A thought struck me last night while reading Mr Stephen Pinker’s excellent book, The Language Instinct, and its chapter, Language Organs and Grammar Genes. This discusses the direct effect of genes on the human cerebral cortex. Here’s an annotated quote from that chapter which kicked off my own cerebral cortical units into a bit of a grey-matter spin:
Could there really be a gene for sneezing in elevators? Presumably not, but there does not have to be…First, a single gene does not build a single brain module; the brain is a delicately layered soufflé in which each gene product is an ingredient with a complex effect on many properties of many circuits. Second, a single brain module does not produce a single behavioural trait. Most of the traits that capture our attention emerge out of unique combinations of kinks in many different modules…Perhaps the sneezing-in-elevators gene complex is the one that specifies just the right combination of thresholds and cross-connections among the modules governing humour, reactions to enclosed spaces, sensitivity to the mental states of others such as their anxiety and boredom, and the sneezing reflex.
Which begs the immediate question; is there a Liberty gene? Or a Liberty gene complex? Some researchers claim that up to thirty thousand genes are used to create the human brain. Could there be some regular patterning of this combinatorial soufflé process to create libertarians? There’s not many of us about, admittedly. My own ragged guesstimate sets any typical libertarian population at around 2% for any given western population. If that.
And maybe even this is some kind of necessary upper limit, for a race which is still essentially stuck mentally in the pure socialist stone-age. Biologically we are essentially the same people we were around 200,000 years ago. And for most of the time since, everyone alive was expected to fill a single tribal pot, with the proceeds of our daily toil. The tribal chief then decided what we got afterwards, after taking out the best stuff for himself and his friend, the shaman, the clever one amongst us who educated the tribe into believing that the chief always knew best; which was remarkably handy for the chief, and his friend and willing servant, the shaman.
But did the chief and the shaman need the libertarians more than even they realised?
In a stone-age sense, were libertarians the ones who invented the fire sticks, the ones who invented the wheels, and the ones who invented the card games to play in the evening when everyone else was wondering what to do with all this new-fangled firelight? Are libertarians the ones who had the gene to discover new valleys beyond the mountains, the ones who could think of better ways to kill mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, and the ones who ultimately helped pull the other members of the tribe away from the parasitic and violent influence of the shamans and the tribal chiefs? Change would not have been good for any members of this ruling gang structure, the politicians and the intellectuals, as with total power already in their hands, any change could only have lead to their having less power.
But without this human action ability to change, we could have become one of those extinct fossil communities on one of the bushy dead-end sub-branches of human evolution. Maybe that’s exactly what happened? Were we the lucky ones, because we had the liberty gene? Without it could we have been the ones who didn’t make it, the ones who didn’t get through the ice ages, the ones who neither knew how to invent nor even how to change a domestic light-bulb? Change is necessary and invention is necessary, especially in times of crisis, such as ice ages, which sculpted and distilled our species so ruthlessly, only leaving tiny percentages of successful humanity, on each massive icy sweep. All of this necessary change requires anti-herd individuals who are prepared to break the rules of convention, who are able to overcome their political masters, and who are able to do it alone, against all the odds, if nobody else in the tribe will support them. It needs libertarians.
In the modern sense, later libertarians invented classical Athens, the Roman Republic, and the United States. All three of these incrementally advanced things were later swamped by the older, slower human types of Spartan and Alexandrian warrior slave-masters, Roman Caesar imperial slave-masters, and tax-funded Washington slave-masters; the chieftains and the shamans exacted their revenge.
But still the libertarians persevere, hiding out now on the Internet, and in small businesses, always on the edge ahead of the slower-moving tribe, still inventing things, still taking risks, and still dragging the rest of humanity behind them, kicking and screaming, with its general will to wipe out and destroy the libertarians in its primal urge to return to the paternalist or matriarchal comfort of the tribalist stone-age, the shade behind the chieftain’s spear, and the incantations of the Guardian-reading shaman, who still has his cup filled every day by the chieftain, from the tribal pot of violently obtained taxes, in return for propagating the rule of this very government violence.
Is this then the spirit of humanity, the thing which ensured it was our particular sub-species of humanity which crawled out of our African heartland, to dominate all the other more pure socialist tribalists, who died in their caves while watching us strip out their resources with our superior economic methods, which even now the shamans still hate? Is there, in short, a Liberty gene? Do we all possess it? Is it switched on when the time comes, in all of us, at times of great need? Is this what makes us different from all those other human sub-groups which died out? Is it somehow tied to the very same gene complexes which allow us to speak in our fabulous human languages? Or is Liberty more of a meme than a gene?
I don’t know. But Mr Pinker writes damn fine books.
Asking if there’s a liberty gene is a bit like asking if there’s a tiny chip in my PC controlling the Samizdata sidebar.
So regarding your final question, yes, liberty is more like a meme than a gene. It’s that condition which allows us to generate candidate memes at the maximum possible rate.
I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think there is a liberty gene per se. I see it as more of an emerging concept that arrises from intelligence in general.
Someone once asked, as a joke, what if there were no hypothetical situations. I thought about this, and it occurs to me that the hypothetical is central to the developement of free will. If you only perceive one set of reactions to stimuli, then that is all you will “choose” but never recognize that you have a choice. And if you do not perceive you have a choice, in what meaningful way do you?
The recognition of multiple actions, of a choice, is essential for recognizing that one is free. Free to choose one’s own actions.
From there, it is very short step to recognizing that either you make your choices for you, or someone else does. The other does not know you, cannot read your mind, and only knows about you, what you tell it. If they don’t ask and you don’t tell, that is vital information that they need in order to make a choice that will be as beneficial as possible to you, as judged by you. They can’t do the job, you can. Therefore the concept of political liberty arrises.
Tom Robinson writes:
It’s that condition which allows us to generate candidate memes at the maximum possible rate.
You’re probably right that the liberty gene complex, if it exists, is that which creates the condition for the ability of candidate memes to propagate themselves spontaneously (like Samizdata articles, floating through a looking glass sky).
This could be where it’s linked to language, where unique sentences spontaneously arise from all of us, all of the time, condensing out these memes from our unpredictable randomized thoughts.
And maybe it’s why so many libertarians get accused of being such mad-eyed lunatics (especially me, by my wife). Maybe we have this condition more strongly activated than most (for whatever reason), which verges us onto the edge of madness, the inevitable price for a species-wide ability to continuously generate new thoughts, but a price which our general evolutionary success has proved to be worth paying.
If this ‘thing’ does exist, this gene complex, even if at the moment it is as significant as a PC chip, it could give rise to two situations:
1. Those of us who wish for a freer society could learn to directly activate it better, via more finely tuned advocacy, better designed Blog sites, or whatever.
2. Those of us who wish for a less free society could learn to directly disactivate it, via straightforward genetic engineering once we have everyone’s DNA details on a smart-chip database.
Though saying that, maybe I just ought to get out more! 🙂
Very little evolutionary time has passed since our ancestors left Africa, so any behavioral traits we have are probably not much changed… with a few exceptions. Some wars which acted upon a large enough portion of the resident populations may have sorted some behavior patterns. I’ve heard it said, par example, the french tend to be shorter today than they were before WWI. True? I haven’t a clue.
If you wish to dive into behavioral traits, you aren’t going to find a liberty gene complex perse. You are going to find a balance of genes that predispose us to behavioral patters which would tend to make us survive in the conditions for which we evolved.
We are hunter/gatherers who live in small extended family groups, who do not stay in one place but migrate across large territories to follow herds of game animals; we can hunt by trapping but are also one of the only species with that can run down its’ prey (only one tribe I am aware of still does this) by simple endurance. (It might be the Kung! who still do this)
Small groups do depend on a great deal of independence of each member, but they also depend on an automatic allegience to family/tribe.
A liberty gene, perhaps not. But you can use Pinker as a kind of stepping stone, arguing that if the human brain is hardwired for language, language in turn can predispose its speakers (sometimes more, sometimes less) toward values such as…liberty.
I’m borrowing a page here from the 19th century German linguist, A. von Humboldt, who believed that language predetermined all sorts of “culture,” from religion to scientific proclivity to aspirations toward freedom (or, conversely, slavery). This was around the time that linguistic families and lineages were being identified and researched. The upshot was that if one’s mother tongue belonged to the Aryan or Indo-European family, one could understand or be taught to understand the Western/rational mindset. If not, too bad. You would never get it.
An interesting, little known cul de sac in western intellectual history, don’t you think?
If you enjoyed this book, you’ll love “The Blank Slate”. Highly recommended.
Sylvain Galineau writes:
If you enjoyed this book, you’ll love “The Blank Slate”. Highly recommended.
Excellent. I shall order it, almost immediately! Thanks for the recommendation.
Before I do, does anyone have any views on “How the Mind Works”? I could do a double order? 🙂
(Both have got to be lighter than reading “Perl 6 Essentials”, my current non-fiction read – it’s a whole new language, though I ‘spose that will mean there’ll be a whole lot more people to teach! $-)
Very interesting.
One problem immediately suggests itself to me, which is that talking about a gene for sneezing in a lift alongside another gene, this time for “liberty”, is to compare the quite specific to the very general.
By “liberty” do you mean the idea of liberty itself, the knowledge that one has liberty, the disposition to agree with it and to believe that having liberty is a blessing rather than a curse, the fondness for publicising the idea of liberty, the ability to make successful use of liberty to invent things? (And I could go on and on, pretty much indefinitely.) Each of these responses are very different, it seems to me, and likely to be influenced by quite different genetic dispositions.
Yet the libertarian movement (or whatever we call it – liberty movement?) is made up of a near-infinity (apologies to that maths guy) of such things. This makes me believe that a gene (or for that matter gene “cluster) for liberty is not a single thing out there to be identified, either encourageable or switchable off.
In other words, I think that although the question is very good, because so provocative of thought, it contains a basic category error.
But like I say, very interesting.
I’m afraid that my reaction to your post is that you have misinterpreted how evolution works. The person who is independent in thought and wants freedom of action outside the social norms of his or her context is not necessarily superior in evolutionary terms. The survivability of genes is determined by how well they fit with the situation at hand—bad fit—goodbye genes.
The analysis ignores that very successful cultures have survived for thousands of years without the constant changes and progress we accept as natural and desirable.
There is a theory extant which posits a critical “moment” many thousands of years ago in which the human race faced a drastic change in the world environment. (Vulcano activity, I believe it was, changed the climate dramatically) The genetic record shows only a few thousand survivors, who then expanded to become the present human race.
Now, those survivors may have needed the kind of thoughtful, realistic, fact based analysis of “what to do now” that can very well be the difference between survival and eradication, but we will never know. It could have been the ones who said, “We must stay here and do what we have always done” who turned out to have been right.
I do agree, however, that the movement and adaptation of humanity to all parts of the Earth, from deserts to jungles to ice caps, shows that the role of the innovator and experimenter is a powerful and necessary one. Too often, the proponents of cultural stability forget that the very “stasis” they are trying to preserve was, by necessity, the innovation of some distant ancestor.
Anyway, instead of some weighty tomes to crack your already over tomed brain, I would suggest you rent a DVD of “Quest for Fire”, and, whether you have seen it before or not, watch the marvelous portrayal of the main character as he sees someone create fire for the first time. It is an absolutely beautiful representation of the true meaning of “awe”.
Finally, find a little book called “Hanta Yo”, a novel about the Lakota nation written a few decades ago. It might provide an insight into the nature of the hunter/gatherer culture you have not found before. It was made into a terrible mini-series, don’t go by that.
I second the recommendation for The Blank Slate, which I reviewed at Amazon. One gem it contains is a Chomsky quote that catches him in the act of changing from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.
Brian Micklethwait writes:
One problem immediately suggests itself to me,…is to compare the quite specific to the very general.
Pinker starts from the small, such as a gene for recognising -ed, for past tenses, through to a set of related genes constructing the whole of the Broca/Wernicke structure, at this pivotal point between all the lobes, in the (mostly) left hemisphere.
Going from specific impediments, up to this general picture, he uses a lot of educated speculation.
If there is a gene complex for liberty, perhaps it would also be built up in this many-layered way, with say a gene for not instinctively obeying someone, such as the tribal chief, just because they are physically bigger than you are, all the way up to the full soufflé, for writing Man, Economy, and State.
With so little known about how all 30,000 genes build the human brain, in toto, Pinker is forced to start small, before heading up to the speculative general case. I don’t bother with that, of course, I just go for the 20 questions route! 🙂
By “liberty” do you mean the idea of liberty itself, … (And I could go on and on, pretty much indefinitely.)
I’d rather cast it in terms of your typical average cave-man. You’re right, we could go on indefinitely with definitions of liberty, and there are hundreds of books which do, but they’re all based on the last 10,000 years of history. If we go before that, to the time when we were formed mentally and physically, we will find our libertarian foundations. Though of course, being pre-historic, by definition, means there’s nothing written down about it! 🙂
So we have to use archaeology, anthropology, psychology, a.k.a. smoke and mirrors. In these stone age terms I would put liberty down to not having to obey the tribal chief per se, being free to invent new things without permission, the right to own non-tribal PROPERTY, being free to wander off by yourself, perhaps with some others in agreement, while remaining in friendly relations with your old tribe, to form a new colony in the next valley. But still being able to come back, if it doesn’t work out. Being able to publicly disagree with the shaman or chief, without suffering violence for it. And mostly TRADE. The ability, without the fear of violence, for mutually beneficial trade to spring up between each individual, each group, and each valley. You give me two flint knives, I’ll give you a gourd full of honey. Whatever. And from these chains of trade arise traditions of trade, common law, property rights, and eventually the whole gamut of Man, Economy, and State.
Each of these responses are very different, it seems to me, and likely to be influenced by quite different genetic dispositions.
Yes. For instance, for trade to work, humanity would have had to learn not to be violent towards that strange group coming down from the hilltop, bearing flint knives, and waving a white flag. Stealing from them, and killing them, is the old short-term profit way, but the long-term route to continuing poverty. Having enough intelligence to come up with the white-flag-means-peaceful-trade tradition, know that it’s a good thing, and being able to remember it long enough not to kill strangers automatically, would require both foresight and superior memory genes (part of the proposed Liberty gene complex).
This makes me believe that a gene … for liberty is not a single thing out there to be identified, either encourageable or switchable off.
It won’t stop the chiefs and shamans from trying, though, will it, to create their brave new UN world, if we let them?
In other words, I think that although the question is very good, because so provocative of thought, it contains a basic category error.
I’m not sure what you mean by category error, as I am the most amateur of armchair philosophers, but if you mean it’s too specific for such a general topic as ‘Liberty’, there must be some genetic foundation at the heart of our need to be free. We could, after all, live successfully like ants, or Borg, or other flavours of socialist, if we were wired that way, but we aren’t. The human condition, where allowed to express itself by the chiefs and shamans, heads towards the freedom to be left alone by the chiefs and the shamans. If it didn’t, ant-like humans would dominate the Earth, in vast warm hives, and we individualists would merely be a few old fossilised rocks in the ground, debated over by large teams of unionised Guardian-reading Ant-humans, in the morning coffee break, at the Nest College. The King Ant, would still be Tony Blair, of course, but not for much longer! 🙂
But like I say, very interesting.
Hey, we try! 😎
veryretired writes:
The person who is independent in thought and wants freedom of action outside the social norms of his or her context is not necessarily superior in evolutionary terms.
But that could be why there are so few of us ‘individualists’? In normal conditions the 1-in-a-100 individualist takes a big risk, leaps off the mountain, and dies. But 1-in-a-100 times, this rare freak leaps off the mountain and finds the next valley is 10x more luxuriant, and full of game, than this one. The rare independence gene wins, and survives to fight another day.
I really don’t want to get into it right now, as it really deserves a whole thread, but homosexuality could be a genetic behaviour triggered by a similar mechanism. Every now and again, if there is a shortage of women, and too many men, it makes more sense for a man to look after his sister’s children, than it does to fight, and possibly die, over getting his own woman. If he raises two or more of his sister’s children, giving her child-raising bandwidth for two more, this is genetically as good as looking after one of his own. Hence, there may be a dormant homosexuality (i.e. female behaviour) gene complex built into every single man alive (except me, of course :). Which is why it keeps popping up, despite its obvious failure to pass itself on by the usual sexual route.
There is a theory extant which posits a critical “moment” many thousands of years ago in which the human race faced a drastic change in the world environment.
From my reading of the subject, albeit many years ago now, there may have been many such situations. Over the last 5 million years, since we split from our mutual ancestor of the chimps, it has been ice age city, with many different ice ages sweeping across the planet, severely drying out Africa, and wiping out most life in the northern continents.
This created an evolutionary distillation process, where 1-in-a-100 human tribes would survive each ice age, usually the most intelligent, best able to adapt to survive. In the warm inter-glacial, this 1 tribe (for the ease of maths), would repopulate the Earth, to create another 100 tribes. The next ice age would wipe out the 99 stupidest of these tribes, leaving just one. And so on, and so on, each ice age distilling us out, until it was left with old Big-Head, over-sized-craniumed us (with baby foetuses which should come out at 3 years old, etc, and long dependent youths). Feeble physically, but brainy enough to cope with all that the Earth could throw at it. Except other humans, of course.
I shall seek out “Quest for Fire” and try to add it to my list of Pinker purchases! Cheers! 🙂
PS> And the next ice age is due next week, when this current inter-glacial ends, if we can’t fend it off with global warming.
Right, I think I’ve exceeded my bandwidth limit on this. I better go and catch that train home before the byte-police come get me.
So, if I understand the post, libertarians are the genetically superior uber-mensch from which all good things flow. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is filled with a genetically inferior proletariat that mooches off the libertarian accomplishments. There’s also a third class of genetically diseased, statist, socialist rulers who are the source of all evil. It seems you have constructed a theory of history as a chemical process, over which nobody has any control or free will.
I also think your appropriation of all the accomplishments of the human race as fundamentally libertarian crosses the line. In fact, it seems like you created some wholly new line with the sole intention of crossing it. You suggest that libertarians are not just responsible for humanity’s great works, but its very survival as well.
Libertarianism is a political and economic system, nothing more. We do not have a monopoly on all the positive traits of mankind, nor do have we cornered the market on virtue. We just have a philosophy that is morally neutral when looked at in isolation. The positive traits of humanity, such as adaptability, creativity, courage, and perseverance, are not fundamental parts of that system. Rather, that system is the way to most effectively unleash those traits to maximum benefit.
Andy, go for the double order. “How the Mind Works” is the first Pinker’s book that I read, and it turned me into his instant devotee. “How the Mind Works” builds up in the premise of “The Language Instinct” with respect to – workings of the human mind :-).
You will also find more humor there than in other Pinker works. Very highly recommended, both for content and style.
I appreciate your response and I agree that there have been numerous periods of extreme hardship that have winnowed out many species, including some of the primate cousins of humans.
The particular theory I am referring to is very specific, revolving around evidence of a massive volcanic episode, (280,000 years ago sticks in my mind but I won’t fight for it), which then correlated neatly with a genetic analysis that showed a “bottleneck” in human gene proliferation at about the same time. It was put forward very recently, as genetic analysis technology and computers allowed the calculations to be made only over the last few years.
Aside from that point, I must say I do not find any evidence for a genetic precursor for the concept of Liberty. What I do see in the human record is the constant need on the part of humans to make choices and adapt to changing conditions.
What that means to me is that the players in the game who could think up new stategies and new tactics, new ideas and new weapons, are likely to be rewarded by nature with the opportunity to procreate, and have their offspring survive. That process, however primitive, is the beginnings of the scientific method, i.e., trial and error until something works and survival follows.
Therefore, the secret to human survival is not a gene but a realistic attitude to reality as it presents itself. Those who sit in front of the sacred tree praying for salvation die. Those who find a new tool to knock down a new form of prey, or search the countryside for a new source of fruit, or cross over into the next valley to see what might be there that could prolong their families’ life might just survive.
When Rand says the anti-mind is the anti-life, this process is what she is talking about. In the midst of our recent, and possibly ephemeral, prosperity, we have a tendency to forget that a dangerous reality demands a very rigorous approach to life from the human mind.
It is non-evolutionary to stand in front of a charging mammoth and argue that all perceptions are subjective. Unfortunately, there are few mammoths left to drive that point home. A pity.
A speculation:
Evolution may work somewhat differently for Homo Sapiens than it does for everything else for one reason: We as individuals, some of us anyway, do not stay in one place and live or die, passing our genes along or failing to do so.
Instead we migrate. Obviously, to an American, there has been a huge migration and remixing of individuals on our continent.
This may be more of the norm throughout human history than the recent relatively static european pattern may suggest. I once heard a lecturer – a German who came to the US prior to WWII – who ridiculed the Racial Purity idea by showing the huge mixture of strains that make up the ‘Master Race’ which arose in the cross roads of Europe. As I recall, there wasn’t much Commanche or Cherokee blood in the average Teuton, but that was about the only deficit. That didn’t happen because of people staying home.
Then there were the repeated asiatic migrations, east and west across the eurasian land mass. In ancient times, Hyskos and Dorians, Celts and displaced Trojans all moved around.
Perhaps there is a ‘libertarian gene’ that makes some people chafe at being told what to do. One response has always been to get up and leave for greener pastures. When they do that, their genes are removed from one gene pool as completely as by death, but unlike with death they are introduced into another distant gene pool. I can’t think of another species that has been doing that for thousands of years. It ought to have some observable effect.
Scott Pedersen writes:
So, if I understand the post, libertarians are the genetically superior uber-mensch from which all good things flow.
No, we all have within us the genetic potentiality to wish or to become more independent, create ideas and objects without explicit political permission, and the ability to think things through rather than just accept received wisdom, and then to do things without such permission. What kicks this off may be many environmental situations, such as being directly harassed by the state, the birth of your children, or a life spent studying political systems, law, and economics. Or whatever. Just as all men may have a homosexuality gene lurking in their bodies, ready to be switched on at developmental key points, again mainly due to environmental challenges, we may all have the liberty gene lurking likewise.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is filled with a genetically inferior proletariat that mooches off the libertarian accomplishments.
Well, the world is filled with moochers, though not genetically inferior ones. As one who spent an entire decade as a mooching, self-pitying perennial socialist student, funded by the coerced taxpayers of the UK, I was one of these people. My genes didn’t change overnight, my ideas changed over several years. And this ability of mine, and many other people, to throw off the shibboleths of religion, collectivism, socialism, and nationalism, may have been within me all the time, and within all of us, as the Liberty gene complex. Either that, or my body transformed from one sub-human species, to the uber-human, superman species, overnight, in a fantastical process of metamorphosis. What a great idea for a novel. Thanks, Scott! 🙂
(Damn, on second thoughts, didn’t Stephen Berkoff already do that one?)
There’s also a third class of genetically diseased, statist, socialist rulers who are the source of all evil.
No, a group of people who are intelligently exploiting the rest of us for their own convenience, and ease, through tax thievery, constant “the state is good” brainwashing, and when it comes down to the final reel of the movie, straightforward violence. They are not genetically diseased, just very clever, violent, and selfish (which is a nice twist, don’t you think? :). Those who don’t realise what they are doing are, are stupid (idiotarians). Those who do, are, yes, you’re right, plain evil. (J. Stalin, A.Hitler, etc.)
It seems you have constructed a theory of history as a chemical process, over which nobody has any control or free will.
You want to get the ‘Blank Slate’ by Mr Pinker, Scott (if you haven’t already). I’m only up to about page 50, and I’m looking forward to the rest, but the way he puts the case for the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine, I’m sure he’ll be able to answer your above point far better than I.
I also think your appropriation of all the accomplishments of the human race as fundamentally libertarian crosses the line.
What line, the one just painted onto the turf by Scott Pedersen? Are you so afraid of these questions you wish to stifle all debate about them? If you are, then I am glad to have crossed your line. I’m obviously working in the right area.
In fact, it seems like you created some wholly new line with the sole intention of crossing it. You suggest that libertarians are not just responsible for humanity’s great works, but its very survival as well.
Well, again, no. Not libertarians, the speculative Liberty gene complex, which we all speculatively possess, including you, and everyone you know, and me, and everyone I know. I don’t want to write 10,000 words here, in an extended comment, which would turn into an ersatz copy of John Galt’s radio speech, but can I ask you a further question? Why do you think it was our particular sub-species of humanity which survived, out of all the other possible sub-species which died out? Was it just on a lucky throw of a dice, or was there something else more fundamental at work? If so, what? Ok, so it may not be a Liberty gene complex, an idea which randomly appeared in my mind two days ago, sparked by the eloquence of Mr Pinker, which will probably disappear before two more days are up. Human language itself is the major contender. Or it could be human memory, or human learning, or a combination of all three. Or is it ‘intelligence’? Would you mind defining intelligence, if you think so? I offered no evidence. I only offered an idea. Are ideas permissible in ‘Scott Pedersen World’? Should we virtually-burn this post, and all the subsequent comments? Just what are you afraid of? If it’s a stupid idea, as it probably is, the court of human opinion will laugh it away, or more likely, just ignore it entirely. If, as Brian Micklethwait thinks, it is an interesting idea, it may spark someone else into thinking of something far more sensible, and I hope they buy me a drink if they make millions from their subsequent exploitation of their new idea. If it is, by some lucky 1-in-a-million chance, a correct idea, I’ll be the one selling my memoirs for millions! $-)
(Though I’m not cancelling the day job, just yet)
Libertarianism is a political and economic system, nothing more.
Yes, but how did it arise? Why didn’t the chimpanzees invent it? What was the substrate from which it, and all other political and economic ideas arose, and how did this substrate come about? Why are there so many collectivists despite the stupidity of socialism, why are there so few libertarians, (as say compared to die-hard socialists), when its basic tenets are at least as convincing as those of hard-core socialism? Am I allowed to ask questions like this? If not, why not?
The positive traits of humanity, such as adaptability, creativity, courage, and perseverance, are not fundamental parts of that system.
Well that’s where we’ll have to agree to differ. I think you’re right about courage and perseverance. Even the most bone-headed socialist can have those. But I do think adaptability, the ability to change spontaneously, and creativity, the ability to take two ideas to create a third (or however you care to define it), are linked to the ideas of freedom and independence, a.k.a., liberty. Everyone in the world may even have these abilities, to some degree or other, but I reckon the degree to which they have them, is the same degree to which they are influenced by the ideas of freedom and independence (on the same lines that ‘leftist-libertarians’ are half-right).
veryretired writes:
Aside from that point, I must say I do not find any evidence for a genetic precursor for the concept of Liberty. What I do see in the human record is the constant need on the part of humans to make choices and adapt to changing conditions.
Fair enough! 🙂
I’ve always liked Stephen J. Gould’s idea of ‘punctuated equilibria’, where nothing happens for a million years, then everything happens at once over 10,000 years (due to some huge event, like a comet, or large volcanoes in India, etc).
It’s a fascinating area, all round.
Doug Collins writes:
I can’t think of another species that has been doing that for thousands of years. It ought to have some observable effect.
I think it’s interesting that the US has a far higher ratio of libertarians than anywhere else, even God forbid, a Libertarian Party! 🙂
Even now, the US keeps sucking in all those libertarians who grow up in other parts of the world, leaving the rest of the world impoverished of such people (though good luck to ’em). This wish to escape to something better, and ability to get up and go do it, is something I admire in all people who have the balls to actually go through with it.
Katherine writes:
go for the double order
Thanks, Katherine. It was too packed and hot on the Tube, last night, so I stopped off at Oxford St. to get ‘The Blank Slate’. I shall try to find ‘HTMW’ at the Waterstones, at Ludgate Circus, this lunchtime. (I couldn’t find ‘Quest for Fire’, in the DVD of HMV! 🙂
“Could there be some regular patterning of this combinatorial soufflé process to create libertarians?” – I hope not, because it clearly isn’t a common pattern and therefore we have little reason to be hopeful.
Mr. Duncan, I think you wrong me unfairly. I am not trying to censor you or stifle debate. I am not afraid of your ideas, and you are free to express them. After re-reading my earlier comment I’m still unsure how you got the impression that I was trying to shut you up, perhaps it was the talk of line crossing… Regardless, let me state clearly that I have no desire to silence you, only disagree with you.
In regards to my first point, I think that I did not understand your post in the way you intended it. Specifically, I had assumed your references to a liberty gene was akin to a gene for blue eyes, or blond hair. That is, some people have it and some people don’t. Rather, as I understand now, I believe you are suggesting that all people have such a liberty gene just as all people have the genetic codings for a heart, or a liver, or whatever. The variety amongst people is not whether they have the liberty gene or not, but rather to the extent which it is expressed based on a variety of factors. I think this is a much more reasonable theory and you can strike the whole first paragraph.
As to appropriating the accomplishments of humanity crossing the line, I was thinking of the line between an honest appraisal of human history and outright propaganda. It seemed that you were trying to draw a connection between human progress and libertarians. While I think libertarianism is a good thing for human progress, I think the suggestion that we invented fire is an unfalsifiable conjecture at best.
I’m having trouble separating what you ascribe to the speculative liberty gene, and what you ascribe to libertarianism the political/economic system. In your comment above, you state that it isn’t libertarians, but the liberty gene complex that is responsible for the achievements and survival of humanity. However, in the original article you state rather explicitly in the seventh paragraph that stone age libertarians may have been responsible for invention of such things as fire, and the wheel. In the subsequent paragraph you describe certain individuals humanity needed to survive and sum it up by saying “It needs libertarians.” I suspect this may mean that I am reading too much into the verbiage of the original article and our disagreement is more about semantics than substance. Perhaps you could explain further the connections and separations between the libertarian system and the liberty gene complex and their impacts on the achievements of humanity?
As to the non-rhetorical questions you raise, I think this particular branch of humanity survived because we’re smart, we work together, and we can communicate fairly large amounts of information efficiently. Communication would probably be the most important of the three since it allows for greater organization and teamwork, and enhances human intelligence by allowing the exchange of ideas. It also allows you to tell your progeny how not to get eaten by tigers, and thus allows new generations to avoid having to learn the same lessons over again, and by extension allows humanity to pull itself out of the stone age. I don’t think this is too far removed from your suggested triad of language, memory, and learning.
I think libertarianism arose because humans are really good at spotting patterns. It’s only a matter of time before some of them realize that beating a dead horse doesn’t get you anywhere and trying to squeeze blood from a stone is unproductive. Similarly I expect that some humans spotted the fact that this statism thing wasn’t working and it was time to try something else. I think the reason chimpanzees have failed to start a libertarian party is they lack any ability to see these patterns and profit from them. I also expect that any libertarian-minded chimp that tries to strike out on it’s own gets eaten by something with a lot of sharp teeth. Admittedly, I’m having trouble picturing exactly what a libertarian band of chimpanzees would be like.
I think the reason we have collectivists and everyone hasn’t converted to libertarianism is that socialism is easy. It doesn’t work in the long run, but it’s easy to convince people to try it based on a pretty simple emotional circuit. Socialists are helping people, and fixing things, and doing something. Understanding the fact that the liberty works out better requires rational analysis rather than a simple emotional response. Which is why fact-based debates with collectivists never go anywhere. The facts don’t matter because, for them, it’s a self-evident emotional issue.
Scott Pedersen writes:
In regards to my first point, I think that I did not understand your post in the way you intended it.
My apologies. I always try to write as clearly as possible, but the nature of Samizdata being what it is, sometimes where one would like to spend 3 months honing an article, as you can do for a quarterly magazine, if you wait longer than 3 hours most of the things you can write are just old news.
While I think libertarianism is a good thing for human progress, I think the suggestion that we invented fire is an unfalsifiable conjecture at best.
Yes, I know. But a fun one, don’t you think? 🙂
It will have been seen lots of times, with bush fires and the like. But it will have taken a genius to work out how to trap it, exploit it, keep it, and re-ignite it, the Einstein of his or her day. And as all technology thrives in relation to the freedom of the country in which it exists, I still would speculate it would have been likely a more libertarian group in which this Einstein thrived, even if not a full card-holding Rothbardian in their own right. (In the same way that the real Einstein had to leave the collectivist Germany of his day, and could only thrive again in the more libertarian USA.)
In your comment above, you state that it isn’t libertarians, but the liberty gene complex that is responsible for the achievements and survival of humanity.
Something made Mitochondrial Eve’s small tribe the one tribe which gave rise to the rest of us a mere evolutionary eye-blink 200,000 years later. As well as language, and so on, it could have been a far greater economic use of the limited resources around them, better than any other group. And what would have caused this? A priori reasoning, or a genetic substrate which gave us certain behaviours which propagated a better system for managing resources, such as the intrinsic acceptance of private property (as in two small children fighting over a car, saying “it’s mine”). And what caused this intrinsic belief in private property? Your guess, Scott, is as good as mine. I like my Liberty gene complex idea. I’m sticking with it, until at least the end of Mr Pinker’s Blank Slate (I’m on p.143 now, and recommend it even more than previously.)
Perhaps you could explain further the connections and separations between the libertarian system and the liberty gene complex and their impacts on the achievements of humanity?
No, I think I’ve said enough. Maybe if Mr Pinker ever asks me to do some research for him, or I go back to University and continue my Psychology studies, I’ll be better qualified to comment.
Similarly I expect that some humans spotted the fact that this statism thing wasn’t working and it was time to try something else.
Except Plato, of course, who thought that things weren’t working because we weren’t statist enough! 🙂
I’m having trouble picturing exactly what a libertarian band of chimpanzees would be like.
Errrm….. They’d wear skull-and-crossbones head scarves, drink from bottles of Stolchynia vodka, and ride Harley Davidsons.
The facts don’t matter because, for them, it’s a self-evident emotional issue.
And in that, I think we should end on this point of agreement. A pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Pedersen.