Right Reason

A Short Paen for "Vice"

 

"At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going."

-Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diaries 

 

“Vice” is simply one of the best journalistic organizations out there. Rather than simply bombarding their viewers with whatever drivel the news cycle is obsessed with or trying to be a third-rate Economist, “Vice” provides an exploration of the world around us. Whether that be about the abuse of krokodil in central Russia, the imbroglio that is Karachi, or the situation facing young immigrants to the United States, “Vice” deals with the world that most forget. More often than not dark  and eccentric  à la Hunter S. Thompson, “Vice” never bores nor does it fail to stimulate. Just as the sick and twisted are all too often the only ones willing to admit what the rest of us would be more willing to simply omit at the edges of civilized society. One could say that they make themselves ugly to reflect the ugliness of society, but the truth is that's just how they are. And “Vice” is never afraid to go where only the mad would dare step foot. With skin ever in the game, they go forth and show us the world. Sometimes caricature, sometimes deadly serious, but always worth paying attention to. Their achievement is monumental.  

The Imperative of Doxastic Commitment

 

 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man's foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

 -Matthew 10:34-38 (Revised Standard Edition)

 

 

Doxastic (from the Greek word δόξα -“Doxa” - meaning “belief”) commitment, a steadfast allegiance in action to the beliefs one holds, is an intrinsic precondition of honor. After all, one of the fundamental demands of honor is the condition of skin in the game, that the person in question be exposed to the costs of her actions. When an honorable human beings acts, she does so in a fashion that exposes her to not only the benefits, but also all of the costs, no matter how bitter, of that action.

The honorable person is thus fully exposed to all of the harmful consequences that result from her behavior. Just as she has her skin in the game when it comes to her ventures in the world exposing her to the harmful effects of those ventures going belly up, she has her soul in the game when it comes to her moral beliefs exposing her to being hurt by them. Nevertheless, doxastic commitment demands that we put our full soul into the game, and be willing to take whatever hurt that follows.

 

No one likes being hurt, and no one especially likes consciously opening himself to harm in the future. Soul in the game exposes the very fiber of our ethical being and identities to wounds, uncertain in their severity, so it should be no surprise that so many want to avoid identifying themselves with clear-cut moral propositions that doxastic commitment requires. As Cicero noted in On Duties: “From the beginning nature has assigned to every type of creature the tendency to preserve itself, its life and body, and to reject anything that seems likely to harm them...” Our animal nature thus expresses itself when we hedge on our believes and remove our whole soul from the game in order to avoid pain.

However, if doxastic commitment leads to a great chance of being hurt in the future, then would it not be rational to protect oneself against that pain by hedging one's beliefs? We need not abandon all of our moral commitment to do this; rather, we only need to be a bit wishy-washy on key matters that would bring up conflict. Our soul need not completely out of the game, but it could just play the game less intensely. However, this ignores the twofold importance of doxastic commitment. Not only is it a laudable trait for a human being to have, but doxastic commitment is conducive to the selection of the best moral practices across societies.

For one thing, fear of pain is never a virtuous motivation. It may illicit sympathy from an onlooker, but the impartial spectator would never applaud it. There is simply no honor in it. That being willing to accept great costs for one's beliefs is so important to honor is displayed in dueling traditions in history. Those customs demanded that a duelist be willing to sustain great bodily harm, and even death, to display their doxastic commitment and therefore their honor.

 

Another aspect of doxastic commitment is that it is much easier to keep people accountable for their beliefs in a community that adheres to that custom. Doxastic commitment thus allows for the efficient communication of desired moral conduct because a person with her full soul in the game is open to social cues that alert her to the desirability of her conduct. Why this is so can be understood in light of systems theory. In a complicated system in which paths of concatenation twist and turn this way and that, simple signals that illicit certain responses from the constituent parts of the system are a means of ensuring that the constituent parts of that system are operating as they need to ensure the health of that system. Thirst and hunger are two mundane examples by which an animal body, itself a system of many constituent parts, ensures that it is kept well fed and satiated. An animal need not take measurements of either hydration or nourishment to maintain its health; instead signals within the system provide controls that keep it acting towards the overall wellbeing of the whole system.

A moral community is also a complex, adaptive system since there is a constantly changing frequency of moral habits within it, and those frequencies can change based on the signals of approbation and censure they interact with. In order for the best patterns of conduct to multiply within the community, people need to learn what those best patterns of conduct are, and be put into a situation in which they are likely to actually go through with adopting them. Both are critically necessary. In order to discover them, people need to have their moral character open to critique. So much in human knowledge proceeds via the process of conjecture and refutation. This is especially true when all of the knowledge necessary to come to the final judgment is rarely at the disposal of any one person, which is certainly true in practical ethics. We may never have the knowledge to determine the judgment of the impartial spectator, but he social process of conjecture and refutation, of approbation and censure, can help us come close.

 

However, moral learning by approbation and censure can only function when there's soul in the game. When people do not put their whole soul in the game, they weaken the signals that they receive about the desirability and propriety of how they live their lives. When people choose to associate themselves with moral propositions that are so indefinite that they can be twisted to suit almost any situation imaginable, then they are unaccountable. Any attempt to criticize them is like trying to grip water: It will always frustratingly slip between one's fingers, ever in metamorphosis to accommodate the circumstances.

Worse, people are more likely to put their whole soul in the game when they are likely to receive praise than when they are to receive condemnation. So now not only is not holding to the habit of having soul in the game not only because it delays the process of the discovery of the best morals by conjecture and refutation, but it also corrupts that process because people will act so as to get a positive signal without truly having the trait that would bring that positive signal about. Not only do they not have their whole soul in the game, but the soul they put there is not their own.

 

As a result, doxastic commitment lends itself not only to personal virtue, but also the efficient operation of an ethical society in which everyone gets not only the benefits, but also the costs, of their moral beliefs, which in turn helps to weed out the least proper and least cleaved-to moral beliefs.

Doxastic commitment is thus not only a sine qua non for a human being's virtue, but also a rule that helps the efficient discovery of the best moral beliefs. Without soul-in-the-game, not only is an individual really incapable of standing for anything because he is incapable of being wrong on anything, but an individual is not accountable for what they have said before because they have not committed to it. A human being without soul-in-the-game is either too afraid of the pain that being open to the costs of one's beliefs or simply does not have any. The impartial spectator would certainly applaud neither.   

Selection and Self-Organization

 

 

“The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. “

- Joeseph Schumpeter

 

Πἁντα ῥεῖ. Even though we have no record of Heraclitus ever saying that, πἁντα ῥεῖ - everything flows – has become the maxim of his philosophy - a philosophy in which we can never step in the same river twice or where justice is strife. Even rejecting everything else Heraclitus said, he was able to put into proper perspective something that must always be on our mind when thinking about, well, anything: Everything changes with time, and the passage of time brings along with it change that, poetically indulging in Heraclitus' concept of the unit of opposites, is the great creator and destroyer of all. In order to study complex systems like the economy over time, then we must take into account how they are able to cope with change over time and how by this process they are able to show design-like characteristics. To do this, we cannot rely on self-organization alone, but we must have recourse to the concept of selection

Self-organization is not a sufficient explanatory explaining the harmonization and coordination of complex systems with a changing world. Even if self-organized entities, whether it be cells or firms, can come into existence without selective pressures, they are surrounded and must survive within a changing world. In order to fine-tune those entities to the stresses and difficulties of survival. Selective forces are needed in order to adapt the entities that have self-organized to their environment, and to ensure that the population is dominated by that which can thrive, rather than that which is doomed. Yes, complex structures may very well be able to emerge without a designer via self-organization, like molecular self-assembly, but self-organization does not explain why populations are able to survive over time.

This is especially true for complex systems like the economy that are under the constant tyranny of Heraclitean flux. In biological evolution, the selection process operates very slowly, the holistic character of an organisms adaptations, and the conditions of the environmental ecology that determines the selective pressures upon organisms are relatively constant. Living fossils do exist. The fishes of the order Coelanacath, which had reached its current form just about four hundred millions years ago, which were thought to have gone extinct by biologists since the Late Cretaceous period just about sixty six millions years ago until a specimen was found off the South African coast in 1938.

 

In The Origins of Order, Stuart A. Kauffman argues that the existence of these living fossils like the order Coelanacath is a strong piece of historical evidence that once species gain their form via self-ordering phenomena, that selection cannot do much to alter the self-ordered forms of species, that order exists despite selection not because of it. However, within the market-economy, evolution proceeds at a much more rapid pace with much more demanding selective pressures than for biological evolution. The demands of profit-maximization do not treat living fossils within the economy very well, and even those business practices that date over a century have had to continuously adapt their practices to the demands of the world. As a result, Kauffman's argument that selection cannot do much to upset the form of complex evolutionary wholes is much less persuasive because it requires a relatively constant ecology and a slow pace of selection.

Limiting ourselves here to the social domain of evolution, if self-organization is the only means for the emergence of order, then the self-ordering entities must be able to deal with the problems that will bring and therefore they must be very robust against change. Important to recognize here is that all self-ordered creations must have non-anticipative strategies against the random shocks that time will bring. As a result, the only means by which a complex system can adapt to random changes is by the selection of those self-ordered objects that have “chosen,” a word that is often still must be used metaphorically since even objects self-ordered by a human mind cannot be designed in anticipation of all relevant future problems, After all, without specifying a selective pressure at work, there is no means by which entities that have self-organized will be able to survive over time. There is simply no way of speaking about self-organization and the survival of what has self-organized without invoking the concept of selection over time.

Once self-organized entities come into existence in society and time passes, bringing change along with it, some of those entities will continue to exist while some will dissolve into the dust. Even though change comes and goes, the complex systems that are human societies have generally endured. Moreover, they have generally thrived. This is especially true for market-economies. With that come questions about the adjustment of markets and how the overall health of the market is able to thrive even though so many of the smaller pieces that make up the market will ultimately fail. Markets do not do not adapt to change simply by the existence of self-organized entities like firms and stock markets. They adapt to change by the success of those most able to foresee future conditions and the failure of those incapable of foreseeing future conditions. Profit reigns supreme and, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Human Action, the source of all profit is the prediction, by accident or design, “the future constellation of demand and supply.” After all, it is through the competitive process that the firms, to take one example of a self-organized entity in society, most capable of maximizing their profits and thriving through time survive while those firms that are not able to are destroyed. Again, we see that in order to explain complex systems through time, we need to recourse to an explanation that has selection over time baked into it, and which helps make it fuller.

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has illumined the process by which complex systems adapt to change in his book Antifragile by arguing that a complex system can only benefit when its consituent parts are able to fail. What he calls the “antifragile” are those things in the world that benefit from variability, like how bones can grow stronger when physically conditioned, and the “fragile” that which does not benefit from variability like a porcelain tea cup, easily broken by the slightest. Taleb argues that a complex system can only benefit from variation if the individual components of that system are themselves fragile, and can be dissolved by change leaving only that which has lasted through the change. Returning to the example of the last paragraph, the health of the markets and their overall antifragility is only made possible by the fragility of individual entrepreneurs. Taleb himself recognized this and recommended in Antifragility that there be a “National Entrepreneur Day” to commemorate the legion sacrifices made by fragile entrepreneurs in order to secure the greater good of an antifragile economy

Like nature, the markets are red in tooth and claw. That which cannot anticipate the future conditions of supply and demand bites the dust while that which can remains and perhaps even prospers. Even though the fragile within the system may be destroyed, the system is benefited by the shocks brought about by variability since the shock has eliminated features within the system that could not stand the flux of change. Of course, no system is infinitely antifragile, so to speak. After all, a large enough shock will be able to completely eliminate a complex system in fell swoop, like an asteroid leading to world-wide, mass extinction, so it would be more sound to say that complex systems are antifragile up to a point. Nevertheless, their antifragility highlights that we cannot explain the adaptation of complex systems like the economy merely with the concept of self-organization; instead, what is needed is a theory that can explain the selective mechanisms by which those systems change. And how they change is by change in the frequency of their constituent parts, whether they are self-organized or not.

 

In the end, self-organization simply cannot be an adequate explanation for the adaptive nature of complex social systems since it cannot take into account the change that is brought upon such systems by the passage of time. We need selection over time for that. Only with the concepts of variation, replication, and selection can we provide an adequate explanation of how complex systems can more than simply endure through time, but can adapt to the environment that they are within.

 

Ants and Evolution: The "Death Spiral" Problem

 

Ancient ants fossilized in amber. 

 

What is evolution? It is certainly not an engineer that contrives systems perfectly designed to face all of the problems that it will face. Instead, it is a haphazard process by which entities adapt in an ad hoc manner to whatever problems are facing it at the moment. Its outcomes are not the products of a well-devised schematic, but Rube-Goldberg like contraptions that have managed to deal with their circumstances and survive by whatever slim margin.

These contraptions, unlike those products, are constituted simply by what has had survival-value, not by that which optimizes its chances in a future. Due to the Rube-Goldberg nature of evolved systems, they are vulnerable to events that are able to cause the adaptions they used to survive to function in a manner unrelated to that they were chosen for. A grim example of this is the circular-milling behavior  of army ants. Seemingly apocalyptic for the afflicted ants, the behavior is a direct consequence of the ad hoc process by which evolution proceeds. The phenomenal means by which foraging army ants navigate has proved to be a great adaptation for their horde-like style of foraging, but can malfunction in such a spectacular manner.

 

 

In The Origins of Order, Stuart A. Kauffman writes of the outcomes of the evolutionary process as Rube Goldberg machines, holistic wholes that are the result of ad hoc problem-solving. Evolution in this perspective is an opportunist that incorporates the few fitness-improving mutations into historically-continent phylogenetic that continue to add-on more and more improvements. There are a myriad possible mutations that can happen to an organism, a very few would be fitness-improving. As those mutations are incorporated into the morphology of any given organism and as mutations cause the tree of phylogeny to split, organisms become more and more historical contingencies.

The radical nature of the historical contingency of all species on Earth can be understood by thinking about an extreme example: RNA, a self-replicating nucleic acid that is vitally important for the functioning of genes. It is one of the most, if not the most, molecules for the existence of life Earth. Without its emergence, one might be led to think that the entire evolutionary history of life would not have happened, but that is a mistaken inference. After all are we so sure that RNA is a necessary feature for the existence of self-replicating organic systems? Could not another self-ordering molecule have emerged in those early days, leading to an altogether alien line of phylogeny from which another great evolutionary epic, one entirely unthinkable to us, would have proceeded? That the entire phylogenetic line of this world's own evolutionary epic is dependent on RNA is not evidence that RNA is a sine qua non for the existence of organisms. Instead, it is merely evidence for how certain adaptions, once they emerge, are locked-into the phylogenetic line.

 

Let's turn to ants now. As Edward O. Wilson has noted, the ant is one of the evolutionary winners of natural history that has discovered a eusocial way of living around a centralized community that has enabled ants to exploit the gains to cooperation to ways that would only be beaten by Homo sapiens. As Wilson once quipped: “Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.” That the ants are one of Earth's evolutionary champions is attested to by the fossil record, which has show that the family Formicidae has existed at least 92 million years, and by the prevalence of ants across just about every landmass on earth Man may very well have been the second animal to have conquered the earth.

The evolution of the ant, though, follows the Rube-Goldberg phylogenetic line above, and that brings great dangers that can lead to the failure of the organism once one of its traits malfunction, so to speak. Such a malfunction can be seen in the circular-milling behavior that can be shown by isolated groups of army ants, colloquially known as a “death spiral.” To find their way, these ants follow the pheromone trails left behind by other ants. Under normal situations, this method of navigation is extremely effective, seen perhaps most vividly in Eciton burchelli's massive raiding swarms. These sorties find prey, overwhelm it with sheer numbers, and bring it back to a temporary nest for final consumption. The tight coordination of movement, ant after another, made possible by the phonemes makes possible a massive swarm, one of nature's most awesome spectacles, from which the other species on the jungle floor can only flee from.

 

 

A short explanation of the circular-milling behavior.

 

However, when the pheromone trails left behind by army ants become entangled, this will result in the ants milling around in a circle until the animals die of exhaustion. That circle expands as more army ants are attracted by the pheromones, only to join the doomed group. This phenomena can even be replicated on a small-scale by putting army ants in a small enclosed space. How this behavior, seemingly so self-destructive for the overall fitness of the ants and their nest, can even be possible after so long an evolutionary history is a puzzle. Yes, the death of foraging army ants is not necessarily fitness-decreasing for the ants given that their caste does not reproduce, but when the milling patterns have the potential of entrapping so many ants, the loss of so many foragers is certainly harmful to the prosperity of the overall colony. So the puzzle remains despite the ant's centralized manner of reproduction; however, it is a puzzle that is easily solved once we remember the historically contingent nature of evolution and how the phylogeny of ants can be seen as the cumulative accumulation of useful accidents.

 

The circular-milling behavior of army ants is but one manifestation of what can go wrong when evolved adaptations are faced with problems that they cannot cope with. The phylogenetic history of evolution is one of the opportunistic incorporation of accidental mutations that have proved advantageous for the continuation of self-replicating objects, whether what is being considered is RNA perhaps in the primordial soup or the phenomenal navigation of army ants. A direct consequence of this ad hoc phylogeny is that seemingly pathological behavior can emerge.

Normally useful accidents can be turned transformed into self-destructive ones for the whole they've been integrated into. That is simply the nature of evolution, and it should give us pause before we seek to critique spontaneous orders by holding them up to the standard of designed schematics.   

Ethics and Poverty: More Than Warm Feelings

"The penury of these miserable masses of - in the main colored - people is not caused by capitalism, but by the absense of capitalism."
-Ludwig von Mises, Human Action 

 

From “Bangladeshi Garment Workers and the Perversion of Ethics” by Mario Rizzo:

I am not saying that we should not have compassion for these people. What I am saying is that the whole of morality is not about feeling good. It is about doing good. And doing good is a complex affair. It requires attention to the unseen."

 

Whether it is about people not having health insurance or about people having to work in dangerous conditions, the human cooperation on the market is not about making what our feelings want to be. It's about serving human desires with limited resources, and ensuring those limited resources go to the most urgent ones as expressed by the price-system. Poverty exists, and as such human decisions about what is the most urgent desire must be made. The market-order will at times show us the great tragedy of such decisions having to be made, but that doesn't mean such decisions don't have to be made.

 

We simply do no favors to people when we make the costs of cooperating with them higher, even if we may feel better about it from the security of our arm chairs. When we make people have health-insurance, people on the margins will decide not to cooperate with some people based on the increased costs. When we make it such that employers have to invest in safety equipment in a third-world factory, some those employers will on the margins decide that they do not want to do business in that country. 

Indeed, we may feel better about ourselves forcing all that to be done, but by preventing people access to cooperation in the market-economy, we greatly harm their welfare. The market-economy is simply the greatest mechanism ever in the history of this world of exploiting the gains to social cooperation. The path out of poverty is not paved with the feelings of wealthy, as we in the first world are from a global perspective, do-gooders, but by human cooperation guided by abstract prices.

 

Countries are poor because they are not productive. Even though we may back away from saying the same thing about people who are poor (ignoring p=mc and the identity of wages as the first derivative of the production function with respect to labor when we do so), we cannot do so when we talk about wages. The only way to not be a poor country is to be a productive country. The only way to be a productive country is to exploit the gains from cooperation made possible by human cooperation guided by prices and, participating in the international division of labor.

 

One of many manifestations of Deidre McCloskey's Great Fact. 

Fundamentally, the jump in material welfare over the past two centuries was not made possible by people wishing better standards of living upon the poor, but by the poor having access to productive modes of social cooperation. It is social cooperation, and the hard decisions that come with making oneself an attractive person to cooperate with, that made the hockey stick possible, not warm feelings about another person's welfare. 

If we truly care about the destitute of the world, of those unfortunate enough to be born in societies in which they could not exploit the gains to social cooperation as we can, we must not saddle them with costs that make cooperating with them less attractive than it was before. Instead, we should allow the capitalistic ethos of free trade and free contracts to emerge in societies across the world, and be content with the knowledge that eventually things will get better. Neither Rome nor New York City were built in a day. 

Genes, Memes, and Culture

 

 

“Lastly, habit in the individual would ultimately play a very important part in guiding the conduct of each member; for the social instinct, together with sympathy, is, like any other instinct, greatly strengthened by habit, and so consequently would be obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community.”

-Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

 

 

Culture exists, and with it a “meme-pool”, so to speak, analytically independent of any one human being. One of the most important features of this meme-pool is a set of general rules and common practices pervading the society superseding any one person within it. It could even be said that these habits are memes that invade the minds of those that are surrounded by them, and program, so to speak, to follow the behavioral specifications that are constituted by that meme. It is no wonder that Charles Darwin noted in The Descent of Man that the human being was more an animal of habit than one of reason (a theme Friedrich Hayek picked up on in the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty). After all, most actions within human life do no find their motivation in rational calculation à la Thornstein Veblen's caricature of the lightning rod calculator. Even when most of us do deliberate, the deliberation is not between the whole range of possible options, but between what we normally choose from (and perhaps that new ethnic restaurant if we're feeling daring).

 We are not only creatures of habit because of an inner anxiety that makes us cleave to what is the norm which has yet to not placate us, even when that satisfaction is lukewarm at best. Instead, it is within our very genetic programming to adopt the habits of our surrounding society and to stick to them. It makes sense from a purely evolutionary point of view that such behavior would be selected for because those ancestral hominids (let's not discount the possibility actual cultural evolution, to differentiate between the simple existence of culture and its adaptation across time, may have happened with other species of Homo) who adopted the local culture would have a survival edge over those who did not.

 

After all, culture does not simply exist for no reason. The practices that dominate within a culture did not simply randomly assume a position of dominance; rather, it was by their adoption in lieu of others and their ability to out compete them for places within minds that they become dominant. Culture, once understood as something more than human artistry, is a record of what solutions have solved problems in the past (think of tradition as problem-solving). Whether it is the clothing culture being a record of what has served people well in the past for protecting themselves against their surroundings or a food culture being a record of what has served well for nutrition, culture points the way for well-serving practices. Those who do not conform to the local culture and insist on reinventing the wheel (or more accurately for the case in point: rediscovering the best hunting techniques) will be unable to learn from culture. Since culture is a record of previous best-practices, the democracy of the dead to cite G.K. Chesterton, those who are most apt to learn from it are those who will, on average, thrive. Ergo, the human propensity to conform plays the very important role within human society of ensuring that most people within that society will adopt what has emerged as the best-practices within it, and thereby be able to thrive.We are left with the co-evolution of the possibility of cultural evolution with the natural selection of the most reproductively successful hominids. Natural selection has selected our genes so that we are, by our very biological disposition, easily programed by the memes of the surrounding culture. In addition, the prevalence of coordination games that rely on conventions as solutions in advanced patterns of cooperation mean that for Homo sapiens to be a truly cooperative animal, she has to quickly be able to pick up on the surrounding cultural practices that constitute those solutions. Even the possibility of human cooperation in complicated networks of exchanges is conditioned upon the human capability of playing the conventional equilibrium informed by culture to countless coordination games in her interactions with her neighbors.

It is quite amazing that the biological dispositions of an ape chosen for by natural selection could, due to certain dispositions selected for, harness culture and with that advanced forms of cooperation to remake the world in its image.

On Culture and Methodological Individualism

 

"What is a state if not an association of individuals under the law?"

-M. Tullius Cicero, On the Laws

 

 How are we to make sense of individualism and culture?

In his book, From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Geoffrey M. Hodgson argues that a methodologically individualistic point of view cannot make sense of society because of the problems that are brought up by the social environment of institutions all human behavior is embedded within. He argues that the existence of general rules of conduct that not only have preceded the lives of every individual within society, or our great-great-great-great-great-great ancestors in the case of sanctions against incest and murder, but that they form the backdrop upon which all the actions of all individuals within society must be understood within. Following the argument, there simply cannot be a Robinson Crusoe and Friday Faraday explanation of society due to the existence of those general rules of conduct that are presupposed in human action. A explanation simply in terms of individual plans and intentions is thus impossible, and with that impossibility comes the conclusion of having to assume the independent existence of the rules of the game outside of individual plans and intentions.

In making this argument, Hodgson is careful to differentiate between ontological individualism and methodological individualism since even though Hodgson denies the ontological reality of social entities like general rules of conduct, but still insists that we must presuppose their existence for analyzing human behavior within society. For Hodgson, then, it is not individualism that is the problem, but the naïve individualism that he finds in Mises’ claim in Human Action that society is nothing but the aggregation of all individuals that is the problem. However, I find that Hodgson may lack a nuanced appreciation for what Mises is trying to claim in that statement: That all social entities require individual human action to have any existence whatsoever. It is certainly true that society cannot simply be considered a linear aggregation of all human action, human beings are simply not added up one by one to create society, but there are rather spontaneous orders that create second-order effects on top of the simple aggregations of individuals. Nevertheless, even though individual action is the only source of efficient causation, to use Aristotelian language, within society, it cannot be understood without the context of the second-order effects which occur from the aggregation of all human action. This was one of the main lessons of Friedrich Hayek's “Individualism: True and False.”

 

How then can we understand culture if it has never been the deliberate creation of human beings? After all, it is certainly possible, as Hodgson does in From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, to simply assume the backdrop of culture upon which people interact and it may very well be true that a grand history of culture from an individualistic perspective is impossible. Nevertheless, as an individualist, I find that lacking. Just as answering economic problems in terms of partial-equilibrium techniques leaves open questions about how the economy as a whole operates, so does assuming the backdrop of culture leave open the question about how that backdrop is itself an emergent outcome of individual action.

To argue that this leads to an infinite regress is practically true for most analyses, but false for the greater understanding of human society. It is practically true when understanding human behavior within a limited environment since it is analytically impossible to provide a sufficient explanation for the cultural norms that help to determine all of that behavior. Hence, like in the case of partial equilibrium a fudge has to be made, except this fudge is not the ceteris paribus assumption, it is assuming the independent reality of those norms. However, just as partial equilibrium must yield not general equilibrium if we are to fully appreciate the causal mechanisms at work within the market, so to must assuming the independent reality of culture theoretically give way to explaining it all in terms of individual human behavior. It is certainly quite the task, a task that may never be able to be done, but it is a task that must at least help to define a point of understanding beyond which we may never proceed.

 

There is another lesson that can be learned here once we push the regression as far as possible: that culture cannot be fully understood without biology. After all, there is certainly a point in explaining human culture where now the theorist must explain why Homo sapiens, and perhaps other hominids, developed culture, and how the preconditions for cultural evolution were made possible by natural selection. A strange place to end up from thinking about the theoretical status of cultural norms like general rules of conduct in society, but that we get there is surely a corroboration that those are the right questions to be asking.

 

Constitutional Orders as Evolutionary Stable Strategies

"NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor [condemn him], but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right."

-Magna Carta, Section XXIX

 

Within the Occident and beyond, constitutions have been one of the primary means man has had for shaping the realizations within his society. Within the liberal tradition, they have been motivated desire to create general rules that make possible the limitation of power within society by restricting its use to certain universal rules. By setting in place certain abstract rules by which the game of society, so to speak, is played, constitutions are able to lead to constitutional orders that will certain outcomes in society are made possible.

Key to the success of any constitutional order is the universality of these rules since it is by binding all within the relevant polity to certain patterns of action that a constitution is able to secure certain realizations within society. It is this attempt to ensure the universal adherence of certain patterns of action that leads to the perspective that a constitution is an attempt to create an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) of institutions in which no institution deemed undesirable can mutate and proliferate.

Tersely described, an ESS is a set of strategies that, when adopted by the population in question, can fully repel any attempt by a newly mutated strategy to survive within that population. Originally formulated by John Maynard Smith and Richard Price in the 1970’s in order to explain contests between animals, its use can be expanded to any evolutionary system when what is being analyzed is the changing frequency of objects, be they genes or institutions, within it. The ESS of a constitutional order describes a society in which the rules that form that order, by the sake of their universality (and the enforcement of their universality), are able to exclude certain patterns of actions that are conditioned by abstract rules contradictory to the relevant constitution. By understanding a constitutional order in this way, we can further and augment our understanding of the necessity of the universality of the laws within that order since it is only by their capability to fully exclude anything that contradicts those laws that a constitutional order is able to secure certain outcomes.

This brings us to another characteristic of any constitution: It is a rational constructivist technique for trying to bring about realizations within society determined desirable according to the human conception of the good life. Any constitutional thus is an attempt by its authors to bring about social outcomes that are congruent to a liberal society by establishing certain general rules that ensure the exclusion of those outcomes. An example of this would be precluding an outcome like the imprisoning of individuals outside of the authority of the government by obliging the custodian to charge the prisoner with a crime. For the writ of habeas corpus to be able to prevent practices like unlawful detention within the constitutional order, and thus ensure that it is an ESS, then it, along with the institutions that support it, must be a general rule that prescribes a pattern of action (i.e. the police must charge a person with a crime in order to hold her for longer than a given period of time). When such practices mutate within society, so to speak, its liberal nature is preserved because not only are those practices incapable of replacing habeas corpus, but they themselves are quickly extinguished by the universal enforcement of habeas corpus. Indeed, like all of the institutions associated with the Constitutional project, the writ of habeas corpus must be a general rule of action for all within society, and if it is to be a general rule then it, or one of its complementary institutions must be able to secure the extinction, of any practice that contradicts it.

 

Whether human attempts at the constitutional project have actually created ESS's is a question of history that cannot considered here, but I can certainly make certain speculative claims motivated by the ESS and the Heraclitean maxim that everything changes. Certainly the theoretical tool of the ESS provides us with a benchmark by which the efficacy of a constitutional project may be judged by. If a constitutional project is not able to establish an ESS that repels all contradictory practices within its society, then the constitutional project has simply failed to establish universal laws for human conduct across that society, and thus fails at its main goal of creating a government of universal laws, not arbitrary wills.

The greatest threat to the success of any constitution is that they are rational constructivist designs and thus their ability to ensure an ESS is only as good as their designers ability to foresee what those threats would be. Even though the constitutional project may be to establish the conditions for an open society in which the course of evolution may take a path unforeseen by anybody within that society, it itself is an attempt for human reason to man the helm of social evolution in a humble, but entirely real manner. It is an attempt to design and establish by speculative human reason institutions that will help to determine the final outcomes seen in society, and to direct those outcomes as seen fit by speculative human reason. Even while it may not try to determine what the exact outcomes in society, any constitutional project still seeks to guide the outcomes by obligating all within its society to act according to certain patterns of action.

However, social evolution will go on, and the motivators of each constitutional project have to be able to foresee what will threaten their constitution in order to guard against it. Thus the evolutionary stability of any constitutional order over time is threatened by those very same knowledge problems that threaten the realization of any planned outcomes within society. If the designers of the constitution cannot foresee threats to its integrity, then its stability against such threats cannot be guaranteed, and as history brings about more conditions unforeseen by those minds, the evolutionary stability of the order grows ever weaker. As things change within society, be they the underlying ethical ethos of what constitutes the good life or the seismic shift of institutions across history, the capability of the constitutional order to actually be a genuine ESS is weakened.

In the end, all Constitutional projects have a expiration date necessitated by the problem of knowledge. Perhaps that is what we should keep in mind when considering Thomas Jefferson's thought that every generation needs its own revolution. If Constitutional projects are to survive through history, then they must be adapted to conditions unforeseen by their original framers. However, if Constitutional projects are so easily tampered with then what is to ensure that they can survive? That, I suppose, is the catch-22.

On Despair and the Excellence of the Sickness Unto Death

 

 

“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”

-Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 13

 

The human being, as a synthesis between freedom and necessity, has the doom of being able to see what could be otherwise. When he sees a hearse upon the road, a man can imagine what could have been had the person not died and the funeral had been unnecessary. It is he who can see not only the emptiness of the blank slate, but also its future potential. In turn, when our own plans are foiled by unforeseen events, we are so often frustrated because we have the potential, as free beings, to imagine what could have been had those plans bore fruit.

Accepting that we are stuck between the dialectic of freedom and necessity is no easy task, and it is one of the marks of a sage that she can accept even the most bitter cup set before her by the necessities of the world with a slow smile.¹ There is also the Stoic belief that there is a cosmic purpose that moves all things, including human beings, towards certain ends, and the corresponding belief that any deviation from where the cosmic purpose directs is certainly an evil² Here is a great trust in cosmic Providence that guides all things towards their proper state, and a great faith that whatever happens will happen – Seneca: fata ducunt volentem, nonvolentem trahit. Acceptance, though, does not mean that one is immune from the effects of being torn apart by the dialectic that Kierkegaard described for no man or woman is immune to the slings and arrows of fate. 

The reason is found in the very nature of men and women as syntheses. Though we may try to be content with the necessary in life and to only use our freedom in a manner conditioned by those necessities, we are able to see beyond the necessary. The imagination, whether a curse of blessing, assures this. There will always be times when the finite and the infinite will rend the person they inhabit to pieces and it is here that the opportunity for despair to enter the soul of that person. This despair, this sickness unto death leads the person to then will their own destruction so that he could be free of the dialectic between the finite and the infinite. The ravine between potential and actuality has become so great that the human being caught within the dialectic wishes self-consumption, but the despair is impotent since no person can rid himself of himself. We necessarily are, and even by suicide we do not rid ourselves of ourselves since either we are immortal (and thus we can never not not exist) or by annihilating ourselves, we rid ourselves entirely rather than riding ourselves of ourselves³. Ultimately, who we are is both a blessing and a curse, and a curse that can lead to the deepest despair.

Πάντα ῥεῖ. That is a basic truth of this world, without which neither we ourselves nor our progenitors would not be. Though the death of fire is not the death of air just as the death of air is not the birth of water, the world is in a constant flux, and making sense of whether we can ever step into the same river twice is a question that has eluded some of the greatest human minds. Not only does the flux and strife of the world perplex, the two tear about the necessity within the human person from his freedom by tearing about the is from the ought. It sunders the dreams of human beings, frustrates their desires, and leads them down paths they would have preferred to have left untrodden; for those unprepared, this flux can bring about despair as they find themselves that their image of who they are no longer corresponds to the reality. Within a world in which even the most beautiful flower must wilt, the most excellent human being die, and the most breath-taking landscape erode, all human ideas about how the world ought to be are but delusions that cannot stand the test of time for the world is but flux and all must into being according to flux.⁴ Perhaps this is the ultimate wound that living within a fallen world will inflict upon every human being: No matter how fervently we may thirst for Eden, no matter how hard we may work for it, and no matter how real Eden seems to be in our lives when the world's flux favors us, it cannot last; the synthesis of freedom and necessity will eventually be torn in two different directions: the is and the ought. Even the most blissful moments, when we seem to have found a joy that seems in the moment resilient to whatever the world matches against it, cannot last, and thus the despair creeps into our lives when we discover we no longer will to be ourselves, but something different.

After all, the human being is between freedom and necessity. With his freedom, he may choose his own Platonic image of himself, build a wall around it in his mind against the strife of the world, but ultimately he will be as much a creation of necessary conditions in the world around him as that Platonic image. Indeed, that the human being is can have his image of himself depart from the actuality of the world, even if that brings about the occasion for despair, is a mark of his superiority over the world of pure necessity, and the excellence that it is even to be capable of despair.⁵ After all, it marks that we are capable of imagining more than what is, and that with our freedom we may choose, however impotently, to follow against the direction that the strife of the world necessarily drags him along. What then is the human being supposed to do with his freedom? Within a fallen world of strife, the only way to be able to unto the splendid visions of a world that ought to be in contrast to what is is to embrace the tragic. To accept that the pain and despair of wishing for the sublime despite what is is itself a more excellent state than the apathetic acceptance of whatever the natural order of things brings about.

After all, like the love that Kierkegaard speaks of in Either/Or our concepts of what ought to be are eternities built upon the churning froth that is the temporal world.⁶ They may be able to be realized in moments and in fleeting visions (or hallucinations) of an empyrean heaven where the ought necessarily is and where there is no strafe to change it, but that is all. Like romantic love, our romantic ideals of the world seek eternity, and by that they seek not so much an infinite time-horizon, but rather an unchanging state of affairs where freedom and necessity are aligned., in Either/Or, Kierkegaard describes first love as this unification.⁷ Just as Kierkegaard reflects melancholically about the impossibility of ever fully realizing the hopes of first love, so to we can reflect upon the inevitable failure to fulfill the demands of the Romantic image of what ought to be. Indeed, the failure of ever fulfilling the hopes of first love that Kierkegaard writes about, is but an example of the more universal truth that the human being is a synthesis that is rent apart by the two different forces constituting that synthesis: one a necessity that finds its genesis in the strife of a fallen world, the other in an elevated capability of choosing otherwise.

When the synthesis will inevitably be pulled in opposing directions and when the opportunity for despair lurks everywhere, ready to throw even the most excellent human being into the sickness unto death, we must remember that the possibility of the sickness is itself an excellence of sorts. After all, if the possibility of despair were to be annihilated from the world, then it would also annihilate the human potential to recognize the ought and to perceive, even if but for a fleeting moment, that empyrean heaven that strife will never allow for in the world. After all, one need not recognize the opportunity for despair without drinking from its cup, and the recognition that there is a schism between freedom and necessity can itself be a beautiful, if not melancholic, realization.⁸ This is where the human fascination for the tragic comes in for how else would pieces like Sophocles' Three Theban Plays endure through history, touch the human soul, be so widely considered beautiful, and yet be constituted by so many opportunities for despair if there was not something wonderfully excellent about the tragic? Without despair, without that sickness that can drown the human spirit in sorrow, then there is no capability to discern the is from the ought, to see beyond the grim reality of the actual, and to see the tormentingly blissful potential of what could be.

Just as the Heraclitean strife of the world is necessary, so too is the sickness unto death. If human beings are to be free agents, then they must be able to fathom more than simply is, and to be able to strive towards ends that they have decided ought to be. However, that does not mean that those ends will become reality, and that in turn can tear the free agent apart as he sees the potential yet must live within the actual. Thus the human being's very nature as a free agent is all that's needed to create the opportunity for the sickness unto death to invade his soul, and ergo there is something beautifully tragic about that affliction whose potential must be celebrated because it is rooted in our free nature.

 

 

 

1“laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est

    oderit curare et amara lento

    temperet risu.”

-Horace, Odes II.xvi

2“There are thus two reasons why you should be contented with whatever happens to you. Firstly, that it was for you that it came about, and it was prescribed for you and stands in a special relationship to you as something that was woven into your destiny from the beginning and issues from the most venerable of causes, and secondly that, for the power which governs the whole, that which comes to each of us individually contributes to its own well-being and perfection, and, by Zeus, its very continuance. For the perfection of the whole suffers a mutilation if you cut off even the smallest particle from the coherence and continuity of its causes no less than of its parts; and you do this, so far as you can, whenever you are discontented, and, in a certain sense, you destroy it.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.50

3“For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is 'Either Caesar or nothing' does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.” - Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 19.

4“You should know that war is comprehensive, that justice is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must be.” -Heraclitus as quoted by Origen in Against Celsus VI xliii.

5“The possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal, and his superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness and sublimity, that he is spirit. “ - Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 15.

6“It has now become apparent how romantic love was built upon an illusion, and that its eternity was built upon the temporal and that, although the knight remained deeply convinced of its absolute constancy, there nevertheless was no certainly of this, since its trial and temptation had hitherto been in an entirely external medium.” -Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 28.

7“So we turn back to the first love. It is the unity of freedom and necessity. The individual feels drawn by an irrestibile power to another individual but precisely therein feels his freedom.” - Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 45.

8“It is beautiful and healthy if a person has been unfortunate in his first love, has learned to know the pain of it but nevertheless remains faithful to his love, has kept his faith in this first love; it is beautiful if in the course of the years he ht times very vividly recalls it, and even though his soul has been sufficiently healthy to bid farewell, as it were, to that kind of life in order to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful in order to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful if he then sadly remembers it as something that was admittedly not perfect but yet was so very beautiful.” -Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 37.

Good, Evil, and Human Capability

 

 

 

 

The best and worst specimens of humanity are two sides of the same coin. Heroes and villains are not categories that are divided by the expansive sea of morality never to have their shores meet. To the contrary, both the most exalted heroism and diabolical villainy are manifestations of a human spirit that has become capable of great things. And great things need not be good things. Alexander the Great, a man whose accomplishments helped to create the very foundation of the Hellenistic world, was given the epithet “Gujastak”, “Accursed”, by the Zoroastrian tradition in the Ardā Wirāz Nāmag for the great destruction his army wreaked marching on a war-path through Persia. Despite what evil he may have inflicted upon the world in his prideful thirst to conquer the world, Alexander the Great was still someone who activated the human potential within him for greatness.

A tragedy it is then that such a person would dedicate his efforts to the ultimately destructive and evil desire for conquest and deification. That it is even a tragedy shows that villainy and heroism are both channels of human capability, and that those who unlock that human excellence within them may become some of the worst monsters to walk the Earth. Excellence in capability is then the coin and both heroism and villainy, the capability of great good and evil, are the opposing sides. Both are united by the necessity of being capable of great things, but the two are distinguished by the paths that the person decides to channel that capability towards. Some create businesses that will make possible the use of a revolutionary product, become great teachers of morality, and inspire others to do good as well while others will become conquerors, and harbingers of other great evils upon the world.

Those who have done the greatest good in the world and those who have committed the great evil have both activated the human potential within them for greatness. Those who do not have the capability for great evil thus do not have the capability for great good. The best and worst of humanity are thus manifestations of the same human spirit and testaments to the power of human choice in the world.