Showing posts with label sapolsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sapolsky. Show all posts
Convergence
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I do this research in east Africa, and every now and then I’ve gone to […] Mount Kenya which is […] an equatorial glacial mountain. If you go up about fifteen-thousand feet almost everything is dead from the cold, and there’s basically only about four or five different types of plant up there. Only a small number [of plants] survive in that environment, and each one of them is very bizarre and distinctive looking. In some way or other, that’s what it takes to survive up there.
I have this friend who does research up in the Andes […], a glacial equatorial mountain on the other side of the globe. One day I’m sitting around and looking at some of his pictures [from this mountain] and suddenly I say “that’s the exact same plant [that I found in Mount Kenya]! How can that plant be over there?”
They are completely unrelated plants - taxonomically of no connection whatsoever - but what they have done is converge onto the same shape. In some mysterious way, if you’re going to be a plant growing on the equator at about fifteen-thousand feet there’s only about four or five different ways of appearing [..] and of surviving an environment like that. There is massive convergence.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'22. Emergence and Complexity'
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Bondage
Global - Local
Bureaucracy - Trust
Law - Custom
Formal - Informal
When
a thing reaches a certain size the bonds between its constituent parts
begin to weaken. These bonds consist of the sorts of things that tie
things - tie people - together; and imperative amongst them is 'trust.'
Because real trust does not function at larger scales, we must invent ways of simulating, or augmenting it. In much the same way that we augment the human eye with telescopes and microscopes in order to allow us to 'see' at non-human scales, we augment our human capacity for trust with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is, amongst other things, a formalised simulation of 'trust.' It substitutes trust engendered through familiarity, with 'certification' by means of 'testing.' For instance, I do not need a criminal record check (known in this country as a DBS check) in order to be around the children of friends or relatives, but I do need one in order to work with children in my community.
In modern societies we are asked to experience ourselves as a part of an increasingly large collective. If we look at the diagram above, where once circle A would have defined the boundaries of our collective, now it is defined by D.
As the
perimeters of our collectives widen, the need for simulated bonds
increases. If human trust fails beyond the borders of A, then any level
beyond this will require artificial trust. At these levels it is our red
tape that binds us; and increasing levels of scale (i.e. complexity) require increasing amounts of red tape.
The fact that we often feel bogged down by red tape is a sign that we're operating at an unhealthy scale. I'm not saying that there are too many people, rather that the way we think of ourselves - and organize ourselves - is dysfunctional.
Inasmuch as we are imbalanced in favour of the large-scale, then our remedy must involve tipping the scales back toward the small-scale. In practical terms this involves, amongst other things, devolving power; splitting our over-grown structures into smaller pieces, and reducing the scale of things to a level in which artificial trust is manageable, and in which human trust can thrive.
Because real trust does not function at larger scales, we must invent ways of simulating, or augmenting it. In much the same way that we augment the human eye with telescopes and microscopes in order to allow us to 'see' at non-human scales, we augment our human capacity for trust with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is, amongst other things, a formalised simulation of 'trust.' It substitutes trust engendered through familiarity, with 'certification' by means of 'testing.' For instance, I do not need a criminal record check (known in this country as a DBS check) in order to be around the children of friends or relatives, but I do need one in order to work with children in my community.
In modern societies we are asked to experience ourselves as a part of an increasingly large collective. If we look at the diagram above, where once circle A would have defined the boundaries of our collective, now it is defined by D.
The fact that we often feel bogged down by red tape is a sign that we're operating at an unhealthy scale. I'm not saying that there are too many people, rather that the way we think of ourselves - and organize ourselves - is dysfunctional.
Inasmuch as we are imbalanced in favour of the large-scale, then our remedy must involve tipping the scales back toward the small-scale. In practical terms this involves, amongst other things, devolving power; splitting our over-grown structures into smaller pieces, and reducing the scale of things to a level in which artificial trust is manageable, and in which human trust can thrive.
How do you define a nation?
It is a land whose citizens, in their overwhelming majority, share a common culture, sense of identity, heritage and traditional roots.
[James Goldsmith]
The Trap, p.48
Although there is some debate among scientists, it seems clear that
approximately 50,000 years ago our species existed in pretty much its
fully formed version, complete with language and art [...] There hasn’t been much evolution—biologically,
at least—in the intervening tens of thousands of years.
Our species likely evolved to adapt to an environment that was native to Africa all those many millennia ago. And this environment looked very different from today’s.
We evolved to live in small groups or tribes of perhaps 20 to 50 individuals. Many of these people, in fact, would have been related to us. Certainly, all of these people would have known each other.
[David B. Feldman]
Does Truth Still Exist, or Are There Just Alternative Facts?
[...] social capital refers to the broad levels of trust and efficacy in a community. Do people generally trust one another and help one another out? Do people feel an incentive to take care of commonly held resources (for example, to clean up graffiti in public parks)?
Most studies of social capital employ two simple meaures, namely, how many organizations people belong to and how people answer a question such as, "Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance?"
What [researchers] have shown is that at the levels of states, provinces, cities and neighbourhoods, low social capital predicts bad health, bad self-reported health and high mortality rates [...] high degrees of income inquality come with low levels of trust and support which increases stress and harms health.
[...] we have chosen to forgo the social capital that comes from small, stable communities in exchange for unprecedented opportunities for mobility and anonymity. As a result, all measures of social epidemiology are worsening in the U.S.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'Sick of Poverty'
Our species likely evolved to adapt to an environment that was native to Africa all those many millennia ago. And this environment looked very different from today’s.
We evolved to live in small groups or tribes of perhaps 20 to 50 individuals. Many of these people, in fact, would have been related to us. Certainly, all of these people would have known each other.
[David B. Feldman]
Does Truth Still Exist, or Are There Just Alternative Facts?
[...] social capital refers to the broad levels of trust and efficacy in a community. Do people generally trust one another and help one another out? Do people feel an incentive to take care of commonly held resources (for example, to clean up graffiti in public parks)?
Most studies of social capital employ two simple meaures, namely, how many organizations people belong to and how people answer a question such as, "Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance?"
What [researchers] have shown is that at the levels of states, provinces, cities and neighbourhoods, low social capital predicts bad health, bad self-reported health and high mortality rates [...] high degrees of income inquality come with low levels of trust and support which increases stress and harms health.
[...] we have chosen to forgo the social capital that comes from small, stable communities in exchange for unprecedented opportunities for mobility and anonymity. As a result, all measures of social epidemiology are worsening in the U.S.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'Sick of Poverty'
A true city is not an encampment for transient visitors, nor a complex of motorways, nor an ephemeral agglomeration of living quarters.
It is a long-standing human settlement, a community spanning generations, a complex social organization inspiring commitment and pride. Every architectural blight, every symptom of social breakdown, should pierce deep into the heart of its citizens and provoke a salutary reaction.
Siena, in Italy, is perhaps the best example of a healthy city. That is why it has maintained social stability and a negligible incidence of crime.
[James Goldsmith]
The Trap, p. 78
We always need both freedom and order.
We need the freedom of lots and lots of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and co-ordination. When it comes to action, we obviously need small units, because action is a highly personal affair, and one cannot be in touch with more than a very limited number of persons at any one time. But when it comes to the world of ideas, to principles or to ethics, to the indivisibility of peace and also of ecology, we need to recognise the unity of mankind and base our actions upon this recognition.
What I wish to emphasise is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: there is no single answer.
For his different purposes man needs many different structures, both small ones and large ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive. Yet people find it most difficult to keep two seemingly opposite necessities of truth in their minds at the same time. They always tend to clamour for a final solution, as if in actual life there could ever be a final solution other than death.
For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness - where this applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite direction.)
[E.F. Schumacher]
Small is Beautiful, p. 53-4
Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty - requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites - the achievement of liberty required constraints upon individual choice.
This limitation was achieved not primarily by promulgated law—though law had its place—but through extensive social norms in the form of custom. This was so much the case that Thomas Aquinas regarded custom as a form of law, and often superior to formalized law, having the benefit of long-standing consent.
Liberalism reconceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms. The only limitation on liberty, in this view, should be duly enacted laws consistent with maintaining order of otherwise unfettered individuals.
Liberalism thus disassembles a world of custom and replaces it with promulgated law.
Ironically, as behavior becomes unregulated in the social sphere, the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking and regulatory activities. “The Empire of Liberty” expands apace with an ever-enlarging sphere of state control.
Because self-rule was achieved only with difficulty - requiring an extensive habituation in virtue, particularly self-command and self-discipline over base but insistent appetites - the achievement of liberty required constraints upon individual choice.
This limitation was achieved not primarily by promulgated law—though law had its place—but through extensive social norms in the form of custom. This was so much the case that Thomas Aquinas regarded custom as a form of law, and often superior to formalized law, having the benefit of long-standing consent.
Liberalism reconceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms. The only limitation on liberty, in this view, should be duly enacted laws consistent with maintaining order of otherwise unfettered individuals.
Liberalism thus disassembles a world of custom and replaces it with promulgated law.
Ironically, as behavior becomes unregulated in the social sphere, the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking and regulatory activities. “The Empire of Liberty” expands apace with an ever-enlarging sphere of state control.
The expansion of liberalism rests upon a vicious and reinforcing cycle in which state expansion secures the end of individual fragmentation, in turn requiring further state expansion to control a society without shared norms, practices, or beliefs.
Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any deeply held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry. Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives, political policies, and legal mandates, undermining voluntary civic membership and requiring an ever-expanding state apparatus to ensure social cooperation.
A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of her freedom.
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.xiii, xiv, 62-3
My study of the family suggested a broader conclusion: that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race.
It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ.
Love, on the other hand-flesh-and-blood love, as opposed to a vague, watery humanitarianism-is attracted to complementary differences, not to sameness.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.36
“[…] I am a Dane, a Swede, or Frenchman at different times, or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what country-man he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world."
The cosmopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive.
"Benevolence," moreover - the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice - presents itself to us as a singularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion.
We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand - “my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind” - leaves us a little cold.
Burke attacked “these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration,” just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. “That this persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.122-3
Liberalism thus increasingly requires a legal and administrative regime, driven by the imperative of replacing all nonliberal forms of support for human flourishing (such as schools, medicine, and charity), and hollowing any deeply held sense of shared future or fate among the citizenry. Informal relationships are replaced by administrative directives, political policies, and legal mandates, undermining voluntary civic membership and requiring an ever-expanding state apparatus to ensure social cooperation.
A massive state architecture and a globalized economy, both created in the name of the liberation of the individual, combine to leave the individual powerless and overwhelmed by the very structures that were called into being in the name of her freedom.
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.xiii, xiv, 62-3
My study of the family suggested a broader conclusion: that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race.
It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they differ.
Love, on the other hand-flesh-and-blood love, as opposed to a vague, watery humanitarianism-is attracted to complementary differences, not to sameness.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.36
“[…] I am a Dane, a Swede, or Frenchman at different times, or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what country-man he was, replied that he was a citizen of the world."
The cosmopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive.
"Benevolence," moreover - the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice - presents itself to us as a singularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion.
We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand - “my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind” - leaves us a little cold.
Burke attacked “these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration,” just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. “That this persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.122-3
--
Cut all local, vivid ties and expand loyalty and care to the abstract universal of the entire race, and finally we may have World Peace... at the cost of World Nihilism.
On the contrary, he valued sociability far more highly than most individualists, and he rejected the culture of philanthropy and “improvement” precisely on the grounds that it would replace the fellowship of friends and neighbors with the vague and watery fellowship of humanity in general.
“Your men from whom all traces of their native land are obliterated, who have that enlarged philanthropy which overlaps all geographical distinctions, and grasps with equal affection all lands, races, and individuals, are quite too refined and transcendental for daily use."
Cosmopolitanism represented a higher form of solitude, as Brownson saw it. In developing this argument, he rested his case, as always, on assertions about the nature and destiny of man—that is, about the ends proper to his existence:
The nature of man is to live by means of an uninterrupted communion, with other men and with nature, under the three precise and definite forms of family, country and property. His destiny, that is, the design of his Creator in his constitution, is not, then, to place himself physically, sentimentally, and intellectually in communion with all men, and with all the beings of the universe. This were to annihilate him by the vast solitude of Sahara.
Brownson made these observations in the course of one of his many attacks on the “no-government” philosophy advocated by so many individualists. Paine's cosmopolitan humanitarianism and Thoreau's misanthropy both sprang from the fallacy that man could outgrow the need for government - that is, for active intercourse with those to whom he was bound by “local attachments," a "preference for his own natal soil," and the peculiar circumstances" in which he was raised.
Ideologies of self-sufficiency and ideologies of self-annihilation (in which the man was lost in the citizen, in Paine's case in the citizen of the world) came to the same thing. Both undermined the "condensed" form of solidarity - the "love of family and fatherland" - that human nature required if it was to flourish. Both made excessive demands on human nature, overlooking the crucial fact that “the finite seeks in vain to master the infinite."
The idea conveyed by this last phrase ties together the several themes in Brownson's social thought the inseparability of matter and spirit, politics and religion; the formative discipline of "peculiar circumstances" as the necessary background of mature personality; the need for any vivid apprehension of reality to be embodied in a particular (and inevitably divisive) set of loyalties rather than a watery eclecticism.
Brownson never forgot that human beings have bodies and that "man disembodied," divested of the weight of circumstances and associations, "would be no more man, than the body is man when deprived of the spirit.”
On the contrary, he valued sociability far more highly than most individualists, and he rejected the culture of philanthropy and “improvement” precisely on the grounds that it would replace the fellowship of friends and neighbors with the vague and watery fellowship of humanity in general.
“Your men from whom all traces of their native land are obliterated, who have that enlarged philanthropy which overlaps all geographical distinctions, and grasps with equal affection all lands, races, and individuals, are quite too refined and transcendental for daily use."
Cosmopolitanism represented a higher form of solitude, as Brownson saw it. In developing this argument, he rested his case, as always, on assertions about the nature and destiny of man—that is, about the ends proper to his existence:
The nature of man is to live by means of an uninterrupted communion, with other men and with nature, under the three precise and definite forms of family, country and property. His destiny, that is, the design of his Creator in his constitution, is not, then, to place himself physically, sentimentally, and intellectually in communion with all men, and with all the beings of the universe. This were to annihilate him by the vast solitude of Sahara.
Brownson made these observations in the course of one of his many attacks on the “no-government” philosophy advocated by so many individualists. Paine's cosmopolitan humanitarianism and Thoreau's misanthropy both sprang from the fallacy that man could outgrow the need for government - that is, for active intercourse with those to whom he was bound by “local attachments," a "preference for his own natal soil," and the peculiar circumstances" in which he was raised.
Ideologies of self-sufficiency and ideologies of self-annihilation (in which the man was lost in the citizen, in Paine's case in the citizen of the world) came to the same thing. Both undermined the "condensed" form of solidarity - the "love of family and fatherland" - that human nature required if it was to flourish. Both made excessive demands on human nature, overlooking the crucial fact that “the finite seeks in vain to master the infinite."
The idea conveyed by this last phrase ties together the several themes in Brownson's social thought the inseparability of matter and spirit, politics and religion; the formative discipline of "peculiar circumstances" as the necessary background of mature personality; the need for any vivid apprehension of reality to be embodied in a particular (and inevitably divisive) set of loyalties rather than a watery eclecticism.
Brownson never forgot that human beings have bodies and that "man disembodied," divested of the weight of circumstances and associations, "would be no more man, than the body is man when deprived of the spirit.”
Man grasps the universal only through the particular: this was the core of Brownson's Christian radicalism.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.193-4
This interrelationship of the virtues explains why they do not provide us with a number of distinct criteria by which to judge the goodness of a particular individual, but rather with one complex measure.
The application of that measure in a community whose shared aim is the realization of the human good presupposes of course a wide range of agreement in that community on goods and virtues, and it this agreement which makes possible the kind of bond between citizens which, on Aristotle's view, constitutes a polis.
That bond is the bond of friendship and friendship is itself a virtue. The type of friendship which Aristotle has in mind is that which embodies a shared recognition of and pursuit of a good. It is this sharing which is essential and primary to the constitution of any form of community, whether that of a household or that of a city.
'Law-givers,’ says Aristotle, 'seem to make friendship a more important aim than justice' [...] and the reason is clear. Justice is the virtue of rewarding desert and of repairing failures in rewarding desert within an already constituted community; friendship is required for that initial constitution.
Estimates of the population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries vary widely, but the number of adult male citizens clearly ran into some tens of thousands. How can a population of such a size be informed by a shared vision of the good? How can friendship be the bond between them? The answer surely is by being composed of a network of small groups of friends, in Aristotle's sense of that word.
This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world.
This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations; but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man's good as such.
Friendship of course, on Aristotle's view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance to and a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant.
In a modern perspective affection is often the central issue; our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much. 'Friendship' has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than of a type of social and political relationship.
E.M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis; he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives.
Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage.
That they lack the bond of friendship is of course bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.182-3
It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life [...]
Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them.
Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. Only those goods in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration.
It is, from both standpoints, as though we had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with a group of other individuals, each of whom is a stranger to me and to all the others. What have to be worked out are rules which will safeguard each one of us maximally in such a situation.
[...] modern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. We still of course, even in modern society, find it difficult to think of families, colleges and other genuine communities in this way; but even our thinking about those is now invaded to an increasing degree by individualist conceptions, especially in the law courts.
Thus Rawls and Nozick articulate with great power a shared view which envisages entry into social life as - at least ideally - the voluntary act of at least potentially rational individuals with prior interests who have to ask the the question 'What kind of social contract with others is it reasonable for me to enter into?'
Not surprisingly it is a consequence of this that their views exclude any account of human community in which the notion of desert in relation to contributions to the common tasks of that community in pursing shared goods could provide the basis for judgments about virtue and injustice.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.290-1
Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism.
In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like 'when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations' what he pictures is 'a community of free individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution.
This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied.
It is unsurprising that abstract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of association which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitude which they condemn in others as ideological.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.303
One of the tasks of a political leader is to conceal the choices his society has already made. In Clinton’s case it has been to generate the illusion that a society in which individual choice is the only undisputed value can meet the human need for stability.
Clinton has done this by colluding with the American public in maintaining the self-deception that a law-and-order policy can be a surrogate for the social institutions that free markets have destroyed.
By acting as a political shaman through whom the contradictions of his culture can be articulated without being perceived or resolved, Bill Clinton may prove to be the prototype for the statecraft of the post-modern period.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.110
Some features of capitalism in mainland China today derive from the recent political history of the country; but its central and enduring characteristics are those exhibited by Chinese businesses everywhere. These reflect the pivotal position of the Chinese family in generating relationships of trust.
Chinese businesses are typically small, their internal and external relationships family-dependent and personal. They rely on guanxi - ‘connections’, reciprocal obligations for their supplies and supports. Even when Chinese businesses become large they remain family firms, with the most important decision being taken by the head of the family, the father.
In the conventional western account, capitalism develops by displacing family and personal relationships from centrality in economic life.
It makes the economy a separate, autonomous domain, ruled by an impersonal calculus of profit and loss, and held together not by relationships of trust but contractual-legal obligations. In this conventional narrative, capitalism develops by disembodying itself from its parent society.
This account squares fairly well with the development of capitalism in England and other Anglo-Saxon countries where there is long history of individualism. Even there, it leaves out the role of state power in constructing the environment - the framework of laws and property holdings - in which disembodied markets work.
In Chinese capitalism it has little purchase. The success of Chinese capitalism depends crucially on the resources of trust within families which it can draw upon.
The familism of Chinese business culture reflects that of Chinese society, in which trust is rarely extended beyond kin in weighty matters […] Relationships of trust and obligation extending beyond the family that are prominent in feudal and modern Japan and in individualist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world have always been weak or absent in China.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.182-4
Related posts:-
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.193-4
This interrelationship of the virtues explains why they do not provide us with a number of distinct criteria by which to judge the goodness of a particular individual, but rather with one complex measure.
The application of that measure in a community whose shared aim is the realization of the human good presupposes of course a wide range of agreement in that community on goods and virtues, and it this agreement which makes possible the kind of bond between citizens which, on Aristotle's view, constitutes a polis.
That bond is the bond of friendship and friendship is itself a virtue. The type of friendship which Aristotle has in mind is that which embodies a shared recognition of and pursuit of a good. It is this sharing which is essential and primary to the constitution of any form of community, whether that of a household or that of a city.
'Law-givers,’ says Aristotle, 'seem to make friendship a more important aim than justice' [...] and the reason is clear. Justice is the virtue of rewarding desert and of repairing failures in rewarding desert within an already constituted community; friendship is required for that initial constitution.
Estimates of the population of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries vary widely, but the number of adult male citizens clearly ran into some tens of thousands. How can a population of such a size be informed by a shared vision of the good? How can friendship be the bond between them? The answer surely is by being composed of a network of small groups of friends, in Aristotle's sense of that word.
This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world.
This is how we sometimes at least think of schools, hospitals or philanthropic organizations; but we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man's good as such.
Friendship of course, on Aristotle's view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance to and a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant.
In a modern perspective affection is often the central issue; our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much. 'Friendship' has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than of a type of social and political relationship.
E.M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis; he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives.
Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage.
That they lack the bond of friendship is of course bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.182-3
It is in any case clear that for both Nozick and Rawls a society is composed of individuals, each with his or her own interest, who then have to come together and formulate common rules of life [...]
Individuals are thus in both accounts primary and society secondary, and the identification of individual interests is prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between them.
Rawls explicitly makes it a presupposition of his view that we must expect to disagree with others about what the good life for man is and must therefore exclude any understanding of it that we may have from our formulation of the principles of justice. Only those goods in which everyone, whatever their view of the good life, takes an interest are to be admitted to consideration.
It is, from both standpoints, as though we had been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with a group of other individuals, each of whom is a stranger to me and to all the others. What have to be worked out are rules which will safeguard each one of us maximally in such a situation.
[...] modern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. We still of course, even in modern society, find it difficult to think of families, colleges and other genuine communities in this way; but even our thinking about those is now invaded to an increasing degree by individualist conceptions, especially in the law courts.
Thus Rawls and Nozick articulate with great power a shared view which envisages entry into social life as - at least ideally - the voluntary act of at least potentially rational individuals with prior interests who have to ask the the question 'What kind of social contract with others is it reasonable for me to enter into?'
Not surprisingly it is a consequence of this that their views exclude any account of human community in which the notion of desert in relation to contributions to the common tasks of that community in pursing shared goods could provide the basis for judgments about virtue and injustice.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.290-1
Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism.
In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like 'when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations' what he pictures is 'a community of free individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and distribution.
This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robinson Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied.
It is unsurprising that abstract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of association which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitude which they condemn in others as ideological.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.303
One of the tasks of a political leader is to conceal the choices his society has already made. In Clinton’s case it has been to generate the illusion that a society in which individual choice is the only undisputed value can meet the human need for stability.
Clinton has done this by colluding with the American public in maintaining the self-deception that a law-and-order policy can be a surrogate for the social institutions that free markets have destroyed.
By acting as a political shaman through whom the contradictions of his culture can be articulated without being perceived or resolved, Bill Clinton may prove to be the prototype for the statecraft of the post-modern period.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.110
Some features of capitalism in mainland China today derive from the recent political history of the country; but its central and enduring characteristics are those exhibited by Chinese businesses everywhere. These reflect the pivotal position of the Chinese family in generating relationships of trust.
Chinese businesses are typically small, their internal and external relationships family-dependent and personal. They rely on guanxi - ‘connections’, reciprocal obligations for their supplies and supports. Even when Chinese businesses become large they remain family firms, with the most important decision being taken by the head of the family, the father.
In the conventional western account, capitalism develops by displacing family and personal relationships from centrality in economic life.
It makes the economy a separate, autonomous domain, ruled by an impersonal calculus of profit and loss, and held together not by relationships of trust but contractual-legal obligations. In this conventional narrative, capitalism develops by disembodying itself from its parent society.
This account squares fairly well with the development of capitalism in England and other Anglo-Saxon countries where there is long history of individualism. Even there, it leaves out the role of state power in constructing the environment - the framework of laws and property holdings - in which disembodied markets work.
In Chinese capitalism it has little purchase. The success of Chinese capitalism depends crucially on the resources of trust within families which it can draw upon.
The familism of Chinese business culture reflects that of Chinese society, in which trust is rarely extended beyond kin in weighty matters […] Relationships of trust and obligation extending beyond the family that are prominent in feudal and modern Japan and in individualist societies of the Anglo-Saxon world have always been weak or absent in China.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.182-4
Related posts:-
Going to extremes
The middle is the liberal space, the Free Space, the vacuum left by tradition. Nothing is set in stone, and so everything is mobile and restless.
The Top and Bottom are secure, contained within (the remnants) of a traditional way of life, whereas the Middle is insecure because it has no fixed identity. So while aristocrats play the game in order to keep alive the tradition, and have nothing to prove by winning, the bourgeois play in order to distinguish themselves through victory.
Lack of constraint - evasion of scaling traps - allows excess; lofty peaks and abysmal depths. The excesses of mobile, globetrotting capital allow for an increasingly independent and enriched overclass and an increasingly brutalised and dispossessed underclass.
Rich and Poor
In my role as a Bikeability instructor I have the opportunity to work with children from varied backgrounds. My pupils run the gamut of the socioeconomic spectrum: from the bottom, to the middle, to the top. To my surprise I’ve noticed certain parallels between those at its extremes. Indeed, those at the top and those at the bottom often seem to have more in common with each other than they do with those in the middle.
My work involves teaching basic road knowledge to children between the ages of nine and eleven. Whilst its not always the case, I’ve often noticed that kids from the more extreme backgrounds - the very rich and the very poor - do not engage with the lessons. Of course, I teach many kids who, for various reasons, do not engage, but I draw attention to these because there was something notably different about their attitude. Furthermore I found it interesting that, in spite of their distance on the socioeconomic spectrum, the attitude that they displayed towards the course was remarkably similar.
Its hard to define this attitude, other than to say they seemed entirely detached. They went through the motions, but I was left in no doubt that this was all they were doing: going through the motions. What they communicated to me was a sense that they were above the course; or beneath it. This stuff simply wasn’t for them; not necessarily because it was boring, or challenging; but because it was irrelevant.
Overworld and Underworld
Society exerts a form of gravity upon the great mass of people, binding them to its surface through its culture, norms and laws. But as we travel further from its centre, this force lessens, and those norms and laws no longer have quite the same pull.
Bookending our society are two worlds: the overworld and the underworld. Whilst they may appear to be opposed - one a positive pole, and one a negative - I see them more as two moons circulating a planet. They may take opposing positions in space, but in their relationship to the planet they are alike. Both orbit it, but are not quite of it.
I have no interest in saying whether the kids I teach belong to either of these worlds. They may or they may not. But their approach to my course showed me something interesting.
I realised that they were not, to paraphrase The Wire’s Howard Colvin, learning for our world - they were learning for theirs.
What I had to teach them came from the middle ground, from that place of strong gravity at the centre of society. It was, therefore, designed for an audience that lived within this middle ground and that accepted its norms.
The attitude of these kids struck me because they came from an unfamiliar place: from the fringes. They showed me that the currency of the middle ground is significantly devalued - if not worthless - in their world.
Going to extremes
In spite of - or perhaps, because of - existing at the fringes of our society, these worlds have a significant influence upon it.
Its been said that the gangsters at the top of society are not very different from those at the bottom. From the hands on gangsterism of the underworld, to the hands off gangsterism of the overworld, both find common ground in their exploitation of those in the middle. Indeed, it seems to me that their very existence depends upon it.
It is easier to exploit something when you are distanced from it, when you do not identify with it.
This is, perhaps, one outcome when a society allows its members to travel too far from its core; when it allows too great a disparity between them.
A structure - be it a body, or a society - can only produce an extreme through concentrating certain of its resources in a pointed direction. If I want to become extremely muscular then I must devote resources - time, energy, money - to the task. If I want to remain in this extreme state, then I must continue to devote my resources to it.
But a structure must also maintain its equilibrium - thus a heavy weight on one side of the scales necessitates an equally heavy weight on the other. Extreme wealth demands extreme poverty.
Opposites meet
What I noticed through my work - this meeting of the top and the bottom - was something timeless and archetypal. It is only one example of a larger truth; that, when pushed to extremes, all opposites will eventually meet. This pattern can be represented by the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail.
In this sense, those that go to extremes always have much in common, in spite of their apparent differences. Thus, the saint and the sinner may well be cut from the same cloth - separated by only a slim sliver of fate.
Spending money on public goods (better public transit, universal health care and so on) is a way to improve the quality of life for the average person.
But by definition, the bigger the income inequality in a society, the greater the financial distance between the average and the wealthy. The bigger this distance, the less the wealthy have to gain from expenditures on the public good.
Instead they would benefit more from keeping their tax money to spend on their private good - a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance.
So the more unequal the income is in a community, the more incentive the wealthy will have to oppose public expenditures benefiting the health of the community.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'Sick of Poverty'
In America, as elsewhere, aristocracy represents money and position grown old, and is organized in terms of families rather than of individuals. Traditionally it was made up of those whose families had had money, position, and social prestige for so long that they never had to think about these and, above all, never had to impress any other person with the fact that they had them.
They accepted these attributes of family membership as a right and an obligation. Since they had no idea that these could be lost, they had a basic psychological security, similar to that of the religious and workers.
Thus like these other two, they were self-assured, natural, but distant. Their manners were gracious but impersonal. Their chief characteristic was the assumption that their family position had obligations. This noblesse oblige led them to participate in school sports (even if they lacked obvious talent), to serve their university (usually a family tradition) in any helpful way (such as fund raising), to serve their church in a similar way, and to offer their services to their local community, their state, and their country as an obligation.
They often scandalized their middle-class acquaintances by their unconventionality and social informality, greeting workers, recent immigrants, or even outcasts by their given names, arriving at evening meetings in tweeds, or traveling in cheap, small cars to formal weddings.
Another good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given to servants (or those who work in one’s home): the lower classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors.
The working class in the United States is much smaller than we might assume, since most American workers are seeking to rise socially, to help their children to rise socially, and are considerably concerned with status symbols. Such people, even if laborers, are not working class, but are rather petty bourgeoisie.
The real working class are rather relaxed, have present rather than future preference, generally worry very little about their status in the eyes of the world, enjoy their ordinary lives, including food, sex, and leisure, and have little desire to change their jobs or positions. They are generally relaxed, have a taste for broad humor, are natural, direct, and friendly, without large basic insecurities of personality.
This middle-class character was imposed most strongly on the United States […] At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition.
From this flowed a large number of attributes of which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.784, 787-8
Fundamentally it is a distinction between playing the game and playing to win.
The aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the scrubs rather than a star or starting player.
The newer recruits to former aristocratic educational institutions play for more personal reasons, with much greater intensity, even fanaticism, and play to excel and to distinguish themselves from others.
The petty bourgeois are rising in American society along the channels established in the great American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the professions, finance, and politics.
They are doing this not because they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility, or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments, narrow specialization, and fanatical application to the task before each of them.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.806-7
The self-reliant individual has gradually changed into the conformist “organization man.” Routine has displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the struggle with diverse concrete problems.
Most crucial have been the demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat) has reappeared.
This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are socially dangerous.
In the United States, where these people congregate in the largest cities and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population.
Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a group is not based on biological differences but on sociological factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their parents, grow up as unemployables.
This is not a condition that can be cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas, because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.774
The United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand stand out as standard-bearers of the new species of capitalism.
In countries such as Spain, in which the extended family remains strong, the underclass of workless households that is so depressing a feature of Anglo-Saxon societies hardly exists. This is despite the fact that in Spain, to a greater degree even than in the other economies of continental Europe, unemployment has reached very high levels in recent times.
This can partly be attributed to the fact that policy over the past two decades has not been dominated in continental Europe by objectives such as deregulation of the labour market. But this is unlikely to be the whole, or even the chief reason for the persistence of such differences.
None of the countries of continental Europe has ever had an age of laissez-faire; market institutions have not achieved the independence from constraint by other social institutions that characterises the Anglo-Saxon free market. No European society has the long and deep experience of individualist forms of family life and property ownership that distinguishes England, the United States and other Anglo-Saxon societies.
In every country, the new and more volatile strain of capitalism is transforming economic life. The impact of anarchic global markets on the economic cultures of continental Europe institutionalises high levels of structural unemployment.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.73-4
Remoulding American society to suit the imperatives of free markets has involved the use of corporate power and federal government to bring about levels of economic inequality unknown since the 1920s and far in excess of this found in any other advanced industrial society today.
It has encompassed an experiment in mass incarceration, accompanied by an elite retreat into walled propriety communities that has left the United States far more divided than Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile.
[...] America is no longer a bourgeois society. It has become a divided society, in which an anxious majority is wedged between an underclass that has no hope and an overclass that denies any civic obligations.
In the United States today the political economy of the free market and the moral economy of bourgeois society have diverged - in all likelihood permanently.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.106, 111
We live in an age of multiple truths.
He who warns of the “clash of civilizations” is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright—and it is also very dark.
More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics.
There will be more democracy—that deft liberal form of imperialism—and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
[Ralph Peters]
‘Constant Conflict’
Related posts:-
Concentrate
Lack of constraint - evasion of scaling traps - allows excess; lofty peaks and abysmal depths. The excesses of mobile, globetrotting capital allow for an increasingly independent and enriched overclass and an increasingly brutalised and dispossessed underclass.
In my role as a Bikeability instructor I have the opportunity to work with children from varied backgrounds. My pupils run the gamut of the socioeconomic spectrum: from the bottom, to the middle, to the top. To my surprise I’ve noticed certain parallels between those at its extremes. Indeed, those at the top and those at the bottom often seem to have more in common with each other than they do with those in the middle.
My work involves teaching basic road knowledge to children between the ages of nine and eleven. Whilst its not always the case, I’ve often noticed that kids from the more extreme backgrounds - the very rich and the very poor - do not engage with the lessons. Of course, I teach many kids who, for various reasons, do not engage, but I draw attention to these because there was something notably different about their attitude. Furthermore I found it interesting that, in spite of their distance on the socioeconomic spectrum, the attitude that they displayed towards the course was remarkably similar.
Its hard to define this attitude, other than to say they seemed entirely detached. They went through the motions, but I was left in no doubt that this was all they were doing: going through the motions. What they communicated to me was a sense that they were above the course; or beneath it. This stuff simply wasn’t for them; not necessarily because it was boring, or challenging; but because it was irrelevant.
Overworld and Underworld
Society exerts a form of gravity upon the great mass of people, binding them to its surface through its culture, norms and laws. But as we travel further from its centre, this force lessens, and those norms and laws no longer have quite the same pull.
Bookending our society are two worlds: the overworld and the underworld. Whilst they may appear to be opposed - one a positive pole, and one a negative - I see them more as two moons circulating a planet. They may take opposing positions in space, but in their relationship to the planet they are alike. Both orbit it, but are not quite of it.
I have no interest in saying whether the kids I teach belong to either of these worlds. They may or they may not. But their approach to my course showed me something interesting.
I realised that they were not, to paraphrase The Wire’s Howard Colvin, learning for our world - they were learning for theirs.
What I had to teach them came from the middle ground, from that place of strong gravity at the centre of society. It was, therefore, designed for an audience that lived within this middle ground and that accepted its norms.
The attitude of these kids struck me because they came from an unfamiliar place: from the fringes. They showed me that the currency of the middle ground is significantly devalued - if not worthless - in their world.
Going to extremes
In spite of - or perhaps, because of - existing at the fringes of our society, these worlds have a significant influence upon it.
Its been said that the gangsters at the top of society are not very different from those at the bottom. From the hands on gangsterism of the underworld, to the hands off gangsterism of the overworld, both find common ground in their exploitation of those in the middle. Indeed, it seems to me that their very existence depends upon it.
It is easier to exploit something when you are distanced from it, when you do not identify with it.
This is, perhaps, one outcome when a society allows its members to travel too far from its core; when it allows too great a disparity between them.
A structure - be it a body, or a society - can only produce an extreme through concentrating certain of its resources in a pointed direction. If I want to become extremely muscular then I must devote resources - time, energy, money - to the task. If I want to remain in this extreme state, then I must continue to devote my resources to it.
But a structure must also maintain its equilibrium - thus a heavy weight on one side of the scales necessitates an equally heavy weight on the other. Extreme wealth demands extreme poverty.
Opposites meet
What I noticed through my work - this meeting of the top and the bottom - was something timeless and archetypal. It is only one example of a larger truth; that, when pushed to extremes, all opposites will eventually meet. This pattern can be represented by the symbol of the ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail.
In this sense, those that go to extremes always have much in common, in spite of their apparent differences. Thus, the saint and the sinner may well be cut from the same cloth - separated by only a slim sliver of fate.
Spending money on public goods (better public transit, universal health care and so on) is a way to improve the quality of life for the average person.
But by definition, the bigger the income inequality in a society, the greater the financial distance between the average and the wealthy. The bigger this distance, the less the wealthy have to gain from expenditures on the public good.
Instead they would benefit more from keeping their tax money to spend on their private good - a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance.
So the more unequal the income is in a community, the more incentive the wealthy will have to oppose public expenditures benefiting the health of the community.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'Sick of Poverty'
In America, as elsewhere, aristocracy represents money and position grown old, and is organized in terms of families rather than of individuals. Traditionally it was made up of those whose families had had money, position, and social prestige for so long that they never had to think about these and, above all, never had to impress any other person with the fact that they had them.
They accepted these attributes of family membership as a right and an obligation. Since they had no idea that these could be lost, they had a basic psychological security, similar to that of the religious and workers.
Thus like these other two, they were self-assured, natural, but distant. Their manners were gracious but impersonal. Their chief characteristic was the assumption that their family position had obligations. This noblesse oblige led them to participate in school sports (even if they lacked obvious talent), to serve their university (usually a family tradition) in any helpful way (such as fund raising), to serve their church in a similar way, and to offer their services to their local community, their state, and their country as an obligation.
They often scandalized their middle-class acquaintances by their unconventionality and social informality, greeting workers, recent immigrants, or even outcasts by their given names, arriving at evening meetings in tweeds, or traveling in cheap, small cars to formal weddings.
Another good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given to servants (or those who work in one’s home): the lower classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors.
The working class in the United States is much smaller than we might assume, since most American workers are seeking to rise socially, to help their children to rise socially, and are considerably concerned with status symbols. Such people, even if laborers, are not working class, but are rather petty bourgeoisie.
The real working class are rather relaxed, have present rather than future preference, generally worry very little about their status in the eyes of the world, enjoy their ordinary lives, including food, sex, and leisure, and have little desire to change their jobs or positions. They are generally relaxed, have a taste for broad humor, are natural, direct, and friendly, without large basic insecurities of personality.
This middle-class character was imposed most strongly on the United States […] At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition.
From this flowed a large number of attributes of which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.784, 787-8
Fundamentally it is a distinction between playing the game and playing to win.
The aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the scrubs rather than a star or starting player.
The newer recruits to former aristocratic educational institutions play for more personal reasons, with much greater intensity, even fanaticism, and play to excel and to distinguish themselves from others.
The petty bourgeois are rising in American society along the channels established in the great American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the professions, finance, and politics.
They are doing this not because they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility, or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments, narrow specialization, and fanatical application to the task before each of them.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.806-7
The self-reliant individual has gradually changed into the conformist “organization man.” Routine has displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the struggle with diverse concrete problems.
Most crucial have been the demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat) has reappeared.
This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are socially dangerous.
In the United States, where these people congregate in the largest cities and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population.
Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a group is not based on biological differences but on sociological factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their parents, grow up as unemployables.
This is not a condition that can be cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas, because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.774
The United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand stand out as standard-bearers of the new species of capitalism.
In countries such as Spain, in which the extended family remains strong, the underclass of workless households that is so depressing a feature of Anglo-Saxon societies hardly exists. This is despite the fact that in Spain, to a greater degree even than in the other economies of continental Europe, unemployment has reached very high levels in recent times.
This can partly be attributed to the fact that policy over the past two decades has not been dominated in continental Europe by objectives such as deregulation of the labour market. But this is unlikely to be the whole, or even the chief reason for the persistence of such differences.
None of the countries of continental Europe has ever had an age of laissez-faire; market institutions have not achieved the independence from constraint by other social institutions that characterises the Anglo-Saxon free market. No European society has the long and deep experience of individualist forms of family life and property ownership that distinguishes England, the United States and other Anglo-Saxon societies.
In every country, the new and more volatile strain of capitalism is transforming economic life. The impact of anarchic global markets on the economic cultures of continental Europe institutionalises high levels of structural unemployment.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.73-4
Remoulding American society to suit the imperatives of free markets has involved the use of corporate power and federal government to bring about levels of economic inequality unknown since the 1920s and far in excess of this found in any other advanced industrial society today.
It has encompassed an experiment in mass incarceration, accompanied by an elite retreat into walled propriety communities that has left the United States far more divided than Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile.
[...] America is no longer a bourgeois society. It has become a divided society, in which an anxious majority is wedged between an underclass that has no hope and an overclass that denies any civic obligations.
In the United States today the political economy of the free market and the moral economy of bourgeois society have diverged - in all likelihood permanently.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.106, 111
We live in an age of multiple truths.
He who warns of the “clash of civilizations” is incontestably right; simultaneously, we shall see higher levels of constructive trafficking between civilizations than ever before. The future is bright—and it is also very dark.
More men and women will enjoy health and prosperity than ever before, yet more will live in poverty or tumult, if only because of the ferocity of demographics.
There will be more democracy—that deft liberal form of imperialism—and greater popular refusal of democracy. One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.
[Ralph Peters]
‘Constant Conflict’
Related posts:-
Concentrate
Closed / Open
Closed - Open
Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Solid - Liquid
Mono - Poly
Certain - Uncertain
Committed - Uncommitted
Known - Unknown
Answer - Question
Fact - Fiction
Old - New
Is - Could be
Actual - Potential
Repetition - Innovation
Conservation - Liberation
Limited - Unlimited
Serious - Playful
Adult - Child
Senex - Puer
Rigid - Flexible
Converge - Diverge
Order - Chaos
Go too far in one direction and you freeze into a statue; too far in the other and you thaw into a puddle.
In every adult there is a child who constantly leads us on to new things.
The adult's knowledge makes him rigid and inaccessible to innovation.
The unknowing child's irrational experimentation, his naive openness, must be retained as a living potential in every adult if he is to remain emotionally alive.
Thus the adult is never completely grown up; if he is to be somewhat healthy psychically, he must always keep a certain childlike unknowingness.
One often meets teachers who seem to have lost every trace of childishness, who have even fewer childish traits then the average healthy adult. Such teachers have become "only-teachers," who confront unknowing children almost as their enemy. They complain that children know nothing and do not wish to learn; their nerves are torn by their students' childishness and lack of self-control.
For this kind of teacher children are the Other, that which he himself wishes never to be.
A dynamic teacher must have a certain childishness in himself, just as a doctor must have a vital
He must not only transmit knowledge but also awaken a thirst for knowledge in the children, but this he can only do so if the knowledge-hungry, spontaneous child is still alive within him.
When [the teacher's childishness is repressed and projected onto the pupils] learning progress is blocked. The children remain children and the knowing adult is no longer constellated in them ... Children are his enemies, representing the internally split pole of the archetype, whose reunification is attempted through power.
[Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig]
Power In The Helping Professions, p.104-6
[One way] that we become mindless is by forming a mindset when we first encounter something and then clinging to it when we reencounter that same thing. Because such mindsets form before we do much reflection, we call them premature cognitive commitments.
When we accept an impression or a piece of information at face value, with no reason to think critically about it, perhaps because it seems irrelevant, that impression settles unobtrusively into our minds until a similar signal from the outside world calls it up again. At that next time it may no longer be irrelevant, but most of us don't reconsider what we mindlessly accepted earlier.
The mindless individual is committed to one predetermined use of the information, and other possible uses or applications are not explored.
When our minds are set on one thing or on one way of doing things, mindlessly determined in the past, we blot out intuition and miss much of the present world around us.
[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.22, 118
Learning what to ignore is critical for effective psychological functioning—it would be simply overwhelming to process the full stream of information available to our senses as we make our way through the world.
So we cull through this information for relevant details, screening out everything else. The problem is, the screened-out information might be useful later, but by then we are slow to realize its significance, to unlearn its irrelevance.
This process can be modeled in the laboratory by preexposing participants to seemingly unimportant stimuli that later form the basis of a learning task. For the average person, this preexposure stifles subsequent learning—the critical stimulus has been rendered “irrelevant” and fails to penetrate awareness. Not so, however, for those high in openness, who are less susceptible to latent inhibition.
This again demonstrates a more inclusive mode of thinking—a “leaky” cognitive system, if you will—that lets in information that others filter out [...] Open people see more possibilities in even the most mundane of objects.
According to personality theorists, openness reflects a greater “breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness” and propensity to “cognitively explore” both abstract information (ideas and arguments) and sensory information (sights and sounds).
[Luke Smillie]
'Openness to Experience: The Gates of the Mind'
That’s what people can do that a computer can’t - see similarities, similes, metaphors […] What we can do is parallel processing [and] patterns.
[Creativity is] networks that have wider expanses that connect to a broader number of neurons […] [A creative individual has] networks that are spreading far wider than in some other individual […] literally making connections that another individual does not.
Picasso had a broader network as to what could constitute a face. A broader network […] is more divergent.
[Robert Sapolsky]
'22. Emergence and Complexity'
Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.Categorizing and recategorizing, labeling and relabeling as one masters the world are processes natural to children. They are adaptive and inevitable part of surviving in this world. Freud recognized the importance of creation and mastery in childhood:
Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early in childhood? The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of the world in a new way which pleases him?
The child's serious re-creation can become the adult's playful recreation.
As adults, however, we become reluctant to create new categories [...] our outcome orientation tends to deaden a playful approach.
[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.63, 64
Any archetype includes opposite elements, e.g. therapist/patient, healer/healed.
If [...] a therapist defines herself or himself as a "healthy person without ailment," this archetype gets split away and the therapist becomes just a therapist and the patient just a patient.
Sadly, the patient then loses the opportunity of healing the self through the functioning of the healer archetype.
In order to prevent such a splitting off of the archetype, the therapist first has to recognize the patient that exists within herself or himself.
[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.98
In most educational settings, the "facts" of the world are presented as unconditional truths, when they might better be seen as probability statements that are true in some contexts but not in others.
Children are usually taught "this is a pen," "this is a rose," "this is a car." It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category "pen."
But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that "this could be a pen"? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child "this is a pen."
What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: "This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass"? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child taught initially taught "a family is a mother, a father, and a child" versus "a family could be ...."
Some may argue that to teach children about the world unconditionally is to make them insecure. Will children taught "it depends" grow up to be insecure adults? Or will they be more confident in a world of change than those of us brought up with absolutes?
Even in the most minor and ordinary details of our lives, we are locked in by the unconditional way we learn in childhood. We pick up rules before we have a chance to question them.
[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.120, 124, 125
OPEN: potential for more complex level functioning
- healthiest form with most possibilities for adjustment
- history and capacities conductive to movement
- Open state thinking changes as conditions/realities change
- deals effectively with barriers
- doesn't present as sharp a picture of the level as Closed does
- possibility for change only if barriers are overcome
- may lack insights that explain what is happening
- will require more dissonance be created to spark change
- makes excuses and rationalizes the status quo
CLOSED: blocked by biopsychosocial capacities
- may lack neurological equipment or necessary intelligences
- historic traumas may have triggered closure
- unable to recognize barriers, much less overcome them
- threatened by change and fights to stay put or else
[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.77
Different patterns and models, as well as step-by-step processes for implementing them, are essential to moving into a new system. These alternative scenarios must be active in the collective consciousness before they can be considered. Too often they are guarded in the minds of an elite few 'planners' or 'decision makers.'
People need mental pictures of what things might be like for them in their own real Life Conditions, not for some distant Hollywood stars or textbook case studies.
[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p. 84
When the idea of altering our opinions, expanding them, or god forbid, abandoning them feels like suicide, we’re in real trouble.
We’re in an emergency where we lost sight of the plot. We forgot how big the world is and how big we are. We don’t have to be our opinions – we only have to be human.
[Andrew W.K.]
Andrew WK: why I'm making a radio show on Glenn Beck's network
Hegel deals with a sequence of logical categories: being, becoming, one, many, essence, existence, cause, effect, universal, mechanism, and "life". Each is examined in turn and made to reveal its own inadequacies and internal tensions. Each category is made to generate another more promising one which in its turn will be subject to the same kind of scrutiny.
Hegel calls this dynamic aspect of his thinking the power of "negation".
It is by means of this "negativity" of thought that the static (or habitual) becomes discarded or dissolved, made fluid and adaptable, and recovers its eagerness to push on towards "the whole."
Dialectical thinking derives its dynamic of negation from its ability to reveal "contradictions" within almost any category or identity.
[Lloyd Spencer and Andrzej Krauze]
'Hegel for Beginners'
In Rogers’ view, a therapy based on the notion of preserving the client’s personal self is misguided. So is a therapy based on the notion of preserving the counselor’s personal self.
It would be better to focus on the moment of experience which we share with our client, finding in it the invitation to be new rather than to go on repeating our past moments of experience the way a rock does.
[…] it is the openness of awareness to what exists in the present moment that is a key condition for the emergence of creativity.
For counselors following Rogers’ or Whitehead’s thinking each new moment is a moment of creation in which we and our client may either allow ourselves to be drawn towards the goal of beauty and complexity and become more than what we have been, or we allow ourselves to be trapped by past habits and reactions into repeating ourselves once more.
[Bernie Neville]
‘What Kind of Universe? Rogers, Whitehead and Transformative Process’, Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies, Volume 6, Number 4, p. 282-3
“What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to ‘know’ - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange and distant, as ‘outside us’.”
The difficulty is not so much in reconstructing the interpretation as in becoming explicitly aware of what we have taken for granted in the first place. Once we have done this, we have seen it as the product of an interpretation; and we can see it as such only on the basis of a further interpretation on our own part. Second, [Nietzsche's 'free spirits'] know that in producing new views they inevitably change their own situation and thus make further interpretations necessary; these interpretations will in turn create still other new situations.
They can thus accept the contingency of their views when that becomes necessary.
A “noble” will is one, as Sarah Kofman writes, “which, though capable of affirming one perspective over a long time is still distant enough from it to be able to change it and to see the world with 'other eyes'.”
[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 72
It appears that pattern perception increases along with the concentration in the brain of the chemical dopamine […]
A higher concentration of dopamine appears to lower skepticism and result in greater vulnerability to pattern detection; an injection of L-dopa, a substance used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease, seems to increase such activity and lower’s one’s suspension of belief.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 67
Disasters do not follow preordained scripts. Even in situations where there is extensive disaster experience, those seeking to respond invariably confront unforeseen situations.
One counterproductive way of dealing with the unexpected is to adhere to plans and procedures even when they are ineffective or offer no guidance in the face of unfamiliar challenges.
[Kathleen Tierney]
The Social Roots of Risk: Producing disasters, promoting resilience, p. 208
Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognise what it is.
For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognise the hydrant much faster.
Moral? The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.
[…] the more detailed knowledge one gets of empirical reality, the more one will see the noise (i.e., the anecdote) and mistake it for actual information. Remember that we are swayed by the sensational. Listening to the news on the radio every hour is far worse for you than reading a weekly magazine, because the longer interval allows information to be filtered a bit.
The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds - so those who delay developing their theories are better off.
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Two mechanisms are at play here: […] confirmation bias […] and belief perseverance, the tendency not to reverse opinions you already have. Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 144
At the broadest level of trait description, therefore, variability in human personality appears to reflect restraint and engagement.
Stability appears to be associated with refraining from a variety of behaviors associated with disruptive impulses (such as drug use and reactive aggression), whereas Plasticity appears to be associated with engaging in a variety of behaviors associated with approach behavior and exploration (such as creative expression and attending social events) [...] behaviors consistent with an underlying exploratory drive.
These results are consistent with the theory that the metatraits reflect serotonergically mediated self-regulation and constraint on the one hand and dopaminergically mediated exploration and engagement on the other.
In particular, some of the processes underlying these traits may best be understood in terms of the different systems that are being restrained or regulated in each case. Process models that are consistent with this view include those linking Agreeableness to the inhibition of interpersonal aggression, Conscientiousness with the inhibition of distraction, and Emotional Stability with the inhibition of negative affect.
Stability appears to be reflected most strongly in restraint from drug use and hostility and in the absence of disrupted sleep. The association of Stability with stable sleep is consistent with the finding that Stability is associated with circadian timing, such that people higher in Stability tend to be ‘‘morning people’’ with circadian rhythms more strongly entrained to the daily light–dark cycle.
[Jacob B. Hirsh, Colin DeYoung, and Jordan B. Peterson]
'Metatraits of the big five differentially predict engagement and restraint of behavior', p. 11-13
Taken together, existing work suggests that political conservatism reflects a greater tendency to seek structure, to avoid ambiguity, changes to the status quo, and novelty. By this account, political liberalism represents greater comfort with lack of structure, new experiences, and novel information.
Given ideological differences in open versus closed styles of information processing, moral concern might follow a similar pattern.
In prioritizing closure, order, and stability, conservatives should express concern toward smaller, more well-defined, and less permeable social circles (relative to broader ones). In prioritizing openness, tolerance for ambiguity, and desire for change, liberals should express concern toward larger, less well-defined, and more permeable social circles (relative to smaller ones).
[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.2
Rather than a dichotomous chicken-or-egg question (does ideology cause differences in concern, or do differences in concern cause ideology?), the relations between ideology and ambit of concern are likely a complex interplay across development involving interactions between genetic and environmental factors.
Both one’s ambit of concern and political ideology are likely preceded by basic temperamental differences demonstrated by research in developmental psychology and political science.
Although again we cannot fully establish causality, we believe these perceptual preferences for tightness versus looseness reflect basic differences in information processing (desire for closure and structure versus desire for openness), which in turn drive preferences for tighter versus looser social circles.
In this way, our work is similar to work showing that left–right ideological differences manifest in basic information processing differences in orientation toward appetitive versus aversive stimuli and exploration versus non-exploration toward novel stimuli (even when these stimuli are devoid of social meaning).
Our work also demonstrates specific perceptual differences and connects these more fundamental information processing differences to social preferences, moral foundations, and moral expansiveness broadly.
[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.8
Jonathan Haidt […] found that of the five major moral foundations, conservatives are balanced in all five whereas liberals really only care about one or two.
The left can’t grasp why the right cares about loyalty any more than you can grasp why an autistic kid cares that his train is pointed the wrong way around—you and the liberal live in discrete moral worlds.
[Imperium Press]
‘The Epistemic Divorce’, Imperium Press, Substack
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