Wow! What a superb exegesis!
I'm biased, of course, because, over the course of reading and writing on FW list, it has been a school to me and I have gradually become an evolutionary economist. The sort of planning that Ray Harrell espouses has been tried in this country for a century and particularly so for the past 50 years since WWII, but our policy-driven highly-centralised social services, state education system, national health service and transport services are creaking and cracking under the strain. None of them can last for a great deal longer and will have to collapse in order to evolve from the bottom again -- if we're lucky. Whether these reform themselves via private companies or by decentralisation of government almost doesn't matter. The point is that workable systems of great complexity can't be planned because the necessary upward information flows can't cope; stable systems can only emerge from atomistic motivations and a multitude of short-range information flows from below. We ought to have been given warning by the total breakdown of the Soviet system, but some people will never be told.
Keith Hudson
At 02:49 02/09/2003 -0700, you wrote:
Hello Ray,
> ... The childlike faith in mechanisms
> that the Republicans have or profess is either idiocy or duplicity (note the
> Wall Street Journal's recent conversion to re-regulation for the power
> companies in face of the failure of the "invisible economic hand"). The
> "invisible hand" is the most ridiculous notion that I've seen to date...
> ... Nature isn't automatic but dynamic
> and Laisse Faire whether in economics, education or the environment is an
> excuse for intellectual laziness and irresponsibility. You have to plan,
> think about the future of your grandchildren and the sustainability of the
> present. I see little of such thought or action in the present in any
> quarter. That's my experience and opinion.
Oh my goodness, Ray, you have targetted the *core* intellectual convictions of the European enlightenment, fundamental ideas and perceptions which endure as strong as ever to this day and lie behind almost all contemporary thought and politics.
I wonder if I can successfully sketch these core commitments. What did Newton discover that was so celebrated by Voltaire? What has the commitment to modern science placed at the center of our beliefs? Newton discovered that the dynamic universe is kept in *order* by the operation of the laws ("rights"?) of motion of individual particles of matter, laws established by the same Provident God who, according to John Locke (Newton's colleague on the London Board of Trade), created those individual particles of society, *human* atoms, each endowed with innate "rights" ("natural laws"?) of life, liberty, and property. Newton and Locke make the world safe for what CB MacPherson famously called "the political theory of possessive individualism".
A collection of material particles, each having its own inertial mass and the power of attracting every other particle (gravity), produces by these mechanical laws a *solar system* consisting of large aggregated bodies moving in stable dynamic orbits. A collection of individual human atoms, each seeking its own way, interact in such a way as to produce stable, progressive, social orders.
The mechanism of the Newtonian universe is imitated in the mechanism of the market. And it is this FACT of MECHANISM that offers such eloquent testimony to the benevolent Providence of an all-wise Creator: the mechanism operates so that each of the individual particles just goes about its own business (moving, gravitating, seeking what it wants) with no larger vision in mind; the LAWS of the MECHANISM guarantee a natural and social ORDER as an outcome, a consequence of the interactions of these single-minded individuals each of them seeking no larger goal than individual well-being.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens" -- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk I, Ch 2.
The beauty of all this is that individuals do *NOT* need to worry about those things you are urging upon us. An individual is a model citizen of a modern republic if he simply looks after his own self-interests and responds rationally to his own individual needs. He does NOT > ... have to plan, > think about the future of [his] grandchildren and the sustainability of the > present...
If he just looks out for himself, the *mechanisms* of the markets (in goods, in ideas, in political candidates) will take care of the greater economic, social, and political good.
It is quite a powerful vision. Its founders (Newton, Locke, Voltaire) saw this as the establishment of a providential diety. As God gradually abandoned the scene -- "I have no need of that hypothesis, sire" says Laplace to the Emperor when asked where is God in his scheme of the solar system -- the benevolence of the diety was replaced by a belief in the progressiveness & goodness inherent in nature.
Thus from Adam Smith's progressive history of human civilization -- all of it driven by the "innate propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" of each individual human atom, Smith's counterpart to the innate gravitating tendency of each Newtonian atom -- it is a small step to *DARWIN* with his evolutionary MECHANISM whereby "more and more highly organized" living things are produced by the interaction of biological individuals having no larger goal than their own day-to-day survival.
There is no greater testimony to "the West's" commitment to *individualism* and natural MECHANISMS than the current conviction that everything exists and everything has happened by the operation of *evolutionary* mechanisms. Thus nothing is explained or understood until its evolutionary origins or foundations have been uncovered: the current insistence on *evolutionary* explanations in anthropology, history, psychology, linguistics, cognitive development, education, economics (right here on FW!), and so on. And so we are the children of the Enlightment. ("What do you mean 'we', Mr European?" I hear Ray asking.)
What is this legacy? The major thing, I think, is the *eclipse of politics* by the sciences of management and administration: a cultural commitment to utilitarian justice and ethics. I first encountered this conclusion in the eloquently argued *Politics and Vision* by Sheldon Wolin.
The basic idea is this: since there are (natural) *mechanisms* that assure best results -- in nature, in biology, and in society -- the enlightened citizen abandons a sentimental and childish pursuit of godly justice or the anti-social ethics of the Sermon on the Mount and realizes that there are no ethical or political issues *as such*. All our social ills are discovered to be social problems of administration and *management* -- hence the prominence of "the economy" and managing the economy in modern politics. All else is subsidiary to this.
I think that a realization of how deeply and unconsciously "we" are committed to this vision of things, to this mechanistic understanding of the natural and social worlds, goes a long way to explaining our behavior and our politics.
There is much more that could be said and much detailed accounting to be given before any of this could be persuasive, but the basic picture seems pretty clear to me. And the problems with this basic picture *are* the basic problems of our current situation. We are in trouble to the extent and in the same ways that this mechanistic vision is in trouble.
Perhaps this makes some sense of things ...
Stephen Straker
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus]
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Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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