No Man is an Island

What is an individual? What does it really mean to be independent?

In the West we have strong beliefs about liberty based on the hard work of philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Paine, important work that heralded a new era of ‘free’ enterprise and dynamism theretofore never seen, certainly at the mass level. Things like fairness and equal opportunity found solid intellectual footing as a direct consequence of these efforts and the revolutionary wars they initiated. But of course things move on, knowledge expands, things change, and it is our task to keep up culturally with new information which threatens long established tradition and status quo. The wiser we are when addressing these issues, the better chance we have of midwifing the new as painlessly as possible into the old. To stay with the midwife metaphor; it’s always best not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Crudely speaking we think of ourselves as individual agents acting in the world of things, where our actions and reactions are parts of causal connection chains stretching back into the past and off into the unknown future, like a vast, universal game of snooker. We both initiate and react to events. We are furthermore ‘free’ agents capable of choice, responsible, therefore, for the consequences of our actions once legally recognised as adults, shaping our lives as we see fit, deserving of success or failure depending on the mix of effort, luck and talent we bring to the party. For the ego – to my mind the true architect of this depiction of the human animal – this is as things should be. To stay safe and alive, the ego wants to feel potent in a world it needs to control. It wants to be able to dominate the environment to some degree to ensure its continuing survival, and if things go well, its comfort too. Almost the entire body of economics has this view of humans at its core.

However, one of the unforeseen consequences of this process of environmental control has been an increasingly complex social setup, a process we might characterise as compromise, or the slow, even stealthy, giving up of individual sovereignty to the growing group. The ego, that arch deceiver, has unwittingly deceived itself. Another force has been in operation all along, invisible to the ego, yet partnering it. Some call it “ethical evolution,” others “the expanding circle of reciprocity.” Both descriptions suggest we are being ‘pooled’ into a global society by our efforts to keep self secure. Is this The Invisible Hand at work? Perhaps, but I think not.

Language is for me the example par excellence of the social urges inherent to humanity. Our need to share tasks and deal with adversity together, combined with our intelligence and incredibly complex facial musculature, have created a communication tool so effective I can write this stuff and others can read it. Language has progressed from unknown early forms aiding hunting and other planned activities, to something quite beyond my powers to adequately describe. It gives us our ability to understand reality at a level so far beyond what (as far as we know) other animals can achieve, as to make us almost aliens on Earth. The social aspect of our nature made this possible. The ego played its part of course, with its need for boundaries and divisions and causal connections, but ultimately the truth will out, and language will be its midwife. Our flawed perceptions of reality must yield in time to increasingly accurate understandings of reality as it is.

One of the manifestations, or perhaps a partner to the process which wrested the ego from the tyranny of the bad prince/sovereign and gave birth to liberty (a somewhat adolescent notion), is the hunt for The Building Block, the atom (in the Greek sense) which can be no further divided. Once this little piece of reality has been discovered all explanations can flow from it. A term like “selfish gene” is an example of this. The quest for intrinsic value that so bedevils economics is another. Freud’s Id, Jung’s Self, and so on, are all examples of the egoic need to seek out the component which, once understood, can finally explain those things out of which it is built. To my mind this is a futile quest. In the same way that nothing can have any use or meaning in total isolation, so too can I say there is no such thing as an individual, there is no such thing as a selfish gene, no such thing as intrinsic value. Everything exists and comes into focus in relationships with other things.

To quote Stephen Pinker:

“[W]hen a person's public stance and private motives are both selfless but those motives came about because they once served the interests of his ancestors' genes, we have not uncovered hypocrisy; we have invoked a scientific explanation couched at a different level of analysis. Color depends on properties of colorless molecules; solid objects are made of atoms that are mostly empty space. That does not mean that peacocks are colorless or that Gibraltar is a mirage. Similarly, selfless people designed by selfish genes are not selfish.”

And John Holt (Instead of Education, p114):

“To ask what is fundamental human nature is to ask what a human being would be like without a culture. Such a question is meaningless, and cannot be answered. There is and can be no such thing as a human being without a culture.”

Systems Theory and the newer Information Systems Theory are humanity’s early efforts at understanding reality as dynamically interlinking relationships of a virtual infinity of variables. The implications of this mode of analysis (or synthesis) are profound and upsetting to many. There is no individual. The utility of discovering the ultimate building block is highly limited, not liberating. Humans are malleable; impressionable; embedded in social conventions of language, both of the body and mind; imprisoned by emotional restraints; utterly dependent on the ecosystem; in short tossed about by events beyond our control like so much driftwood. The ego does not like this view, but I think it reflects reality far more accurately than the egoic perception I outlined above. Economics has much to learn from it, indeed is torn asunder by it.

I believe there are such things as creativity and choice, but such a belief is not easily proven. There are simply too many variables to process, to take into consideration, at both the tiny and massive scales, to establish the existence of creativity and choice in Universe. One thing is certain (and inspired this blog entry), we are getting so good at simulating reality, seeing more clearly the processes which define it, and yet are having such a hard time with controlling and understanding money, something has to give. In terms of what we really are and what experience is, the following brings things like Star Trek’s Holodeck a little bit closer, and chips yet another piece from our certain sense of ourselves as autonomous individuals (seen at Naked Capitalism):

“Dzmitry Tsetserukou, an assistant professor at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, was the big winner at firstAugmented Human International Conference (AH’10), held recently at the French Alps ski resort of Megeve. His paper on haptic “exointerfaces” forvirtual [sic] reality — co-authored by Katsunari Sato and Susumu Tachi — created quite a stir. It describes a prototype of a remote haptic system called iFeel_IM! (“I Feel Therefore I Am”) that can simulate “several types of heart beat, a realistic hug, the tickling sensation of a butterfly stomach, a tingling feeling along the spine, and warmth.” With sensors, small motors, vibrators, and speakers woven into a series of straps similar to a parachute harness, it reacts to "emotional messages" embedded in written IM text (hence the name iFeel_IM!).” Hplusmagazine

Bring it on.

Equalities R Us

A recent article at sciencedaily discusses an interesting discovery from human brain research illustrating a seemingly hard-wired aversion to income inequality (hat tip Naked Capitalism).

“In this study, we’re starting to get an idea of where this inequality aversion comes from,” he says. “It’s not just the application of a social rule or convention; there’s really something about the basic processing of rewards in the brain that reflects these considerations.”

As someone who believes we culturally misunderstand competition and cooperation, that both concepts need to be re-addressed and re-analysed, and who agrees strongly with the main thrust of “The Spirit Level,” a work packed with statistics proving what recent brain research seems to be confirming, I am nothing but encouraged to see such research yielding these types of results.

But, is it not possible that the brain lighting up in the way described in the experiments, is a consequence of social convention’s influence on biological wiring? Isn’t the brain’s wiring organized mainly by the process of socialization we all go through? A perhaps suitable analogy for what the brain is not is a cup unchanged by the information poured into it. I do not believe in Locke’s tabula rasa, far from it, but do believe that our wiring, that is, the way our biology takes shape as we grow from baby to adult, is shaped by our environment to a powerful degree. An oft used analogy I like is the baby in the box, kept alive magically in the dark for say ten years, unexposed to light and sound. With zero environmental influence, a human cannot become what its biology would become with the right environment stimulants working upon it.

Of course we must consider the chicken and egg aspect of this too. How would humans come up with the idea that fairness is morally good unless something in their nature nudged them towards this? This sensitivity to equality could well be an organic outgrowth of the human social animal. But even here, unless the brain of every human on the planet reacts to income inequality the same way (and here I’m assuming brains shaped by the Lloyd Blankfein mould would not), environmental variables such as a culture of greed for monetary wealth could perhaps “switch off” this sensibility. It would be interesting to know how widespread and uniform such reactions are.

So, knowing where wiring ends and environment begins – to fixate for the purposes of this short discussion on what is ultimately an unsatisfying boundary line – is not easy, and will occupy human effort for some time to come. I find that very exciting.

Camerer, too, found the results thought provoking. “We economists have a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested, and won’t try to help other people,” he says. “But if that were true, you wouldn’t see these sort of reactions to other people getting money.”

The Ballad of Joe Stack

There is most certainly something theatrically ironic in a self-made man of the national vanguard of capitalism quoting the following in his terrorist/homicide/suicide note (Yves Smith's take here):

"The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."

And there is a clear whiff of the cloying and rude in commentators analysing his kamikaze attack on the IRS, his background, and what it all might mean. Whenever I engage in analyses of this kind, even just in my own thoughts, I feel I am spoiling something precious, but this has resonance beyond the personal, beyond Mr Stack’s interpretation of reality and his decision to attack. There is no such thing as The Truth, there are only shifting views of an ever changing enormity far beyond any individual’s or collective’s grasp, and yet it is not only helpful – in a stumbling and haphazard way – to try to understand, we cannot help but try. We are curious, intelligent, social. Joe Stack (how poetically close his name to Joe Sixpack) has shot out a bright flare, a harsh light in which, before it fades, we are obliged to study ourselves in all our naked glory.

To anyone who will listen: Please don’t use this event to see irreconcilable differences and certain doom, that tea-baggers are idiots (or justified), that some people are born crazy, or some other half-baked, beer-and-chips wisdom, and then stop there. We live in and are shaped by a system which has been built up on various assumptions we figured out hundreds of years ago. No matter how great the economic genius, none escaped the trap of basing his theory atop untested, unscientific plattitudes about human nature, nature itself, competition, scarcity and so on. To a very large extent these assumptions are still with us today. Economics and money-creation are absolutely pivotal to modern society. Recognising how flawed our system of self-governence is, and how shaped by it we are, demands of us humility, patience, sympathy, compassion and caution, but also a fierce determination to correct, peacefully, those elements of our understanding that suffer as a consequence of those earlier errors of judgement.

Violence is always a failure of spirit, of intellect, of wisdom, but, as good things come from bad, and bad from good, so all events, no matter their hue, are opportunities to learn.

It's that old devil called Human Nature again

One of the most stubborn and frequently reoccurring truisms to emerge when people of all ideologies and levels of intelligence discuss what might make the world a better place is that old chestnut “human nature.” Human Nature, that coiled, double-helix curse of imperfection, that ever-present Murphy's Law, that permanent spanner in the works, ruining everything, crushing dreamers, thwarting progress, draining hope. Things can only get worse, because we're human. Human nature gets in the way, and there's nothing we can do about it. We are [fill-in-cynical-list-of-negative-attributes here], always have been, and always will be. Get over it already, wake up and smell the coffee. You idiot.

I am an idiot, I freely admit it. I believe no one knows what human nature really is, in direct opposition to the constant gene-this and gene-that discoveries trumpeted at us almost daily, left, right and centre. There's nothing more idiotic than disagreeing with common knowledge, right? Everybody just knows human nature is what it is, right? I mean, duh. We're all made of genes, they control us, make us do the things we do, and that's that. Case closed.

But please contemplate the following: There is a God and she/he/it causes, on a whim and to see what happens, the behaviour of the planet to change from one second to the next. Suddenly, every act of aggression or violence, every theft, every lie, is returned to the perpetrator or to someone the perpetrator loves, immediately. You shoot someone, a stone shoots out from the soil and shoots you. You punch someone, something from the environment punches you. You torture someone, a member of your family suffers exactly the same fate. You start a war, the people you command suffer exactly the same fate as the people you attack, one for one, and you die too. Not one human gene would be changed, but within days this environmental change would cause us to change our behaviours radically. It would put an end to all war and crime within weeks. We would quickly learn a new way of treating one another under that environmental pressure. Things would get better, for everyone, everywhere.

Please consider this too: A baby taken at birth and placed in a magic box, completely dark, but able to keep the baby physically alive and clean. Keep the baby in the box for 10 years. Then take it out. Would it be greedy? Ambitious? Violent? Would it be able to walk? Crawl? Speak? See? Ever? It could be absolutely perfect genetically speaking, the child of Albert Schweitzer and Marie Curie, or any two people you want to choose, and yet without any environmental input whatsoever the ten year old child would be nothing but a useless, barely-alive collection of flesh, blood and bones.

So, how should we change our environment so as to get the best out of us? I think abundance is the answer, and I've said so before. What do you think?

Our old friend and foe, Human Nature

"Lenin’s ideas fell apart in practice, due in no small part by the human tendency of greed for posession [sic] and power." From a comment at Naked Capitalism

The comment is in response to an important posting by George Washington discussing which socioeconomic system currently best describes the US. It is well worth a read, if only for the fact that it encourages thinking about the question, but that is not what I want to comment on.

The person behind the above quote goes by the name of tgmac and seems to know what he is talking about, expresses what he wants to say eloquently, and all in all seems like an intelligent human being. And yet, there is an assumption in his post that human nature is fixed and tends towards greed for material possessions and power. Typically one has this opinion because history demonstrates that this is the case. Look at all that warring, raping, pillaging, cheating, blackmail, fraud and downright psychopathic tomfoolery that litters the pages of virtually any history book you care to open. Of course we can say with a high degree of confidence that human nature is bad. Just look around you.

What is very seldom considered is that recorded history began at a time when scarcity was not, at least in the economic sense, a solvable problem, and when our knowledge of ourselves, psychologically and biologically, was very poor. Organically and in some ignorance, and under pressure of particular environmental conditions -- like harsh winters and poor agricultural skill -- we have fashioned into our languages and philosophies a very hard to shake relationship with scarcity that is, at least technically, no longer helpful. We also have inherited a rather lazy understanding of ourselves as biological entities characterised by greed and ambition, at least at the popular level. Economists and historians are seldom also zoologists and biologists, neither are they anthropologists or child psychologists etc. Economists in particular have a particularly narrow and shallow view of the human being, assuming it to be rational, selfish and greedy.

Without blathering on for pages let me finish with a couple of questions and a couple of links. Question 1: What exactly are the pathways from genetics to behaviour? Question 2: Why did the islanders of St. Kilda display no laziness until, after 2,000 years without it as incentive, they were introduced to money in the mid nineteenth century?

The links:
My paper on human nature
Peter Joseph's orientation guide, pp 69-77