordinate human. The entrepreneur is the subordinate taking the risks of society, and sometimes benefiting from that risk to such a degree that (s)he becomes a dominant member of society. Spontaneous orders emerge when the subordinate humans come to socially dominate. Attempts to impose hierarchical network structures are attempts by alpha humans to reassert their dominance. Given the dominance of the subordinates, the alpha humans resort to pro-subordinate rhetoric to maintain their power. It is unlikely we will ever see an end to this struggle. In fact, since one cannot have subordinates without alphas, the elimination of the alphas would result in the elimination of entrepreneurship as well. Those paradoxical tensions must exist to drive social complexity. Which means the struggle for liberty will never end.

Far-From-Equilibrium Modeling of the Economy

The belief that real markets are inefficient comes about when economists compare equilibrium models of the economy to the real economy and, noticing a huge difference between the two, conclude there is something wrong with the market. For some reason it doesn't occur to them that their models may be wrong.

One gets an equilibrium in one's model when that model uses negative feedback alone. The benefit of this is that the models are then very simple and unmessy. The negative feedback drives human action and prices to equilibrium. Competition among consumers drives up prices while competition among sellers drives down prices. Increase supply while holding quantity demand steady or decrease demand while holding quantity supply steady, and prices will drop; increase demand while holding quantity supply steady or decrease supply while holding quantity demand steady, and prices will rise. We have the law of diminishing returns -- no clearer summation of negative feedback leading to equilibrium. And more, equilibrium models show that in perfect competition (another problematic idea), negative feedback will drive profit down to zero. Thus, if there is profit, there is a problem with the market.

But what if the market is not a process in which only negative feedback exists? What if there is positive feedback as well? There is certainly a law of diminishing returns at any given time for any given individual, but what happens overtime, and when there are groups of people? What about fads, where the more popular something becomes, the more you want it -- even as the price goes up? A fad resembles a sort of mini-bubble -- as well it should. Bubbles are caused by positive feedback processes. And both bubbles and fads end -- often spectacularly.

But we can only see this if we understand the economy as being the product not of pairs of people in a sort of atemporal pinpoint, but as large groups of individuals over space and time. We thus get both positive and negative feedback at work simultaneously, creating multiple equilibria. This creates entrepreneurial opportunities and thus the opportunity for pure profit.

And this ignores the roles of money/finance and technology, two other spontaneous orders that interact with the catallaxy, keeping it in a constant far-from-equilibrium state.

In the end, the economy is and can be creative if and only if it has bipolar feedback. The economy behaves precisely as it does because it necessarily has these two forces at work, and not merely the one. Such a model of the economy will certainly be much messier than equilibrium models, but they will be more true to life -- and far less misleading. They will certainly demonstrate the utter impossibility of predicting the outcomes of certain rules and regulations.

Now, none of this is to say that there aren't aspects of the economy that aren't dominated by a tendency toward equilibrium. It is likely true that there are aspects of the economy that are dominated by negative feedback. But I don't think we are in a strong position to say what those are until we have models of the economy that make simultaneous use of both negative and positive feedback.

How Property Creates Liberty

For the average libertarian, it borders on cliche to argue that property protects liberty. So why do we need Matt Zwolinski's latest argument?

Consider this part of the argument:

For Locke and Nozick, on the other hand, property rights are only justified if they benefit (or at least do not harm) each and every individual. Now, this probably seems like an extremely tough argumentative hurdle for the defender of property to clear. Could it really be the case that each and every individual is better off under a system of private property rights than he would have been without one? Consider the position of the poorest of working-class Americans today and ask what his situation would be like if nobody had ever appropriated anything. What would his life be like if he enjoyed the full bounty of the state of nature, but none of the results of the past appropriations which (in our world) have actually taken place? He could walk or work or live on any land he chose; he could draw gold or oil from the ground, hunt or harvest all the food he could find from the land, and draw all the fish he wished from the sea.

But how would he get to the oil, or the gold? Without a system of private property in place to protect and provide incentives for creative work, who would have built the tools for him to get it? Who, even, would have built the knife or the spear with which he might hunt or fish? Tools such as these require physical resources, time, and effort to create. And unless people can be relatively sure that others will not seize the fruit of their creative efforts, why should we expect them to invest these scarce goods? No property rights means no industry or trade, even in their crudest and most basic forms. And no industry or trade means, in the famous words used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the state of nature, “no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

 But wait -- in this argument, Zwolinski only argues that property creates wealth, not how it creates liberty. But if we understand liberty as the freedom of choice -- of the freedom of choices -- then it is property which has given us increasing liberty. One could argue that this is mere materialist freedom, but this is hardly the case. All of the things Zwolinski identifies create more and more time -- time more and more people can spend doing the things they want, including creating more art and literature, more games and toys, more technology. As a result, property gives us the freedom to do more and to have the time to do it. Those of us who live in countries that more or less have free markets are so wealthy that we can do pretty much what we want when we want. We are incredibly free, and incredibly spoiled by it. We sit around and invent things to worry about, we have it so good.

This would suggest that property not only protect liberty, but creates it. Property makes us more free -- more free over time. So free that, sometimes, we fail to recognize when governments begin (or continue) to infringe on those freedoms.

I have read many pieces that talk about how property is necessary for liberty, and how it protect liberty -- but I have yet to read how it actually creates liberty. This is perhaps an area that needs more investigation.

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?