We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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As I proceed deeper into Popper, I have pondered his ideas on ‘historicism’, the idea that one can define a set of laws of history. Within the context he is arguing I must say that he is correct. Popper argues such laws are unscientific because they are not falsifiable. This is true for the case of all of which I am aware, whether several millinnia ago or within recent memory. But is it a true statement or is it an over-application of inductive reasoning?
I do not think we know enough to make that general of a statement about the possibility of historical laws. With the knowledge at hand we are probably on safe ground to agree that racially based, class-based and simple projections of past events onto future history are non-starters. So what would it take to really have a ‘Seldon Theory’?
Science requires data. Hypotheses must be based on data and should be falsifiable by uncovering new data or effects which are sufficiently counter to the predications of theory so as to bring its viability into question. To do that with history we need not one history but many. True, we can analyze numerous Earthly civilizations from different times and places, but that is not enough. We simply do not have enough detail about many of them. Perhaps new developments in Archaeology will one day make such data available, but for the present we have only a small number of historical, independent civilizations from which to work.
Even worse, were we to generate a theory that was applicable to such pre-technological societies, those theories would still fall upon the same problem when looking at what comes after, because once technology arrives on a planet, the boundaries become fuzzy very quickly and you are back to having only one data point. You cannot build a theory on a single data point. Even worse, we are in a technological civilization in which the rate of change grows more rapid with each passing year. How can you generate any sort of prediction about a world with wildly different characteristics from your own, none of which are knowable to you? How could a Scientific Historian of, say 1950, predict much of anything about a world with global access to virtually all of human knowledge, blogs, twitterers, computerized phones more powerful than Colossus and a third world that is not quite so third any more?
The simple answer is: “They would not have had a prayer of being right.”
So have I proved a Theory of History is impossible? No, far from it. I have simply framed the obvious limitations of the data available to us. It is insufficient to allow anything like a hard science of history to develop. That does not mean such data will never be available. Let us posit one possible future in which there might be true scientists working in such a field…
It would be some hundreds if not thousands of years hence. Humanity has gone to the stars and we have studied the histories of hundreds of other sentient races. We have put our AI’s to work for some decades to analyze and categorize; we have looked at vast amounts of cross-galactic statistical data; we have framed the areas where mathematical Chaos reigns and know the likely set of outcomes. Our learned future historical scientists are arguing over what experimental data is required to falsify their theories: ie, can we find a civilization X in which Y occurred?
Then and only then could we say that history is a science. Of course we still do have a problem. Unless we run across an elder civilization willing to talk to us, we still cannot predict our own future at all. We can only do so for civilizations at earlier stages of development than our own.
Thus Popper still wins the argument against Historicism as a self-analysis tool even in the far future.
After having it sit on my book shelf collecting dust for half a decade or more, I finally picked up Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” as I had nothing left that was less daunting in appearance for my late afternoon lunch/dinner/coffee break. Whatever else I may get from it, whether I find myself agreeing or not, I most certainly found it a generator of ideas and flights of wild fancy, some of which I will now impose upon you.
First, I have only ever read parts of Plato. A few chapters here and there over the years. I have tended to use my deep thinking reading time for people more like Hayek and the other free market economists and thinkers. Thus I was utterly and totally unprepared for the shock of the Platonic quotation that headed Volume I:
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”
I do not think I have ever had such a horrified awakening to such pure evil in my life. If this is what Plato’s philosophy espouses, then nearly anything built upon him is likely to be totalitarian and I can easily see the direct line from him through the Hitler’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s of well over two thousand years after his demise.
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
There is a subject that we often return to on Samizdata when discussing things, and that is ‘meta-context’. This is the frames of reference, the unspoken assumptions, the underpinning world view if you like, within which people see things and discuss them. Context is usually explicit, whereas meta-context is implicit and very much in the background.
This is a useful concept for understanding why discussions get framed in the manner they do. When the meta-context of two people is widely divergent, they tend to talk past each other, because much of what they say will not be what the other person understands. A great deal of the success of the statist political establishment comes from their control of the meta-context, so that in the minds of many, much of what states do simply goes without saying… that is just the way it is, even if on a contextual level a person is not predisposed to like or trust the political establishment, the state’s basic purview is essentially a given and thus not really pondered deeply, much like the sun rising in the morning.
So when David Cameron and Gordon Brown exchange meaningless ritual barbs in the House of Commons, we hear an exchange between two people with somewhat different politics and personalities, but they are as one at the meta-contextual level. Each understand the other completely on a great many levels and both understand instinctively what are the ‘proper’ limits of their political ‘disagreement’.
So when someone comes along who does not share meta-context, all sorts of interesting things happen. Not only is there going to be a profound non-meeting of minds, there is going to be both misunderstanding and often great antipathy as people struggle to fit the opposing person’s views within their own meta-context, assuming things that are actually not the case at all and imputing meaning that tell you far more about the person doing the imputing than the person they are discussing.
And so I present you with Randy Cohen, who blogs for the mainstream statist-left newspaper the New York Times as The Ethicist. The article which caused my meta-contextual antennae to start tingling a few days ago was titled How not to talk about health care. → Continue reading: So genuine opposition is… unethical?
The other night I attended a talk by Tara Smith, a philosopher from the University of Texas who has written a number of good books, such as this one. Her talk was at a private event so I am not going to relate the exact details of what was said, but one thing that struck me during the Q&A session was when a guy in the audience, who clearly disagreed violently with Prof. Smith’s views, began to state that she “did not get” certain ideas (which he presumably agreed with).
I really dislike this verbal tactic, although I occasionally find myself lapsing into it, and I should not. When we say that someone does not “get” something, such as not “getting” rock music, or clothes fashions, or a political creed, or whatnot, what they really are trying to say is that “X does not like or agree with this because he or she is an idiot or is blind to the wonderfulness of it.” I remember, back in the days when he was cheerleading for George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan was a particularly bad offender, writing about how X or Y did not “get” the threat posed by Saddam/etc and so forth. Even if Sullivan was right at the time, this tactic smacked of saying that smart, clever people like him understood what was going on but those who did not were in some ways deficient in their reasoning.
Jamie Whyte, about whom I have written before, has a great book debunking these lazy ways of thinking and arguing. Well worth the read.
Books that try to convey important philosophical ideas can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to read. Much as I liked Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the sheer sweep of the novel and the way it tackled all manner of topics, I’ll be the first to concede that some folk out there will find that type of book a daunting read. But a shorter, and highly engaging, example of something rather similar has been out for a few months now: “Old Nick’s Guide To Happiness”, by Nicholas Dykes.
I will not give the plot away but to say that Mr Dykes’ novel is based in the wilds of Scotland, focusing on what happens when a young man, who is shortly to head off for Oxford as an undergraduate, gets lost and hurt during a hiking expedition in the Highlands, and how he falls in with a rather unusual couple living there. There are lots of discussions of philosophy and ideas along the way, but is done in such a charming way that the reader, whatever their views, will not feel they are being lectured at. Admittedly, if you are a religious fundamentalist, deep Green or hardline collectivist, then this book will drive you nuts.
I have known Mr Dykes for several years and he has been a regular writer for the Libertarian Alliance, among other places. I liked this book very much and I hope Mr Dykes tries his hand at another novel. As he realises, abstract treatises are all very well, but if you can convey ideas through the medium of fiction, with strong characters, a good plot and plenty of engaging detail, it can be far more effective. The Left, if I can be permitted to use that term has long understood this – it needs to be understood by those who work in the broadly classical liberal tradition, too. And the same point applies even more, perhaps, to the world of TV drama and films.
Many people say that the poll tax funded BBC no longer matters – but I do not agree.
The BBC matters less than it once did, but it (or rather parts of it) is still considered a source of serious discussion – and things said on the BBC go into the schools and colleges (via teachers and university lecturers – the sort of people who still actually listen to things like BBC Radio Four) and even into the entertainment media – as BBC money is still a major source of funding for comedians, and actors and even pop singers like to be thought of as “intellectual” so they follow what other people tell them are serious ideas.
The BBC is not all “Eastenders” and other soap operas; it still considers itself in the business of spreading ideas (although, of course, even the soap operas spread ideas and attitudes) and the Reith Lectures, named after the founder of the BBC, John Reith, is what BBC thinks of as the high point of its “High Culture” mission.
Of course the vile taxpayers may not actually listen to the Reith Lectures, or understand them if we did, but watered down and adapted forms of the ideas expressed in the Reith Lectures will be used to “educate” our children and even “inform” popular entertainers, so whether we listen or not is not really relevant from the point of view of the BBC.
The Reith Lectures this year are to be delivered by what the BBC’s advertisements describe as “one of the world’s great philiosphers”, Michael Sandel, actually a Harvard professor who has spent his entire academic life repeating the statist mantras of the late John Rawls. In this context, see Antony Flew’s examination of the ideas such men stand for, which Flew gives in such works as “Equality: In Liberty and Justice”. → Continue reading: BBC Harvard ‘Philosophy’ is based on lies
There is a Reuters story quoting a survey suggesting that the recession could trigger a general increase in violence around the world. As is always important in these kind of claims, we need to be sure that correlation between two things – violence and economic uncertainty – is not being conflated with causation. Consider: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s when the world, in general, was quite prosperous, albeit coming out of a short recession in countries such as the US and UK, when the price of oil had also been falling. The violence that broke out in the MEast later in parts of Africa (think Sudan, think USS Cole) took place in the middle to late-1990s, a period when emerging market economies were generally on the rise. The exceptions may prove the rule: what I think is true is that places that are felt, rightly or wrongly, to be unfairly excluded from a global prosperity are often likely to be unstable, and quite violent, but not always.
In fact, it is even arguable that greater prosperity might even cause some forms of violence if reactionary/religious groups regard such wealth as a defilement of whatever it is they want to protect. (I happen to think that explains why some anti-globalisation folk are often, in essence, reactionary snobs). That in part explains the argument of those who said that the West was attacked on 9/11 not for its supposed transgressions in the Middle East, but for its wealth and freedom per se.
Where I think economics does play a more direct role is where you have regimes that are financially busted, with few remaining resources, and where they greedily, and desperately, eye other, resource-rich nations nearby. That explains some, but not all, military campaigns. As in the case of Japan during the 1930s, a hunger for raw materials, coupled with a militaristic ruling ideology and elite, led to the Japanese conquests in parts of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The same happened with Argentina and its invasion of the Falklands Islands in 1982 (the islands are supposedly close to some very big oil reserves). Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul had a partly economic incentive (all that gold, slaves, etc). And so on.
There may also be some evidence that the more prosperous we are, the more tolerant we are, too. In fact tolerance, which is allied to liberty, and prosperity, are faces of the same coin. In the minds of the great Victorian champions of free trade, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, free trade and peace went hand in hand. A bit naive, maybe – trade routes need to be protected against thieves and thugs – but it is a view based on an essentially benign view of how most of us live our lives, given half a chance.
Mike Oliver (who blogs as ‘Mr. Integrity’… currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.
BB&T – and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason – I say!
Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of “business leaders” who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that “rationalize” their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them – the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.
But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.
National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand’s rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so – Buckley’s first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled “capitalism.” with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.
Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices – of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of “capitalism”… or Marxism… which to so many seemed a “scientific” or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later – either Marxism or many of its falsely-“humanist” variants.
Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism – almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it’s probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.
“There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who “starve for want of luxuries.” But it is always easy to regard another man’s things as superficial and another man’s pursuits as greedy, while one’s own belongings have sentimental value and one’s own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access.”
– Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing.
“Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate…The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy.”
– Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week’s terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long.
I think this is great, from regular commenter here NickM of Counting Cats:
The tale science tells about how we got here (and got to the point where we could ask such questions) is not just truer than the bronze-age claptrap of The Bible (or Qu’ran or stories about Marduk or whatever …) but more compelling. We are DNA on the right-handed scroll and it has taken four billion years to make us. We are that amazing. Isn’t that more compelling than some old shit about talking snakes and a job done in six days? Is it not a truly grand narrative? The truth is so much more beautiful than the lie. It is also the truth and that also goes a long way on it’s own.
Ah, c’mon folks … I have heard enough from creationists about how if we’re merely risen slime we’re still slime and that in some unspecified way we are therefore still tainted by the slime. But what slime! This piece of slime can be moved to tears by the music of Palestrina, this piece of slime can be amused by the plays of William Shakespeare, this piece of slime can parse HTML and FORTRAN. This piece of slime can factorize quadratics, do integration by parts and hold an opinion on the Copenhagen Interpretation. This is one hell of a piece of slime and so, dear reader, are you.
I am proud to be slime with post-graduate qualifications. I am stardust (so are you) created in the forge of supernovae (is that not cool?). I am atoms in motion (so are you). I am victory (so are you). I am almost everything you are and you are almost everything I am. We share half of our DNA with cabbages after all.
I entirely agree with all this, but I do not stick it up here to insist that all of you do. I know that all of you do not, which is fine by me. Especially if, from what you do believe instead, you draw political conclusions with which I strongly do agree. I stick it up here because it puts a particular point (call it the “glory of slime” argument) in answer to a common objection to Darwinian atheism (the “sliminess of slime” argument) with exuberant eloquence. Even many of those who think it tosh will at least agree that it is very well written.
The Cat Counter acknowledges the sliminess of slime, but then trumps it with the grandeur. But I bet, when he wrote his bit, that he had, rattling about somewhere in his head, this, which acknowledges the grandeur but then trumps it with slime, or in this case with dust:
What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how
express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
While Hamlet emphasises also what fine and beautiful athletes we are, NickM concentrates only our mental glories. An interesting omission, maybe? There are all kinds of memes floating about now to the effect that although many of us dirt-bags are clever, we are not that beautiful, a blot on the world even, compared to many other more exotic looking animals, who now seem to us much more express and admirable in form and moving. Maybe this is something to do with how we have evolved to admire how we look only when young, yet are clever enough now to have contrived for millions upon millions of us to be shuffling on unattractively into old age instead of reverting to actual dirt at forty and being replaced by younger and prettier dirt-bags.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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