Digest of Posts on WSN network
Due to the number of postings on this group, I am trying to cut down
on the amount of time I spend reading & posting. Here are my
rebuttals to the posts I both found and found interesting. (Threw
away many of the posts to cut down the load on my server)
Stephen Sherman said:
I really don't get all this talk about maximizing benefits--was David
Ricardo around three and a half billion years ago when somehow
chemicals
on earth started to act in ways that we now call life? Or even two
million years ago when some creatures which were very human like
began to
appear? IF not, why presume the transhistorical validity of his
approach
to explaining action?......
_______________________
According to that logic, the sun must have orbited the earth until
Newton "invented" the laws of gravity. There is a difference
between
discovery and invention. Ricardo did not pass legislation which
decreed that human behavior in general, and economies specifically,
worked according to self interest -- he discovered and theorized this
principle.
As to your second point, as I said before, there are complex patterns
of cooperation and competition within societies. Genetic self interest,
could lead an individual to sacrifice himself on the battlefield. How?
First, a male is fairly disposable, genetically speaking. Once his,
ah, contribution to procreation is finished, there are no further
demands that nature imposes on him in raising his young.
(Remember, from the gene's point of view, individual life is
secondary to the main mission of the creation of more copies of the
gene. In other words --borrowing from Rothschild here -- a chicken
is just an egg's way of making another egg.) It might well be in the
interests of one copy of the gene to sacrifice itself to improve the
odds of survival of other copies of the gene, carried by family and
young. This is a strategy that was better suited for an age of small
tribal conflict, and the latent predispositions has been, er, capitalized
on by the modern nation-state - which has successfully transferred
old tribal loyalties to the nation-state. Clearly, modern warfare is
not rational from the point of view of the gene. But, in this,
Nation-States
were able to grow and thrive by taking advantage of this aspect of
human nature. .As Montaigne put it: A rational army would run away.
Tribes or nation states which are defended by armies that run away
tend not to survive, and thus the genes within them have less
opportunity to perpetuate themselves, and are selected out of the
population. In a modern society, where the "tribe" protected is
composed of millions of members, the most rational choice would be
to run away. However, the hardwiring of the human brain -- human
nature -- allows nation states to have wars because the hardwiring
does not "know" that circumstances have changed. -- It is "natural"
behavior.
One more point while I am on the subject. Obviously, I do not believe
in social Darwinism. It led -- like so many other ideas in the physical
sciences applied to society (more on this later) -- to monstrous,
unworkable ideologies and caused a great deal of human suffering.
The bell curve is obviously a work of this type of belief, and yes,
genetic variation does occur more within "races" than across them.
What I am speaking of is the broad evolution of _humans_, their
competition for the resources of the planet long before agriculture
and civilization developed, and the traits and predispositions which
led naturally to strategies of dealing with the real world. These
strategies were hardwired into the brain, and form the base from
which human behavior, in all of its diversity, flows.
To use a playful analogy, my personal computer has ROM memory --
fixed instructions that cannot be changed, present at "birth", and the
defining element of what I call a "Macintosh". These
instructions allow an amazing degree of flexibility, but put limits on
the nature of the computer: Think about the differences between
Macs and Sun OS servers, or adding machines, or any other hardware
platform
you can think of. It is the nature of the hardwiring which determines
the performance envelope of the computer. RAM, "learned"
memory, can differ enormously from machine to machine,
(depending on what software packages you load) but all
share certain underlying characteristics, both strengths and
weaknesses. (like that #$*%ed bug that affects my disk
insertions....) The pathetic spectacle of seeing a PC attempt to
imitate a Mac offers a lesson on the futility of attempting to impose
software which is ill-suited for the hardware of a given system.
[this one should be good for at least another dozen flames :=> ]
Moving on;
It is a complete mystery to me that "objective observers" can
"observe" a theoretical economic paradigm applied in many different
places and times, all of which fail --miserably-- and say that the
obvious solution is that the paradigm was not applied widely enough.
Reading all of the excuses and props afforded socialism/communism,
and the desperate search for scapegoats for its failure - mostly
individuals (which are supposed to be "mere flotsam on the sea of
inevitable economic forces") really does make one believe in that
element of human nature called pride, and identity -- both of which
must be protected against admission of failure.
By its fruit, the tree is known.
Relativity vs. Relativism
Andrew Austin asserts that (a) Einstein proved that Time and Space
were relative. Therefore, (b) everything is relative.
Broken down this way, the absurdity of the logic is fairly clear. It is
not, however, the first time that this mistake has been made,
particularly by the intelligentsia. The thesis of Paul Johnson's
incredibly good history, _Modern Times_, is that most of the woes of
our particularly evil century spring from two events: The first
World War, and the publishing of Einstein's theory of relativity. He is
worth quoting:
Chapter one, "A Relativistic world"
"....The impact of his theory was immediate, and cumulatively
immeasurable. But it was to illustrate what Karl Popper was later to
term 'the law of unintended consequence'....At the beginning of the
1920s, the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular
level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of
good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. *Mistakenly but
perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.* No
one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension.
.... He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.
..[and] insisted the world could be divided into subjective and
objective spheres, and that _one must be able to make precise
statements about the objective portion_......He lived to see moral
relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he
lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare.
[Note this does not support Austin's assertion that "What Einstein
means is that time and space are conceptual relationships"]
(Also worth quoting)
"....The emergence of Einstein as a world figure in 1919 is a striking
illustration of the dual impact of great scientific innovators on
mankind,. They change our perception of the physical world and
increase our mastery of it, but they also change our ideas. The
second effect is often more radical than the first. ....(Illustrates with
social impact of Gallileo and Newton) .... Darwin's notion of the
survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept
of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped
Hitlerism. Indeed the political and social consequences of Darwinian
ideas have yet to work themselves out, as we shall see through this
book. So, too, the public response to relativity was one of the
principal formative influences on the course of twentieth - century
history. "
I submit that it is necessary to understand _to what extent_
darwinist views influence human behaviors. Genetic selection _does
not_ significantly influence human affairs at the level of culture or
conflict between cultures - or even between individuals. It _did_
have a past influence on shaping our modern behavior patterns, that
cultures/tribes/nations can and do use to further their own ends.
Austin wrote:
> It is not at all guaranteed that people will calculate
>the consequences of present behaviors.
Of course. What I submitted was that humans have the _capability_
to use the past to modify their behavior with an eye towards
modifying the future. This does not mean that individuals always
utilize the capability. (If humans _always_ learned from the past,
there would be no socialists :=>)
Another, related posting from Andrew Austin went like this:
>If you want selfish, freedom-stealing, and self-destructive
>humans, then I recommend choosing a capitalist mode of production.
If you
>want cooperative, loving, and creative humans, then I suggest
choosing a
>communist mode of production. The capitalist tells you "I realize that
>the second choice is marvelous, but human nature will not permit it."
A
>capitalist would say this. The goal here is to convince the powerless
>majority that the goal they seek is not possible because of powers
beyond
>their control: God and/or nature. But because human being is a social
>product, and since we can change society, then we know we can
change
>human being. So choice *does* exists--we are not bound by human
nature to
>exist in inequal social orders--and it is a choice that must be
>made; for to not make this choice is to allow others to make it for
you.
I am going to combine my reply to this post with the one to the poster
who submitted the article based on Ayn Rand's _The Virtue of
Selfishness_ which the poster argued was a circular argument.
It has been some time since I read _The Virtue of Selfishness_, but
from what I recall, the point of the book was not that all human
behavior was motivated by self-interest, but that it was the most
moral of the impulses which give rise to human behavior (as
suggested by the title) Now, I am not going to go debate this issue,
since I am pretty rusty on the arguments, but the key question that
the book asked was: Which motive has caused more suffering in
human history, self interest or altruism? (You might send your
rebuttals to some group who cares to hear them, like
alt.libertarian.ayn_rand). In order to answer for Rand, I would have
to reread her book and that I am disinclined to do. Moreover I should
point out that I did not assert that all behavior in humans is
self-interested. Instead, I pointed out that 1. True altruism is too
dammed rare to build a society around, and therefore 2. Depending
upon a class of self-less unbiased observers to be available to run the
society is folly. I _do_ feel, however, that your preference for
communism over capitalism, based on the traits you think are
desirable in society is at best, wrong-headed. Freedom: Capitalism
is the most purely free economic system that I know of: No one
forces you to buy anything, no one forces you to work, and no one
forces you to sell. Indeed, capitalism _depends_ on freedom to
survive: when information is hindered, prices lose their information
value, and inefficies begin to mount. I always thought Communists
rebutted this assertion by sneering that it includes the freedom to
starve: Yes. It does. What freedom does communism depend on to
survive? I know of several authoritarian regimes that have adopted
some form of capitalism, and over time had the economic system
drive the Government towards democracy and civil liberties
(Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, even to some extent China). I am
unaware of a Communism, or even Democracy, driving the economic
system or itself towards more freedom. I would go further and
assert that where there is not a free economic system, civil liberties
do not have any effective champions. As for Cooperative, Loving, and
Creative humans, I suppose that you could call Polish cooperation in
the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague to be "co-operative". I suppose
that the Stalin and Lenin cults could be called "Loving", and the
subversion of the psychiatric profession to jail and "treat" dissidents
reclassified as mental patients be called "Creative". I would not do
so.