Collective Wealth

Still reading Toynbee’s monumental work on history, it strikes me—as I see him assessing ancient cultures’ decline and occasionally touching on our own—that humanity has never experienced a situation like our current one (viewed some 80 years after Toynbee wrote his first five volumes). It is a situation in which extraordinary wealth touches a huge population—but it’s  not wealth as once understood, namely personal control of physical resources and money; it is wealth in the form of collective systems, structures, technologies, and organized knowledge.

Two examples may be Communications and Health Care. Communications anciently demanded personal wealth in that, to deliver a message, one had to send a courrier to distant places; no such media as telegraphy, telephony, radio, or television existed—and general circulation news papers were also absent. Health Care then was centered on the person of a doctor, midwife, or a surgeon—and what small bag he or she carried. The hospital, with its emergency room—accessible even to the poor—did not exist; nor did colossal testing technologies, clean-rooms, remote and robotic surgery, or the pharmaceutical industries.

Behind communications today are submarine cables and space satellites; behind the satellites stands an aerospace industry. Behind medicine are mountains of extraordinarily sophisticated institutions, technical developers very much cut of the same cloth as aerospace, computer technology, and world-wide supervisory organizations communicating, by means of the never-before-seen communications sector, to inhibit the spread of plagues; among them is our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These two sectors—and they are just two of many others that operate in the same way, for the collective—represent a form of wealth one cannot discover in ancient times except in the most rudimentary forms: state-built roads with their bridges and water control on a large scale for river management and for delivering water via aqueducts.

Can our collective wealth, which makes even the poor a little “wealthy,” be traced to a single discovery? Yes. It is the “discovery” of fossil fuels. I put that word in quotes because, of course, coal and oil were known before the age of fossil fuels dawned. They were also used, principally for making weapons-grade metals, usually employing human-made and therefore manufactured charcoal. The discovery, however, was triggered by a technological innovation, the steam engine. That device—the Luddites’ first nightmare—then led, step-by-step, to an extraordinarily massive geological raid of dormant energy hidden beneath the earth probably by cataclysmic global changes literally eons ago.

The quite foreseeable exhaustion of this incredible and non-replaceable deposit of wealth will have consequences we can logically project forward. The extent to which essentially “free” energy underlies virtually everything we do and touch—not least how we communicate and heal—is effectively invisible to the public—except its members visit filling stations. The sooner it becomes the daily conscious worry of the average citizen, the sooner can creative responses to future troubles begin. The most important job now is to slow our current energy consumption drastically—to give humanity more time to adapt to conditions where effective “wealth” will once more become personal and nothing much beyond—except roads, bridges, aqueducts, and (I hope) sewage systems that will still, collectively, support us all.

Missing Anchor

Today is an official holiday but lacking a traditional anchor. It doesn’t mark a great event or the turn of a season fixed by our planet’s motion around the sun. An essentially arbitrary calendar simply rolls over. In the context of this blog the change is more interesting, in a mild sort of sense, than usually, what with our fascination with “thirteen” (link). But, as holidays tend to do, today reminds me of our need for absolute markers in the continuous flux of time. Such days are meant for collective reflection on the transcending meaning of our existence. This New Years Day, however, is more of a reminder of another sort. It brings to mind just how far, as a collective, we’ve drifted into flux. Just as the day began, the Senate voted to avert an arbitrarily created disaster. Later today the House will vote to avert the same again. The Senate has celebrated its secular version of the Midnight Mass, the House will gather to observe a holy secular None.

Well, never mind. One of the demands of such times is a sage withdrawal from the reigning collective. Invisibly beneath its roar a new culture is being fashioned. And for those still in the work force, a day off is nice.

From a Distance

Seen from a distance or through a glass darkly, human communities reveal their invariably amusing character. All depending on the viewer, other words may be substituted for “amusing”—“silly,” “dreadful,” “admirable.” A case in point is North Korea. We get from there within a day news of a rocket that blew up and a ceremony in which two giant statues are unveiled while dignitaries in uniform, and a sole little young man in black stand to watch the unveiling while fireworks explode in the sky above. The little young man watches the statues and probably ponders a future in which his bronzen simulacrum will join the other two. Those watching the ceremony in masses probably think unuttered words: “At least we know how to get the fireworks up there.” The equal silliness of our own rituals entirely escapes us—the contrast, for instance, between sighs of relief because a self-appointed peacekeeper in Florida will most likely be tried for murder—and of a presidential candidate standing tall before the NRA and solemnly pledging to protect our future Zimmermans’ right to bear arms.

More Notes on Collectives

I noted the other day: “Human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals.” This, for me, is perhaps the most valuable lesson of history. If the lesson is not internalized, temptations arise to make mistakes in other realms of reality. One is the belief that inorganic matter can yield life or that collectives of conscious beings are in some way superior to individuals.

I think it is wise to view public events as if they were natural events, thus to ignore the fact that rational individuals make decisions and thus shape history. Those are invariably collective decisions, thus a fusion of contradictions. The individuals who make them almost never have adequate knowledge to foresee or the power to shape the outcomes, and the greater the scope of the events, thus the more “collective” they are, the less predictable.

Here Secretary Gates’ muted remark the other day about the differences between wars of necessity and wars of choice is a good illustration. Wars of necessity may be defined as wars imposed on us as organized, large-scale physical attacks on our territories intended minimally to seize them, maximally to take control of the entire collective that we represent. If the aggressor is not a state, with a definable territory of its own, going to war makes no sense. After the 9/11 attacks, a full-scale war on Afghanistan was an overreaction. Afghanistan was the hiding place of a terrorist group—not the attacker. And once the Taliban government had been replaced by another, that over-reaction should have ended—in 2004. Indeed Al Qaida had intended neither to seize our territory nor to replace our government when it destroyed the towers and damaged the Pentagon. The War on Terror that mushroomed out of this was thus irrational, a natural event, in other words—although its raw materials were the collective emotions of a public that, at election time, might have displaced the Bush administration if that administration had merely reacted to 9/11 as it should have—by narrowly-shaped raids on Al Qaida’s camp. It was precisely such raids that President Clinton had staged in 1998, using cruise missiles, when he retaliated for embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Writing this, and remembering Clinton’s limited actions, it occurs to me that irrationality in public life is not necessary. Not necessary but certainly likely—and likely roughly in proportion to the emotional turmoil an event produces in the public as a whole. Now, let us note, irrational impulses in the public can be exploited or tamped down by the administration in power. And the temptation to exploit them will in some way be stimulated by the needs and ambitions of those in power.

Once irrationality takes over—once the horse has the bit in its teeth—it is difficult to bring it under control again. In an open society, rational reasons must be trotted out to explain and justify actions that were, on second thought, altogether wrong. The new product, the new narrative, will then be, again, an incoherent fusion of contradictions, producing yet other irrational decisions.

Yesterday’s presidential announcement to the effect that we’ve now pretty much accomplished our goals in Afghanistan is a consequence of an irrational process, introducing further irrationalities. In wars of necessity, things are simple. In World War II Germany invaded France; Germany had to be pushed out of France. The “goal” was simple, measurable. The German government had to be removed. It was removed. No ambiguities. What our “goals” in Afghanistan might be is as much of a mystery as the location of the territorial lines of “Terror,” whatever terror is. It has no place, it has no organization, no reality, as such—no tangible, visible reality at a scale any great Collective can see. Sad business, listening to the President. He too is reacting to collective emotion; this time the collective emotion is disgust with war. And so he is cooking up a brew of contradictory confusions. He means well. He is a rational being—caught in a kind of storm produced decades ago, because the TV screens in 2001 brought us clouds of smoke surrounding two towers in New York. We barely noted the deaths of 224 people in the embassy bombings of 1998; and only 12 of them had been Americans…

Defending the Tram

In re David Brooks’ new book, The Social Animal, the issue is not really about the conscious or the unconscious mind, and which predominates, but ultimately about the presence or the absence of a genuine agent who may be held responsible.

One reviewer (Will Wilkinson in Forbes) quotes Brooks summarizing the thrust of his book. It is “the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connection over individual choice, character over IQ, … and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self.” These are supposed to be (and no doubt they are), the revolutionary discoveries of modern psychology and brain science.

I note here the incoherence of this characterization, so prevalent everywhere these days. If we have multiple selves, who has the emotions? How do we define the character (singular) of multiple selves (plural). I know, I know. We also speak about public opinion, as if it were something tangible, the national interest, as if there was a concrete something actually capable of having an interest. But now we find it projected backwards into the individual who, on close inspection, turns out to be a crowd.

If someone hired me to defend this characterization on rational grounds, I’d want to be paid in advance—because my chief argument would be, “Well, I don’t mean that precisely, but you know what I mean.” I would, in other words, appeal to a presumed understanding in my public that modern science denies the actual presence of a soul, an individual, an agency because science can’t decant it, hold the glass beaker up to the light, and then, pointing, say: “There it is! Can you see it? It’s swirling in there.”

The presumption here is that belief in an actual conscious person capable of genuine choice is a “traditional” belief, meaning old, pre-scientific. Also obsolete, hoary, dated, primitive. Therefore the discovery that we are a more or less cohering, continuous, but ever-changing phenomenon—but inhabited by a multiplicity of selves generated by the phenomenon—is “revolutionary.” But if we really are this phenomenon, then there isn’t really anyone there to notice that a discovery has been made. The “revolutionary” modern theory may be rendered as a street-car line in which the real objects are the power lines and the car that runs on rails. The passengers who come and go, our multiple selves, are not really what it’s all about. The revolutionary theory is about as easy to defend as this description of a streetcar line.

(If you’re inclined to read more on a single soul or many (my take, that is), I suggest this post on Borderzone. And here a post, also on BZ, on the actual interactions between understanding and intellect. Understanding is a feeling, isn’t it? A feeling is an emotion. Are there different kinds? Do they mean the same thing?)

No Self-Consciousness

Nations have no self-consciousness, obviously. They never look into the mirror. They’re never genuinely shocked, ashamed, or startled by their own behavior. They never “catch” themselves. Similarly animals. Animals never blush. Winston, our Lab, sometimes cowered and slunk away in fright; I might have interpreted that as shame, but it was simply knowledge that a certain behavior would cause me to berate him. He felt no guilt as such. We project ourselves into the animal.

Several days of catching glimpses of the news brought this to mind again. Japan and earthquake, Japan and a potential meltdown. In the flurry of coverage, our reporters are saying things spontaneously. On the one hand they’re struck by Japanese formality, sang froid, discipline. On the other they project the notion that Japanese are in some way inferior, that they somehow don’t understand nuclear power like we do. One CNN correspondent assured us (yesterday, the day before, it blurs) that we’ve no cause for concern. American experts are present, advising, and U.S. troops are there too. It didn’t therefore surprise me at all that the NYT lead with a story today telling me that our Nuclear Regulatory Commission sees things in much darker light than the Japanese government evidently does. Or, perhaps, chooses. But never mind that. It’s the same in every context. Other nations can’t even police their streets if we don’t dispatch our experts to train them.

This way of seeing isn’t new. It is a tribal projection. It is biological, low, chthonic. It led to pogroms in the past. It is the fear of strangers. The Yellow Peril. The White Man’s burden. Etc. It can be positive or negative. A positive form of it was the view of America by the rest of the world after World War II. Superior. For those of us who came here as naïve immigrants, it was a bit of a shock to discover that Americans were just human, like everybody else.

The peculiarly modern form of it, due to the enormous spread of the media, it seems, is the strange feeling on the part of often very sophisticated and sensitive people that something like a group mind (and therefore self-consciousness of the many) may actually exist—or may be in the process of evolving. I’ve recently encountered this in Doris Lessing’s science fiction novels, collectively Canopus in Argos: Archives. There she projects both a very benign collective consciousness, that of Canopus, and a very dark one, Shammat. But it does not actually exist, not in high forms, nor in low, the low suggested by rhetorical forms proclaiming that the American people have spoken—for this or against that.

Self-consciousness requires a genuine agent. There must be a there there. The blended voices of several hundred thousands of people, our communications elites, do not a person make. But they do reflect a tribal reflex.
----------
The Uncle Sam teddy bear may be purchased for $69 here. I found the little Samurai here; if sold at all, it will probably run a lot more.

Put Not Your Trust…

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. Psalms 146:3.

I was a boy of six when I won my first award, a golden star, and my peers’ approval. I’d memorized the Hungarian national poem and recited it to my first grade class with shining eyes and childish force. The children cheered, and my teacher, a sister, had tears in her eyes. Big emotional moment. Golden star.

I was born into an age of nationalism, and in Hungary as elsewhere—never mind that I was in a Catholic school—the love of country was the powerful thematic, constantly in front of us. Small Hungary is not a country, Great Hungary is heaven. That rhymes in Hungarian. We all knew that rhyme. The maps we used showed Great Hungary, with fat borders—small Hungary with faint borders; much of the great country was Slovak, Austrian, Serb, and Romanian.

Love of country was conflated then, and still is today, with political power and the figure of the ruler. In Hungary our ruler then was the Regent, Admiral Horthy. Horthy was a decent man, by the way, a worthy sort; he rose to power in opposing a communist take-over of the country in 1919, in the course of which both of my grandfathers had either been arrested or faced by a mob. But worth is not my point. To love one’s country is appropriate, My country, right or wrong, is not. And growing up involves learning that famous verse in Psalms and, further, discovering a modern wording for it: Put not your trust in collectives.

I was a young man of twenty, a newly-trained soldier in the United States Army, en route by air to Germany to join my unit there, when the 1956 Hungarian revolution flared up briefly. During a brief stop-over in Scotland, I was astounded to discover the little airport filled with Hungarian refugees. I spent my stop-over talking to them. Would Eisenhower intervene and help this uprising? I hoped that he would; I was then still young enough to hope; but by then I was grown up and my hope therefore faint.

Over and over and over again. The same patterns repeat. The words are in the holy books but the reality on the ground is always something else. These thoughts recurred the moment the recent revolutionary phenomenon began in Tunisia and rolled forward, the Media Chorus excitedly cheering and, nowadays, sobering as Khadafy seems to be getting a grip. No-fly zones are up in the air, sanctions take wing in the skies, security councils secure things in the abstract but never in the real. Meanwhile little children, right hand laid over little young hearts, sweetly sing the words: “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.”

A work in progress, as we say nowadays.

Parsing the Budget Battles

Politics is the art of the possible—said Otto von Bismarck.

The tragedy of the commons might be defined by saying: “It is present in every situation where most involved will gain by an action immediately but the collective will lose in the long run. The typical choice is almost always to realize gain now. Which is kind of tragic.”

Politics is the art of the possible, not of the optimal, because in modern politics, characterized by relatively rapid feedback systems, people who hold power only ever hold it by a slender margin. If their art is well-developed, they can therefore realize a small part of what they intend to realize, never a comprehensive program.

As I’ve just noted yesterday, politics is conflict between interests. In the long run an optimal solution would benefit all parties to a conflict, but each of the parties only partially. Whereas the extraction of the possible gain will always be greater for the dominant group. Therefore we’re mostly staging tragedies rather than comedies.

I discovered a concise formulation of this in E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed. It made a strong enough impression on me so that I’ve cited it numerous times on this blog already. Schumacher made the distinction between convergent and divergent problems. In the first there is unanimity in what is to be achieved and how; in the other there is conflict. In divergent cases the problem is never resolved at the level where the participants in it live.

The reason why budget battles cause distress to most of those people whose time horizons are long and whose concern for humanity is extensive—thus includes the largest number—is that it seems as if a sensible and optimal resolution of the problem should be possible. And indeed it is. But it requires what might be called an engineering approach. Appropriate cuts combined with appropriate tax increases. But this cannot be done in a commons where the majority of the people participate in the process, if not directly then by reps.

We all know this perfectly well. In some societies, the Roman, for instance, dictators were appointed when serious change needed to be made. The downside is that those appointed don’t want to leave—and have to be removed by force. Cincinnatus is still remembered and revered—because he was the exception. After his dictatorship, he did the unexpected. He just went back to his farm. Order making—to reverse the tragedies slowly cumulating—happens after revolutions when a strong man makes order. Napoleonic reforms are still yielding genuine benefits in France and, by imitation, all over Europe. We make half-hearted attempts in that direction by appointing commissions, e.g., the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform; but we deny them real power to implement.

What’s The Issue?

Once during my days in Washington, talking to a senior Congressional aide—we were walking together down a corridor in the Senate—I was explaining a problem relating to the environment to him. He said: “Okay, okay. But what’s the issue?” I said: “I’m talking about a situation here. Why does it have to be an issue?” The aide now stopped in his stride and earnestly touched my arm. “Listen,” he said. “Around here nobody is interested in what you call a ‘situation.’ It has to be an issue. That’s the currency here. Issues. Whose ox is being gored. Situations…” He let that trail out by way of saying “way, way, way beneath all notice.”

Issue means a clash, and a clash is always between groups, organized groups. And for groups to come to the notice of the political sphere, they have to have power—clout and visibility. Furthermore they have to be aligned in some way with one of the parties. Politics is ultimately a contest between groups for power and resources. Political parties come about fluidly as aggregations of groups. Principles—and ideologies based on them—are supplied, are labels pinned on them later. Parties are bottom up social structures built of issues, of conflicts. Their interests are not in justice, say; their interests are in interests. Not surprisingly a party can remain an institutional entity even as its labels gradually change. The history of our parties illustrates this.

The people we call Democrats now were originally Anti-Federalists who represented small people, indeed they claimed all the people—a tired, over-worked little donkey ridden by a big fat banker. They were agglomerated groups threatened by Hamilton’s nationalist banking policies, originally very much opposed to Big Government and committed to states rights. Later they were known as the Democratic-Republican Party (1832); yes both names in the same party a good half of which was later pro-slavery. Little People-hood did not include the slaves. The Republicans formed around 1854 to oppose the extension of slavery to the new territories of the west. They were northern in origin and motivated by a desire to modernize the U.S. economy, which expanding slavery threatened. This, of course, put them in opposition to the slave-owning south. Their opposition to slavery was only partially pure—but, of course, that stance attracted the more advanced and religiously motivated segments of society, not least many Democratic-Republicans. Democrats have morphed into the party of activist government—although once opposing it. The Republicans are still trying to modernize the economy by a having become the party of capitalist ownership and those who fancy themselves aligned with it.

My point here is that seeking for a principled approach to governance is to misunderstand the nature of politics. It is entirely about interest and only ever incidentally principled. The principles can change, indeed morph into their very opposites. Thus liberals once were laissez faire in economics and intent on curbing government interference in the market, never mind individual freedom. That label, meanwhile, has become attached to the Democrats while those actually supporting such views are called conservatives—the very same people who, looking back a long ways, once advocated the divine right of kings.

The bald truth of the matter is that politics—and the higher it reaches the more true this is—is strictly about power and really nothing else. Or to put it more mildly, if principles come in conflict with a party’s interests, principles will be left behind. To view parties—or government for that matter—as structures of principles is to mistake a collective for an individual. We can demand principled behavior from individuals—especially if we can enforce our demands. Large collectives are not actually reachable that way. That is why the message is never in agreement with the facts on the ground, except by exception. Very rarely towering personalities emerge who, for a time, manage to give governance the semblance of principled behavior. Names that arise to me at random are anciently Charles the Great (the only reason why we remember one French king of yore) and more recently here figures like Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR.

Mysterious Communities

Communities, when I think about it, are mysterious entities—and present only in shattered fragments in modern life. My image of a real community is of people working together, but in such a way that the commonality of the effort is reflected in the horizontal as well as in the vertical dimensions, thus that they are working together in the same space, more or less, and that the labor has the same inner and outer purpose, a purpose that all those who support it spontaneously understand. The manner in which individual efforts are meaningfully linked ought also to be quite visible: the people to whom I sell groceries teach my children, sell me clothes, repair my plumbing, attend my church... The activities we undertake together should have a purpose we actually share.

In modern life the closest thing we actually encounter is the spatial unity we share with others who work in the same enterprise. But the vertical and inner dimension may both already be quite vague. The aims of large corporations are up there in the sky and abstract—profit and growth. And my relation even to this partial community may be rather tentative. I’m easily replaceable; and my income is a necessary cost for the collective (but a benefit for my community). But the community’s is not the hammer hand; my employer may reduce me (cost that I am) and gladly if at all possible. My employer may itself also be (at least thinkably) altogether unnecessary—thus throwing my work identity up into the air as well. This is especially true if it competes—and doubly so if it must compete fiercely with others; the more embattled it is, the less necessary it appears. But then—what about me? That’s the thought I would be thinking if I worked for General Motors, an entity recently resurrected from the dead by the artificial interventions of Big Brother; to be sure, that resurrection was motivated by communitarian considerations, but it was not that of any genuine or local community but that of an abstract and vast beast, itself up in the sky.

My thought next turns to hospitals. When we arrived here in 1989, virtually none advertised. Now they all do. Our own St. John, founded by a handful of nuns because a hospital was needed here, now maintains a mere block from where it sits a vast billboard on the corner of Mack and Moross touting its services to the physically troubled in heart. I’d feel oddly marginalized if I worked for pushy Beaumont expanding by acquisitions yet. What has happened to that most honorable of all institutions, the hospital, that, these days, it must scramble like mad for its so-called “customers”? Has it been invaded by machines? Is it the clamor of the machines for return on investment that I hear shouted from the billboards?

Looking for the right word, the word “organic” comes to mind. Why? Because the alien atmosphere of modern life tells me that our institutions are no longer really anchored in organic social reality. They have detached from the soil. They’ve begun to levitate. Most communities, in fact, are communities in name alone. They’ve devolved. They have become transformed into bedroom communities or vast, layered, sleeping slabs. Their inhabitants shower and then travel all over the vast Detroit metroplex to work, to study, to worship (if they do so at all), to shop, to seek health services—everywhere. Virtually all communities today have become virtual; they’re communities of interest. People no longer share anything at all with those who live close by them—except incidentally. Annual block parties trumpet this fact in small talk. The neighbors are strangers unless, by happenstance, small children are present and the still local elementary school binds their mothers (rarely their fathers) into a common purpose they genuinely share. The vast majority—not least some of those mothers—work for institutions the purposes of which are expressible in numbers; and what they actually do is only incidentally related to the corporate objectives that their labor serves.

Real communities, of course, tend to restrict, constrain the individual. The young dream of escaping for the lights of the great city, the excitements and adventures of freedom in the distance. Little do they know… There is an ideal point of equilibrium somewhere, but the laws of this dimension are such that we rarely and only briefly experience genuine community life (if we are lucky to do so at all); memories of that time, to be sure, remain in the heart as a kind a memory of paradise, even when, in detail, it wasn’t—and we remember that perfectly well too. Very odd, indeed, but that’s the way things are.

Value Systems

One aspect of the subject—I’m once more talking about collectives—is the widespread feeling that large collectives share a system of values and that our public ills are the consequence of the loss or decay of this “system.” A diagnosis then usually follows—a search for some specific group or broad development that has caused this decay. A while back I published a personal note from Daughter Michelle on LaMarotte under the title Dilution of Culture. That letter of hers has become surprisingly popular on that site. A lot of people seem to be pondering the subject.

A “value system” is a curious sort of concept. Is it simply a modern phrase for morality? Yes, modern.  System is a modern word suggesting more than ordinary day-to-day behavior; and value is also neatly neutral; it can be used without a glance toward the Sky where, in other times, people thought values came from. The phrase also suggests something quite different than a word like habit does. It suggests something of greater coherence than is usually present in the public mind. How many people have actually worked out their own value system? A few have, of course. But the great majority today—and however far back we might wish to look—engage instead in something that Arnold Toynbee, the historian, called mimesis, imitation. People “pick up” a value system any which way, through contact with others. They rub shoulders. They hear people they admire talk. They expend very little thought of their own on the matter. They’ll register reactions, pro and con, to be sure. But such reactions aren’t thought. And (diverse as we are as a species) if some aspect of the “system” happens not to please them, there will always be others who feel the same way they do and will thus confirm the doubters’ misgivings.

The way that a value system takes hold in large collectives is an extremely complex process. Toynbee singled out elites as the source of such systems, although he would have preferred to use the term “culture,” instead. To be sure. Any system worthy of the name has to have a certain coherence and consistency; it requires thought and action in the development; it must have tangible results that are visibly desirable by the great mass of humanity that just lives life and gets its values catch-as-catch-can. The elites must be seen to practice what they preach. In every generation, a minority of people do engage in the labors of maintaining a value system or a culture. But these systems are not born equal. Some adhere closer to the truth than others, are genuinely comprehensive; others are based on a limited subset of human experience—thus the experience of an expanding economy, for instance. Value systems, therefore, obviously, are also engaged in a kind of competition. But only very few individuals within the great collective can even trace a particular value to its cultural roots. In changing times (and the times are always changing) most members of a society will indifferently hew to contradictory concepts of value, some taken from this and some from that tradition. Don’t let’s get philosophical, people will say. It works for me.

Genuinely comprehensive value systems are born of pain. None of us wants to experience pain. It must be present in us—or we’ll gladly look the other way. The paradox is that as collective wealth rises, simple and weak systems of value can win a greater following than the difficult and the demanding. At the cultural level, nothing fails quite so tangibly as great success. Sounds like a paradox—unless your own value system is comprehensive enough to teach you what the game is all about. And it isn’t about grabbing all that gusto because we only go round once. The darker note here is that as times worsen—and sooner or later they always do—the value system will also tighten, will become much more demanding. The elites that lead this change will become more admirable, suddenly, because the collective will feel the pain more than the elites. And therefore morality will see a rebirth. The dark note here? It isn’t that times will worsen but that the great majority will still only engage in a mimesis. Reality is a steep mountain.

Coal Illuminates Collectives

A news story in the New York Times this morning brings the latest about black gold. China has become a major importer. The price of coal has doubled in the last five years. And producers all over the world, not least in countries where coal consumption is under major environmental pressure, are vying to take part in this latest coal rush. Meanwhile our domestic airwaves are filled with pious talk about carbon footprints and the like. A telling statistic is this: U.S. exports of coal to China stood at 2,714 tons in 2009; in the first six months of 2010 we’ve already shipped 2.9 million tons. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter where that coal is actually burned—not in the context of global warming or ocean-acidification. Let him who wants to chastise China first look to his own exports, etc.

The behavior of all the parties, wherever they are, is easily understood, indeed quite logical. The point that I’ve been making, talking to myself, is that collectives are quite incapable of acting with the kind of consciousness and will we associate with individuals at their best. Many years ago, a colleague of mine at Midwest Research Institute, as part of some study of energy, made the fascinating discovery that China had once been as thickly, you might say impenetrably, forested once as Russia still is in part. Over the millennia, China became deforested. And not just China, you might say. As a collective, humanity devours natural resources in an entirely unthinking way. Never mind our extremely sophisticated predictive computer models.

But note. I’m not pointing fingers or advocating any program. I’m simply observing. It saves time. No point in listening to global warming seminars on television. We’ll consume the last molecule of sugar on that slice of glass and multiply like mad as we do it, just like bacteria in an experiment. And when it’s all consumed, the vast majority of us will go to the Big Petri Dish in the Sky. I note this because it teaches me something about the meaning of Reality, yes, that one, the one with the capital R.

I have the image from edublogs.org here. The source provides no source for, or the name of the creator of, this cartoon.

Collectives—and Virtue

In a comment yesterday Brandon (Siris) enclosed a link to a paper by Alasdair MacIntyre titled The Nature of Virtues, saying that he found parallels in McIntire’s paper to my posts on collectives. That paper is a long and learned (if also fascinating) disquisition on virtue. The parallels appear on the last of nine dense pages—and are indeed illuminating.

Some context before I present some quotes. MacIntyre develops his theory of virtues by pointing out that virtuous actions or practices are associated with what he calls external as well as internal goods. External goods are the rewards associated with virtuous actions—thus money, fame, influence, and so on. Internal goods are joys, pleasures, and satisfactions that arise from the virtuous acts themselves—and would be present even if no external rewards flowed from them. My own favorite example is the joy that comes simply from doing a job right. In the concluding paragraphs of his paper, MacIntyre applies these concepts to collective activities—and reaches the same conclusions I do. I spoke of inefficiency and higher costs as concomitants of genuinely human (read virtuous) behavior. The emphasis is mine. Here are the quotes:

The virtues are of course themselves in turn fostered by certain types of social institutions and endangered by others. Thomas Jefferson thought that only in a society of small farmers could the virtues flourish; and Adam Ferguson with a good deal more sophistication saw the institutions of modern commercial society as endangering at least some traditional virtues. It is Ferguson’s type of sociology which is the empirical counter part of the conceptual account of the virtues which I have given, a sociology which aspires to lay bare the empirical, causal connection between virtues, practices and institutions. For this kind of conceptual account has strong empirical implications; it provides an explanatory scheme which can be tested in particular cases. Moreover my thesis has empirical content in another way; it does entail that without the virtues there could be a recognition only of what I have called external goods and not at all of internal goods in the context of practices. And in any society which recognized only external goods competitiveness would be the dominant and even exclusive feature. We have a brilliant portrait of such a society in Hobbes’s account of the state of nature ….

Virtues then stand in a different relationship to external and to internal goods. The possession of the virtues—and not only of their semblance and simulacra—are necessary to achieve the latter; yet the possession of the virtues may perfectly well hinder us in achieving external goods. I need to emphasize at this point that external goods genuinely are goods. Not only are they characteristic objects of human desire, whose allocation is what gives point to the virtues of justice and of geometry, but no one can despise them altogether without a certain hypocrisy. Yet notoriously the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often, the world being what it … is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful. Thus although we may hope that we can not only achieve the standards of excellence and the internal goods of certain practices by possessing the virtues and become rich, famous and powerful, the virtues are always a potential stumbling block to this comfortable ambition. We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.

The link to the paper itself is here.

Responsibility v. Mechanics

The soul-less behavior of large institutions seems (to me) due to a combination of fear, rigid rules, harsh sanctions, and employees who lack discretion or think that they do. This institutional behavior also owes a great deal to an almost silly modern faith in “training.” Now people will say that sheer size necessitates the use of policies and disciplines. And that the modern legal system gives people the right to sue deep pockets—and hence employees must be constrained so that the institutions can defend themselves in court. There is also present here an implied but never stated belief that society does not produce a large enough supply of genuinely intelligent and responsible people who can be trusted to exercise their own discretion when working for large, rich organizations. Decisions therefore must be channeled to those with the right qualifications.

I see this as the substitution of mechanics for meaning. In agriculture we have soul-less monoculture—overwhelming nature with machines and chemicals to produce a single crop sure to sell in vast quantities. In manufacturing there’s the assembly line—you might call it mono-movement: you will secure these three nuts with an electric drill…for the rest of your miserable life. In institutions we have bureaucracy where even the simplest questions, complaints, or adjustments must be referred “up the line”—for God’s sake do not make decisions on the front line where institution meets its client.

It’s riskier but much more effective, in the long run, to delegate the power to the level where it must be present. This has long been known and preached under the code-word of “empowerment.” But use of that very term reveals the problem. No. People already have the power to make sensible decisions at every level of a complex organization. The power is built in, comes with the employee. We speak of empowerment as if the employee didn’t have it. If the employee doesn’t have it, it is because it has been taken away—by the system. To be sure empowerment is there as a subject in countless “off-sites” and the seminars—but not for actual implementation.

We live surrounded by collectives rather than communities because our leadership, those who control wealth or power, hold on to it and insist on using people as soul-less gadgets rather than employing them as responsible individuals. We don’t walk the talk we talk in our endless training sessions. If we could genuinely humanize the large collectives, all sorts of new demands would arise in society. Our elites would then begin sincerely to insist that we have schools that really work, that all families are “empowered” to raise competent children, etc. Instead we apply the same policy mechanics at every level—and some few lonely voices out in the wilderness, like mine, cry out against and curse the “collectives.”

The way to humanize institutions (or agriculture, or manufacturing, etc.), is always to favor  the rational and human side of a situation—even when it is inefficient. Organic, diversified agriculture is—inefficient; but it is adaptive. Enabling employees is—inefficient; but ultimately it will make the organization responsive and more secure. Inefficiency means more costly. This translates into those who control the wealth letting go of some of it willingly to secure an adaptive, moral, and higher order.

The Grosse Pointe, MI Collective

Little house...

Big house...

Public Views of...Collectives

Gallup tracks what it labels as “confidence in institutions,” and a recent poll (July 2010) shows public ratings of some seventeen (here). I suggest you take a moment to study the table that Gallup shows. In a complicated sort of way, the data show us how we view and judge collectives—reflecting multiple aspects of our relationships to them.

It’s fascinating that in a democracy the top-ranked institution is the military, the Man on Horseback, that most ancient symbol of force and therefore of authority. The military is the big collective shield. It’s also very distant from most people and never mentioned except with bows of awe and words of praise by our politicians. People evidently ignore the cost of this institution. In a time when taxes are labeled evil, very few rail at the billions spent on military might—indeed the taxes that support this sector are untouchable. Distance, uninvolvement, and basic security—and never mind what it costs.

Small business in second place surprised me just a little—but it makes sense. Small business is all around us—but being small it is the most personal of all collectives. We might as well be dealing with other individuals. Small business also lacks all power and does not awe us in the least. It is responsive and ubiquitous. Familiar, useful, personal.

Police has a high rank because it is the military—at the local level. The vast majority see the police but don’t feel its weight—and when it touches us, we’ve usually been speeding. When a child’s lost, it is the police we call—and when the squad car comes and brings back Malcolm (in our case), we overflow with gratitude.

Only 48 percent of the polled view religious institutions with high confidence—enough, however, to give this collective the fourth rank. The trend in this country is unbelief (as I’ve pointed out here), hence less than half is pretty good. In one sense religion is another protective institution—against the dread of the unknown. We participate in religious institutions entirely voluntarily—and they lack all power to compel. Those who engage in collective worship do so because they approve of what they do.

The fifth-ranking collective is the medical (with HMOs excepted). People rank five collectives higher than any political grouping! Interesting. Tells us something about the rank of politics in public perception (as over against the media’s perception). Were it not for the financial and bureaucratic aspects of this sector, I think it would end up much higher than it does. Its relatively low marks must be due, first, to the financial hassles it imposes and, second, to the mechanization that has come to surround it. Tests, tests, and tests. Ever more we’re dealing with machines and with technician, ever less with that most trusted of all professionals, the doctor. HMOs, sixteenth of seventeen, get their low rating because they are much more intrusive and seen to impose a kind of rationing of health care.

Gallup lists the Supreme Court above the Presidency here although both have 36 percent approval. As this other post by Gallup shows, however, in the period 1974-2009, the Court was always ranked higher than the executive branch. That, too, is an interesting indicator. In government we approve of an appointed level, and one limited to the interpretation of a single document, much more than the elected levels. Supreme Court justices have formal qualifications. The other branches are qualified only by mass opinion which shifts now to us and now to those other people we wish would simply stay at home.

This is getting long, so I will wrap this up by commenting on Big Business. Small business is on top, big business at the bottom. The products of big business don’t differ from products sold by the small. The difference in ranking arises, it seems, because big business is impersonal, unapproachable, and powerful. It is the proud tower in the town from which death looks gigantically down (ht Edgar Allan Poe). Its employees often behave just like we do. They raise their hands and look up into the air by way of saying—“It’s beyond me. It’s the system.” But it’s a human system. Somehow, therefore, we expect it to behave…more human. It is a sign of how badly frayed public consensus has become that in July of 2010 Congress has managed to be ranked even lower than big business.

Summation. Now it strikes me that the general public has no more direct contact with the Supreme Court, the Presidency, the Congress, or the judiciary system than it has with the military or the police. But its opinions of the other sectors are based on experience. For me this highlights the power of the media. What opinion echoes back in polls is only the public’s experience of news reports and pundits’ opinions—which is not the same as forming an opinion from, say, visits to doctors offices, clinics, and hospitals.

When institutions are distant, generally beneficial, and don’t intrude into daily life, opinions will be favorable. Low opinions will be based on intrusion and compulsion—mitigated by the benefit received. Thus the opinion of the medical system is middling. But for the overwhelmingly vast majority the federal government is not a tangible reality. As the Chinese saying has it, Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away. I double-underline this. The federal government is not felt—except on April 15. The majority’s opinion must therefore derive from some kind of reporting.

More Notes on Collectives: Command

Having broached the subject of collectives—and thrown out the notion that they more resemble primitive entities than conscious beings—I thought I that would add notes on the subject as they occur to me. Here is one.

Collectives—complained about from without—can also be viewed from within. We’ve all lived and worked inside them and have our opinions about the ones we know. My premise today? Those who think that collectives behave more or less like conscious individuals have never been in charge of one. Once you’ve experienced command, as it were, you know better. People who’ve held management jobs know this only too well—and they also know that the larger the group becomes the more it assumes a life of its own that no single person can—indeed should even aspire to—control. The effect of increasing size produces an organization—organs, in other words, thus division of labor. Lines of communication, in both directions, grow longer and more complicated. The more often a message passes from one person to the next, the more it tends to change. This change is only natural. Each recipient will adapt it in good faith to his or her immediate context—and will pass it on with some of that change sticking to the message. At every level measurements of performance tend to be present—implicit, explicit, indeed also those that the people measured don’t even know are being applied. The presence of these measurements influence the information that passes up and back; people will minimize bad news and try to “look good”; this deforms the information as it moves. You might say that coherence is lost in this process—or say that the coherence is “adapted” to the nature of the organism and, ultimately, only vaguely resembles the intention in the mind of the leader who initiates an action. The initiator, indeed, will be only vaguely aware of all of the many contexts that must be considered by the organism as a whole.

This then results in the creation of an entity that has a behavior, sure enough, but that behavior is not that of the individual who, in any one instance, actually carries it out. He or she is carrying out instructions, after all, not all of which he or she agrees with. Nor that of the individual who initiated it—who could not foresee precisely what would happen in the “process” along the way.

Partial consciousness of what is going on is present in every member of this artificial life—but no one person can see the whole entirely as it is. This is also true of all those who deal with this entity as its constituency. Not to be forgotten: the person in charge is always just a human being with limited talents and insight. And even if the talent is high, the insight deep, and the arrangements excellent, the very fact that a collective is at work will diminish all of these positives as they are ground away by the resistant medium of the many and of the other. My working premise is that we must have collectives, but we should not expect them to behave like people do—although individuals do make them up. A frequent reminder of this comes when I hear a charming recorded voice say to me: “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us.”

Collectives

Fairly often I come across the notion that in some ways collectives are superior to the individual; the idea seems to appeal to one kind of modern thought. Most recently I saw this view applied to insects and to bird swarms. It lies at the root of sociobiology, the creation of Edward O. Wilson: “The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA,” as he said. From him, by one remove, we get “the selfish gene”; that’s Richard Dawkins. I first became aware of this tendency in the context of artificial intelligence, specifically reading Douglas Hofstadter’s best-known book many years ago, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Mind you, the book was a pleasurable experience! The ultimate roots of this mode, of this belief, I think, lie in Neo-Darwinism, the notion of “emergence,” the idea that complexity itself creates the reality—or at least the illusion—of consciousness. Materialism needs this idea as an explanatory principle. The alternative to it, that genuine agents might actually exist—and owe their existence to something other than matter or energy or both—is far simpler but, if held, produces a dualism which the advanced modern mind finds unacceptable.

Dualism has certain aspects that make the world much more intelligible—first because it makes room for meaning, not least the meaning of suffering. We can see suffering arising from the tension between an agency and aspects of this material dimension that cloud its vision and delimit its scope of action. It makes room for letting us explore reasons for our being here, for undergoing all manner of hardships—and how that could have come about. Materialist monism, forced to cough up some kind of explanation, can’t do much more than say that Shit happens—but whether we think it shit or not is an altogether subjective reaction arising from our history, internal arrangements, and the roll of the dice of probability.

This introduction is a bit too long for what I want to address—namely just an aspect of this subject. It is the notion that collectives have a kind of reality at least analogous to that of an individual human being and that, therefore, they can be held responsible. We are so used to this tenuous theory that we don’t even notice the problem when we ourselves speak of the Right or the Left, the Financial Sector, the U.S.A., Al Qaida, fundamentalists, or the media. Occasionally, rarely, we hear this notion assaulted. The most recent example of that is the notion that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to exercise political speech. Now there, finally, quite a few people want to draw the line—and I find myself sighing in relief. For a while I was half-convinced that Edward Wilson had turned out to be right. In his 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, he predicted that in one hundred years humanity will have evolved to a form no longer recognizably human—and I was convinced that I must one of those people who have been Left Behind.

The problem, of course, is that it’s very handy to use generic references and to commit anthropomorphism especially when referring to human institutions. Made up of humans—must be a human being. Writ large. Now my premise, already stated in a post a day or so ago, is that collectives are not. Not human. If you accept the modernist view, they could arguably be considered human. We are—yet we’re not really, not if our organism is just a convenient vehicle for DNA and our thoughts are ultimately reducible to coalitions of neurons engaged in Darwinian competition. Arguably, using the modern conception, we can’t effectively see the U.S. of A. because we’re too small. But we see as through a glass darkly. But the U.S. of A. can clearly see China—and hear its roaring threats much better than we can. I can hear you, but any one of your neurons is, as it were, just a bit challenged, shall we say?

If we accept the old-fashioned, traditional, dualist view, what we really see is that aggregates of people are just that—aggregates of people. They have no mind; they just display behavior. To understand that behavior we’d have to understand, over extensive periods, the behavior and motivations of each and every individual that makes them up. And that’s not handy at all. Indeed these collective entities, lacking a core self, as we do not, are distinctly inferior to any individual human, even the most humble among us. No one person actually controls any collective, even the very small ones. It is handy, of course, to pinpoint some leader by name—especially if that leader has a detectable influence on the total behavior of the collective.

The dualist view, I think, is correct—but if consciously realized, it keeps you sober and humble. The big dudes out there, however human-like they seem to be, are just vast lumbering and ultimately stupid beasts projected by our minds. We might as well get mad at the forest or hope for rescue from the ocean.

---------------
For more on Sociobiology, see this earlier post.

Nations and Persons

Nations aren’t persons—which is rather obvious. This popped into my mind today for a number of reasons. To cite one, I was reminded of one of Castaneda’s stories in which Castaneda’s hero/guru, Don Juan, suggests that collectives should be viewed as natural phenomena—like storms, hurricanes, and floods rather than as agencies. Nations aren’t persons—but our reflexive behavior is to treat any and all structures formed by human beings as if they were. I can understand why we think so. People head up all collectives with one person in charge. Therefore we think that the collective ought to behave as a person does. But a moment’s reflection will remind us that collectives—and never mind nations—behave much more like unconscious animals or vegetative structures than as conscious individuals. The reason is that no person is able to feel the collective or make it move in response to his or her will. The intention of the leader is rapidly diluted as it moves outward to be implemented. The returning feedback is muted and deformed as it reaches the decision-maker.

Another source of today’s thought was pondering the rise of China into much greater prominence. This brought to mind Pat Buchanan’s long standing advocacy that the United States should abandon its imperial tendencies, concentrate on its limited role in the world, and just do things right for a change. And yet another source was looking at long-term trends in U.S. manufacturing (see recent entries on LaMarotte). I noted that the U.S. performance is not as shoddy as I had assumed it was; the hype doesn’t quite reflect the situation on the ground. And it occurred to me, in Buchanan style, that we’re all right, Jack—provided that we just pay attention to our knitting.

In both of the cases above, the underlying notion is that such phenomena as the U.S. international policy or the collective I label as Manufacturing are subject to intelligent and rational direction. They are subject to a certain influence, to be sure, but not to active steering. The U.S. international policy is, whether we like it or not, anchored in facts on the ground so vast and extensive as to be well beyond the control or even effective influence of a national government formed of an executive and a nearly deadlocked legislature. Executive and legislature are themselves collectives and only mildly subject to direction by figures such as Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

The mistaken notion that great aggregates are human—and subject to the same laws of morality and reason that rest upon each of us individually—is the source of much frustration. We can be sure of disappointment. We’re expecting the weather cock to crow. It won’t. As usually ancient wisdom suggests what not to do. But notice that, even in the Psalms, the collectives are viewed as individuals: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” Psalms 146:3.