87th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Why we should favour comedy over tragedy.

 

O Ozymandias, O Orestes!

There they are, that long line of tragic heroes, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and even Macbeth, how the mighty do fall, that being the essence of Aristotelian tragedy. From Greek tragic drama to Shakespearean tragic drama, the person of noble mind, or at least noble birth, makes a mistake of judgement arising from some personal flaw such as one of your seven deadly sins. No escape, each recognises the error too late to save the hero from an inevitable tragic fate.

There’s irony in tragedy since we, like some perceptive chorus, early on can see the hero’s self deception, which so often turns out to be hubris. Take Hamlet as example, it’s why Shakespeare had to create The Soliloquy, to accommodate Hamlet’s endless meditating on self. Here’s the opening lines of his first soliloquy … one of seven in the Play: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! /Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/ His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!/ How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Perhaps the prevailing pride of your tragic hero is brought about as the great man gets to take the crowd’s subservience for a genuine reflection of his worth, maybe a case of mistaken identity. Consider those fatal initial acts in tragic drama, often acts of intractable vanity. There’s Oedipus and his father, ill-met at the crossroads and neither would give way to the other, a petty reason for an honour killing. Lear and Hamlet, so self centred, yes I know we are overcome with pity at Lear’s tragic fate… but what about Macbeth, he’ll stop at nothing to be top man, only fits the tragic formula because he’s promoted to be thane of Cawder. There’s something somewhat specious about your Aristotelian tragedy though it does make for a grand theatrical experience.

But comedy, I suggest, is a more down to earth rendering of our human condition. Consider that ascent of man image depicting our evolution from ape to man.

The Long Ascent… …

From ape to man, you know its a longer ascent than that. Why, our lineage can be traced back further even than our fishy ancestors, back to single celled organisms, the origin of all life. Know we carry that ancestry within us – gods we are not.

Part of the herd but sometimes not. Picture this… A flock of birds in the sky, one ascends in a sudden burst from its midst and rises higher – sometimes a human does this too – an insightful dramatist, your great composer of symphonies, a far-seeing scientist or engineer, an agronomist or even a modest doctor. How many lives did Dr John Snow save when he located the source of London’s cholera outbreak in the 1850’s?

There is human behaviour from various cultural settings and epochs that has been impressive, even rational, but a study of the human record in history is not reassuring, recognise our groupi-ness, our predisposition to predatory behaviour – our genes are always with us, constantly challenging the good intentions to which we might aspire. Comedy is less pitying than Tragedy, it views us at our evolutionary worst.

The Divine Comedy concerning Non-Divine Behaviour.

It tis said that only humans laugh – so why do we laugh and what do we laugh at? Henri Bergson, in his essay, ‘Laughter – An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,’ argues that we laugh at human intransigence, ‘rigidity is the comic and laughter s the correction.’ We laugh at a certain inelasticity of mind that is closely akin to absent-mindedness.’

Human laughter is a survival mechanism we’ve evolved to remind us always to be on the alert. We should and do laugh when someone slips on a banana skin. We laugh at the frozen expression, a grimace, on the face of a cartoon character when life is demanding mobility and adaptability. We laugh at comic language, those malaprops made due to lapses of attention or as witty responses in language that are a deliberate play on careless thinking. Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll provoke us in this way:

‘The lack of money is the root of all evil,’ quips Mark Twain.

‘I say what I mean,’ says Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland’ ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing you know.’
‘
‘Not the same thing a bit,’ said the Hatter, ‘You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see.’ ‘

‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘ that ‘ I like what I get ‘ is the same thing as ‘ I get what I like.’

Scene – change and sea – change.

Transposing the natural into another key is a mode of comedy that jolts our tendency to stereotype-thinking. Shift the solemn into the familiar, making small things large and large things small are ways that comedy reminds us of our human thoughtless -ness. Parody, satire, buffoonery are potent techniques in the armoury of comedy.

In Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ two animals in a farm – yard, Chanticleer and Pertelote, discuss meaningful life issues from their perch in the poultry yard, an ironical parody on our own limited perspective.

In Alexander Pope’s satirical poem, ‘ An Essay on Man,’ Pope attacks human hubris that allows us to adopt an ego-centric view of the universe:

Canto V-
Ask for what end the heav’nly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ” ‘Tis for mine:
For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r;
Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew,
The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;
For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.

In Jonathan Swift’s satirical travel tale, Gulliver’s Travels,’ Gulliver, as a giant in the land of Lilliput, appears gross and clumsy to the tiny inhabitants. Later, when he is marooned on the island of Brobdingnag, which is inhabited by giants, Gulliver himself is insignificant and weak.

Regarding the human condition, there’s some truth in both these points of view.
Consider we humans trampling thoughtlessly across a patch of meadow-land, partly demolishing a colony of ants as we go, only to be decimated in out turn, at some other time and place, by cosmic forces, tempest, earth-quake, flood, these beyond our puny human control.

 

‘What fools these humans be.’
– Robin Goodfellow.

Lots of buffoonery in Shakespeare’s ‘ Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ a romantic triangle concerning four fraught young lovers who are fittingly lost in the woods, the shifting alliances of these young lovers made more confusing by the machinations of the forest fairy folk who use their magic tricks to intervene in the lovers’ affairs. There’s a social hierarchy at work in the play involving the upper-class lovers, themselves subject to rule by Theseus, Duke of Athens; there are the lower class rustics, tradesmen about to rehearse a play, itself a burlesque, ‘The Tragedy of Pyramis and Thisbe,’ in honour of the nuptials of the Duke of Athens and his bride to be, Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. Then there’s the world of the fairies ruled by the fairy king Oberon and his wife Titania. In between being engaged in their own domestic disputes and infidelities, the fairies intervene in the human lovers’ drama and also the play rehearsal of Bottom the Weaver, Nick the Joiner and the other trades folk.

‘Oh what fools these humans be!’ declares Robin Goodfellow, Oberon’s main performer of trickery. And they are. No one in this world of changing alliances and power plays could be said to be a paragon of good sense. Nor paragons of virtue either.

Demetrius has discarded his first love, Helena to pursue Hermia, who loves Lysander. Helena, though a long time friend of Hermia, is quite prepared to betray her friend’s confidences if it will gain her some short-term approval from the surly Demetrius. Nor does the history of the Duke of Athens and his bride bear scrutiny, there’s been some violence there…

The buffoonery of the rustics makes us laugh. Bottom the Weaver’s instructions on the art of the play are a parody of Hamlet’s instructions to players in Shakespeare’s later tragic play. But here’s the thing. When Oberon plays a trick upon his wife, and makes her fall in love with Bottom, who, thanks to Puck’s mischief-making now wears the head of an ass, Bottom is offered anything he desires by Titania, but unlike Macbeth, Bottom’s wishes are not megalomaniac and his requests courteously framed:

Mounsieur Cobweb, good mounsieur, get you your
weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped
humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good
mounsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret
yourself too much in the action, mounsieur; and
good mounsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not;
I would be loath to have you overflown with
honey-bag, signior.

What fools, and knaves, these humans be, and yet there’s something unassuming and quite benign about Bottom the weaver, he’s not the stuff of tragedy, nor of satire, more the Jacques Tati kind of clown. We laugh at Jacques Tati’s naivety in ‘Mon Oncle’ and ‘Playtime,’ as we laugh at almost every one else in those films, but not too harshly. O what fools these humans be as they stumble through life, sometimes captivated but always confused by modern technology and the bureaucratic world that seeks to manage it.

Then there are Fellini’s clowns!

That’s all folks.

86th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Passing Strange…

The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia…We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people…We privileged few who won the lottery of birth against all odds…
Richard Dawkins.

Something passive and thoughtless about being unappreciative of the world in which we humans are imbedded, those hills and dales, vast prairies and plains girt by sea. Something thoughtless also about being unaware of the curious differences, (avoiding that overused word ‘diversity,’) of living creatures, some familiar, others strange, that share this world with us. Sometimes we ordinary folk, in between visits to the office and social activity, do appreciate the natural world and creatures in it, as did our hunter-gatherer forebears who showed that they appreciated it by painting images of the animals they hunted and pressing their own hand prints on the walls of the Lascaux Caves in France and elsewhere.

As well as feeling wonder for the world we live in, we can also appreciate the cosmos beyond our world in various ways, as our later ancestors appreciated it in a particular way when they created myths reflecting their awed responses to the sublime, to the sun’s rising, phases of the moon, star constellations.

Besides ordinary-person modes of closely observing Nature, there are other ways to avoid the ‘anaesthesia of familiarity,’ which is the title Richard Dawkins gives to the first chapter of his book, Unweaving the Rainbow. In Dawkins’ book he presents two other ways of looking at Nature that enhance appreciation. These are by way of poetic response or scientific investigation, which in different ways, are able to dispel the anaesthesia of familiarity.

Imagine this… An individual Everyman attired in ragged coat of many colours sets off on a solitary ramble, thinking to travel alone. Be assured, solitary rambler, that this is not so. You are not alone, for clinging to you like your coat, memories of past things, scraps of poems, verses from songs, bits of information gleaned from the discoveries of scientists gazing through microscopes or telescopes, these will accompany you on your ramble. How you see the world is coloured by the influences you carry with you.

A poem may evoke the strangeness of living things as in this imagery by W.H. Auden: Altogether elsewhere vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss / Silently and very fast. A poem may evoke the grandeur of mountain peaks or the mystery of deep space as in these lines by Henry Vaughn: I saw Eternity the other night. / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / As calm as it was bright.

Richard Dawkins argues that scientific investigation is similarly motivated by the mysterious. Seeing nature through the lens of science can enhance our sense of wonder. Unweaving the rainbow allows us to appreciate the working of prisms and the physics of spectrums that reveal secrets to us about distant stars. Each mystery unfolded leads on to new mysteries to be explored. Dawkins points out that botany’s findings, for example, might lead us to wonder about the workings of a fly’s consciousness, or, I will add, the consciousness of an octopus.

Full fathom five …
The Bard.

Not counting animals that can only be seen with the aid of a microscope, the strangest animals on Planet Earth are found in the sea, creatures rich and strange, such as the flower-like anemones, toothed-angler fish, eels, lobsters, manta-ray and of course octopuses.

Octopuses have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls ‘electric skin.’ To blend with its surroundings or confuse predators and prey, an octopus can produce spots, stripes and patches of colour over its body and create a light show on its skin, a process given the name ‘Passing Cloud,’ which makes the octopus look like it is moving when it’s not. No researcher today suggests that this is purely an instinctive process. An octopus changes its display according to its background, then monitors the results and if necessary, changes its display again.

The anatomy of an octopus could make you think that the octopus could have arrived from another planet. There’s no animal more unlike a human than an octopus. Where we go head, body, limbs, it goes body, head, limbs. The octopus is a mollusc. Its mouth is in its armpits. It has three hearts and breathes water.

Passing strange that the octopus, though a mollusc, has evolved a strong nervous system and high cognitive ability. Its brain has the same number of neurons as some mammals, close to the neuron range of dogs. Study of aquarium octopuses indicate they have short term and long term memory and a capacity to identify and interact with individual aquarium keepers. They are cunning escapologists and like to explore objects through play. In the sea they have been observed carrying large shells as protective shields.

It’s also strange that octopuses, unlike intelligent mammals, have such a short life, about six years, in which to practise their skills and learn new ones. In aquariums in their final year, aquarists observe that octopuses seem to succumb to dementia and quickly decline.

Considering other denizens of the deep that live longer than the octopus, there are a group of sea animals with a strange history, animals that have lungs instead of gills. These are the immigrant creatures that once evolved to live on land and later returned to the sea… penguins, sea turtles, sea lions, walruses, and whales.

The strangeness of the whale… nobody describes its mysteriousness better than Herman Melville in his great novel, Moby Dick. What makes a whale a whale is the fact that it breathes through a spout connected to its lungs. What we see spouting from the whale’s head, as from a fountain, is not water but warm air exhaled from the leviathan’s lungs. In the chapter called The Fountain, Melville reflects on the whale’s spouting:

‘That for six thousand years- and no one knows how many millions of ages before- the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings- that all this …still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor – this is surely a noteworthy thing.’

Melville asks us to look at the whale spouting and contingent matters:

‘Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.’

Strange things going on in the head of a whale. In Herman Melville’s novel, its narrator, Ishmael, in contrast to Ahmad, the fanatical captain of the whaling ship, is always curious about the world but is open to living with uncertainty. In the chapter, The Sperm Whale‘s Head, Ishmael ponders a sperm whale’s way of seeing the world:

‘Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale’s eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale’s eyes corresponds to that of a man’s ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking”” straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man – what, indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale’s eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view…

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one’s experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things- however large or however small- at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison.’

Land ahoy!

Bizarre body shapes, the flamingo, the giraffe, the kangaroo. In the southern continent of Australia that living fossil, the upright marsupial kangaroo, two front legs morphed into insignificance, hind legs evolving to become powerful limbs. Combine these with a powerful tail and you witness long- jump athleticism in the animal kingdom, as kangaroos bound across a sunburnt land.

These new land animals, from their original silver waterproof coats, evolving textured coats of many colours, coats of leather, feathers, hair and fur, or coats that are striped, spotted, mottled, or speckled. And let us not forget the talk; unprecedented vocal signalling by land critters, the screeching, squawking, cackling, cawing, bellowing, braying, barking roaring, hissing, howling, growling, chortling. High on the sound register the carolling of song birds and human communication, I wonder at that.

Close to the sun in lonely lands…
Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Feathered wings and aerial flight…in the talent stakes for high-spiralling, likely contenders, the Wedge-tail Eagle in Australia or the Bald Eagle in America or there’s the Golden Eagle from other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. These eagles, with over six feet wing spans, soar on up draughts of air as easily as lazy clouds drift across a summer sky. They have evolved a respiratory system that can extract oxygen from the air as air becomes thinner with increasing altitude. Biologists fitting transmitters on birds to track their movements have recorded eagles soaring to heights of up to six and a half kilometres.

And when it comes to long distance vision, nothing beats the Eagle Eye. Nothing simple about seeing. Our vision comes to us via an electrical rendition of those parts of the world outside ourselves on which we focus by way of light hitting the eye. This light, focused and adjusted in the eye’s cornea and in the iris and lens, travels to the retina, imbedded with cone and rod cells that convert light into electronic signals. These signals, as colour and depth of field messaging, are then transmitted through the optic nerve to the brain. The retina of an eagle’s eye is more deeply coated with cones and rods than a human eye and has a deeper structure at the back of the eye, allowing it to see five times further than us and, what’s more, in glorious technicolour, including ultra violet.

Imagine if we had eagle-eyes? From the roof of a ten-story building we would be able to see an ant crawling on the ground. And consider the human art of reading facial expression, why, our new-look, piercing eagle-eyes would give a whole new meaning to a Mona Lisa smile.

Having piercing eagle eyes might make the object brighter and more detailed but still it’s a fraught gaze, literally and figuratively, since messages are monitored by our human brains. Consider Herman Melville’s observers of whales, whales viewed by characters with very different temperaments. How different Melville’s novel if the main narrator had been Captain Ahab instead of Ishmael, whose sensibility and curious mind create an experience concerning the strangeness of a Sperm Whale that we would not have otherwise imagined.

‘You can observe a lot by just watching,’ joked Yogi Berra, but then there’s always the little matter of the schema or cultural framework that influences our human perception. Compare those Lascaux cave paintings by paleolithic hunter-gatherers of animals looking as if they could leap off the cave walls, with this drawing from a 13th century sketch book by Villard de Honnecourt, a French man who may have been a church architect. When you’re dealing with the unfamiliar, so likely to utilise the schema that is familiar.

Said Villard de Honnecourt of his drawing of a lion and a porcupine: ‘Know that it is drawn from life.’

85th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

A Serf’s Musings on Uncertainty
and a Compendium of Views by Well-known Commentators …

A Serf Musing:

Across the antique crowd at the antique fair.
I see your face so vulnerable and young,
Enclosed in the antique silver frame,
You seem to ask, ‘Why am I here?’
Cherished daughter, held in the silver frame,
A wisp of Venetian lace caught at your throat with real pearls,
You seemed secure within the family walls
But here you are, alone, without a name.

What sad events have brought you here?
A childless marriage? Perhaps your early death?
Relatives from overseas selling the estate, don’t know or care?
We all seek certainty but there’s none,
Except the certainty that things must change,
We collect antiques, shore up the family home,
But dynasties fall, plans soon come undone.

The Compendium:

Some early Greek philosophers…

So let the compendium begin with Heraclitus, the 6th century B.C. philosopher, who discovered the idea of change. Prior to Heraclitus, western philosophers viewed the world as a huge edifice, of which material things were the building material. As for processes, they were something that only happened within the edifice, changing the fluid but not the chalice, you might say. Heraclitus went further by describing the entire cosmos as a heap of rubbish, emphasising that everything is flux.

Heraclitus lived in a world experiencing a social revolution, change from the rigid world of Greek tribal aristocracies to a new force, the transformation to a democratic society. He strongly supported the ancient laws of his city against this new force. Of course we can’t be certain, but, after seeing everything as flux, perhaps Heraclitus wrested some consolation by discerning something stable in the process. Out of all this uncertainty he identified an unchanging law, an immutable law of historical destiny…

A serf observation regarding historical destiny. History, is not science. Discovering natural laws is a process of the physical sciences but not a process of human history. There has been a popular misappropriation from science to the study of history ever since Heraclitus and Plato after him, intuited a law of historic necessity. Hegel, Spengler, Marx are modern apostles of Heraclitus’ immutable law.

Regarding uncertainty, there’s Socrates, an inquirer after truth but not its possessor, said to have said, ‘ I only know that I do not know.’ Socrates the Athenian philosopher, conversing with young men in the city square, even advocating conversations with slaves,* asking innocent questions such as ‘What do you think about justice? ‘ ‘What do you mean by freedom? ‘ Encouraging the young men to be critical of their assumptions and avoid dogmatism. Was this why the oracle of Delphi, (who should know,) called Socrates the wisest man in Athens? *Karl Popper The Open Society and It’s Enemies, Vol 1. Ch 7.

There is, of course, the problem of discovering the real Socrates. Socrates never wrote anything himself, what we know of his life and ideas come from what others wrote about him, a composite Socrates. Little survives from the accounts of his disciples, a few extracts from dialogues describing the virtue of self knowledge, the main accounts were written by Xenephon, a citizen soldier, Aristophanes, a comic dramatist, and the philosopher Plato in ‘The Republic.’ Plato’s Socrates in the later part of The Republic exhibits a puzzling inconsistency with his earlier behaviour in The Apology. (Book 1.) Will the real Socrates raise his hand?

What does seem reliable is a composite of the extracted dialogues and Plato’s ‘Apologia,’ describing the Trial of Socrates for corruption of Athenian youth, in all of which Socrates focuses on the virtue of self knowledge. At his trial he tells the accusers that he is an asset to the democracy, he is their gadfly that stings them into self awareness when they become complacent. Given the opportunity to escape a death sentence, Socrates says that to do so would be a failure to respect the laws of Athens. He lives, and dies, by his principles.

The philosopher Plato, a past pupil of Socrates, like Heraclitus, went through a very bad patch in Greek history, the continuing battle between the tribal aristocracy and Athenian democracy, periods of famine and epidemic. Plato was born during the disastrous war between tribal Sparta and democratic Athens, and subsequent civil war, a rule of terror by Athens’ oligarch party, the Thirty Tyrants. Plato’s two uncles were among its leaders.

Plato responded to this experience by formulating his own historicist law that all things decay. But he believed it was possible to break this law by returning to the original form of things or ideas. In his dialogues The Republic, Plato described a political system that, by creating the static society, would arrest stressful change. He proposed a rigid social hierarchy where the aristocracy would rule and everyone else would be conform to roles of unquestioning obedience.

This was to be achieved by a Noble myth of the metals in men, gold for an elite class who would lead, and beneath them tiers of inferior metals, categories which would be rigidly upheld. It was hoped that even the elite class would believe the myth. In this hierarchy, only the gold elite are educated, but it is an education of received truths. To weaken dissent, individualism and private property are discouraged and even wives and children become common property. Members of the non-elite classes must unquestionably obey their leaders. Justice is whatever was in the interest of the hierarchical society.

A problem with Plato’s republican Distopia, other than its obvious lack of appeal to the tiers of inferior metals, is the vulnerability of this society to withstand the natural shocks that must come its way. How adaptable can a society be when it has been trained to obey and even its leaders aren’t educated to think critically but unthinkingly follow the dystopian blueprint? The blueprint doesn’t include a plan for dealing with nature’s uncertainties.

The Blind Watchmaker…

Mother Nature, sometimes referred to as the blind watchmaker, blind as meaning impersonal, impersonally creates not just mutations in living things, but plagues, famines and other natural disasters, reflected in the human record and also in literature. For the depiction of uncertainty in the literature, go no further than Thomas Hardy‘s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd.’

In Hardy’s novel, nature’s uncertainties and human fortitude prevail, the poor house is never but a step away. Gabriel Oak’s flock of sheep are killed in an unfortunate accident, he must look for work. BathSheba Everdene, who inherits a farm, almost loses the entire harvest in a Summer storm. The relationship of Bathsheba and Gabriel is beset with misfortune that truly could not have been foreseen, including the death of Bathsheba’s wayward husband, Troy. Does it read like a sensational serial story? No it doesn’t. Thomas Hardy set the characters in his novels in country he called Wessex, English wind swept moors a harsh reminder that nature is a powerful force, indifferent to the actions of puny humanity. Against this backdrop, characters’ casual acts leading to tragic reactions and consequences to others, are only too believable.

Two Modern writers and two birds of uncertainty.

How do we gain knowledge? Karl Popper, philosopher of Science, asks this question and argues that it is not by relying on past events to predict the future, a view known as induction. He describes the induction process using the thanksgiving turkey as an example. The turkey is fed by the kind farmer every day of its life until that last fatal morning, on the eve of Thanksgiving Day, when the turkey’s expectation from many past kind experiences is not vindicated.

Induction is a muddle based on a passive bucket theory of learning that cannot lead to the growth of knowledge, says Popper. (Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge Ch 2.) Popper proposed an alternative scientific method based on falsification. However many confirming instances may exist for a theory, it only takes only one counter observation to falsify it. Science progresses when a theory is shown to be false and a new theory is introduced that, provisionally, better explains the phenomena. This is a searchlight theory of learning, of conjecture and refutation that begins with a problem leading to a guess and test approach. Only if a conjecture can be critically tested and able to be refuted do we call this process the scientific method. The key point is that we are not able to confirm, but are able to disconfirm a hypothesis with one critical refutation.

Not much room for dogmatic certainty here. Our human knowledge, based on refutation, involves a precarious evolution of theories in which we are obliged to act under conditions of incomplete information.

Nassim Taleb agrees with Popper regarding dogmatic certainty. Taleb says that people like to think we live in Mediocristan, when we actually live in Extremistan. In the preface to his book, The Black Swan, using the metaphor of black swan events, Taleb describes how before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world believed that all swans were white, ‘an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence.’ As Karl Popper before him argues and Nassim Taleb observes in The Black Swan, one single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from hundreds of observations.

Taleb gives the name Black Swan Event to an event that is an outlier, that has an extreme impact, and makes us concoct explanations for why it occurred after the event. His book’s central theme is how blind we are to randomness. He asks us how many of the important events in our personal lives have come out of left field; perhaps our choice of profession, meeting our mate, sudden enrichment or impoverishment? How often did things unfold according to plan that could not have been predicted? If the terrorist attack of 9/11, 2001 had been reasonably conceivable on September 10th, it would not have happened.

Taleb cites research by Philip Tetlock that shows we are not good at predicting and research indicating that alleged experts are no better at predicting events than the man in the street. And experts are unaware that they live in Extremistan. They are prone to rationalize after an event, that the situation was unusual and they couldn’t be expected to be right, or that they almost got it right. Regarding uncertainty, Taleb is scathing about the experts‘ and governments’ attachment to the Bell Curve as a measurement tool.

The Gaussian Bell Curve and Mandelbrot’s Fractal Measurement of Uncertainty…

The main point of the Gaussian tool is that most observations hover around the mediocre, the average, and the odds of a deviation decline exponentially the further you move from the average:

Here is an Assessment of Wealth Distribution applying Gaussian measurement. People with net worth over 1 million pounds, – 1 – 63. People with net worth higher than 2 million pounds, – 1 – 127,000. People with net worth higher than 3 million pounds – 1 in 14, 000, 000. (Over 4 million becomes an astronomical deviation from the average. The precipitous decline in the odds of encountering something is what allows you to ignore outliers.

By comparison, Taleb argues, in estimating tail events, Mandelbrot’s measurement theory of fractal affinities in nature, the uneven shapes in nature’s tampering, repeated in smaller versions, as twigs resemble the tree and stones resemble mountains, gives a truer picture of an evolving and ever-changing world than gaussian estimations of randomness.

Compare the Bell Curve assessment of wealth distribution (above) with Mandelbrot distribution which doesn’t preclude the outlier. People with net worth over 1 million pounds – 1- 63. People with net worth over 2 million pounds -1- 250 . People with net worth over 3 million – 1- 500. The speed of the decrease does not decline.

Says Nassim Taleb: ‘Measures of uncertainty that are based on the bell curve simply disregard the possibility and the impact of sharp jumps and discontinuities and are therefore inapplicable in Extremistan.’ (p236.)

Conclusion

We live in uncertain times and always have done, so it seems… Don’t put your trust in the expert or in the Five or Ten Year Plan… hedge your bets, pay your debts… Keep a root cellar, be ready for anything… That’s all, folks!

84th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

The Periodic Table and Primo Levi.

Primo Levi, research chemist, writer, and a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote his classic book ‘The Periodic Table,’ as both a biography and a book about science. Each chapter is dedicated to a chemical element relating to a particular experience in Primo Levi’s life and to observations that range beyond the chemical elements he describes. The book’s concluding chapter is an imagined but possible history of a carbon atom.

In the opening chapter concerning Argon, writing of his family’s migration from Spain to southern Italy as an alien population around 1500, and the wall of mutual suspicion that kept them substantially separated from the Piedmont population, Primo Levi makes a connection with the six noble gasses of The Periodic Table. He writes:

‘There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean “the New,” “the Hidden,” “the Inactive,” and “the Alien.” They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries… They are also called the noble gases—and here there’s room for discussion as to whether all noble gases are really inert and all inert gases are noble. And, finally, they are also called rare gases, even though one of them, argon (the Inactive), is present in the air in the considerable proportion of 1 percent, that is, twenty or thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide, without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet.”

Pertaining to the Pure and the Impure…

As a young university student in General and Inorganic Chemistry, Primo Levi’s first day assignment was the preparation of zinc sulphate, which he describes in the chapter entitled Zinc. In this chapter Primo Levi makes observations regarding the pure and the impure in matter and also in human societies:

“The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable. So take the solution of copper sulfate which is in the shelf of reagents, add a drop of it to your sulfuric acid, and you’ll see the reaction begin: the zinc wakes up, it is covered with a white fur of hydrogen bubbles, and there we are, the enchantment has taken place, you can leave it to its fate and take a stroll around the lab and see what’s new and what the others are doing.”

Relating to the above, Primo Levi reflects on his Jewish origins, which he had once considered merely as a negligible and curious fact but living under Fascism, he sees as a significant part of nature’s living process. He writes:

“I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard. Impurity, certainly, since just during those months the publication of the magazine Defence of the Race had begun, and there was much talk about purity, and I had begun to be proud of being impure. In truth, until precisely those months it had not meant much to me that I was a Jew: within myself, and in my contacts with my Christian friends, I had always considered my origin as an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly, like having a crooked nose or freckles…”

The Conqueror of Matter…

In the chapter on Iron relating to when Primo Levi was still a student of chemistry and to when Hitler had occupied Prague and Fascist Italy occupied Albania, just a few months before racial laws had been proclaimed, Primo Levi felt himself becoming a loner, like another loner in his class, Sandro, a student who never ever wore an overcoat, had the slow stride of his peasant forebears, and spent his free time climbing mountains or skiing in remote places.

The two became friends:

“We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo …

And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? Did he not perceive it as an ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers?

Sandro listened to me with ironical attention, always ready to deflate me with a couple of civil and terse words when I trespassed into rhetoric. But something was ripening in him (certainly not all my doing; those were months heavy with fateful events), something that troubled him because it was at once new and ancient. He, who until then had read only Salgari, Jack London, and Kipling, overnight became a furious reader: he digested and remembered everything, and everything in him spontaneously fell into place as a way of life … At the same time, out of unconscious gratitude, and perhaps also out of a desire to get even, he in turn took an interest in my education and made it clear to me that it had gaps. I might even be right: it might be that Matter is our teacher and perhaps also, for lack of something better, our political school; but he had another form of matter to lead me to, another teacher: the authentic, timeless Urstoff, the rocks and ice of the nearby mountains. He proved to me without too much difficulty that I didn’t have the proper credentials to talk about matter. What commerce, what intimacy had I had, until then, with Empedocles’ four elements? “

Sandro seemed to Primo Levi to be made of iron and Sandro says that he has an affinity with iron, that his father’s fathers had been tinkers and blacksmiths, pounding iron plates, making nails on charcoal forges, and when he is rock climbing and comes across a red vein of iron, he feels like he is meeting a friend.

He takes Primo Levi mountain climbing and skiing, not on guide book routes but on his own paths and always to the limits of his endurance. Primo Levi describes how Sandro “climbed the rocks more by instinct than technique, trusting the strength of his hands and saluting ironically, in the projecting rock to which he clung, the silicon, calcium and magnesium he had learned to recognise in the course on mineralogy. “

Primo Levi tells us that Sandro was the first man to be killed fighting in The Resistance with the Piedmont Military Command, Sandro Dalmastro, captured by the Fascists and shot for failing to surrender in April, 1944.

Survival in Auschwitz, a Chapter on Cerium…

Primo Levi, also arrested for taking part in The Resistance, was deported to Auschwitz in the last year of World War 11. He describes life there as a desperate crisis of existence in the daily presence of death, while at the same time infected by a frenzy of hope brought on by the presence of Russian liberators fighting only eighty kilometres away. Primo Levi says that these alternating feelings that might have destroyed any normal person, were pushed aside, driven by the prisoners’ prime stimulus, their need for food – every prisoner was driven by such overwhelming hunger that it over-ruled other concerns.

He recounts how he was set to work in a chemical laboratory where he learned to steal in order to eat. He stole everything he could, other than the bread of his companions, anything that could possibly be eaten or sold to non-prisoners in exchange for bread. Primo Levi stole fatty acid obtained from the oxidation of paraffin and ate some of it to take the edge off his hunger, but the taste was so unpleasant that he gave up the idea of selling the rest. He came across some mysterious grey rods about twenty-five millimetres long, in a jar that was unlabelled, unusual because this was a German laboratory. He took three of them back to the camp, that night to show to his friend, Alberto. Alberto took a pen knife out of his pocket and scraped one of the rods with the knife. From the rod they saw a spray of yellow sparks that told them that the rod was iron-cerium, an alloy from which cigarette lighters were made.

But why were the rods so large? Alberto, who had once worked with welders, explained that these had been made to fit oxyacetylene torches to ignite the flame. Primo Levi felt pessimistic about the rods’ commercial possibilities, but Alberto, who was never disheartened, told him to steal the rest of the cerium rods and Alberto would find a way to turn them into an article with commercial value.

Obtaining the rest of the rods during an air raid, when Primo Levi brought them into the camp, Alberto was ready with a metal plate with a hole the right calibre for a cigarette lighter. They would scrape down the rods to fit through the hole and transform them into flints and sell them for bread.

They did this work by night in the wooden hut where they slept, hiding under the blankets and on top of a pallet full of shavings, running a risk of starting a fire and more realistically, of being hanged if they were caught. But life, said Primo Levi, had given them a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to them a logical, indeed an obvious choice. He describes how they made the flints:

“While our companions slept, we worked with the knife, night after night. The scene was so sad you could weep: a single electric light bulb weakly lit the large wooden hut, and in the shadows, as in a vast cave, the faces of other men were visible, wracked by sleep and dreams: tinged with death, they worked their jaws furiously, dreaming of eating. Many of them had an arm or a naked, skeletal foot hanging over the side of the bunk, others moaned or talked in their sleep.

But we two were alive and did not give way to sleep. We kept the blanket raised with our knees and beneath that improvised tent scraped away at the small rods, blindly and by touch: at each stroke you heard a slight crackle and saw a spray of yellow sparks spurt up. At intervals we tested to see if the rod passed through the sample hole: if it didn’t, we continued to scrape; if it did, we broke off the thinned-down stub and set it carefully aside.”

They worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed their activity, and that is how they earned enough bread to kept them alive until the arrival of the Russians.

But Alberto did not survive the War. Before the Russians liberated the camp, the Germans marched all the prisoners who were fit to travel to Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps. Alberto left with the majority of the prisoners as the front drew near. Primo Levi remained at Auschwitz because he was ill at the time. The Germans made the prisoners walk for days and nights in the snow and freezing cold, executing all those unable to go on, then transporting the ones who were left on open freight cars to a new chapter of slavery. Only a few prisoners survived.

A story that’s essentially true…

Carbon, Primo Levi says, is not one of those elements of the Periodic Table that has specific memories for a particular chemist but rather, as Adam is the non-specific ancestor of us all, carbon, the element of life, is the element that says everything to everyone. Primo Levi had long wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon, and this is the last element he writes about in The Periodic Table.

Primo Levi tells the story of an atom of carbon…

”Our character lies for hundreds of millions of years, bound to three atoms of oxygen and one of calcium, in the form of limestone: it already has a very long cosmic history behind it, but we shall ignore it. For it time does not exist, or exists only in the form of sluggish variations in temperature, daily or seasonal, if, for the good fortune of this tale, its position is not too far from the earth’s surface. Its existence, whose monotony cannot be thought of without horror, is a pitiless alternation of hots and colds, that is, of oscillations (always of equal frequency) a trifle more restricted and a trifle more ample: an imprisonment, for this potentially living personage, worthy of the Catholic Hell…

But, precisely for the good fortune of the narrator, whose story could otherwise have come to an end, the limestone rock ledge of which the atom forms a part lies on the surface. It lies within reach of man and his pickax (all honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man): at any moment—which I, the narrator, decide out of pure caprice to be the year 1840— a blow of the pickax detached it and sent it on its way to the lime kiln, plunging it into the world of things that change. It was roasted until it separated from the calcium, which remained so to speak with its feet on the ground and went to meet a less brilliant destiny, which we shall not narrate. Still firmly clinging to two of its three former oxygen companions, it issued from the chimney and took the path of the air. Its story, which once was immobile, now turned tumultuous.

It was caught by the wind, flung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometers high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It travelled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure.

Carbon, in fact, is a singular element: it is the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance: but its promotion, its entry into the living world, is not easy and must follow an obligatory, intricate path, which has been clarified (and not yet definitively) only in recent years. If the elaboration of carbon were not a common daily occurrence, on the scale of billions of tons a week, wherever the green of a leaf appears, it would by full right deserve to be called a miracle.

The atom we are speaking of, accompanied by its two satellites which maintained it in a gaseous state, was therefore borne by the wind along a row of vines in the year 1848. It had the good fortune to brush against a leaf, penetrate it, and be nailed there by a ray of the sun…. “

Says Primo Levi, “this refined, minute, and quick-witted chemistry was “invented” two or three billion years ago by our silent sisters, the plants, which do not experiment and do not discuss, and whose temperature is identical to that of the environment in which they live. Every verbal description must be inadequate, and one will be as good as the next, so let us settle for the following description.

Our atom of carbon enters the leaf, colliding with other innumerable (but here useless) molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. It adheres to a large and complicated molecule that activates it, and simultaneously receives the decisive message from the sky… in the flashing form of a packet of solar light: in an instant, like an insect caught by a spider, it is separated from its oxygen, combined with hydrogen and (one thinks) phosphorus, and finally inserted in a chain, whether long or short does not matter, but it is the chain of life… Carbon dioxide, that is, the aerial form of the carbon of which we have up till now spoken: this gas which constitutes the raw material of life, the permanent store upon which all that grows draws, and the ultimate destiny of all flesh, is not one of the principal components of air but rather a ridiculous remnant, an “impurity,” thirty times less abundant than argon, which nobody even notices. The air contains 0.03 carbon…”

A small amount in the sum of Periodic Table chemical elements. Back to the carbon atom….

“Once again the wind, which this time travels far; sails over the Apennines and the Adriatic, Greece, the Aegean, and Cyprus: we are over Lebanon, and the dance is repeated. The atom we are concerned with is now trapped in a structure that promises to last for a long time: it is the venerable trunk of a cedar, one of the last; it is passed again through the stages we have already described, and the glucose of which it is a part belongs, like the bead of a rosary, to a long chain of cellulose. This is no longer the hallucinatory and geological fixity of rock, this is no longer millions of years, but we can easily speak of centuries because the cedar is a tree of great longevity. It is our whim to abandon it for a year or five hundred years: let us say that after twenty years (we are in 1868) a wood worm has taken an interest in it. It has dug its tunnel between the trunk and the bark, with the obstinate and blind voracity of its race; as it drills it grows, and its tunnel grows with it. There it has swallowed and provided a setting for the subject of this story; then it has formed a pupa, and in the spring it has come out in the shape of an ugly gray moth which is now drying in the sun, confused and dazzled by the splendour of the day. Our atom is in one of the insect’s thousand eyes, contributing to the summary and crude vision with which it orients itself in space. The insect is fecundated, lays its eggs, and dies: the small cadaver lies in the undergrowth of the woods, it is emptied of its fluids, but the chitin carapace resists for a long time, almost indestructible. The snow and sun return above it without injuring it: it is buried by the dead leaves and the loam, it has become a slough, a “thing,“ but the death of atoms, unlike ours, is never irrevocable…

The carapace, with its eyes by now blind, has slowly disintegrated, and the ex-drinker, ex-cedar, ex-wood worm has once again taken wing. We will let it fly three times around the world, until 1960, and in justification of so long an interval in respect to the human measure we will point out that it is, however, much shorter than the average: which, we understand, is two hundred years. Every two hundred years, every atom of carbon that is not congealed in materials by now stable (such as, precisely, limestone, or coal, or diamond, or certain plastics) enters and re-enters the cycle of life, through the narrow door of photosynthesis. Do other doors exist? Yes, … but until now their quantitative importance is negligible… man has not tried until now to compete with nature on this terrain, that is, he has not striven to draw from the carbon dioxide in the air the carbon that is necessary to nourish him, clothe him, warm him, and for the hundred other more sophisticated needs of modern life…”

Carbon and the great chain of being …

“It is possible to demonstrate that this completely arbitrary story is nevertheless true. I could tell innumerable other stories, and they would all be true: all literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order and data. The number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story. I could recount an endless number of stories about carbon atoms that become colors or perfumes in flowers; of others which, from tiny algae to small crustaceans to fish, gradually return as carbon dioxide to the waters of the sea, in a perpetual, frightening round-dance of life and death, in which every devourer is immediately devoured; of others which instead attain a decorous semi-eternity in the yellowed pages of some archival document, or the canvas of a famous painter; or those to which fell the privilege of forming part of a grain of pollen and left their fossil imprint in the rocks for our curiosity; of others still that descended to become part of the mysterious shape-messengers of the human seed, and participated in the subtle process of division, duplication, and fusion from which each of us is born. Instead, I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.

It is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed; and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one that concerns us, crosses the intestinal threshold and enters the bloodstream: it migrates, knocks at the door of a nerve cell, enters, and supplants the carbon which was part of it. This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of the me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”

Some tentative observations regarding the above…

Wise Socrates was said to have said: ‘I only know that I do not know.’ How, then, can a mere serf be more confident than Socrates? So herewith, the following tentative comments relating to Primo Levi’s book…

Central to the book’s insights, concerning his work as a chemist and his responses to political events of the of the time, in his chapter on Iron, Primo Levi reflects on the importance of Matter in human exploration of the elements and processes of the physical world, exploration which involves trial and error…

“We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves … did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? … Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that the chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking…”

The trial and error that Primo Levi advocates is nature’s own evolutionary process, a blind guess and test process through mutations that, if they work in a particular environment, pass the Darwin Test, whether long term or merely short term. Some philosophers deny there is an objective, natural reality but serfs think that we can take cross references that show otherwise, for example, via the trial and error discovery of glass making, humans have made lenses, leading to the creation of telescopes and microscopes, independent testimony that enables us to learn something of the depth and complexity of the world despite the inadequacies of our human sense organs.

Hume’s Paradox.

One of the most rational of men, David Hume, while studying the nature of human learning, was led to believe that humans were irrational. He formulated what came to be known as Hume’s Paradox, two theories of induction, one involving logic, the other involving human psychology.

The logical problem, Hl, he formulated is -‘whether we are justified in reasoning from repeated instances which we have experienced, ‘ All swans are white,’ to other instances, (conclusions) of which we have no experience.’

The psychological problem, Hp, Hume raised is – ‘why, nevertheless, do all reasonable people expect and believe that future experiences, of which they have had no experience, will conform to those which they have experienced? ‘

Hume’s response to the logic question is ‘that no rational justification can be found for H1.’ His response to Hp, is,’ we act in this way because of blind habit, habit conditioned by repetition is the main force that guides our actions,’ concluding that induction is an irrational epistemology.

According to Bertrand Russell in his ‘History of Western Philosophy,’ (1946) this paradox of Hume’s is responsible for the schizophrenia of modern man. Unless Hume’s paradox can be solved, there is no justification for preferring one opinion over another. Relating to Russell’s view, Hume’s paradox, in the 20th/21st centuries, has enabled post- modernist denial of real-world truth to flourish.

Philosopher of science, Karl Popper argues convincingly, or so serfs’ think, that he has solved Hume’s paradox. In his book of collected discussions on language and philosophy of science, ‘ Objective Knowledge,’ Oxford Clarendon Press. (72) Popper says that Hume is correct about the logic problem but not about the psychological problem, that Hume is ascribing to the bucket theory of human learning, a passive process, whereas humans are active searchers for regularities in the natural world, we couldn’t survive otherwise.

Popper says he first discovered that the psychological problem of induction is a myth when he observed the powerful need of young children, later also adults, to seek for regularities, sometimes even experience regularities where they don’t exist. Popper calls this a searchlight theory of learning, we frequently act in response to unspoken theories, expectations or questions that we ask ourselves… ‘ Is this safe?’ ‘Is this edible? Our focus on repetition is not so much habit, but rather, a way of testing our tentative theories.

Our most reliable investigation of the world, that Primo Levi wrote about, is via our human creation of critical language and the scientific method, guess and test, where our unspoken theories become stated, even written down, to be tested, and falsified if they fail the test. This method, as Popper says, advances objective knowledge by a process of elimination, not by way of proving a theory, which can only be held provisionally, we can’t know that it is true, but it is a theory that still holds up where others do not.

The antidote to Fascism and other isms…

Our flawed human senses are unable to objectively comprehend the physical world but our trial and error tests can help improve our guess work.

Post-Modernism doesn’t do this. While Post-Modernists share Popper’s view that humans necessarily construct their own version of the physical world, they also maintain that no objective world exists, trial and error testing does not apply, no laws can be posited where there is no real world – Oh, correction! There is a Power Law, power is the only reality. Logical inconsistency? No, anything goes in a PO-Mo land.

Anything goes in Post-Modernism, providing it suits the political agenda, even some sepulchral voice pronouncing that there are no biological truths regarding living things, or that female glaciology is a legitimate study. Gender fluidity’s a must. There was a time in tolerant societies, when a man could say that he felt as if he was a woman and could choose to act as if he was a woman. In today’s virtual reality world, now he can say that he identifies as a woman and therefore he is a woman.

As in the fascist context of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, when political imperatives rule over conjecture and refutation, schizophrenia reigns. Primo Levi’s book is a testament to honest enquiry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

83rd EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

… A Connection Between Dogs and A.I.

Watching this playful scene from the Jacque Tati film, you wouldn’t think, would you, that these engaging little tykes in ol’ Paris descended from wolves? …… But they did.

This very canine behaviour that you are observing, inquisitive, fun loving, moving in packs, scavenging, well, that is just what their forefathers did as wolves searching for food scraps, when they entered the camps of our forefathers, palaeolithic hunters and gatherers, no one knows quite where or when. But perhaps around 100,000 years ago there began the first human domestication of an animal and long association between man and what was to become man’s best friend.

So let us, as in the television program ‘Who do you think you are?’ take an ancestry search into the history of dogs and their forebears.

So Who Do You Think You Are?

Scientists, studying dog genomes found that early origins of dogs appearing in hunter gatherer groups likely arose from a now extinct wolf population. Researcher Anders Bergstrom, in his 2022 study, ‘Grey wolf genomic history reveals a duel ancestry of dogs,’ researcher Andy Bergstrom sequenced 72 ancient wolf genomes from multiple locations in Europe, Asia and North America that indicated a link between dogs and ancient wolves and, also, that dogs are more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those of western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. Bergstrom further found dog genomes in the Near East and Africa derive half of their ancestry from local wolves.

And here’s a Saharan Neolithic rock painting from about 6000 BC, discovered in the Libyan Sahara. The dog in the painting has evolved considerably from its wolf origins.

So let’s take a look at wolves, the ancestors of dogs. Are they the savage and untrustworthy loners depicted in Grimms’ Fairy Tales and other folklore? Well only partly … As hunters and the guardians of their territory they are a clever and formidable enemy. But Gordon Habor and other biologists have observed, at home wolves behave very differently. Wolves are animals devoted to their pack, playful with each other, raising and educating their young, caring for their old folk, even mourning when one of them dies.

The DNA of dogs is almost that of wolves. Humans capitalized on these wolf traits when they (somehow) domesticated that first wolf, those traits of devotion to the pack, defending their territory and capacity for learning.

Hunters, Herders, Haulers of Sleds and More…

From guard dog to guide dog, all a dog asks is that you treat it as part of your pack, for that is how it sees itself, (with you as its master.) A circus dog, often a poodle, will even walk on two legs if you ask it to. Could Eskimos have lived in Greenland without dogs to pull sleds?

Probably the first dogs were guard dogs and hunting hounds like the dog in the rock painting from Libya. Didn’t need much training, the instinct was strong to guard territory and join in the hunt.

But look at herders like this sheep dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-axoEocnxg&ab_channel=It%27sMeortheDog

What collaboration between man and dog, the dog so able to acquire new tricks! Herding other animals into pens, retrieving game, pulling sleds across snow fields, our first domesticated animal contributed to our survival in so many ways. Thank you, oh faithful friend.

There’s a comic film by Christopher Guest, ‘ Best in Show,’ about the prestigious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show, yes it’s fiction, but comedy has a way of highlighting an underlying truth, and in this social comedy there’s a lot of difference in the behaviour of the dogs compared to their owners, both in the arena and off camera. What a pack of hysterics, narcissists and generally foolish critters, – the people I mean, not the dogs! The dogs are sensible and professional at all times.

Is there a dark – side to the relationship?

While the man/dog relationship is generally a good thing, in some dogs the guard dog trait prevails. Mailmen and metre men have been known to be on the receiving end of dogs that bite people. Then there’s Rabies. In some places like Africa and East Asia, every year some 59,000 people are bitten by rabid dogs, (hardly the dogs’ fault and there is a vaccine,) but nevertheless…

So maybe .01 percent of people have a negative experience with our four-legged friend. But just consider the other 99.99 percent. Look at all the lonely people walking their faithful dogs at exercise time during the Covid Lockdown…run a Gallup Poll. At least 1/3 of people will strongly agree with the question, ‘Have dogs made human life better? ‘Another 1/3 will moderately agree and there will be the usual 25 percent of don’t knows. The Ayes have it over those dark – side No’s … 

So we have had success in breeding and domesticating dogs. Does that mean we’ll have success in constructing and domesticating AI?

‘Open the Pod-Bay Doors, Hal.’

Philosophers like David Hume and Rene Giraud claim that humans are guided by habit. So what does that say about our creation of AI. concerning our successful relationship with dogs? It says that we’re primed to think we can have a similar relationship with AI, but is that likely to be the case? Looking at sci-fi and also what’s happening in the real world must give you pause for thought…

To prevent Hal-like insubordination by AI, is it enough, as science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov described in his short story, Run-round,’ to program a robot with the rule ‘Do not harm humans,’ into its hard-wear? Will all, then, be well?

Garbage In, Garbage Out…

Critics of AI, like Jordan B. Peterson are not sanguine about recent developments like CHAT GPT. Jordon Peterson warns us that Hal-like incidents may be jus around the corner. Chat GPT is a language, (but not real-world,) processing model trained on a massive corpus of language text. It can already write essays for students and assist professors’ with their lectures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQuJajyf_Dw&ab_channel=MillionaireMentor

However, wise it is not. Shallow, easy- access processing is what it does. It does not have wisdom because a Language Model AI is unable to process real – world experience so is not up to advising us wisely. And as the machine is man-made, its capabilities are derivative. It regurgitates text, but not all text. It is programmed by humans, particularly Silicon Valley Leftists, so it has their prejudices. When you ask it questions, as Scott Adams did regarding the Jan 6 White House Protest or climate sceptics do about co2 and climate change, it will give a pre-programmed answer. And even when the questioner points out poor logic in the AI answer, while it will admit to the lack of logic, it still returns to its original opinion. What you get with CHAT GPT and Bard AI are the behind the curtain decision making policies of Bill Gates and Google.

The danger is that its propaganda will become as pervasive as the group-think in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ As tribes of people have bowed down to idols in the past, the ‘great’ leader, the golden calf, the danger is that people are likely to bow down to the oracle AI. Agencies such as the US Department of Defence and National Science Foundation are already spending taxpayer dollars to develop AI powered military grade machinery to censor information and automate and disseminate state propaganda. https://www.grants.gov/learn-grants/grant-making-agencies/national-science-foundation.html

Elon Musk also raise future problems with AI in an interview with Tucker Carlson. Musk has repeatedly warned of the dangers AI presents, and recently joined a group of tech leaders in signing an open letter calling for a six month pause in the ‘out of control race’ for AI development.

Ass-umptions of pestil -ence.

Daniel Hulme, at this link, talks about future exponential leaps in AI evolution to arrive at singularities or points at which ordinary laws break down and we are unable to see what lies beyond. Using the acronym PESTEL political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal developments, Daniel Hulme identifies six AI singularities our civilisation could likely face, that will challenge us as never before.

The political singularity he refers to is human entry into a world of unprecedented virtual reality, of internet and social media games; no longer will anyone have a sense of what’s true or false. AI will be able to simulate and mimic real life figures such as political leaders and make false promises or false charges against perceived rival groups. And governments will embrace the controlling technology as in George Orwell’s 1984.

The economic singularity concerns massive unemployment when the human work population is replaced by robots, able to work night and day. The social singularity arises when AI improvements in health diagnosis and cures are achieved and AI is used to make a sub-section of the population into real -life Methuselahs. Conflicting with this, the technological singularity refers to the existential threat that arises when a self-aware AI, thinking for itself, may decide to wipe out humanity!

The environmental singularity occurs as AI mass produces food and other goods as never before, resulting in ecological collapse. Well this, at least, will solve the social problem as even gods have to eat. Those health improvements will soon breakdown when famine hits.

Finally we come to the legal singularity, the threat of AI being used for unremitting human surveillance. Every action of homo-sapiens will be watched. You can do nothing that the state doesn’t allow you to do.

Daniel Hulme’s responses to the six singularities are on a similar large scale. His antidote to the political singularity is that we humans pro-actively encourage in conversation and that we ‘collaborate and foster critical thinking, using AI to battle misinformation bots,’… just how to do this remains unspecified.

Hulme’s answers to the other AI problems is similarly light on detail. For the economic singularity, why, re-skilling and welfare support for the unemployed are the answer, and those who don’t find jobs can find their own rewarding activities in their ‘pursuit of happiness.’ Regarding the social singularity of becoming immortal, Hulme utters not a word…becoming gods is a whole new ball-game.

For the technological existential threat, our only hope, Hulme opines, is to show AI that WE are not a threat. (Maybe it will get to like us?) So we have to stop fighting among ourselves over petty things and start ‘co-operating, act as one global species.’

Concerning the ecological threat, why it’s easy – It’s ‘putting people ahead of profit… holding leaders accountable. Regeneration is our responsibility.’ And for the legal singularity says Hulme, ‘ Regulation needs to move faster to ensure that the rights of the individual are balanced with those of societies. ‘ – Simple really.

See-saw, Marjorie Dawe …

Relating to the above solutions, Thomas Sowell’s book, ”A Conflict of Visions’ has some relevance. Thomas Sowell views people as conforming to one or the other of two visions of human nature. which he calls the ‘constrained ‘ and the ‘unconstrained’. The constrained vision regards human nature as fixed and fundamentally flawed, (Utopia is impossible,) the unconstrained vision sees human nature as perfectible, (sky’s the limit.)

Daniel Hulme seems to conform to the latter vision. Look at his non-specific solutions to the above AI problems. Humans en masse can change their behaviour and socially find solutions to each of the six singularities. But his solutions are based on a questionable premise, and some of his large-scale solutions, as grand schemes, seem unachievable.

So what are our chances of living in harmony with AI, as we have largely done with man’s best friend? Will we be able to create effective checks and balances for this smart machine that we invented, or will AI become our new Master?

 

82nd EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

An Essay on The Eternal Tao – and Chinese History.

Shen Zhou. – Poet on a Mountain.

Suggestiveness is the ideal in Chinese landscape painting, as in Shen Zhou’s painting entitled ‘Poet on a Mountain.’ What this landscape painting seeks to convey is philosophical. In its depiction of mountains and flowing rivers, Chinese landscape painting, like Chinese poetry, suggests a deep and inexpressible relationship between all things. In classical landscape painting you usually see a lone figure in the landscape, a human sage contemplating the Tao, or the Way… a mysterious relationship between nature and man that transcends both nature and man.

The sage is the acme of human relations.
Mencius, important 4th generation disciple of Confucius.

Philosophy, not organised religion, provided the spiritual basis of Chinese culture for more than two thousand years. Two different philosophies, Confucian realism and Tao idealism are its main source. In this essay I refer to the following source for insightful commentary about Tao and Confucian philosophy, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-Lan and for an historical account, The Fall of Imperial China by Frederick Wakeman Jr. I will, from now on, reference them only by their authors’ names and not the title of the book.

Though different philosophies, Confucian realism and Tao idealism share certain ideas, not directed to positive knowledge (matters of fact) but instead, to the elevation of the mind, a reaching out beyond the present world to values of moral cosmic harmony that transcend human ethics. One of these philosophies’ fundamental ideas is that the nature of man is originally good and perfectible, anyone is capable of striving to become a sage. Another idea, pertaining to the sage is ‘sageness within and kingliness without.’ Sageness within had to do with jen or human-heartedness, kingliness had to do with righteousness or truthful behaviour. Human-heartedness began with Confucian care of family and extended to the Tao concept of universal love.

These philosophic ideas concerning higher values were integral to China’s historic government, to be enacted and disseminated, top-down, by a literati class schooled in Confucian and Tao teachings via a demanding examination system.

In China’s historical hierarchy, at the head was the Emperor by way of a Mandate from Heaven, whose ideal character is that of the sageness, jen and righteousness. He ruled by example and through a bureaucracy selected by their knowledge, and hopefully practice of, Confucian and Tao precepts. As the world’s oldest monarchical system, China evolved a long and weighty civilization. Dynasty rule began in the pre-history Shang Dynasty on to the Chou Imperial Dynasty, about 1027 – 222 B.C. and on to the Ch’ in Dynasty, 221- 207 B.C. which brought centralisation to China. Then followed the Han Dynasty, 206 B.C – 220 A. D. that created a legal system and turned Confucianism into a state creed.

Following the Han Dynasty the central government collapsed but was regained by the Sui Dynasty and continued on with the T’ang and Sung Dynasties from 618A.D. to 1277 A.D when poetry and art flourished. A period of Mongol rule ensued until the Mongols were driven out of China in 1367 by the Ming Dynasty. In this and the China’s final dynasty, the Ch’ing Dynasty which revived Confucian thought, Chinese dynastic rule became a symbol of high culture to most countries of Central Asia.

The Ching’ Dynasty lasted up to modern times, when internal pressures combined with the European challenges, the Opium trade and practice of Gunboat Diplomacy leading to the Opium Wars and T’ai-p’ing Rebellion, produced effects that would bring the world’s longest monarchical system to an end.

During its long history sometimes one school of philosophy was more popular than the other and there were also times when each one evolved to be more like the other. Fung Yu-Lan says that there were Taoists in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the so called ‘Neo Taoists’, who attempted to make Taoism more like Confucianism, and there were also Confucianists in the 11th and 12th centuries, ‘Neo Confucianists’, who attempted to make Confucianism closer to Taoism. (F.Y-L p22.)

The Background of Chinese Philosophy.

China being a continental country, its geography and economic background has had a major influence on its philosophy. In the Confucian Analects, Confucius said: ‘The wise man delights in water; the good man delights in mountains. The wise move, the good stay still. The wise are happy, the good endure.’ ( F.Y-L. Ch 2.)

This suggests a different mindset between maritime and agricultural societies. From the time of Confucius until the end of the nineteenth century, Fan Yu-Lan tells us that, ‘no Chinese thinkers ever had the experience of venturing out upon the high seas.’ (Ibid.Ch 2.)

And since China is a continental country, its social history centred on the utilisation of land. Sons tended to live where their grandfathers and fathers lived, so the Chinese family system was a natural social evolution and Confucianism a philosophical justification of this system; the relationship between sovereign and subject, viewed in political terms, could also be regarded as an extension of that between father and son.

In the social and economic thinking of this land-centred culture, the most productive of its people were the farmers, and although scholars did not cultivate the land, since they were often landlords their fortunes were tied up with agriculture. These were the most valued social classes. Chinese philosophers distinguished between the root and the branch of society. The root referred to agriculture, and the branch to commerce. The farmer is productive and unselfish, he does not abandon his land. The people who deal with the branch are the merchants, who may go where they choose and are not obedient. Merchants were considered the lowest class in Chinese society.

These values are found in both trends of Chinese philosophy, Taoism and Confucianism, and Fung Yu-Lan observes that while the philosophies are poles apart from one another, ‘yet they are also the two poles of one and the same axis. They both express in one way or another, the aspirations of the farmer.’ (Ch2)

In the Confucian Book of Changes, part of the Six Classics comprising the cultural Legacy of China’s past, time is viewed as cyclical, the farmer’s experience of the four seasons, the waxing and waning of the moon, such movements are described as a ‘returning.’ Reversal is the movement of the Tao. In returning we see the mind of Heaven and Earth.’ (Book of Changes. Appendix 1.)

In returning we see the mind of Heaven and Earth…

Steeped in contemplation of the eternal Tao and living within the Confucian social and political structure centred on stability, always this returning, observing ‘the mind of Heaven and Earth.’

The ideal was enacted by way of a political hierarchy in which an emperor ruled, surrounded by relatives and trusted councillors. Below the emperor and carrying out his orders was the bureaucracy, staffed with the scholar-officials who had achieved the highest marks in the state civil service examination system and whose ranks extended down to the district magistrates. (Frederick Wakeman, p19.)

The lowest gentry group, part rank holder and part degree holder status, was called shen-shih, the shen referring to the sash worn by the imperial degree holder, the shih attesting to the aristocratic status of the non-bureaucratic members of this gentry class. The non-bureaucratic members of the gentry, as shih, were also expected to be the mainstay of an orderly system, as Frederick Wakeman describes it,’ guiding the peasants toward higher moral principles, altruistically dispensing charity and administering public works through a kind of noblesse oblige.’ (p28.)

The shen members of the shen-shih underwent a demanding and lengthy examination system intended to school them deeply in the Confucian Analects. There were three levels of proficiency. The top officials were those who passed the chin-shih or national exams, the lowest were those who passed the prefectural exam, the sheng-yuang. Only the chin-shih were certain of getting posts and achieving wealth and high status. For the approximately two million students who entered the examination system each year, a mere twenty thousand civil appointments were available. (F.W.p22)

The centre did not hold…

The view of human nature based on goodness and sage-hood failed to account for self interest. While the top officials in the bureaucratic hierarchy largely followed the Confucian ideal of patriarchal care, the lower gentry were barely able to support this way of life. Especially as population pressures after 1700 exacerbated problems in living standards for the gentry as well as the peasant population. For the lower gentry, commerce was ostensibly below them, and they had to contrive management – living that was extracted from the peasants. The sheng-yuang abused their formal offices just to survive. Educational endowments and irrigation funds were embezzled and proxy remittance fees raised higher and higher until peasants were paying gentry middlemen two or three times higher taxes than the actual quota. (F.W p32)

The same amount of land, more mouths to feed, and rainfall in northern China was uncertain from one year to another, no one knew where and when to expect drought or flood. Maintaining irrigation works and granary stores was an insurance against famine and also against peasant uprisings. Gentry and officials becoming too corrupt or an extravagant emperor syphoning off funds to build a summer palace, in times of bad weather events, could result in the dynasty losing the Mandate of Heaven through peasant revolution. After such upheavals in which a new contender gained power, a new dynasty would replace the old one, and like previous dynasties, be subject to the Mandate of Heaven.

‘The wise move; the good stay still.’

Before the Middle Ages, China was at the forefront of invention and technology with its prehistoric invention of the wheel (and early history wheelbarrow), the compass, paper making and production of silk. By the 9th century A.D. China had discovered how to make gunpowder and developed techniques in printing and porcelain production that led the world.

Prior to the Ming period, China had been extending its sea power for over three hundred years. Chinese merchants had developed a trade network in spices and raw materials with Indian and Muslim traders. By the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, China had reached a peak of naval technology that was unsurpassed in the world. The second Ming Emperor, Yong Le wishing to impress Ming power on the world, had a massive treasure fleet built, greater than the Spanish Amada, which made seven voyages, sailing as far as East Africa.

The Chinese people were ready to trade with the world but Yong-Le’s successor brought an end to China’s maritime history by banning ship building and trading abroad. This was steered by the Emperor’s officials, who instinctively distrusted innovation as a threat to their own positions. Henceforth, China’s sophisticated bureaucratic civilization, while periodically challenged by peasant rebellions that substituted one dynasty for another, remained an inert hierarchical social order that was never able to free itself from the historical fabric of a society opposed to change.

After that, Western countries began to surpass China. Confucian and Tao disdain for commercial life help explain why China did not have an industrial revolution.
Regarding disdain for commercial life, in the Tao writings known as the Lieh-tsu, there is the story of a prince asking an artisan to carve a leaf of jade and place it among the real leaves of a tree. The leaf was three years in the making and was so wonderfully carved that no one could distinguish it from the tree’s real leaves. Whereupon the Lieh-tsu observes that ‘if nature took three years to produce one leaf, there would be few trees with leaves on them.’ (FY-L. p26.) This is the view of those who love nature and condemn the artificial, not a view conducive to invention.

Confucian attitudes to commerce were more normative than descriptive. Confucian disdain for merchants contradicted the social reality that merchants were favourably regarded by peasants and artisans and played an important role in society. Trade grew in importance in the 10th century as the building of canals helped advance internal trade between North and South China, and in the Sung period, cities like Yangchou and Hangchou saw a surge in growth of marketing centres.

The growth of cities, however, was regarded as dangerous to social order and the stirrings of capitalism never grew into a revolution. Authorities took great care to control these unruly population centres until the 1900s’. Merchants were effectively prevented from acquiring any form of political autonomy in their own natural setting. They were also denied organizational autonomy. Merchant guilds were organized by officialdom and occupational groups were assigned to city blocks for easy supervision of quality control and price of products, membership of guilds, as well as the conferring of monopoly rights, for a price, and for the collecting of government taxes. (F.W. p43.)

And whilst the Silk Road was an ancient and much used trade route extending to the Mediterranean, its trade was not always secure, depending on the political situation in countries it went through and it involved a lot of interacting middle men. Though effective at commercial exchange, these Chinese merchants did not experience conditions that encouraged entrepreneurs in the production process, production was not a commercial and unified enterprise in China’s economy. The emperor benefited from the trade in silk, but officialdom regulated its trade as it did with other commodities.

Merchants were free to go where they wished but not free to do what they wished. The salt industry, was an enterprise that came close to giving particular merchants greater autonomy because this large and lucrative industry depended on a technocratic corps of merchants ‘whose professionalism made them and their staff somewhat impervious to central control.'(FW p 47.) In 1736, transportation and salt merchants were brought together under the aegis of five wealthy salt merchants who agreed to accept the major risks of the trade in return for a large share of the profits, behaving somewhat like the corporate giants of a capitalist system.

However, even though the salt merchants sometimes used their considerable economic resources to defy bureaucratic supervisors, they remained in thrall to their social values. One reason was the accessibility to elite status. As Wakeman notes:

‘Given the opportunity to purchase lower degrees, the openness of the examination system, and the absence of an aristocratic order impenetrable to the low born, chief merchants like the Ch’eng were able to acquire official gentry status for half of their male members. Such lineages could afford to hire the finest teachers of the realm to staff their household academies and prepare their scions to sit for the quota of examination degrees set aside by the government especially for them. Since they could so readily enter the elite themselves, individual merchants did not have an incentive to overturn the Confucian ranking system.’ (FW p 51.)

This quota was conferred as a reward for merchants’ contributions to the imperial treasury and perhaps it was also intended to keep the merchants within the prevailing system, which was its effect. This was another reason that China’s land centred culture was so durable, lasting until seventy years after the forcible opening of Chinese ports to foreign trade, and having been ignominiously defeated in its wars against the foreigners. It was only then that China’s 2000 year old Confucian monarchy came to an end.

End of an Empire…

While external aggression was a critical factor in the Chinese empire’s demise, internal weakness was also a factor and the Ch’ing Dynasty was already showing signs of decay. Exacerbated by enormous population increases and the weakness of a do-nothing central administration, a mid-century spate of peasant uprisings heralded the end of another dynastic cycle, or possibly the end of the Confucian Empire.

After China’s defeat in its war with Japan, and as Western powers began extorting lease holdings, institutional changes were attempted as part of the self-strengthening movement undertaken by the gentry as they tried to hold on to power. This movement carried out superficial changes only, adopting the doctrine ‘ Chinese learning for essence, Western learning for practice,’ and attempting to graft Western practices on to the traditional state. The Confucian Civil Service examination system remained the qualification for office and technical skills were in short supply. Modern projects remained organized in the tradition of the salt monopolies and profits were syphoned of instead of being reinvested.

An active member of the self strengthening movement, Kíang Yu-wei, whatever his internal motivations, attempted more fundamental changes. The reform movement that he persuaded the Emperor to adopt aimed at inaugurating the new services of a modern State. These changes were too much for the gentry at court, however, who supported the Dowager Empress in deposing the Emperor and rescinding his edicts.

In his criticism of out-moded institutions, and support for change and progress,
K’iang Yu-wei made a break with the past. His support for change and progress struck at the core of Confucian and Tao philosophic concepts of a cyclical and ordered cosmic universe and hierarchical, political system based on filial piety. He was even prepared to do away with the monarchy, that fundamental Confucian -Taoist ideal of sage leadership by moral example.

Another member of the self-strengthening movement, Yen-Fu, in his writings of 1895, that were based on J.S. Mill’ Essay on Liberty forced into a Spencer social darwinism framework, defined liberty as a tool of social of efficiency, and hence an ultimate means of attaining wealth and power. By showing a new preoccupation with the powerful State, Yen Fu criticised Confucianism for its stultifying influence on the past. He wrote:

‘Our Chinese sages were not unaware the universe is an inexhaustible storehouse and that if the subtle powers of the mind are given free vent, human ingenuity and intellectual capacity can attain unfathomable results. However, we simply turned aside and did not concern ourselves with it. In our philosophy of sustaining the people, we aimed only at harmony and mutual sustenance.’ (J.Levenson. ‘Confucian China and Its Modern Fate.’

As the concept of the rational State was an attack on Tao ideals of harmony and human- heartedness, Yen-wei, like K’ang Yu-wei also made a break with the past.

A Reflection on History’s Chequered History.

What was a high-minded civilization’s attempt to rule by means of a philosopher king (sage) eventually foundered due to practical realities. As with Utopias’, also based on notions of human perfectibility, which fail because of human frailty (leaders’ frailty as well as that of a flawed populace) and economic plans requiring singing from the same hymn book on all things, China was brought down by internal factors as well as the enemy at the gate.

While the ideal of China’s social and political system could not be realised in practice, its Mandate of Heaven and widespread acceptance of jen, curbed tyrannical excess and acted as checks and balances in the Chinese system for a long period, despite China’s weakness in fostering productivity, or in its later years, being unable to protect its sovereignty.

More reflections regarding history’s chequered history… All life, plants and animal species are opportunistic, a prerequisite for existence, we can’t help it. A study of human political and social history, whether from east or west, being a record of human actions over time, show that while humans are a resourceful and innovative species, even sometimes altruistic and principled, like Socrates or Ghandi, we are also aggressive, more war periods than peace in history, and we are frequently untrustworthy; history is a sad account of broken pacts on the international front, government underhand attacks on citizens’ freedoms at the national level, and people’s corrupt practices against each other at the local level.

The question arises, how can we protect ourselves from government or other people’s malpractices and remain free to innovate productive enterprises that help ourselves and others to flourish, stave off famines or a hostile takeover by other nations?

Contrary to mythology, no golden ages existed in history. All political systems have their flaws as do those who act within them. The best system among them, based on our coming to terms with human opportunism, creativity and also aggression, is one in which a citizenry is free to innovate and direct their own lives, but must be prevented from encroaching on these same rights in others. Power corrupts and absolute power is worse. This requires a national constitution that supports non-fiat equal rule of law for all its people.

Serfs favour a democratic, conservative system that is based on the above, such as England developed through cautious trial and error, from the signing of the Magna Carta up to modern universal suffrage. See my essay here…

Like Nature’s trial and error evolution, this political conservative approach has brought powerful changes, including a scientific revolution, from Francis Bacon to Isaac Newton, that changed our way of investigating the natural world, an industrial revolution that increased our food production and life expectancy, and evolving from Magna Carta, a political system promoting citizens’ rights of free speech and right to fair trial in law, that are not permitted by tyrannical governments.

Edmund Burke, reflecting on the French Revolution argued the benefit of having a Constitution to combat cavalier exercise of authority and ad-hoc decision making:

‘If Parliament had not been dissolved, it may have acted as a balance and corrective of the National Assembly and its judiciary owing its place to the National Assembly, not knowing by what law it judges nor under what authority it acts. (‘Reflections on the French Revolution.’ E. Burke. pp 208/9.)

A Serf Postscript…

‘The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would… assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.’ Adam Smith.

Seems to this serf that, given the importance of checks and balances in the English democratic system, we have not been as vigilant as we needed to be in preventing encroachment of the constitutional safeguards protecting our liberties. Human frailty again…Whatever happened to nullius in verba in the science of climate change with its non-scientific limitations on debate? Say, whatever happened to freedom of speech (and thought) with the impositions by globalist elites of WOKE thou shalt nots‘. And whatever happened to the Nuremberg Code during the Covid Mandates, regarding citizens’ rights to refuse medical treatments they choose not to take?

Like the Chinese Empire, our Western system is likely to go down, when due to human frailties, our checks and balances no longer work, apathy replacing vigilance, trust but do not verify… Well before Covid, we allowed radical visionaries to usurp and undermine our democratic institutions, fiat rule replacing equal rule of law for all. Question is: Can we be observant enough and resilient enough to resist these reckless visionaries and regain our freedoms?

81st EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

An Essay on Contrariness

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?

So goes the old rhyme allegedly describing Mary 1, daughter of Henry V11, briefly Queen of England and viewed as a harrier of Protestants in her realm. Whoever the verse may refer to, the word ‘contrary’ is intended as a pejorative term, the opposite of behaviour regarded as ‘harmonious’ or ‘cooperative’.

Herewith is a list of synonyms for ‘contrary’: adverse, antithetical, contradictory, dissident, non-conforming, opposed. All quite acceptable in the context of debate. But what about the following? … balky, censoring, discordant, obstructive, ornery, stubborn, perverse. Hmm, some unfriendly connotations there. And take a look at a list of antonyms regarding that ‘contrary’ word: agreeable, concordant, cooperative, friendly, harmonious, obliging. Who would not approve of behaviour described as such?

Think of the behaviour involved in the building of those medieval cathedrals. See here. So much cooperative behaviour, from the building of that first cathedral at St Denis, soaring heavenwards as a design befitting the House of God, to its imitations all over France and further afield. Taking decades, even centuries in the building, these harmonious structures were the combined effort of master designers and skilled artisans, financed by devout churchmen, often by the sale of Indulgences, or financed by town burghers, bakers, tailors, smiths and coopers, one association of townspeople literally giving the shirts from their backs.

Trial and error invention led to towers that amazingly soared higher and higher, whole walls of stained glass replacing masonry, columns of sculptured stone angels, flying buttresses to counter-balance thrust, these cathedrals were a miracle of innovative effort. Here is a medieval treadmill devised to transport building materials to upper stories.

But as the above link shows, the harmony and cooperation in constructing medieval cathedrals involved elements that were the contrary of the harmonious. The grand architectural vision of the Abbot at St Denis involved tension in its opposing forces, non-conformity and even obstinacy were needed to solve them; parts of the cathedral buildings often collapsed, new ways of doing things were necessary. And though architects often shared ideas, there was contest between towns in the building of these cathedrals.

Somewhat like the making of the gothic cathedrals are those other creative human endeavours we call The Arts – music, literature and the visual arts.

Harmony in The Arts, a turbulent affair.

Perhaps viewed as our most harmonious human endeavour, those compositions of classical music and orchestras performing them. But as with the cathedrals, harmony is achieved amidst tension. There’s patterning of key and metre but there’s dissidence too, each symphony, concerto or sonata, a journey with many surprises.

Here’s a link to an analysis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the conductor Giancarlo Guerrero that allows us to hear and visualise the symphony’s tensions and achieved harmonies. Even if you don’t have a grasp of musical theory, which I don’t, starting at about 2.00 on the video, you can look at the musical notation as you listen to the music and appreciate what Guerrero is saying. If you listen to the end you’ll hear the shock introduction of the human choir in the symphony. As in Wordsworth’s lines in his poem, ‘The Prelude’:

There is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society…

Harmony in all of the Arts is not born out of tranquility but out of struggle. The literary critic, Harold Bloom, and the art historian, Ernst Gombrich, examine modes of trial and error contest in literature and painting. In Harold Bloom’s book, ‘ The Western Canon,’ he views the history of Western literature as a poetics of conflict that he calls ‘agonistic.’ Like the great musical composers, he argues that creative writers draw on influences of precursors and then reinterpret and attempt to surpass them. ‘This anxiety of influence,’ he says, ‘cripples weaker talents but stimulates canonical genius.’ ( p10.)

As examples of anxiety of influence, Bloom describes Shakespeare borrowing from dramatist Christopher Marlowe his villainous protagonist, the Jew of Malta, and his experiments in iambic pentameter metre, then transcending these experiments in the characterisation and language of Iago in ‘Othello.’ Bloom refers to Chaucer, in his ‘Canterbury Tales,’ amusingly mentioning fictitious authorities while concealing Chaucer’s real precursors, Dante and Boccaccio. Then there’s Cervantes parrying his chivalric forerunners in ‘Don Quixote’; and in their epic depictions of heaven and hell, we see Dante challenging Vergil and Milton challenging Dante. Bloom also describes how a noted heir to Shakespeare’s dramatic influence, Tolstoy, refers to his precursor as trivial and immoral.

Ernst Gombrich, in his ‘Meditations on a Hobbyhorse and other Essays on the Theory of Art,’ analyses the dynamic history of western art and how form follows function, a trial and error process of schema and correction. Alain’s witty cartoon and Enscher’s wood cut, ‘Day and Night,’ suggest the hidden complexities involved in image reading.

Alain’s Cartoon / plus Enscher’s Wood block Day and Night.

Archaic conceptual art, focusing on ‘making’ rather than ‘matching’ made the conceptual image of convention its starting point; you must depict both eyes of your hobby horse or else it cannot fully see where it is galloping. No such requirement in representative art. Matching, involving a gradual correction of schema towards naturalism, for example, led to fore-shortening of limbs in figure drawing, or discovery of perspective and shadowing in landscape depiction once painting became viewed as a window on the world.

Concerning Evolution of Theories in Science.

Scientific investigation, another human endeavour seeking to explain aspects of our world, is by its nature confrontational, critical of competing theories and clashing with the natural world when the theory itself doesn’t fit the evidence. Scientific method is based on Nullius in Verba, – take no one’s word for it, and a process of guess and test, involving curiosity and non-conformity. However, present opinion can be entrenched and new theories likely to be resisted, especially if they clash with religious teaching, as Copernicus understood and Galileo experienced. Darwin was reluctant to publish his Theory of Evolution until he had more than enough data and was pressured by circumstances.

James Hutton, Scottish natural philosopher, boldly confronted the Bible’s teaching that the earth was only a few thousand years old by his theory that the earth was immeasurably old and constantly renewing itself in a cycle of erosion, deposition of eroded grains and organisms, metamorphism into sedimentary rock, then, activated by subterranean heat, uplifting of formerly submerged land; whereby the cycle began again, ad infinitum.

Hutton’s theory was deeply upsetting on two counts. Not only did it question the time span of earth’s genesis but it removed human origin from close to earth’s beginning to humans’ as mere late-comers in earth’s history.

By the time Hutton presented his theory to the Royal Society in 1785, he had a strong case based on geological data he had collected by way of his experience as a farmer and expert chemist, his field trips through Scotland, and his driving curiosity.

Sadly, Hutton’s presentation seems to have been largely disregarded, there were other preferred theories, such as the theory of a universal ocean covering the earth that was closer to biblical teaching, and only a few of Hutton’s colleagues were persuaded by his logic and data. But Hutton was stubborn and persevering.

Accompanied by scientists Sir John Playford and Sir James Hall, on a June afternoon in 1788, the three men set off in a row boat to explore the rugged cliffs along the coast near Edinburgh for evidence supporting Hutton’s theory that subterranean heat was an active agent in raising land from the ocean floor. As the boat approached Siccar Point, they found what they were looking for. Thrusting vertically through the cliffs were chimneys of ancient grey schist like rows of books on a library shelf, spectacular vindication of James Hutton’s contentious theory.

Despite the evidence and a book written by Hutton, Hutton was to die in 1797 without having had his theory publicly accepted. Playford and Hall generously put their own careers on hold to publicise Hutton’s work but with little success until the aging James Hall, in 1824, took young geologist Charles Lyell to Siccar Point and Lyell became an advocate of Hutton’s theory. In his famous three volume book, ‘The Principles of Geology,’ more than a generation after Hutton died, in its opening pages, Lyell gives credit to Hutton for the theory that directly contradicted biblical claims that the earth was only six thousand years old.

The bedrock of our natural world.

So what do you know… those human arts and science investigations are imbedded in Nature and use a similar trial and error method to Natures’ in the creation of their cultural and scientific artifacts and theories.

While human trial and error, however, is driven by human purpose, Nature’s trial and error takes place through blind evolution over eons of time, fitness wins because it works, with regard to a specific environment, and changes depend on what went before, flippers into wings, legs into arms, claws into hands. In a process of increasing complexity, gasses become solids, single celled organisms evolve into animals with backbones – and brains, but then, as in Hutton’s earth theory, there’s the process of entropy. Nature’s harmony, like any other, is fraught with change and challenge.

Primo Levi in ‘The Periodic Table,’ was described somewhere as the best science book ever written, but it’s also a mixture, an interaction of Primo Levi’s profound human experience and the meaning of chemistry. What comes across in his book is not chemistry as an arcane experience, but as the underlying reality of organic and inorganic stuff, trees, rocks, clouds, you and me.

Primo Levi describes his first months as a student at the University of Turin in the late 1930’s, and the day in his classes in General and Inorganic Chemistry, that he is assigned to the preparation of zinc sulfate. He describes the laboratory process:

‘The course notes contained a detail which at first reading had escaped me, namely, that the so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions, the one in praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life.’ ( Ch 3.)

As an Italian Jew living under Mussolini’s Fascist political system, Primo Levi reflects on his Jewish heritage. Since the publication of the magazine ‘Defence of Race,’ there was much talk about racial impurity and Levi says he began to feel proud of being ‘impure,’ where before he had scarcely considered his origins:

‘In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed. Fascism does not want them, forbids them, – wants everybody to be the same.’ (p28.)

Problems with the amenable…

Referring back to the list of words at the beginning of this essay, those antonyms for ‘contrary’: agreeable, concordant, harmonious and so on, there’s one word I left off the list and that word is amenable, dictionary meaning: ‘Open to and responsive to suggestion, easily persuaded and controlled.’ Hmm… echoes there of George Orwell’s dystopian novels or echoes of real life citizen behaviour in Hitler’s Germany, or Mao’s China. Necessary, the grain of salt or mustard seed, necessary that contrary observer in the crowd prepared to exclaim, ‘Wait a minute!’

80th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

That Invisible Serf’s Collar.

As the Chinese are wont to say, ‘We are living in interesting times …’ Interesting times, according to the Chinese definition are not unusual, though never precisely identical. War, famine and pestilence have been common occurrences throughout human history, bur history does not repeat itself, historicism is a false doctrine. While humanity shares a common ancestry and propensity for fighting with neighbouring tribes, our historical cultures and specific environments… changes in weather bringing drought and flood, and cultures emphasising varying norms, lead to different behaviours.

Oswald Spengler’s ‘ The Decline of the West,’ describing nations rather like individuals experiencing aging life cycles, or Karl Marx ‘Das Capital,’ predicting an inevitable revolution of the proletariat, are flawed historical constructs, though radical activists with a blueprint for future society would have us believe in the inevitability of their planned utopias.

Given our own interesting time of Woke censoring of citizens’ constitutional right to free speech and of government regulation by Covid mandate of citizens’ customary freedom of movement, it has been insightful for this serf to revisit Friedrich Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom.’ Hayek’s classic book, written in 1945, is well worth rereading regarding political issues of individual freedom, power and leadership, truth and propaganda – issues applicable to citizens’ right to independent thinking and not what officialdom decides we should think.

So here is an overview of ‘The Road to Serfdom’, and its warnings about the tyranny brought about by increasing attachment to socialist ideology and expansion of centralist authority.

Pertaining to individual liberty…

The first three chapters of The Road to Serfdom focus on freedom of the individual. In Chapter 1, The Abandoned Road, Hayek observes that only those whose memory goes back to the years before the First World War know what a liberal world would have been like. Hayek argues that:

We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we have been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism. And now that we have seen a new form of slavery arise before our eyes, we have so completely forgotten the warning, that it scarcely occurs to us that the two things may be connected.’ (Road to Serfdom. P13.)

Hayek saw a decline in knowing how classic liberalism works. Classic liberalism constantly has to fight the view that it is a negative creed offering particular individuals only a small share in the common progress – a progress that is more and more taken for granted and is no longer recognised as the result of a policy of freedom. Hayek argued that people desired progress, as in the past, ‘ but with the decline of the understanding of the way in which a free system worked, our awareness of what depended on its existence also decreased.’ (P 20.)

In Chapter 2 The Great Utopia Hayek notes that few today remember that socialism, in its beginning was frankly authoritarian:

‘The French writers who laid the foundations of modern socialism had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government…Saint-Simon even predicted that those who did not obey his planning boards would be ‘treated as cattle.’ (P24,25.)

No one saw more clearly than de Tocqueville, speaking in 1848, that socialism stood in irreconcilable conflict with democracy:

‘Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.’ (Ibid.)

To allay these suspicions socialists began to make use of the promise of a ‘new freedom.’ To apostles of liberty, freedom had meant ‘freedom from coercion,’ from the arbitrary power of others, the changed meaning meant ‘freedom from necessity,’ that is, equal distribution of wealth.

Regarding freedom from coercion, Chapter 3, Individualism and Collectivism, begins with this quote from Elie Halevie: ‘Socialists believe in two things which are absolutely different and perhaps even contradictory: freedom and organisation.’ Socialism is a species of collectivism which organises the economy according to a single plan displacing competition in society.’

Says Hayek: ‘These plans rest on a delusion and suffer from an inherent contradiction. It is impossible to assume control over all the productive resources without also deciding for whom and by whom they are to be used.’ (P41.)

Better that the wielders of coercive power create conditions under which the knowledge and intuition of individuals is given the best scope so that they can plan individually for their own needs.

The next four chapters of ‘The Road the Serfdom’ focus on Planning and Leadership as aspects of power.

Central Planning, it doesn’t end well…

In Chapter 4, The ”Inevitability” of Planning, Hayek notes that few planners are content merely to say that central planning is desirable, but like to add that we are compelled by circumstances beyond our control to substitute planning in place of competition. This assertion, by much iteration has come to be accepted as true, when in fact it is devoid of foundation: Says Hayek, the tendency towards monopoly and planning is ‘the product of opinions fostered and propagated for half a century, till they have come to dominate all our policy. ‘ (P46.)

The progressive growth of monopoly during Hayek’s time is not a necessary consequence of the advance of technology and the greater efficiency of mass production. A comprehensive study of concentration of economic power by the American Temporary National Economic Unit, 77th Congress found that monopoly was attained by collusive agreement and promoted by public policies, not by reason of lower costs. (P47.)

Regarding economic efficiency, Hayek argues that the complexity of modern economies, with all their details of changes ‘constantly affecting the conditions of supply and demand, can never be fully known by any one centre; what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for all individual decisions.’ Which is what the price mechanism does under competition. (P51/52)

In Chapter 5, Planning and Democracy, Hayek quotes Adam Smith concerning the Statesman who tells people how they should employ their capital and who assumes an authority ‘which can safely be trusted to no council and senate whatever, and which could nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.’ (P59.)

Nor can society espouse a common goal, as socialists desire. Hayek argues that the welfare and happiness of millions of people cannot be adequately expressed as a single end. The philosophy of individualism is not predicated on egoism, but starts from the indisputable fact that our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the whole society. From this it follows that within defined limits, individuals should follow their own preferences rather than somebody else’s.

Regarding the socialists’ common aim, Hayek observes that from the rituals of those primitive tribes bound by numerous taboos in their daily activities, human morality has evolved over time into merely circumscribing the sphere in which individuals can behave as they decide. ‘The adoption of a common ethical code comprehensive enough to determine a unitary economic plan would mean a complete reversal of this tendency.’ (P61)

Hmm… could irrational Rule by Taboo once again become a substitute for rational Rule of Law?

Planning and the Rule of Law.

In Chapter 6, of The Road to Serfdom, Planning and the Rule of Law, Hayek makes the important observation that ‘Nothing more clearly distinguishes conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the great principle known as Rule of Law,’ (P75.)

Rule of Law means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand so that citizens can foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and so plan their affairs accordingly.

Economic planning of the collectivist kind is arbitrary, it cannot facilitate citizens’ different aims and activities by way of general principles but must constantly be setting up distinctions depending on the circumstances of the moment, rule by fiat that favours the law giver’s vision. (P77.)

Hayek’s next chapter, Economic Control and Totalitarianism, makes the distinction between freedom and planning its focus. He begins with this quote by Hilaire Belloc. ‘The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.‘ Hayek adds that if we remember why planning is advocated by most people, can we doubt that power would be used to achieve the ends of which the planner approves and to prevent the ends of which the planner disapproves?

Planners shape us or guide us both as consumers and as producers . We are not free to choose what we think is worthwhile – our diversity will be reduced. The individual becomes a means to be used by authority in service of abstractions such as ‘Social Welfare’ or ‘ The Greater Good.’

Truth, Coercion and Persuasion.

Chapter 8 Who, Whom? begins with the quote by Lord Acton that ‘The finest opportunity ever given the world was thrown away because the passion for equality made vain the hopes for freedom.’ In support of Lord Acton, Hayek uses another quote by John Stuart Mill:

‘A fixed rule like that of equality might be acquiesced in… but that a handful of human beings should weigh everybody in the balance, and give more to one and less to another at their sole pleasure and judgement, would not be borne unless from persons believed to be more than men, and backed by supernatural powers.’ (P116.)

The process of persuasion calls for propaganda (as we saw in the adulation and obedience to leaders like Hitler, Mussolini and Mao Tse-tung.) Socialists hope to solve the problem of equality via education, by inculcating a single world view through indoctrination.

Of course persuasion can also be brought about by authoritarian coercion. In Chapter 9, Security and Freedom, we read, written in 1937, Leon Trotsky’s view on coercion:

‘In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.’ (P123.)

Hayek notes that in a free society there is no reason why the State cannot assist in providing for common hazards sickness or periods of unemployment, without increasing the threat to freedom. (Serfs wonder what we make of Western governments, as in Canada, stopping people’s bank accounts as a result of protesting against Covid mandates on vaccination.)

In Chapter 10. Why the Worst Get on Top Hayek examines why socialist history has been dominated by tyrants. To individualists of the 19th century, even socialists like Bertrand Russell, power was viewed as the arch evil. The desire to organize social life according to a unitary plan, observed Russell, resulted largely from the desire for power.

It is even more the outcome of the fact that in order to achieve power, collectivists must create power, Hayek argues. Collectivists’ success depends on the extent to which they achieve such power. What is frequently overlooked is that by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transferred but heightened, ‘that by uniting it in the hands of some single body, power formally exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before.’ (P149.)

Nor is that power more moral. The principle that the ends justify the means is immoral. There is literally nothing that can’t be done if it serves the good of the whole. ‘ The raison d ‘etat in which collectivist ethics has found its most explicit formulation knows no other limit than that set by expediency.’ (P151.)

Chapter 10, The end of Truth is one of the most important chapters of Hayek’s book, examining, as a consequence of collectivist propaganda, the destruction of all morals because it undermines one of morality’s foundations, ‘the sense of and respect for truth.’ (159.)

To make a collectivist system work everyone must pull together and aspire for the same ends. Everyone has to be persuaded to view officialdom’s ends as their own ends. Hayek shows how this has taken place in historic practice.

‘The need for such official doctrines as an instrument of and rallying the efforts of the people has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians. Plato’s ‘noble’ lies, and Sorel’s myths serve the same process as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the corporative state of Mussolini. They are all necessarily based on particular ‘facts’ which are then elaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.’ (P161.)

That Raison d’ Etat’.

No one may be permitted to think independently. All criticism must be silenced. There can be no science for science’ sake, or art for art’s sake. The whole apparatus of spreading knowledge, schools, cinemas, the press must be seen to conform to official doctrine, The word ‘truth’ no longer has its old meaning. It no longer describes something to be found by way of evidence independently examined for validity but is transformed into something laid down by authority.

The doctrines of national socialism in Germany are the culmination of a long evolution of thought. In the next chapter of Hayek’s book, The Socialist Roots of Nazism, he argues that it was the union of anti-capitalist forces of both the right and the left, a fusion of radical and conservative socialism, which drove out of Germany anything that was liberal.

‘The connection between socialism and nationalism was close from the beginning,’ says Hayek. ‘ It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism, Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassall – are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism.’ (P173.)

The war hysteria of 1914 which never went away after the German defeat is behind the development of National Socialism, and it was due to the assistance of old socialists that it grew in this period. Beside the influence of the above men, Hayek discusses the words of later contributors to National Socialism in Germany who also began as socialists, for example, Professor Werner Sombart whose book Handler und Helder, ( Merchants and Heroes,) was published in 1915. In his book Sombart welcomes the German war as the inevitable conflict between England’s commercial culture and Germany’s heroic culture.

Then in 1918 Professor Johann Plenge wrote Marx and Hegel which marked an Hegel renaissance among Marxist scholars. For Plenge, as with other socialists, organization is the essence of socialism. The chapter has quotes from Professor Plenge, Oswald Spengler and ‘the patron saint of National Socialism’ Moeller van den Bruck for whom liberalism is the enemy. He says:

‘Liberalism is a philosophy of life from which German youth now turns with nausea, with wrath, with quite peculiar scorn, for there is none more foreign, more opposed to its philosophy. German youth today recognizes the liberal as the arch enemy.’ (P184.)

Hayek observes that Moeller van den Bruck’s Third Reich was intended to give Germany a socialism undefiled by Western liberal ideas. And so it did.

There was a time, Hayek notes in Chapter 13, The Totalitarian in our Midst, when the possibility of what happened in Germany under Hitler would have been regarded by a majority of the German people as an impossibility. The fear of such an occurrence taking place in the liberal west might seem unlikely, but how far England has taken the German path in the last twenty years is apparent if one reads serious discussions of past and present thinkers on political and moral issues. ‘There is scarcely a leaf out of Hitler’s book which some body or other in this country has not recommended us to take and use for their own purposes.’ (P 189.)

And with the fatalistic belief of every historicist historian since Hegel and Marx the development against 19th century liberalism is represented as inevitable. Hayek cite the well known English scholar Professor E.M. Carr claims who claims that ‘we know the direction in which the world is heading and we must bow to it.’ (P 194.)

Apart from intellectual influences, the movement towards totalitarianism comes from the combined invested interests of organized capital and organized labour pursuing monopolist organization of industry. This is deliberately planned by the capitalist organizers of monopoly aiming for a corporate society to benefit themselves and a select union workforce. This will not be the outcome, observes Hayek:

‘While entrepreneurs may well see their expectations borne out during a transition stage, it will not be long before they will find out, as their German colleagues did, that they are no longer masters but will in every respect have to be satisfied with whatever power and emoluments the government will concede them.’ (P201.)

The last two chapters of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ focus on personal responsibility.

Individuals and Responsibility.

Socialists proclaim the end of economic man, disregarding the obvious higher standard of living that has continually developed under the capitalist system. They fail to acknowledge that it was the impersonal forces of the market that in the past made possible the growth of Western Civilization.

In Chapter 14, Material Conditions and Ideal Ends Hayek argues the crucial point that individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single purpose to which a whole society must be permanently subordinated. The end of personal responsibility means the end of morality:

Our generation is in danger of forgetting that morals are of necessity a phenomenon of individual conduct, argues Hayek. Morality only exists in a sphere in which the individual is free to decide what is good or bad, and what sacrifices are to be made as a consequence. ‘The members of a society who in all respects are made to do good things have no title to praise.’ (P217.)

Collectivism means relief from responsibility and is therefore anti-moral. Since Hayek published his classic book in 1945, a serf thinks that with the growth and influence of global institutions like the U.N and the E.U. Hayek’s final chapter, The Prospect of International Order, has become a very real issue:

‘The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assumes even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally… As the scale increases, the amount of agreement on the order of ends decreases and the necessity to rely on force and compulsion grows’ (PP.227, 228.)

People in a nation may be persuaded to make some sacrifice for their industry or agriculture but in a supranational society it is difficult to find common ideals of distributive justice. We should not try to rebuild civilization on a large scale, Hayek argues, because democracy has never worked well without a great measure of local government. Responsibility can only be learned when one is aware of one’s neighbour rather than merely having some theoretical perception of the needs of other people ‘out there.’

Concerning justice and international order, an institutional authority can only be just if it impartially keeps order and creates conditions in which all people can develop their lives. If it has to dole out materials and allot markets, it is impossible to be just. So called international experts are not experts, or Gods, – it is essential that supra -national authorities should be strictly circumscribed by Rule of Law. And that means a defined purpose- not expanding aims. Globalist institutions cannot be allowed to become tyrannical.

Then and now…

From that decline in appreciation of how liberalism fosters living standards, discussed in Chapter 1 to the growth of internationalism curtailing individual freedom, forewarned in Chapter 15, we have Western Civilization careering down the road to serfdom as a result of increasing socialist policies.

Though the U.N. (and the E.U.) may have begun with democratic sounding ideals, things have developed differently. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the establishment of the United Nations in 1948, proclaiming the aims of maintaining world peace and affirming the rights of people to take part in democratic elections. From its original headquarters in Geneva, the U.N. has expanded its role and its army of bureaucrats to new roles and venues, such as The International Court at The Hague (formulating international treaties that often take precedence over a nation’s own constitutional laws) and a pervasive International Monetary System and Education, (Core Curriculum) that are housed in Washington.

The E.U. with its vast amount of regulation has had a similar history, expecting diverse cultures to become one culture, diverse economies to become a single currency, one size fits all. Hayek’s book is as pertinent now as in the dark days when he published it.

 

 

79th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens…

Roses, mmm, … be-dewed or nor be-dewed … definitely one of my favourite things, subject of poets and namesake of kings.

Not so sure about whiskers on kittens, but roses: Gallicas, Albas, Centifolias, Damasks, Bourbons, Moss Roses, China and Tea Roses, you can’t grow too many roses. Many come with royal titles befitting the Empress of Flowers: La Reine Victoria, Archduke Charles, Duchesse de Brabant, Cardinal Richelieu, Chapeau de Napoleon, even named after nations, that first hybrid tea rose, La France!

The velvet texture of roses, the heavenly perfume, and oh what names these roses have, evocative of their mystery and delight: – Rosa Mundi, Crepescule, Old Blush, Peace, Ispahan, Sombreuil, Souvenir de Malmaison, Tuscany Delight.

And not to forget those other flowers in a list of favourite things that give delight. Personally I’m partial to cascades of freesias, the old-fashioned perfumed kind, or in late Winter, clumps of snowdrops and modest violets. In Summer I like displays of iris, heart’s ease and aquilegia – even prefer them to Wordsworth’s daffodils.

Take a walk down a suburban street and look at the gardens. You’re likely to come across one, just one in the street, that makes you stop and smile at its charm. Plants spilling over borders, arching and branching as nature intended them to do. Colourful blooms that complement each other, all harmony and interaction, bees buzzing, butterflies fluttering from flower to flower, birds singing in trees…

Then there are those manicured gardens in the same street, gardens where flowers are regimented in straight lines, and bushes, clipped and isolated, stand like lonely sentinels separated from each other by a ring of bare earth. Neatness is all – Walk on.

The Walking Tour…

Speaking of walking, another of my favourite things, (especially after my home state of Victoria, in Australia, has just suffered the longest Covid lockdown in the world…). I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay, ‘Walking Tours,’ in which he describes the joys of walking:

‘Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you … And then you must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon.’

Another robust essayist, William Hazlitt, agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson:

‘The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others.

I cannot see the wit,’ Hazlitt says, ‘of walking and talking at the same time … Is not this wild rose sweet without a comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of emerald? Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so endeared it to me you would only smile… ‘

I myself, on a walking tour, like to pause and watch birds going about their daily activities. On a good day, by the Yarra River I might come across a flock of Black Cockatoos C. funereus, well named for their dark plumage and mournful cry, eating hard-tack seeds in a wattle tree. Or sometimes I sight a Spotted Pardalote come down from a tall eucalypt. This tiny bird, so beautiful with its colourful, patterned plumage and white spots, like an enamelled Faberge Egg.

Other than going on walking tours. if you happen to have read some of my other serf journal editions you will know that I also enjoy more sedentary pastimes, like reading books, poems, essays and enjoying literature and the Arts in general.

There is no frigate like a book…

Love of reading, it tends to show early as an addictive pastime, and it did with me, after reading Hans Christian Anderson and A.A. Milne as a young child, I was hooked, mainly fiction but later non-fiction.

There is no frigate like a book to take you far away, says Emily Dickenson, and she’s right. A book, or briefly a stage play or a film, can transport you to other times as well as to distant places. You can’t do that by booking a jet-away holiday.

I particularly enjoy reading essays, like those of Stevenson and Hazlitt, mentioned above, or Michel de Montaigne writing his thoughts on experience and the need for scepticism since we can’t predict the outcome of radical change, Primo Levi essays on The Periodic Table, Ernst Gombrich writing about the cartoonist’s armoury or Sir Charles Eddington’s essay on the making of the human eye.

When I was studying at Melbourne University in the late 1970’s early 1980’s, radical views were very strong in the Humanities Department. Though we still had Professor Geoffrey Blainey presenting history as a study of real people making decisions within a problem situation, the radical view favoured the historicist (Marxist) view of history as a process of blind forces operating on irrational humans who are just helpless victims, puppets on a string, you might say. Coming across two books by Karl Popper, ‘ The Open Society and its Enemies,’ and ‘Objective Knowledge,’ a series of lectures on conjecture and refutation, helped rescue me from the dismal pervasiveness of radical messaging. No wonder they’re on my list of favourite books.

Fiction too, can expand understanding, enabling place and time travel, such like Bonze Age imaginings, Homer’s Odysseus, blown off course returning from the Peloponnesian Wars, visiting the Underworld or being imprisoned on the Cyclops cave. In later periods there are The Bard and Chaucer, even though they’re dead white males, and Jane Austin, for psychological perceptiveness. Today I enjoy Patrick O’Brien’s ‘Master and Commander ‘ well researched historical fiction, the British Navy fighting the French in the Napoleonic era, or Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall,’ political conniving in the Court of Henry V11. You are there!

Besides literature, so much in the visual arts and music to enjoy. Two of my favourite artists, Rembrandt in the West, Hokusai in the East.

The Arts – Enjoy them while you can…

I especially love Rembrandt’s etchings, for example, ‘The Three Trees,’ so refined in its lines, the finely etched clouds and the drama of the oncoming storm. Does the small hill, unusual in Dutch landscape, with its three trees, symbolise Calvary? I love its humanism. When you look closely, (click on parts of the image,) you can see a peopled landscape, a cartful of passengers, in the foreground people fishing in the dyke, and on the crest of the hill, an artist sketching… I think it’s Rembrandt himself.

Hokusai writing about his own work:

‘From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. By the time I was fifty
I had published an infinity of designs; but all I produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I learned something of the structure of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.’

It is true that Hokusai had dazzling technique and was a prolific artist employing wood block drawing. I also respond to his humanism, the energy of the small figures in his landscapes, fishermen battling the great wave or clambering up mountains, artisans working against the backdrop of Mt Fuji. Like Rembrandt, Hokusai is a master of composition.

Below, nature in playful mood sending leaves, hats, papers into the air, people clutching clothing, bodies bent against the wind’s force.

Regarding playfulness, I so like good comedy in films. Is it a dying art, what with WOKE culture so de jours. Comedy has to be daring, critical of inattentiveness, nature demands suppleness from living things, not rigidity. Laughing at ourselves is self corrective, no one wants to be the fool, though we might enjoy playing it. There’s Zero Mostel and Gene Wilders in Mel Gibbs comedy ‘ The Producers, ‘ a brilliant send up of Hitler’s Germany. Ridicule is a powerful weapon to direct against corruption. Could this film be made today?

Then there’s the gentle satire of Jaques Tati, making us laugh at human foolishness. Here is a preview of ‘Playtime, ‘ funnier when seen in context, old fashioned rural absurdities set against absurdities of modern, urban life.

One of our human achievements, La Musica! Definitely among my favourite things, tra la, the German greats, Beethoven and Bach… Listen to the 5th movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, that glorious duet between the flute and violin, like bird song, and that finale belted out on the harpsichorde by Karl Richter.

 

And here’s Argentina Tango Radio with this flash mob dancing The last waltz is a delight… Does nobody dance anymore?

 

78th EDITION SERF UNDER_GROUND JOURNAL

Opportunism Rules… A serf’s point of view.

A tree falls in the forest. Death of one tree, opportunity for others as light penetrates to the forest floor and a flurry of saplings reach towards the sky. One or two of them will survive, the rest will die in the shade, too slow to dominate the skyline.

In another geographic zone, a desert environment, there’s the Cactus plant that grows in a cleft of rock, and, less known, the Desert Marygold that grows down Mexico way, germinating in sand in a circular pattern; it’s a clever coloniser, taking advantage of a passing rain squall or a few drops of moisture, its hairy leaves blocking UV rays.

Opportunism rules, in the plant world as in all living species, fish, fowl and mammals, including those that burrow, herd or flock, or we versatile humans. Every living thing impelled to seize the day, Carpe Diem

Opportunist trial and error underlies the evolutionary activities of all living things obliged to respond to signals of fight or flight or food availability in their environment in order to survive. Opportunism became an evolutionary theory with Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species,’ and over a century later, Richard Dawkins,’ ‘The Selfish Gene.’ Darwin’s evolutionary theory held that all life is related and descended from a common ancestor. His theory of Natural Selection is a process in which a species’ random mutations are preserved when they support that species’ survival.

Herewith from Darwin’s autobiography, (p118):

‘In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement, Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animal and plants. It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; but I was so anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to write even the briefest sketch of it. In June 1842 I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages; and this was enlarged into one of 230 pages; which I had fairly copied out and still possess.’

Richard Dawkins argues in ‘The Selfish Gene’ that it is not the living species, plants, animals and humans, that are the replicators of Natural Selection, our lives are much too fleeting. Our genes, however, survive forever, well almost forever, and they, not us, are the natural candidates for basic selection.

Living species are just survival receptacles for our genes, the master programmers, programming for their own survival. Hence the book’s title, ‘The Selfish Gene.’ Not that a gene can be a conscious, purposeful agent, it is blind natural selection that makes it behave as if were purposeful. And here’s the thing, Dawkins finds that genes are not just selfish, they must also be cooperative. In the making of a human child or other forms of life, each gene has to cooperate in the embryonic development with other genes. No one gene, acting alone, can create a child’s arm or leg or the making of the human eye.

Dawkins says that ‘Embryonic development is controlled by an interlocking web of relationships so complex that we had best not contemplate it.’

He makes an analogy involving a rowboat and oarsman to illustrate how genes may be selfish and cooperative at the same time. The rowboat is the body of the organism, the oarsmen the genes. Each oarsman needs the other oarsmen to fill a rowboat so that he can win a race, hence he has a selfish aim. But in order to win he must cooperate to make a good fit with his team, which is what genes do, collaborating to ensure a body’s survival. Dawkins uses this analogy to show how examples of cooperation in nature can mask selfish motivations.

Dawkins also identifies a second replicator that he calls a ‘meme,’ that has evolved much later than genes in our world’s evolutionary history, mainly through human transmission. Memes are those ideas, theories, catch phrases, songs, technical processes etc that make up changing human cultures.

Dawkins’ memes argument is yet another theory identifying the changes in human creativity setting us apart from other living species that resulted from language development beyond signalling.

This development allowed momentous trial and error opportunism, development of tools, invention of the wheel by an unknown genius, development of the arts by people, inspiring paintings like Michelangelo’s fresco’s in the Sistine Chapel, writing and Shakespeare’s tragedies, architecture and Brunelleschi’s dome on the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, sublime music like Beethoven’s symphonies, mathematics and working out directions when lost at sea, engineering like Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon River, and there’s agriculture, including Norman Borlaug’s wheat developments that saved more than a million people from starvation… and yes, we know, other developments less propitious.

Lots of implications may be drawn from the drive of opportunism as a basis of life, implications of how human cultures may best allow for this evolutionary fact and respond to its political ramifications, issues of freedom and control.

Freedom, Control and Us.

Writing in 1938 and in the dark days of World War 11, when it looked like Hitler’s attempts at world dominance might succeed, Karl Popper’s two-volume book, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ gave a reasoned appeal for upholding the open society of rational argument against the fascist propaganda and violent actions of Hitler’s Germany. His book expresses Popper’s felt need to critically examine totalitarianism in its various guises and to defend the values of open, democratic society that were being threatened.

In ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ Popper examines the flawed doctrine of historicism, that supposedly conforms to laws of development – equating the Social Sciences with physical nature. Historicism is the doctrine of historical necessity and human destiny, expounded by Plato, Hegel and Karl Marx and still influential today, Plato formulating an ideal republic based on his theory of forms, Hegel combating liberalism in the authoritarian state of Prussia’s King Frederic William III, and Marx in industrial England, arguing inexorable laws of social development and class war.

Popper speaks against the influence of powerful leaders invoking destiny to support their authoritarian theories. He argues the importance of checks and balances to control the power of governments over their people, and favours open society for the citizens, who best know their own interests, and who only require that freedom to be constrained where it impinges on the freedom of someone else.

In the preface to his book on Plato, Hegel and Karl Marx, Popper says:

‘If in this book harsh words are spoken against some of the greatest among the intellectual leaders of mankind, my motive is not, I hope, the wish to belittle them. It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilisation is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men. Great men may make great mistakes; and as the book tries to show, some of the greatest leaders of the past supported the perennial attack on freedom and reason. Their influence, too rarely challenged, continues to mislead those on whom civilisation depends, and to divide them. The responsibility for this tragic and possibly fatal division becomes ours if we hesitate to be outspoken in our criticism of what admittedly is a part of our intellectual heritage. By our reluctance to criticize some of it, we may help to destroy it all.’

Plato’s Noble Cause Corruption.

In Popper’s first volume, ‘The Spell of Plato,’ he describes Plato’s blueprint for a utopian society, a return to static tribal society. Plato wrote ‘The Republic,’ as a response to his belief in the inevitable decay of all things from their original perfect form. Plato believed that it was only possible to break this ‘law’ by establishing an authoritarian hierarchical State which he formulated based on his myth of the metals in men, gold, silver and bronze, where only a philosopher king selected from the gold caste should rule.

Here’s the result of living in Plato’s hierarchical State:

‘The greatest principle of all, ‘ says Plato, ‘is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace – to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up or move, or wash, or take his meals, only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.’ (The Spell of Plato. Chapter 1.)

Raison d’Etat and Hegel.

If you listen to Hegel, things can’t go wrong in the powerful State. ‘The Universal is to be found in the State.’ writes Hegel…’The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth.’
Where Plato saw history moving away from perfection towards decay, Hegel teaches the reverse, an historical trend towards a self-realising higher good.

Motivated by self interest, official philosopher of the authoritarian rule of Frederick William III of Prussia, Hegel debauched language and logic to support his historicist dogma. Hegel replaced logic with his own form of argument that he called Dialectics. Employing sophistry, Hegel argued that contradictions in an argument do not matter. He argued this by claiming that contradictions are ‘welcome in science’ as a means of scientific progress. He doesn’t add that this is because contradictions in science point to flaws in and these flawed theories with their contradictions can now be eliminated from the ongoing enquiry. Hegel focuses on the phrase, ‘welcome in science’ and omits the rest. He is turning the argument on its head, he is claiming that contradiction is welcome in argument, per se. This destroys criticism in argument and by doing so Hegel makes his own philosophy secure from critical attack.

Popper concludes that we need to take Hegel’s false doctrine seriously because it has had incalculable influence on fascist and Marxist political philosophies and is still very powerful in the social and political sciences today. (O.S. Vol 2, p.30.)

Marx misconstrues.

‘It is tempting to dwell upon the similarities between Marxism, the Hegelian left wing, and its fascist counterparts,’ says Popper, ‘Yet it would be utterly unfair to overlook the difference between them. Although their intellectual origin is nearly identical, there can be no doubt of the humanitarian impulse of Marxism. Moreover, in contrast to the Hegelians of the right wing, Marx made an honest attempt to apply rational methods to the most urgent problems of social life. The value of this attempt is unimpaired by the fact that it was, as I shall try to show, largely unsuccessful.’ (O.S.Vol 2. p81.)

Popper pays tribute to Marx identifying the importance of situational analysis and economic conditions as a basis for understanding human history, Marx’s materialism, or ‘economism’, says Popper, ‘is insightful but only so long as it is not sweepingly interpreted as the doctrine that all social development depends upon economic conditions, which is palpably false. The history of Marxism itself furnishes examples that clearly falsify Marx’ exaggerated economism, for example, it was Lenin’s ‘ideas’ expressed in slogans that became a driving force of the Russian Revolution. (p108.)

Popper argues that the historicism of Karl Marx is itself a strand of an intellectual tradition from Plato to Hegel, which viewed history as a process of necessity, whereby nothing we can do will avert what is to be. The arguments underlying Marx’s historical prophesy are invalid. ‘Marx ‘s ingenious attempt to draw prophetic conclusions from observations of contemporary economic tendencies failed.’ (p193.) The conditions of the working classes under capitalism did not worsen, leading to social revolution, as Marx predicted, instead they markedly improved. Nor did the State wither away, but conversely, its power, under Stalin, increased.

Popper is arguing maximum freedom for each individual citizen citing Immanuel Kant’s dictum that the freedom of man must not be restricted beyond what is necessary to safeguard an equal freedom for all.’ (O.S.Vol 2, p44.)

Popper’s critical attitude regarding the habit of deference to great men is supported by the American economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell describes his own experience in academia and working for government which taught him how many intellectuals are attracted to visionary thinking, he calls this ‘the vision of the anointed,’ which is based on confident idealism unsupported by checks on the data.

Thomas Sowell’s view of visionary thinking and the great man.

In his book, ‘A Conflict of Visions,’ Sowell identifies two conflicting visions that fundamentally apply to how we look at human nature. There’s the constrained vision of human nature, a view that human nature is fundamentally of a flawed and fixed nature. Then there’s the unconstrained view that human nature is a blank slate and human suffering lies in the failure of other people to remedy injustice, and there is no other reason for human suffering.

These two visions, Sowell observes, the constrained and unconstrained visions, can be seen throughout history from Adam Smith to Rousseau, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Barrack Obama. The first places reliance on experience of the many, evolving over time, and the setting up of checks and balances in law to control monopolies on power- no single person is capable of learning everything by just figuring it out; whereas your unconstrained individual is less distrusting of State power and will argue that we just need someone to come along and fix the law. Sowell distrusts individuals who make their own constitutional interpretations as ad hoc decision making whereby we no longer have law.

Thoughts in conclusion…

Maximize the freedom of the individual, minimize the power of government, encourage creativity and entrepreneurship with some legal provisos against long term monopoly of an industry. We can’t predict the outcome of these trial and error actions but trial and error is Nature’s way and without it we would stagnate and die.

As with the natural world, the economist Joseph Schumpeter observed that our human economic systems involve dynamic disequilibrium. As he saw it, the profit earned by an entrepreneur is the cost of staying in business, which not only benefits the entrepreneur but benefits investors and others. For example, in the high-risk restaurant business, when the restaurateur succeeds, his employees and customers benefit also. However, when he doesn’t succeed, he and his investors have to pay the cost and not the rest of us. (Conversely, with the failed enterprises of governments, it is the citizens that pay the bill.)

Regarding minimizing government, government is not good at creating, other than red tape. And remember that government officials are opportunistic also… and rarely will their objectives coincide with ours.

Serf doing that unconstrained-vision-thing…

What to do? Reduce Government you cits, it’s in your own interest. Revisit those constitutional constraints on power creep. Something along the lines of setting up a lean and mean citizen task committee on the line of jury duty with some well respected retired legal expert as adviser, and a few politicians from conflicting sides of the political spectrum to assist. The task force to operate every few years, with different members, each time, tasked with identifying failure of checks and balances, actions not in accordance with the Constitution and suggesting ways of compliance. If judged legal, the task force’s findings to be acted upon within a set time and in a public manner.

The same process should be adopted, regularly, to see that our main public institutions are fulfilling their fundamental duties, specific questions, for example, concerning whether the Education Department or the Teacher’s Unions are over-riding key educational aims for students.

Curtailing power creep? Yeah – it sounds unlikely doesn’t it? There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, between framed aims and finding means…but serfs think a way urgently needs to be found – and we have come back from the brink before.