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REH:
That is my problem with "social" experiments like
economic systems that have been put in place based upon theory but with
inadaquate "checks and balances" to assure the "guinea pigs" that they can still
survive and even be happy should it fail or need "tweaking."
Mengele assumed Jews and Gypsies were "guinea pigs" and
that simply burning them rather than "using" them for science was a
waste. Today our economists ruin individual and professional lives
in the service of market theories for the "greater good" in "Mengele" like
experiments that require that their lobbying representitives be impotent for
the "experiments" to work. Why else would everyone be so
anti-labor union in such situations? Personally I have both
belonged to and been abused by labor unions but they are a part of the system
that checks and balances the abuse of individual workers by other groups i.e.
the wealthy share holders.
Just a few comments, Ray. Economists aren't all
bad. It's the defunct ones that one has to go after. As Keynes put
it: "We are all the slaves of defunct economists", or some such thing.
Defunct economists enslave us, present day ones try to fix things up and, in
turn, become defunct and enslave us. What a dastardly
profession!
However, I would suggest that there is a difference
between economist and Mengele. Even if theoretically, economists attempt
to understand reality. Mengele's world was one of complete and utter
unreality, except of course for the unfortunate people that were thrust into its
madness. For example:
Twins in the experiments describe three days
of what must have been psychological examination and three days of laboratory
experiments. "Three times a week we were marched to Auschwitz to a big brick
building, sort of like a big gymnasium. They would keep us there for about six
or eight hours at a time - most of the days. ..... We would have to sit naked
in the large room where we first entered, and people in white jackets would
observe us and write down notes. They also would study every part of our
bodies. They would photograph, measure our heads and arms and bodies, and
compare the measurements of one twin to another. The process seemed to go on
and on." (Echoes from Auschwitz, Kor).
The laboratory experiments were described by
Kor as follows: "Most of the time, they would take blood from one arm, and
they gave us shots in the other." (Echoes from Auschwitz,
Kor).
Experiments did not end with the death of the
twins. Dissection of the corpses for final medical analysis is well documented
by Nyiszli and by Lifton. (http://www.candles-museum.com/mengele.htm)
Can you imagine anything more bizarre?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 2:14
PM
Subject: Re: You are naive (was Re:
[Futurework] Walmart and the American dream
Bravo Harry,
Very elegantly put. Now for a couple
of things. "Simple" is an interesting word.
Would you not not agree that "simple" for Horowitz (on the
piano) is not the same as "simple" for Liebowitz (the writer) even
though their names are similar? Complexity always depends
upon competance and simplicity is what has become "natural" to the
person i.e. "walking" is simple to an adult who is healthy and complicated to
a person who has had a knee injury or to the child just learning to
stand.
The second part has to do with
cooperation. Just as there are levels of competance i.e.
complexity, for individuals, so are there levels of competance for
groups. The group that has the highest level of competance and the
lowest complexity level is the most successful, would you not
agree? So what seems almost casual in your comments is
really a lot more interesting than that in reality. Does not the
future of work depend upon such expertise in analysis as systematically
exploring what you are describing in a more deep and layered fashion?
And finally are not the "simplicities" of science
based upon predictability? In the end, does not science
accept a certain degree of sloppiness if it "works"?
Is not the problem for science, the necessity of experimentation for the
purpose of nailing down "predictability?" As a result do you
not need a certain number of "smallpox" experiments to know if the
vaccine works or not? (or on the extreme you have the experiments of Mengele
with the twins.) That is my problem with "social" experiments like
economic systems that have been put in place based upon theory but with
inadaquate "checks and balances" to assure the "guinea pigs" that they can
still survive and even be happy should it fail or need "tweaking."
Mengele assumed Jews and Gypsies were "guinea pigs"
and that simply burning them rather than "using" them for science was a
waste. Today our economists ruin individual and professional lives
in the service of market theories for the "greater good" in "Mengele" like
experiments that require that their lobbying representitives be impotent for
the "experiments" to work. Why else would everyone be so
anti-labor union in such situations? Personally I have both
belonged to and been abused by labor unions but they are a part of the system
that checks and balances the abuse of individual workers by other groups i.e.
the wealthy share holders.
So for me it ultimately comes down to competance
and the lowering of complexity through the raising of the competance of
indivduals and groups. Simplicity then becomes "elegant
balance" and not just the most "stupid solution"
possible.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 12:08
AM
Subject: RE: You are naive (was Re:
[Futurework] Walmart and the American dream
Gentlemen,
As you might expect, I have a rather more simple view
of human behavior.
There seems to be a certain acceptance of experimental
research that is based more on the reports of these efforts, than the actual
research. Any scientific research is full of maybe's, and perhaps, and
possibilities, rather than probabilities.
However, reporting such uncertainties doesn't make for
sexy news.
I know that people will survive or not depending on
how they behave. They surely have a better chance of surviving in
communities. Cooperation multiplies well-being.
We who have survived because we enjoyed the advantages
of community. If we
are nice to each other, if we help each
other, if, on occasion, we even sacrifice for each other - it may be because
these are traits which have made us welcome members of the
community.
Those without this built-in behavior are
probably long gone (or most of them). How this propensity to cooperate moves
from generation to generation is, I feel, less important than the fact that
exists.
Harry
Ed,
At 11:23 28/10/2003 -0500, you
wrote:
Keith, you seem to attribute almost all of human
behaviour to motives like gaining status and ensuring the preservation of
one's genetic code.
Every single lifeform acts to
preserve its genetic code more than anything else. In primate societies,
rank order is the main device that has evolved for the selection of sexual
partners. It's as basic and important as that.
By your view of it, a behaviour like altruism is not
something based on morality, on wanting to do 'right' by others and
wanting others to do right by you, but something that it essentially
selfish and that we can't help because we are genetically programmed to
behave that way. I simply don't buy that.
You are
entitled to believe the above, but the evidence is increasingly showing that
all our principal behaviours are predisposed by our genes. However, where we
differ from other primates is that our frontal lobes are able to embellish
all our deep drives in imaginative ways. For example, almost all the goods
we buy have been, at one historical period or another, status symbols.
Another example: almost all religions' rules about marriage put a civilised
gloss on the incest taboo which is followed rigorously by all human
societies that are not under stress.
Our sense of morality and decency is ancient. It has
been developed out of a vast array of interactions over the millennia. It
has been codified in religions, philosophies, laws and institutions, and
surely plays at least as important a role in our behaviour, one to
another, as our basic animal make-up. Without a codified morality, we
could not function as societies. It is what distinguishes us from other
species.
We could easily function without detailed,
codified moralities. But it's helpful to codify them and, where they differ
in detail from one culture to another it adds colour to each.
The examples you give of morals that are prefigured
in our genes are not very convincing. Both mothers and fathers have died
to save their children.
Yes, but mothers try harder!
In cases of bad house fires in England where one of the parents perish
trying to save the children, it is the mother who nearly always dies rather
than the father. The ratio is something like 12 to 1 -- if my memory is
correct (the ratio might be more than that, but it's significant).
And when, as in cases of intended rescues I know
about, brothers have tried to save brothers, the very last things they
were thinking about was the preservation of the family genes.
Of course, individuals don't actually think about
their genes! In primate societies, brothers will nearly always come to
the aid of their brothers. In the case of humans, this could only be proved
conclusively by a scientific experiment which would be ethically impossible
to carry out! But, gosh! -- just think of the nepotism that goes on in
buysiness and politics and the way almost everybody writes their Wills.
As for altruistic work, I know of many people who do
things for strangers without any thought of getting something in return. I
personally am involved in a food bank, and I demand no recompense. I and
the other people who work with me just feel that it is a necessary thing
to do.
Yes, this is true. But this is quite rare,
and it nearly always involves individuals who are more intelligent than the
norm and are more aware of the importance of community/social linkages. In
Bath there are quite a number of charities and voluntary societies. There is
only one I can think of in which working class voluntary helpers are almost
as numerous as middle class individuals -- this is the Refuge Centre for
battered wives (which is the particular charity that I support)..
My general point remains: quite apart from our genes
and what might be interpreted as our economic self-interest, we are moral
creatures.
We are only 'moral creatures' because we
say there should be morals. And the people who are the most insistent about
morals are those who want power -- churchmen and politicians
All I was suggesting in the posting you challenged
was that our morality needs to be applied more forcefully to some of the
more pressing problems that confound our economy today. Something other
than rounding them up and deporting them needs to be done for illegal
immigrants who enter the rich world to do its menial work, and something
must also be done to help affected communities deal with job-loss problems
arising out of outsourcing. Perhaps because business has become so big and
powerful in society or because we have become more cynical and less
secure, we seem to have lost some of the focus that, for example,
Roosevelt, applied to the economy of his times via the New Deal and, as
another example, the Kennedys and Johnson applied to civil rights in the
1960s.
I believe that we in the developed world are
prosperous enough and should be civilised enough to adopt a general duty of
care to many illegal immigrants. But let's not get carried away about this.
I can only speak of England. According to a BBC Radio 4 investigation, 2,000
children are brought into England every year from Africa. Some have been
brought here so that people here can claim children's benefits from the
welfare state, some are brought in as sex slaves and some are actually
brought in for ritualistic human sacrifice (and there is strong police
evidence that this goes on). Some come here for entirely valid reasons, of
course, for fear of persecution. There are also at least 70-80,000
prostitutes who have been brought in by (mainly Albanian) criminal gangs.
Their passports and papers are taken from them, they know no English and
many of them have no chance of escaping from the pimps' clutches. In effect,
they are slaves. At the present time, it is almost impossible to know how to
sort out all this substantial immigration because most illegal immigrants
entering the country simply destroy their passports and identity papers on
the plane as they fly here, or they hide them on
arrival.
Keith
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Ed Weick
- Cc: Harry
Pollard ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 2:16 AM
- Subject: You are naive (was Re: [Futurework] Walmart and the
American dream
- Ed,
- At 18:04 27/10/2003 -0500, you wrote:
- I believe I started all of this by
rather innocently posting an article from the NYTimes dealing with
cheap illegal immigrant labour doing cleaning work at Walmart.
Personally, because I have first hand familiarity with what second
generations can achieve, I'm not against bringing in cheap immigrant
labour to do menial work, nor am I against sending work abroad to
India and China. What I am against is holding the threat of
deportation over immigrant labour's head and using outsourcing to
undercut domestic workers and their communities. There must be a
decent and moral way of doing both out and in sourcing. Society,
acting through its elected politicians, has to find that way and not
leave it up to Walmart and the outsourcers. The matter has to be
considered as an important political issue and not be kept hidden
under the table. But perhaps I'm being naive?
- Ed
- I think you are being naive. Not because you are an innocent but
because you are trying to mix morals and economics. In truth, consumers
are greedy and will always go to the cheapest sources. When the British
car industry was dying in the 1960s and early 70s in my home town of
Coventry (we had eight large factories there then: one now) and
politicians of both parties were appealing to us to "Buy British"
whenever they were in power -- with "Buy British" stickers everywhere
you looked and stuck on every conceivable product -- the very same
workers who were destroying the British car industry were also buying
Japanese cars. They were there, large as life, in the car parks of
all the factories when their owners were on shift. Why? Because Japanese
cars were better and cheaper.
- And why were Coventry car factories destroyed (the last remaining
one -- Jaguar -- is due to move abroad shortly)? Because the car workers
were greedy (they were already earning twice or thrice the average UK
wage for those days) and the local management was weak. I know because I
worked in one of the factories for many years.
- We all deplore the demise of the corner shop, yet we (Bathonians, at
least) all do the bulk of our weekly shopping in the superstores because
there's more choice, the food is cheaper and the quality is more
reliable. When I first came to live in my present house in Bath 17 years
ago there were five corner shops (literally) at the end of the road --
greengrocer, butcher, grocer, newsagent, post office. They've all gone
now. What we have now is a deli (in truth, a posh takeaway) and four
antique shops, mainly for the benefit of tourists. Yet another dagger in
the heart of the local community.
- We don't have much by way of morals -- but all are deeply prefigured
in our genes. They are:
- 1. A mother (but not a father) will give her life in sacrifice for
her children in an emergency; in a period of starvation, however, she
will allow her child to die instead of herself. (Why? Because she has a
chance of having more children if and when the starvation period goes --
otherwise, both might die. Observe any and every TV clip you see of mass
starvation, as in Ethiopia and northern Africa.);
- 2. An individual will help another within his family in order to
maximise the survival of his/her particular cluster of genes;
- 3. An individual will help another in his community (that is, when
there is a fair chance that the help can be reciprocated sooner or later
either by the recipient or by an observer in that community);
- 4. An individual will tend to trust another (friend or stranger) in
any transaction if there is an almost certain chance of reciprocation
either immediately or at some stage in the future;
- 5. It is permissable to use every trick in the book (that one can
get away with) to raise one's status in the community because in this
way one is able to choose a beautiful and talented sex partner with
survival-worthy genes for your offspring.
- The first three are called altruism; the fourth is called trade, the
last is called art and/or science and/or philosophy and/or organised
religion (another version of politics) and/or politics and/or economics
and/or consumerism.
- This may seem a bleak list -- and so it is, because, ever since we
left hunter-gatherer times (after having extinguished most of the
easily-available animal prey) the majority of the world's population are
either suffering physically or are experiencing unhappiness. Even the
'prosperous' developed world is becoming increasingly stressful and will
probably become increasingly divisive (both inter-nationally and
intra-nationally). It will always be so -- until we have a more
realistic notion of what sort of creature we are and are able to fashion
our social and political units more in accordance with our genetic
make-up. Until then, I'm afraid, it's all pie in the sky.
- Keith
- Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
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