Should Universities Provide Education or Training?

If you were to ask what it is that universities are supposed to provide, perhaps everyone would say that they are supposed to provide a person with an education. But what, exactly is an education? And is that what our universities are in fact providing?

What if I were to tell you that many if not most classes in our universities are not designed to provide you with an education but, rather, are designed to provide you with training? This of course only raises the question of what differences there are between the two. For that, I want to refer you to James P.  Carse’s classical book Finite and Infinite Games, in which Carse makes this distinction between education and training.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future. (23)

There are many classes in our universities that on the one hand train us, and others that do in fact educate us. So when, for example, you take a composition class in college, the professor is going to treat grammar and syntax as something that has been finished in the past, which you need to learn as it now is. Grammar and syntax are considered to be established rules you need to learn. If, on the other hand, you take a graduate level class on the grammar of languages, you will discover that the rules of grammar and syntax do in fact change in languages over time, that each language has its own grammar and syntax, etc., and this knowledge then prepares you for when you encounter an unknown language to be prepared for differences from what you know from the language(s) you know. You are thus prepared for surprise.

Education also helps you to be able to continue to make more and more discoveries in the past. The more literature you read, for example, the richer you find all literature to be—and of course all literature is necessarily “past.” As is all knowledge. Even a biologist is studying already-established processes. Economists are studying economies as they once were. In a sense, each is a kind of historian, each trying to discover the rules of those processes. Education is what prepares you for such activities.

Training, on the other hand, is more akin to engineering. The person trained in writing is going to write future books and papers. The genetic engineer is trying to create future changes in the organisms he is working on. The policy maker is trying to create a healthier, stronger economy. Training prepares you to be an engineer, to make things now for future purposes.

Naturally, there are going to be mixtures. Future scholars all have to be trained to write papers in their fields, so need some training. They need to be trained in appropriate methods, and so forth. But most of what they do is get educated in their fields.

What Carse is calling education is of course what we typically think of our universities as doing. However, universities have very much moved away from that model and have embraced the training model. Our universities attempt to train people to write, and there are departments of engineering, business, information technology, and so on, each designed to train people for certain tasks. And this has been happening for a long time. I, for example, did not get my undergraduate degree in biology, a field of education, but rather in recombinant gene technology, a field of training. I was of course educated, because you have to have background information with which to work, but there was an end-goal of producing a technologist rather than a scholar.

Carse argues that training is designed to prepare one for society, while education is will prepare you to participate in culture (50-55). “Society” of course involves engaging in business, governance, and any number of organizations. “Culture” on the other hand involves the ongoing change of tradition, is founded in history, but plays with boundaries. Through investigating the past, we discover ourselves, and as such change the very culture in which we live. Only education can prepare you to do that.

Education, then, would involve the natural sciences as discovery, the social sciences as understanding, philosophy, the study of art and literature as not just things to study to write scholarly papers, but as inspiration for the creation of art and literature. This is the proper role of education. 

Both are kinds of learning. But they have completely opposite results.

If you teach composition, you will train students in grammar, and there is a finality to that grammar.

If you are a linguist, what you teach and learn about grammar its that It changes, varies, and is generative. Grammar is open.

I'm familiar with both. I tried to explain to a linguist why teaching grammar was important to teaching writing, and the linguist couldn't understand my points. Because grammar As open knowledge is nothing like grammar as closed knowledge.

Chemists need education. Chemical engineers need training. Molecular biologists need education. Biotechnologists need training. Physicists need education. Engineers need training. Anthropologists, historians, and politicians all need educations. They are not trades. They participate in culture. 

The maintenance of a culture means working in a certain tradition and maintaining it to work in it on the margins.

Even a good pop star works in a tradition to which they are responding and in which they are educated. That education in that case won't take place in a university. But out is an example of what is meant by education and culture.

Universities help maintain a different kinds of culture. Increasingly a global culture, which involves a classical tradition. This includes the arts and literature, the sciences and social sciences, philosophy and theology. One must be educated to contribute to these things, to the creation of knowledge and understanding in them. 

With an education, you actually never stop learning. An education never ceases. Those working in culture never stop educating themselves. What one learns through such an education, even if one chooses to stop studying (which I don't think actually happens), still affects one's choices in life, decisions, ways one thinks, etc. Further, getting an education, even if one doesn't participate in the culture through cultural production in a direct fashion, can help one to be more creative, more compassionate, more humane in one's societal actions. Which is why it remains an ideal, even if rarely realized. 

Literature creates empathy through allowing us to experience another's mind in a safe place space. More complex literature affects our abilities to experience social complexity. And these necessarily affect behavior. The books don't just reinforce, but create. And while creativity is only learned if you are inherently creative, and the vast majority of people are not because creativity is extremely difficult and requires a great deal of energy, meaning few have what is needed to be creative, one can increase one's inherent creativity--through gaining an education. Whatever creativity a person may have is maximized through an education. The fact that few are creative this way is perhaps why few actually want an education.

But training for trades is what our schools are now promoting. Increasingly, they seem to be eschewing education for training. It is less important to read than it is to learn how to write—as though it were possible to learn the latter without doing a great deal of the former. We are supposed to go to school to become business people, engineers, programmers, and so on. And as more students enter our colleges to get training, they resist getting an education. They are not interested in culture and the continuance of culture. They are interested in getting trained to get a job.

And that is fine. Except that it is increasingly coming at the expense of education. We are not educating people for culture, to participate in culture. We are more and more preparing our students to work at jobs in the economy, but we are less and less preparing them to create, discover, and understand.

Perhaps that is why we are increasingly finding college students engaging in political correctness, resisting new ideas, and calling for limitations on free speech and academic freedom. Perhaps we are seeing students acting this way because we are no longer preparing them for culture. We have been training them, but telling them they are educated. They are not, and the ramifications for that are beginning to show.
 

Too often college classes give students anything but an education. Most are now mere training. And too often the classes that were once for education are now used for propaganda. But it doesn't have to be that way.

On the Temporally Atomized Individual

Because he said I could share it, I am going to share this Facebook comment made by Mikhail Voloshin. I am sharing it because he nails so much of what is taking place in the world, especially the West, today and I didn't ever want to lose it:

The Western education system has become very bad at producing people *who feel themselves to be part of Western civilization*. Or of civilization of any kind, for that matter.

The point of being able to answer questions about Plato or Beckett or Chaucer, as the author uses as examples, has nothing to do with being able to show off esoteric knowledge and playing a game of I'm-smarter-than-you. It has to do with understanding the shared experience of countless generations, and being in a position to continue to build upon that edifice.

Humans are utterly unique in our ability to communicate life experiences from one generation to the next. In a sense, the advent of language has granted our species biological immortality.

So when you study Plato, and Chaucer, and Newton, and Erasmus, and Locke, and Schopenhauer, and Bach, and Turing, and Lewis... You're not merely accumulating facts. You are, in fact, retracing the steps of people who have lived full lives before you, and you are absorbing those lives into your own. You are, in essence, fast-forwarding through thousands of years of human life; discovering things that you yourself might discover eventually if you were biologically eternal, but it might take you literally millions of years to accumulate the sum total of the experience at your disposal right here and now.

And this accumulation of experience doesn't just confer knowledge, but also wisdom. The humans who have lived before you didn't *just* figure out why crops grow or how gravity works and what disease is. They also pondered questions like, "What is virtue?" "What sort of things are worth being upset about, and what can I let slide?" "When is it okay to intervene in the actions of other people?" "When is it *obligatory* to do so?" These are *extremely* difficult questions, and people throughout history have spent entire lifetimes working on solutions. You can try to discover them yourself, but you'd literally have to spend millennia catching up. The whole point of being a participant in a civilization is to download past minds into your own, internalize their train of thought, and pick up where they left off. And, of course, to speak literately with present people who are in likewise the same position, because all of you are trying to answer the same problems together -- in effect, you're each extensions of one great mind.

And different civilizations represent different collections of great individuals, having left off at different points and coming to different tentative conclusions.

This is most blatantly obvious when one looks at Muslim civilization. For all of Islam's faults, what gives it strength is its ability to unify three billion people with a common history, a common set of heroes and villains, and a common set of perspectives about how life should be lived. And while the state of literacy and education in the Muslim world is beyond miserable, every Muslim is able to answer questions like, "What do you believe? Why do you believe it? What templates do you use in deciding how to interact with people and the world?" (Part of the reason why Islam is so popular, especially among the poor and uneducated, and why it spreads so quickly, is that the answers it provides are exceedingly simple.)

Likewise, the Jews are able to answer this question very directly. While the Muslim answer for everything is, "What would Mohammed do?" (with some additional interpretation and extrapolation by various subsequent philosophers), the Jews have a much more complex system of both written and oral tradition that can take decades to internalize (there are books in Jewish mysticism that you're literally not allowed to read until you're at least 40 years old, on the premise that there's no way you can be ready for it until then and exposure to the knowledge would be wasted on you). It's a much more complicated answer, but it's one of the most complete examples of civilizational coherence in the modern world. Essentially this means that every Jew, to one extent or another, is a continuation of the consciousness of every Jew that came before us; and we can answer questions about meaning and virtue with precise citations of ancient philosophers almost as though these were answers that we ourselves came to. As I said before, that is why we remind ourselves every Passover, "*I* was a slave in Egypt, and God delivered *me* to salvation."

This is where the article, and Troy, come in. Schools today, in general, *do not teach* the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization. They teach the present tentative conclusions, but they fail to connect those conclusions with the process that produced them; which not only leaves these conclusions void and pointless, but also leaves the student in no position to expand upon them. Even in the rare instances where students today are able to talk about, say, the writings of Thomas Acquinas, they typically do so by reciting a few Cliff's Notes takeaways; they don't *put themselves inside the mind of Acquinas* to understand how he came to his beliefs; they don't imagine themselves to be dressed in thick wool robes in a monastery in medieval Europe, bent over a candlelit desk, reading encyclicals on parchment delivered by horseback pages from the Holy See. Same goes for the writings of the Founding Fathers, or the speeches of Cicero, or the drafting of the Magna Carta. At *best*, they are willing to project themselves into the personae of black protesters during the Civil Rights movement, but even then it's a distorted simplification of something that happened *within living memory*; after all, if you think you can understand the mind of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. without understanding the mind of Martin Luther, you're in for some unpleasant revalations.

My point is this: If you ask a Westerner today, "What templates do you use in determining how to act with regard to other people and the world?", most would literally have no answer; and the few who do, are likely to cite a cartoonish Manichean Marxist Foucault-ist template along the lines of, "Well, it's easy: In every interaction between human beings, there is always an oppressor and there is always someone being oppressed, and the former is bad and the latter is good, and they are both defined by superficial and plainly observable physical characteristics..." For many in the West today, it's as though all of Western civilization started only in the mid-1800s with the publication of "Das Kapital". Or in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement. Or, from the POV of Millennials, there was no Western philosophical tradition before Tumblr. Some of the *extremely* well-versed can trace their beliefs back to perhaps Robespierre, but you can probably fit in my apartment all the people in America who have actually read him.

And don't think I'm only attacking the Left here, either. Conservatives at least can solidly trace their beliefs back to figures like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, but ask them to go older than that and things start to get fuzzy.

My point, and the article's point, and Troy's point, is that Millennials in general have a weaker connection to the origins of the contents of their heads than any previous generation in Western history; you'd have to look at pre-literate Germanic tribes before you find people who knew less about who they are or where they came from. The question is not whether or not they can program a computer; the question is whether or not they see themselves as heirs in the line of logical minds, from Aristotle to Occam to Russell to Turing to Hopper to Knuth, who led in sequence to the very program that the kid is writing right now. The question is not whether or not they can play a piano, but whether or not they feel themselves personally to be extensions of Pythagoras and Arezzo and Bach and Brahms. The question is not whether they can point to a case of people committing violence and say, "This is Bad," but whether they personally have the wisdom inherent from sharing in the collective memories of millions of people over thousands of years so that they can form a cogent and meaningful understanding of *why* it's bad.

And for the most part... No. No, they cannot.

This observation needs to be developed. And it needs to be read and understood by everyone. 

Creativity and the 20-80 Split

A common story we like to tell ourselves is that everyone is creative. We perpetuate this by calling a large number of what are essentially uncreative activities creative. 

For example, if you have a sewing machine and you buy a pattern and you make a shirt on your sewing machine and wear it, people will compliment you on how creative you are. The problem is, you weren't creative at all. You literally copied a pattern someone else developed and selected cloth with a pattern someone else designed. You are a copier in this case. Now, you may in fact enjoy sewing, and you may in fact enjoy following purchased patterns, and there is certainly nothing wrong with loving to do this activity, but it's not creative.

The above kind of person probably constitutes 20% of the population. They are an uncreative core of copiers who greatly stabilize society. Many of these will even go so far as to resist change. This has the social/cultural benefit of preventing change from taking place so fast that the culture/society is torn apart. For the creatives they are a royal pain in the neck, but from a group selection standpoint, they are vital for social health.

At the other extreme are what I would call the extreme creatives. These are novelists, poets, artists, creative programmers, technological innovators and other disruptors of society, culture, the economy, etc. Those who engage in "creative destruction" and are thus Schumpeterian entrepreneurs. These people probably constitute another 20% of the population. They destabilize society and keep it on the edge of chaos. They are the change-makers. 

In the middle is a wide variety of modestly to rarely creative people. They may have a clever idea once or twice in their lifetime. Many won't even follow up on it. Some will, but it will be something like adding embroidery to the shirt they sewed. The remainder of the population---about 60%---are these kinds of slightly creative people. These will also be entrepreneurs, but mostly in the Kirznerian sense of noticing opportunities. Which is a form of creativity, and an important one socially and culturally, but certainly not in the way we think of highly productive creative people as being creative. 

From the highly creative person's perspective, only about 20% are creative and about 80% are not, while from the copier's perspective, only about 20% are copiers and 80% are those crazy creatives. This mixture seems to be the most stable one to maintain a stable culture/society, which must always be changing to remain stable, but but also be stable to remain stable. Resistance is necessary for movement, even at the social level. It is the simplest expression of the power laws that necessarily underlie all complex systems. Another way of understanding it is that the 20% highly creatives almost certainly engage in 80% of what we would identify as creative activities, while the other 80% engage in only 20% of such activities. And as noted, the 20% who are almost pure copiers won't share much if any of that 20% creative actions.

Copying is a vital aspect of cultural/societal stability, because we need to be able to copy what we have been shown to work. Tradition is vital, and the copiers keep tradition alive. Studies show that the vast majority of people are indeed copiers the vast majority of the time, and will engage in copying even when they can see that there is an easier way to do things. Indeed, even the ultracreatives do not extend their creativity to every single aspect of their lives, even if they may do so to much more of their lives than most people. They may raise their children in more traditional ways, for example. Or like eating the same things over and over. Few are like Goethe and seem to be a genius at everything. Most genius creatives are geniuses like Shakespeare, and genius at one thing. Of course, those we identify as geniuses, let alone universal geniuses, constitute a much smaller percentage of the population still. And they typically require specific times and places and networks to arise. 

I also address the 20-80 phenomenon here 

* The percentages given above come from Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, and have likely changed somewhat since the publication of their book. the percentages provides are intended to give a rough sketch of what is happening. 

Donald Trump and the Pull of Nihilism

Both the Democratic and Republican parties are run by elites who have nothing but contempt for the average person. The only difference this year is that the Republicans have Donald Trump running, on the path to the nomination, a usurper from the outside who is not supposed to be able to get this far. And that has the elites panicked.

To show how out of touch these elitists are, their solution is to have Mitt Romney, perhaps the quintessential out of touch elitist, explain to the American people why they shouldn't be so stupid as to support Trump. Based on the success of all of the GOP's past attacks, that should boost his numbers just fine.

The elites (of both parties) are completely at a loss to explain Trump's appeal. The appeal is precisely that he acknowledges the feelings of a large number of dissatisfied people who see themselves as victims of the system. And the politicians we currently have are part of the system. Trump as an outsider appeals to these people.

Trump is appealing to the most basic drives, including tribalism. Those who are primarily tribal in their thinking consist of about 10% of the population, but only have about 1% of the power in society. Those who are primarily driven by the feeling of being a victim and who support empires are probably about 20% of the population, who have about 5% of the power in society. Groups like the Klan and people like Farrakhan are part of this group, and see themselves as victims of others actions. The next group Trump is likely pulling from are those who support a generally authoritarian world view, who believe in absolute right and wrong, and who see our culture as actively degrading those values and tradition. They make up about 40% of the population and have only about 30% of the power in society. They are the Christian conservatives, who support conservative social issues, but aren't really in favor of free markets. It may seem odd that someone like Trump attracts such people, but he does after all come across as an authoritarian, and his economic populism is very attractive to this group. And he's actively attacking those who seem to support relativity and political correctness.

If we assume only about half the people in the last group support Trump, that gives Trump about 50% of the population. Which is about where he polls.

The next group are those who have an entrepreneurial mindset and are generally classical liberals. They are about 30% (perhaps less) of the population, but have about 50% of the power in society. Almost none of these people support Trump. They are likely to be Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton supporters, depending on how close they are to also being egalitarians. Or, in their purest, postmodern form, these people are libertarians.

Egalitarians/communitarians are only about 10% of society (perhaps more), but have about 15% of the power of society. They are the primary supporters of Bernie Sanders.

The people who are attacking Trump are in the last group, or a combination of the last two. They come across as out of touch elites to everyone else, so the more they attack Trump, the more they like Trump, who at least says out loud what they are all thinking at some level. Trump is a bully? They want someone to be a bully FOR THEM. They don't perceive anyone else to actually be for them, and if those nerds/elites need some bullying, all the better.

More, Trump is tearing the curtain back and showing how superficial and stupid everything is. The wizards are panicking and trying to cover themselves back up, but Trump is exposing the absurdity of the entire system.

And that is a danger to the system itself. Its survival depends on everyone agreeing to the game and the rules of the game. Trump is violating the rules of the game, insisting that it's all just a stupid game anyway, so why take it all so seriously and follow a bunch of stupid rules.

The problem is that this is what all of civilization is built upon. If you go around and do like Trump and show that in fact there is nothing there, civilization itself will collapse. Trump promises to keep the barbarians on the other side of the wall, but in fact he is the very expression of barbaric nihilism that is the true root of the collapse of all civilizations.

But then, I'm just another elite complaining about Trump, too.

The Ringer

So here's my idea for a play.

The story is pretty much the Presidential campaign to date. Republicans are having a hernia because there is a candidate like Trump running, and it looks like he's going to win. And, indeed, he does win the nomination of the party.

What they don't know is that the crazy person running is a plant from the front runner for the Democratic party, who wants to create chaos in the GOP. Neither think the plant will win the nomination, but they do think enough chaos will take place to make the GOP look foolish and dissuade people from showing up to vote Republican. The idea is that the plant will say increasingly ridiculous things until he loses.

But when the plant wins the GOP nomination, the plans are thrown into chaos. Of course, the DNC candidate expects the plant to basically throw in the towel. And they agree that he will in fact drop out of the race right before the election, with enough time to make people not want to vote for him, but without enough time for the GOP to come up with another candidate.

However, as the campaign goes on, his poll numbers keep going up. And it suddenly occurs to him that he could, in fact, become President. And who wouldn't want to be President? So he runs all the way through to the end and wins.

Now, given that the DNC candidate is the kind of person to do the above scenario, what do you think (s)he would do?

When Government Colonizes Spontaneous Orders

When government colonizes the economic order, that is socialism. That and only that is socialism. If you call anything else socialism, you are wrong, by the definition of socialism throughout the history of socialist thought. Mises and Hayek showed that socialism was impossible. Because the historic evidence wasn't enough for some people. And still isn't.

When the government colonizes philanthropy -- through providing welfare, for example -- that is not socialism. It is welfare. The colonization of philanthropy by government is Welfarism.

The government can also colonize science. Michael Polanyi showed how impractical that was.

The government can also colonize money. Historically, almost all money has been colonized by governments. Those monies not colonized by governments have been the most stable currencies.

The government can also colonize technological innovation, though typically this is subsumed under "socialism," as technological innovation is typically considered to be part of the broader economy, even if it is not in the catallaxy. When government colonizes technological innovation, we call that "stagnation."

The government can also colonize the arts and literature. When it does that, we call the results "censorship" and "propaganda."

The government can also colonize religion (or vice versa -- the result ends up being the same). When it does that, we have a theocracy.

The government can also colonize philosophy. When it does that, we get scholarship.

The government can colonize many things in both direct and indirect ways. For example, the government has mostly colonized our universities, and in doing so, it has managed to mostly colonize our science, social science, art and literature, and philosophy. That is why these areas are increasingly sick.

Consent and Crime

In Les Miserables, when Jean Valjean takes the silver from the priest, did Valjean steal the silver?

The knee-jerk answer is, "yes, of course he stole the silver." But wait, I want you to think about that a bit more deeply. When the police bring Valjean back  to the priest and accuse Valjean of stealing the silver (which Valjean insists the priest gave him, though Valjean left during the night and took it all without asking), what does the priest do? He insists that of course he gave the silver to Valjean, and he then chastises him for not taking more, which he then loads into Valjean's sack.

Valjean leaves stunned, and the experience utterly transforms him. But that's not what I want to focus on here. I want to ask again if Valjean stole the silver. Certainly Valjean thought he did, and the police have their suspicions. But the police have to let Valjean go because the priest insisted that not only did Valjean not steal the silver, but that he had forgotten even more.

Is there a crime if there is not a victim, even if the other party thinks what they are doing is a crime?

So long as the priest doesn't think he was robbed, he wasn't robbed. The priest turned it into an act of giving, meaning no crime took place, even if Valjean had intended to commit a crime (which he knew to be a crime).

One can take this and apply it elsewhere.

If you intentionally kill someone else, and you planned it, you commit murder. First degree murder, at that. But what if the person killed wanted you to kill them, and they make it abundantly clear that they wanted you to kill them? Well, we call that "assisted suicide," and it seems that many if not most people now think no crime was committed in such a case. So long as the person killed was a willing participant and consented to the act all the way up to the act, a murder did not take place, but rather an assisted suicide.

We already accept in the very definition of rape that so long as there is willing participation and consent, then no rape occurred. If there is no consent to sex, a rape took place. The fact that there is violence involved is not sufficient; it may be possible that the couple are simply into rough sex. What may to a third party look like rape may in fact be completely consensual.

What this seems to suggest, then, is that you not only have to have either a violent act against another person or the taking of property, but that you also have to have a lack of consent to the action in question for there to be a crime. That is why fraud is considered to be a crime -- you cannot have given consent to the exchange if fraud has taken place. When fraud is introduced, consent is impossible, because I in fact consented to proposition A, when you intended to do and carried out doing action B. A taking of property has taken place without consent, and thus fraud is a crime. This is also why there is talk of making sex in which one of the parties committed fraud (by, say, misrepresenting his or her wealth) in order to have sex with the other party rape. This is simply a logical extension of the relationship between lack of consent and criminality.

We can also therefore see why libertarians insist that there can be no such thing as a consensual crime. If you need lack of consent for there to be a crime -- in the case of theft, rape, and murder, for example -- then a consensual crime is a contradiction in terms.

But is all "lack of consent" when there is an interaction involved a crime?

Think about the phrase "consent of the governed." This would imply that the only government that is not a criminal government is one that governs only with the consent of the governed. But what about those who, within a geographic area, do not consider their consent to have been given? Again, many libertarians come to mind. If a majority consider their consent to have been given, does that mean that no crime is being committed against the minority who did not give their consent to be governed?

Or consider taxes. Many libertarians throw around the idea that all taxes are theft. When you tell people that, they think you're stupid. Of course, they think that because they have in fact, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, given consent to being taxed. Libertarians have, again, not given their consent to being taxed, and so they consider taxation to be theft. Were there a polity in which one could chose the form of governance and have voice and exit, it is likely even libertarians might find a place where they consent to be governed and to be taxed.

So it seems that the real issue when it comes to crime is not whether violence is involved or not, but whether or not consent was involved. If you climb a mountain, you consent to the danger inherent in mountain climbing. If you break into a house, you consent to the danger of getting killed by the owner defending his or her property. The criminal thus consents to the dangerous situation in which they may get killed by creating the situation in the first place.

But do they consent to the laws they are breaking? It would seem not to be the case, but when it comes to law, you are consenting to its continued existence so long as you would insist on its being followed if you were the victim. The person who robs you but objects to being robbed consents to the law against robbery. The mere fact of violating a law at a given time does not mean consent is withheld.

Let us then return to taxes. If I go ahead and pay my taxes, doesn't that mean I am giving tacit consent to being taxed? Not necessarily. If I am paying taxes only because I am threatened if I do not, I am not paying from consent. I prefer to not face the consequences. A "your money or your life" situation does not mean consent is given if you choose life over money.

So again, the issue of criminality actually involves the granting or withdrawal (or failure to grant) consent. A government that governs without the consent of the governed is a criminal government. Taxes are theft for anyone who does not consent to being taxed. A military draft is a criminal action because pretty much nobody being drafted are consenting to it.

Given these facts, it seems that we need to move away from discussions of violence or coercion and rather start discussing criminal behavior and actions according to this idea of consent.

What say you?

An Interview With Me on Poetry, Economics, and Hear the Screams of the Butterfly

My novella, Hear the Screams of the Butterfly, is finally going to see the light of day. It is being published by Transcendent Zero Press and should be available in April of this year. In preparation for its release, the editor, Dustin Pickering, did an interview with me on TZP's blog. To date, TZP has been a poetry publisher, putting out poetry books and the poetry magazine Harbinger's Asylum. I am proud to say that this will be the very first piece of prose fiction they will publish. I hope my novella lives up to their faith in it.

Toward a Universal Moral System

Unethical actions are impossible to commit against someone whom you consider a fellow human being. If one considers some other individual to be a fellow human being, it is impossible to even want to murder, assault and battery, rape, steal, or defraud them. One can only do these things against an individual whom one has dehumanized, or perhaps never considered human in the first place.

The truly ethical move, then, is to consider more and more people as fellow human beings. The truly unethical move, then, is to consider fewer and fewer people as fellow human beings. The man who is abusive to women does not consider women to be fellow human beings. The man who rapes a woman does not consider that woman to be a fellow human being. Even the woman who, coming home to find her husband having sex with another woman, kills her husband has not killed her husband, but has killed a "cheater," and cheaters are not fully human. They are a dehumanized ideal.

It is easiest to treat one's own family morally, though the existence of familial murder, assault and battery, rape, theft, and lying demonstrates that there are even those who can and will dehumanize their own family members, at least on occasion. Sometimes all the time.

The sociopath never considers anyone else a fellow human being.

Morals expand as one includes more and more people in the group of "fellow human beings." Morals regress if one excludes a person or group one previously considered fellow human beings.

If you consider any group as "inferior" or less human than yourself or your group, you are immoral. Certainly less moral than someone who is inclusive. Since only human beings can act morally or immorally in this way, to point out that someone is behaving immorally is not to dehumanize them, but to fully humanize them. To insist that a person or group should be excused for immoral behavior is to dehumanize that person or group.

You can dehumanize someone based on any number of group memberships: sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class, income, occupation, IQ, neural architecture, etc. Dehumanizing someone based on sex is sexism. Dehumanizing someone based on race is racism. Dehumanizing someone based on class is classism. All are equally immoral, as all are dehumanizing in nature. If you hate someone because of their income, that is identical to hating them because of their race. You hate them because of some quality they have, and hatred is dehumanizing. Fear and hatred lead to immorality.

Criticizing some aspect of culture is not immoral. Criticizing some aspect of a religion is not immoral. Criticizing some particular behavior is not immoral. Dehumanizing someone because of their cultural or religious affiliation or behavior is immoral. Failing to criticize a culture for doing something you would criticize a member of your own culture for doing is dehumanizing to the members of that culture, and is immoral.

As one's moral sphere grows, one's morality grows. Those of us who consider all members of Homo sapiens as fellow human beings are more moral than past generations who did not. At the same time, we should not make the mistake of imposing our own moral narrative on that past, on people who could not have possibly known what we know. We are more moral because we are more knowledgeable. If the fault is ignorance, the goal, then, must be education.

When you do not know, and you act on that ignorance, and the outcomes is bad, your action is bad. When you do know and act on it, you are good. When you do know and do not act on it, or act against it, you are evil.

Are you knowledgeable or ignorant of building bridges? If you are knowledgeable and build a bridge that stands up, you are a good bridge builder. If you are ignorant and build a bridge that falls, you are a bad bridge builder. If you are knowledgeable and purposefully build a bridge that falls, you are an evil bridge builder. But do you even try to build bridges? If you're not trying to build a bridge, you're not a bad bridge builder, because you're not a bridge builder at all. You know what you don't know, and don't try to do what you don't know how to do. Refusing to act out of ignorance also makes you a good person. Good intentions don't count, other than to reduce your sentence. 

We must keep in mind that there is relevant and irrelevant knowledge when it comes to a given action. Now, it may be possible that one necessarily must act in ignorance. the consequences of biotechnology, for example. But one will necessarily act in less ignorance the second time around. One is obliged to use whatever relevant knowledge one can prudently attain, or one discovers. If one acts, and the action has bad consequences, one must attempt to correct future action by learning why is it the action failed. Failing to expand one's sphere of knowledge in order to ensure one's actions improve in the future is itself a moral failing.

Vice is easier than virtue. Dehumanizing is easier than humanizing. 

If you read this, you know. Now you have no excuses.

The Top 20%

In complex dynamic processes, power laws are almost inevitably exhibited. At its broadest, we find the 20:80 ratio. In market economies, we find that generally the wealthiest 20% have 80% of the wealth, for example. When it comes to altruism, we find a similar pattern, though it breaks up in interesting ways. From one perspective, we find that about 20% of the population are perfect altruists, meaning they are willing to give to people no matter how they act, meaning about 80% are not "perfect altruists"; from another perspective, we find that about 20% are "cheaters," meaning they will avoid being generous when at all possible, meaning they are almost perfectly selfish. Relative to the first group, we have 20% perfect altruists, 80% selfish; relative to the second group, we have 20% perfectly selfish, and 80% altruistic. This means that there is a middle group of about 60% who are generous with conditions. This same group is also willing to personally lose to punish cheaters (the 20% perfectly selfish), while the perfect altruists are never willing to punish cheaters.

From a social standpoint, the perfect altruists are "suckers," while the perfectly selfish are "cheaters." The middle group are a sort of golden mean, demanding just actions  from everyone, that everyone behave in a pro-social manner. At the same time, I'm willing to bet that the perfect altruists, after a while, get sick of being suckers -- may it not be these people who end up embracing socialism at the most extreme, or at least welfare statism, as a way to ensure everyone be socially generous?

I am also willing to bet that we find this ratio in many other aspects of human behavior. And it may be that it is this 20-60-20 ratio again.

For example, there are studies that suggest that humans are primarily copiers. Humans are superb copiers, which is why our cultures are so incredibly strong and dominant in our lives. This keeps tradition strong. While creativity is also an element of our species, I would argue that it's rarer than we would often like to admit.

I would argue that only about 20% of the population are creative. The other 80% are not creative.

Now, that doesn't mean that people aren't sometimes creative. But let's take a look at the ratios again. It is likely that about 20% of the population are perfect copiers and are never creative; about 60% are almost always copiers, and are only sometimes creative; and about 20% are our most creative people, doing about 80% of the creative work in the world (the other 20% being done by the other 80%).

All of this is, of course, on a certain spectrum. There are a handful of extreme creatives, more high creatives, more still moderate creatives, many more occasional creatives, and a significant percentage who aren't creative.

The vast majority copiers are absolutely necessary if we are going to have a stable society/culture. Too many creatives, and too much is happening too fast. Equally, too many copiers, and you have stagnation. It would not surprise anyone, I suppose, if the perfect copiers were the most socially conservative people in the world, not thinking that change is necessary or even desired. The most creative would be the most liberal in the world, thinking change is a natural and necessary part of the world. The correlation, especially in the middle 60%, is perhaps not perfect, but it would surprise me if it weren't there.

This certainly has implications for social evolution. This means that revolution is a bad idea, and would only be preferred by a small minority (who would likely disagree on the direction, since there are a variety of liberalisms), while evolution would be greatly preferred as a way of both allowing for stability for the conservatives/copiers, and change for the creatives/liberals. This is similar to the patterns of early adopters of new technologies, etc. Ironically, many of the copiers might very well be early adopters since they will be copying certain people.

It seems to me that these patterns are the kinds social scientists ought to be interested in investigating.

Virtue Aims at The Beautiful, but What IS The Beautiful?

In the Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle makes the famous argument that virtue aims at the good. The word translated as "the good" is to kalon, which is more accurately translated as "the beautiful," though "the good" is certainly a not unreasonable translation. The Greek language thus makes a certain equation between "the good" and "the beautiful." If we then also take Keats' equation that "beauty is truth, truth beauty" (said, perhaps not surprisingly, by the ode on the Grecian urn), when we find that the trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful are in fact one.To which we can add justice as well, since the just is the fair, and "fair" in English is another word for "beautiful."

Since virtue aims at the beautiful, the good, the true and the just, it perhaps behooves us to come to understand what "the beautiful" is. A good place to start, I think, is with the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who argues that something is beautiful if it demonstrates unity in variety and variety in unity. We see this equation of balance throughout philosophy, in a variety of forms. We can begin, again, with Aristotle, who argues that virtuous actions exist in the golden mean between unvirtuous actions. The virtue of courage, for example, exists between the vices of cowardice and rashness.

Aristotle also argues that the virtues exist in the golden mean between the two vices. The golden mean, known in his time, is the ratio 0.618:1, which is the same as the ratio of 1: 1.6.18 (the only ratio that exhibits this balance). Beautiful architecture typically exhibits this ratio. The great buildings of ancient Greece certainly did. The aim was of course to achieve this ideal ratio, and only by aiming at achieving it could one create an actually good building.

As in architecture and the other arts, so too in nature. The golden mean ratio is found everywhere in nature, from the spirals of galaxies, the spirals of sea shells, limb ratios in animals, leaf ratios in plants, etc. Beautiful faces exhibit the golden mean ratio in a variety of ways, from length and width of the face, to eye placement, etc. For the Greeks, the virtues of nature should be emulated in human societies -- to put it in Greek terms, nomos ought to map well onto physis. The virtuous society would find its true nature in emulating nature -- if, perhaps, at a higher degree of complexity. Thus, the arts, human actions of all kinds, social structures, etc. found their true natures in coming as close to the golden mean ratio as possible.

The balance between two extremes is found throughout nature. We have found that nature is neither orderly nor disorderly, but more typically on the edge of both, known as "criticality." Certainly when nature is at its most creative, it is necessarily in this realm of orderly chaos/chaotic order. Creativity, virtue, justice are not in the realms of either order nor, certainly complete disorder, but rather within the realm of balance between the two. In the realm of justice, pure orderly justice would grind us all to dust, while forgiveness of everything would result in criminal chaos -- rather, we need justice tempered with mercy, and mercy tempered with justice, so the wronged are made right, and yet we have the freedom to make mistakes and correct them ourselves. One is not creative by sticking with what has been always done, but neither is one creative by doing what nobody could possibly understand -- the golden mean is in that realm between the two, where one is rooted in what was, while one places a blaze with one's work, that opens the future.

But I will not argue that living on this knife's edge is anything but difficult at times. Vice is easier than virtue. Doing what everyone else has done (or arguing that you just don't understand my brilliance when you don't understand the strange thing I've made or done) is easier than creativity. Iron fists and libertinism are easier than justice and liberty. This is why so many seek order, seek someone who will create order, and go with whatever is easiest. Virtue is difficult. Creativity is difficult. Being just is difficult. But things which are difficult are the things worth doing. This doesn't mean that the best of us don't slip into the easy, as they all, we all, do. But not every aim is true.

Given the definition of beauty as unity in variety and variety in unity, we can come to another conclusion about beauty. Knowledge is always various in form. Knowledge is fragmented, pursued by different people in different fields, often in isolation from each other. These Modern times (including these post-modern times) are the Age of Knowledge. Wisdom, on the other hand, exhibits unity of form. Wisdom is holistic, unified, seeks to see how everything comes together as a whole. The Ancient World was the Age of Wisdom. And yet, if beauty is the unity of variety and unity, we must conclude from this that beauty is the unity of wisdom and knowledge. Are we open to an Age of Beauty? To have an Age of Truth, Goodness, and Justice, I think we must. For if virtue aims at the beautiful, it must aim at both wisdom and knowledge. We cannot do with either without the other. Not if we wish to act in a virtuous manner in all things.

From this, we can see that there are various vices with golden mean virtues in the world:

order -- criticality -- disorder
cowardice -- courage -- rashness
copying -- creativity -- confusion
known -- discovery --lost
unforgiving -- justice -- license
collectivism -- social -- atomistic individualism
homogeneity -- society -- heterogeneity
control -- liberty --chaos
legislation -- law -- libertinism
certainty -- truth -- unknowability
cooperation only -- cooperative competition as a discovery process -- zero sum competition
fundamentalism -- knowledge -- lies
monism -- wisdom -- fragmentism
unity -- beauty -- variety
wisdom -- beauty -- knowledge

What? Wisdom and knowledge as vices? Relative to the virtue of beauty, yes.

One may also note that we have on one side many of the elements of religious funamentalism, and on the other side many of the elements of postmodernism. The former may be wisdom taken to its religious conclusion, and the latter may be knowledge taken to its religious conclusion.

Now that I have brought up religion, one might also then wonder about the nature of the divine. If the divine is (and ought to be) our model for living, and virtue aims at the beautiful, one must surmise that the divine exhibits unity in variety and variety in unity -- if God is indeed beautiful (and if God is Good, then God is beautiful).

Further, these elements must also be the case for every element of every spontaneous order, and of spontaneous orders themselves. There must be order and disorder at the same time, giving rise to criticality. There must be scale-free networks and hierarchical networks (as we find in nature, in cells in their regulatory apparatus within the scale-free networks of the cells proper). There must be unity and variety. There must be the elements of creativity and discovery and justice. They must be exhibited in the natural unfolding of these processes. And if we fail to find them, we discover an unbeautiful, injust, vicious order (or disorder).

To take an example perhaps no one would think of (which is why I choose it), the monetary/financial order would be healthiest, best, most beautiful if it exhibited these balances within it. Central planning of the monetary order to create a more rigid order in fact creates vicious circles -- boom-bust cycles, for example. Something more like free banking, in which there is a monetary network of co-discoverers of what constitutes good money, would give rise to the kind of monetary order that would smooth out many economic cycles. On the other hand, ensuring that there was only competition among the banks and that there could be no cooperating among them would cause fragmentation and prevent economic coordination across large areas.

The same is true of artistic creation, technological invention, scientific discovery, scholarly production, economic activity, democratic governance, etc. If we are going to be the best within each of these realms, or even across the realms (civil society is the unity of the variety of spontaneous orders), we must aim at the beautiful within and across each. We must work well within each realm, and not mistake one for the other. What is a virtue in one realm may well be a vice in another. Part of what we must do is make these discoveries of what constitutes the beautiful within each spontaneous order so we can exhibit virtue in each one. As we each do so, the orders themselves will discover their highest beauty, and they will in turn interact to create a beautiful civil society as well.

Evolution, Not Revolution

Revolution is not an option. Revolutions are pretty universally disastrous. One has to start from where one is currently and encourage people to move in the right direction.

Aristotle argued that virtue aims at "to kalon." To kalon can be translated as "the good" or "the beautiful." You aim at the good, understanding that you cannot (and should not) actually hit what you're aiming at (since you are aiming high) so that you can in fact hit the target. Gravity always drags you down. That's why you have to aim high.Also, one should be grounded in reality -- another true drag on the arrow. After all, one misses the mark if one aims too high as well. One has to be balanced between the ideal and the real -- a golden mean that helps you hit the mark.

The purpose of ideals is to provide the good/beautiful at which one should aim. Knowing what the best is helps one to achieve realistic goals.

One purpose of literature -- literature at its best -- is to provide beautiful models. Coincidentally, preachy works are typically unbeautiful. At the same time, one shouldn't mistake the use of long speeches in epics, for example, for being "preachy." Indeed, epics are very often the exemplary form for showing realizable ideals. They are always about establishing a polis, a new way of coexisting. We need more beautiful epics.

So if you run into someone whose ideals seem "unrealistic," I would argue that they need to be at least somewhat unrealistic, otherwise they won't ever actually hit the mark. They'll fall short. At the same time, those ideals must be rooted in reality, otherwise you will miss the mark as well. There must be both. There must be a golden mean in order to achieve virtue.

And that golden mean also means revolution is not an option. There must be balance between the reality of the now and the future into which you are trying to push. Tragic art is always about those people who push ahead, into the future, just a little too far without having made their blaze in the right place. The tragedy takes place when the person is punished for going out too far ahead. They are often perceived as gadflies, social misfits, troublemakers. Of course, society then follows the trailblazer into the future he already discovered. And that's when the tragic figure turns into the tragic hero.

Evolution, not revolution -- this means understanding that you must deal with tradition, whatever that tradition may be. You have to understand there are path dependencies, flow channels that cannot be abruptly changed. You may cause a disastrous flood if you try. Marxism, for example, was a disaster everywhere people tried to implement it in a revolutionary form; the U.S. took an evolutionary approach, adopting practically every aspect of the 10 Goals (9 of the 10), and while I don't think the society that was created as a result is anyone's ideal, it wasn't the mass-murderous disaster we saw in the places where it was implemented in a revolutionary fashion.

The path out of the policial-economic-social situation we find ourselves in will be via the pathways already established. Small evolutionary changes, understanding the pathways taken, and the pathways we can take. The ideal is a guide star, but we have to work our way toward it starting from the known, blazing the trail along the way.

On Our Increasing Political Violence

The latest mass shooting, in San Bernardino, CA, should draw our attention to the fact that there has been an overall increase in mass shootings in the U.S. over the past several years -- even as gun violence overall has been decreasing. The answer in the case of this latest shooting seems obvious -- a radicalized Muslim couple is now known to be responsible -- but the rest are not so simple. Neither, by the way, is this one.

I have written previously about Peter Turchin's thesis of 50 year cycles, which he discusses in light of mass shootings in Evonomics. But I haven't really done so in light of some of the specifics we are beginning to see.

One thing Turchin predicts is a rise of political violence. What that means can vary. It doesn't necessarily mean assassinations of politicians, though in the late 1960s and 1970s it certainly did mean that. It doesn't necessarily mean the targeting of obviously political/governmental targets, either. What it can and often does mean is the targeting of institutions which the individuals in question consider to be responsible for their situation. It is telling that universities, colleges, and schools seem to be high on the list of targeted institutions.

We see a lot of "unrest" at our colleges. Adjuncts are pushing for reforms in employment. Left-wing students are increasingly pushing their P.C. agenda, demanding the end of free speech, including the silencing of critics and even the media. Many of them are essentially victims in search of oppressors -- they have been told for so long by teachers and professors that they are victims, they now believe it. The only problem is, there are no real oppressors around. Whatever racists there are, they mostly keep their mouths shut. Unless provoked. The P.C. left have discovered that if they want oppressors, they have to provoke the racists into exposing themselves. So they first fabricate an incident, protest against their own fabrication, provoke the racists to expose themselves, then protest the racists' words and actions. Rather than trying to build bridges and tear down the residual racism in America, they seek to create deeper divisions, just so they can justify their own ideology. It is a tactic which is ultimately self-destructive, but in the meantime it's socially destructive, being intended to trigger hatred. Among the beneficiaries of this will be the professors who have radicalized their students and are using them to make reforms within the universities. Politicians will also benefit, as they will be able to use the unrest to centralize power more and more and try to disarm the public.

In the meantime, we see increased militarization of the police and increased police brutality, even as we see fewer police harmed in the line of duty. Those who protest the police the most ironically want only the police to be armed, and they also want the police to have even more laws to enforce. This will lead to more and more police killings, which will only increase political violence. We are seeing this with more and more protests against police shootings.

And let's be honest, what happened in San Bernardino was a case of political violence. As is all terrorism. We should expect to see more and more mass shootings from all sorts of political actors, left and right, religious and secular. This is due to increasing alienation in our society, alienation created by our government, whose actions at home and overseas are designed to dissolve social cohesion and trust in order to centralize power more and more. There is a web of economic policies that keep us working longer and longer hours, discourage entrepreneurship, and protect political cronies -- policies supported by both parties -- and thus alienate us more and more from friends and family we can't see because we work long hours, and alienate us from the places where we work as we blame our employers for our situation (seen vs. the unseen). We should expect to see people reacting violently against our government's policies, foreign and domestic, and targeting anything but the government itself, since targeting the government is even more of a suicide mission than hitting softer targets. Thus the tendency to hit gun-free zones and avoid direct government targets.

Much of the violence we have been seeing and will be seeing involve race and other kinds of differences, like religion and ideology. People of different races make for an easy scapegoat, while the people actually responsible for the situation we find ourselves in are safely tucked away in government buildings. Worse, we should expect our politicians to use race, religion, and ideology to direct people's attention away from the polities in question. In fact, we are already seeing this happening in the Presidential nomination races. The most obvious offenders are Trump and Sanders, but they all do it in more or less subtle ways.

Over the next few years, political violence will continue to increase. Will it become more overtly political over the years? Perhaps. If and when it does, we'll begin to see more direct solutions proposed. Will they solve the problem? In the short term, perhaps. It's amazing what a few carrots will get you, even as you continue to ensure everything remains mostly the same. But people won't remain fooled for long. Then the violence will return.

What needs to happen? A true revolution. There are too many path dependent problems in our political environment, economy, culture, and society. Unfortunately, history shows that most political revolutions turn out terrible. But the revolution doesn't have to be political in the way most of us think; rather, it can be a change in culture, society, philosophy, art, literature, thinking, economy. The best revolution would be one that completely bypasses politics as practiced, leaving the politicians within nothing and no one to rule. The best revolution would be a psychosocial revolution. It can be realized, but it will require a revolution in our thinking about revolutions themselves.