In previous Essays I have referred to certain Ideologies, Weltanschauungen and to styles of intellectual Method associated with them. It's time for a more systematic treatment. (In several parts). Nothing recondite or esoteric: no more than a refined version of common sense. This background will help later to avoid digressions, when I come to consider such subjects as Socialism.
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Most daily activities and experiences are concerned with things, or with people, or with the interaction of the two. There are other entities -- the sea, the sky, rivers and mountains, birds, mosquitoes -- but in a modern city not so important. Say a plumber has an emergency callout from the owner of an apartment: a leaking pipe which is flooding the bathroom. Of course the plumber needs his craft expertise, but he won't get far in his trade unless he is also capable of a degree of diplomatic skill in his relations with the distraught owner.
The two fields -- craft expertise, and diplomatic skill -- are quite different. The first field relates to Matter, the second to Mind. It is a fact -- of momentous significance -- that we know very little about the relation between the two fields, and no-one can tell whether we ever will know more. It's also true that in the last few centuries library shelves have been burdened by a vast amount of learned academic lucubration on this subject -- the words 'Determinism' and 'Materialism' come to mind.
I'd better expand a bit. There is a relation between the two fields -- Matter and Mind. External events and objects do of course influence Mind; they are the main set of influences. But in any particular case we cannot know for sure the exact effect of this influence; and sometimes we will be quite wrong. Especially if the person, the subject, goes out of his way -- as he often can -- to ensure that we will be wrong. (Deliberate confounding of expectations, misleading, fabrication of alibis, disinformation, etc). We can guess; we may even feel pretty definite, but it is logically impossible for us to predict with certainty. We sometimes express this logical impossibility by using the notion of Free Will.
Confronted unexpectedly by a five-foot snake on a footpath I would probably react calmly and sensibly. I grew up in the region of a country where snakes were very common -- to encounter one was no big deal -- and if you knew this fact about me you might guess accurately my reaction. But even then you couldn't be sure; it would still be a guess -- a wild guess, or perhaps an informed estimate; it doesn't really matter which -- and there's nothing, nowhere, which will enable you to do better than this.
By contrast, we do predict the behaviour of objects, often with great precision and with automatic certainty, and any apparent deviation from the expected is a ground for concern. In the proverbial case of the sun: if it failed to rise tomorrow at exactly the time expected there would be more than concern, there would be mass hysteria.
All of this means that the realm of knowledge splits into two main parts. The first part deals with external events -- what the Natural Scientist refers to as 'Nature' -- which is the province, not only of Scientists, but also of Engineers, Craftsmen, Factory Workers, Farmers, and other practical persons who deal with physical structures, things, substances, and also with non-human organisms such as plants and domesticated animals. Here there is the possibility, sometimes the reality, of exact prediction. The second part deals with human thought and action -- that which is the province of, amongst many other types, the Politician, the Administrator, the Lawyer, the Economist, the Historian, the Teacher, the Salesman, the Psychoanalyst, the Novelist. Here there is never more than likelihood, never the possibility of exact prediction.
For each of these two main parts of the realm of knowledge there is the appropriate general Method and Mindset. This is what is meant by Methodological Dualism. There is no alternative: in daily life everyone who is not mad does practise Methodological Dualism, including those persons -- e.g. those who call themselves Determinists -- who in their writings overtly maintain that the realm of knowledge is unified, is one. Many of our institutions -- and most importantly the Legal System -- are predicated upon this Dualism.
[I have specified various occupations, and assigned them to one of the two realms: e.g. Engineer vs Historian. There are a small number of the most vital occupations which should be mentioned, especially the two commonest ones -- Housewife and Parent -- which cannot be usefully assigned. These are notable in two ways:--
Firstly although, for many occupations, Wages are often not a complete measure of the value of work done, in the case of these anomalous 'occupations' we cannot even begin to effectively quantify their value.
Secondly, as Housewife or Parent one continually crosses and recrosses the boundary between the two realms, of Natural Science and Human Action, and therefore in these cases the dichotomy is not illuminating.
There are other Ways of Life, Vocations -- e.g. Priest, Artist -- which share some characteristics with those of Housewife and Parent, but they are more specialized, not so ubiquitous.]
More generally, Civilization as a whole is predicated upon this Dualism -- Natural Science and Human Action -- and develops concurrently with an increasingly clear understanding of it. One of the key functional concepts of Civilization is the Promise, usually explicit, but sometimes implicit. In the explicit case I bind myself -- i.e. I make prediction possible in a particular situation; I assimilate the behaviour of a person, myself, to the predictable behaviour of a thing -- by a Mental Act involving a set of words, spoken or written. Most civilized persons who live for a while amongst a primitive people will have a few characteristic reactions: they will be disgusted at the (often avoidable) crudity of the physical conditions; they will be bored to stupefaction by the cultural and spiritual poverty; above all they will be deeply upset -- even to the point of breakdown; I have seen it happen -- by the general indifference of the community to the keeping of promises. You cannot rely upon anyone. ['Rely': from L. religare. Ligare = to bind.] Likewise, an infallible mark of the progressive decline of any Civilization is the steady shrinkage of the social area in which one can rely upon others, the social area where it is still customary for promises to be given and kept.
[The Irish understand symbols. Even as Nihilists they have flair. On 10th April, 1992 the IRA detonated a huge bomb and blew up the magnificent building of the Baltic Exchange, Shipbrokers, 30 St Mary Axe, London. Over the facade of the building was engraved the legend: My Word Is My Bond. As a two-pronged attack on Civilization this was perfection: three innocent persons were murdered -- they merely happened to be nearby -- and a strikingly symbolic artefact was destroyed.]
In more primitive communities, when trust breaks down, when promises are neither given nor kept, what supervenes is straightforward thuggery, overt violence: the rule of Gangsters and War Lords. In Britain, a sophisticated modern society, where the people over centuries have gradually grown more and more law-abiding, what has supervened, replacing Trust and Personal Relations, is Government by Regulation. This is a summary description of the vast and pervasive transformation which has altered so profoundly the texture of daily life for everyone in modern Britain. The tendencies were getting gradually stronger, but some kind of critical point was reached about 30 years ago, and since then the flow of Regulations has risen to become a continuous flood, and the cumulated quantity of them, affecting everyone and everything, is now enormous. For those older persons who can remember different, happier times, the sense of claustrophobia and continual personal violation is extreme. The Continental Europeans, with their penchant for Revolution and the coup d'état, achieve the Total State almost overnight. The more cautious British, inclined to mildness, comfort and cups of tea, favour the method of Civilizational Suicide by Small Increments -- Death by a thousand cuts -- aiming for the same point over a period of several decades. The effect is to replace a devolved Society, built primarily on a vast intricacy of Personal Relations, with a different kind: one where Society becomes a mere Aggregate of units, where Society and State are indistinguishable, and where there is rigorous Control from the Centre, using a combination of Bureaucracy and Technology.
Having lived for centuries without major internal conflict the British people have become complacent and sleepy. They can no longer remember and hold together in their minds, in a state of creative tension, the two eternal Rules of Politics, which once they understood so well:--
(1) Government is essential.
(2) Government, and especially Big Government, is always dangerous, since every Government is potentially an enemy, an insidious manipulator of the People it governs.
If the British are going to pull back from the Total State -- to pull back from being transformed by their leaders into a timorous, servile, society of envious, sneaking wimps, despised by all nations who still retain some capacity for initiative, and some elements of masculinity and honour -- they will have to relearn some painful lessons.
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To simplify and summarize: Nature is what is external to us, and parts of which we can sometimes learn to control because it is constituted out of a limited number of entities (e.g. the chemical elements) which always behave the same way: i.e. there is an unerring regularity in phenomena. We understand and describe this regular behaviour using the concept of Causality. It took a few millennia to realize all this, to gain analytic insight: to unravel the complexity; to identify the basic entities; to observe this unerring regularity of sequences of behaviour; to devise the necessary operational concepts. It took so long because little of this is on the surface; it is not what meets the eye. Many of the most important regularities are not obvious; also, our eyes don't have the resolving powers of electron microscopes, so that we cannot watch atoms of iron combining with atoms of oxygen to produce molecules of iron oxide (rust).
Natural Scientists, those who specialize in the investigation of Nature, have two main areas of study: one where prediction is very precise -- e.g. the kind of simple chemical reaction just cited -- and the second field where prediction is approximate. Sometimes the approximation is pretty good, being based on accumulated statistics: as when we predict that a male child will grow to adulthood and reach a height of magnitude between 60 inches and 78 inches. Sometimes the prediction is very poor -- as when we try to forecast the weather a couple of weeks ahead. It's not that this second area, of approximate prediction, is intrinsically or logically different -- the same scientific laws apply, and the same category of Causality -- but knowledge is harder to come by. In the case of the weather we are dealing with a hugely intricate system, and it's very difficult, at least as yet, to know in sufficient detail enough of those initial conditions which might influence the outcome. And even if we did know, it's doubtful that our present techniques of analysis are good enough to handle the data.
This is a name for the general theory of Human Action. A distinctive term is necessary, and this word has become current through the writings of Ludwig von Mises (d. 1973). The two most developed branches of Praxeology are History and Economics.
Natural Science centres on Matter. It presupposes Mind, but investigates only certain aspects of it. It can investigate some of the regularities of Mind; also some of the underpinnings and preconditions of Mind as, for example, in Experimental Psychology, which is certainly a branch of Natural Science. (E.g. the reaction time to a stimulus, or the effects of sleep deprivation.) To put it summarily: Natural Science can investigate some aspects of human behaviour, but not human action. They are not the same. [To an unruly child we say: 'Behave yourself.' We don't say: 'Act yourself.'] Behaviour is about happenings, as viewed from the outside. It is about causes; it is about groups, and results are given as statistics. Action is more complex than behaviour. It is about the single case, as viewed from both outside and inside; it is about reasons, and the ends desired from action.
Praxeology centres on Mind. It uses many of the same categories as Natural Science, but adds some entirely new ones. A comparison may help. Take three stones: a lump of quartz, a lump of granite, a lump of sandstone. The physicist and chemist can tell us with certainty and precision how each will respond under various circumstances -- when pushed, say, or when placed in a bath of acid. Now take three men: the proverbial Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman. How will each respond when pushed? "I say, old chap." "Dinna ye do that." And lastly a punch on the nose. Maybe so: it's a rough-and-ready schoolboy joke; and uses types rather than individuals. But even then we don't really know the responses. And as for placing in a bath of acid ...
Clearly the whole analysis is misguided since, in spite of all the talk over the last three or four centuries about environment, upbringing, class, race, we don't have -- because it's not possible to have -- any standard, permanent, intrinsically useful way of classifying humans which enables us to predict results with certainty. An illuminating analysis of humans uses different categories. A human being is a unique individual; a stone is not meaningfully individual: it is an instance of a particular kind. A human being is a creature of intention and purpose; a stone is not. One can communicate with a human being; one cannot communicate with a stone. Human beings have values; stones do not. And so on.
There are at least two good reasons for people being confused about the distinction between Natural Science and Praxeology.
Firstly, precision of prediction is often not a useful discriminator.
Consider the example of a parliamentary election; which is clearly a case of praxeology, since each individual chooses, for definite reasons, to vote in his own idiosyncratic way. However, this doesn't stop us, at least sometimes, from making fairly reliable predictions, based upon previous statistical data. By comparison, our prediction of the weather two days ahead -- a clear case of natural science -- might be much less reliable.
Two more examples, of reliable prediction, from within the domain of praxeology:--
As aforementioned, within a culture of honour, where promises are strictly kept, the binding of oneself by a promise makes prediction nearly certain.
Also, in a law-abiding community a regulation can produce a similar assurance: e.g. driving on the left hand side of the road in Britain.
Secondly, by means of heavy, repetitious conditioning, or by long training, we can often bypass thinking and human choice -- move into a situation of automatic, predictable reflexes. This is a main reason for military drill; or the endless repetition of scales, in learning to play the piano. Prima facie these two cases belong within the province of praxeology, but by intelligent conditioning -- a kind of clever trick -- we make them operationally similar to cases within the province of natural science.
[Note on Classifcation:--
The Universe exists; and we believe it existed before we humans came into existence. If we observe it and classify, using certain categories -- Natural Science vs. Praxeology, say -- it's well to remember that the Universe did not arrange itself with our intellectual needs as a priority. The Natural Science / Praxeology dichotomy is no more than a convenience. Often it illuminates, and dispels confusion: the comparison between Physics and Biography, say. Sometimes it doesn't help much: the example above of Military Drill. In which case it's best ignored.]
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Apart from the very simplest items, such as breathing, satisfaction of drives is typically a very social affair, closely dependent upon upbringing, and the society in which one happens to live. I live within an industrial society, in a house which is centrally heated. I eat in a fashion characteristic of one living in a large Western metropolis -- e.g. the local supermarket stocks foods imported from all over the world. And as for sexual satisfactions -- every one knows the wide range of possibilities, prohibitions, and rules, sometimes draconian, which obtain in that area.
It all seems a bewildering jungle of complexity. However, starting around the 17th Century, some Western thinkers began to devise a way of bringing about a degree of intellectual order into parts of this jungle.
Two fundamental ideas:--
First: Choice. A person chooses, continually. The trajectory of life can be seen as a sequence of choices, attempts at reaching a happier state, a state more agreeable than the present one.
Second: The Irreducible Subjectivity of ends and values.
I know what I want, and only I know it. No one else can know for sure. Also, although my various ends may be internally comparable -- I can sometimes rank them in order -- there is no objective measure or ranking which enables a direct comparison between my desires and those of another person.
There are no measures, or direct comparisons, but there are indirect interactions, via the lives of those who hold the desires. Historically the main interactions have been competitive ones. If my neighbour and I both desire to hold a certain piece of land, I can negate his desire by putting a bullet through his heart. Any existent ranks higher than a non-existent. That is one kind of practically effective ranking; a solution to the problem of measurement.
The subjectivity of desires, ends and values is such an important fact, and so poorly understood by most -- apart from a few honourable exceptions the academics haven't helped; in the main they have added to the confusion -- that it needs to be spelt out in detail, repetitively, and from several perspectives.
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This achievement was completed over a period of about 350 years. Say, from the time of the Oxford Calculators (Thomas Bradwardine et al) plus Jean Buridan in Paris, in the early 14th Century, to the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687 AD.
The insights of the Natural Scientists didn't have much application for quite a while. Until about 1850 AD Industry in England was still based almost entirely on the craft skills of hundred of thousands of artisans, who learnt their various trades via apprenticeship. The precisions of the Scientific Laboratory weren't essential. After 1850 this gradually changed. Two examples:-
Electricity: Electric Motors and the devices which incorporate them -- most familiarly the labour-saving gadgets of the household -- derive mainly from the laboratory experiments of Michael Faraday (d. 1867).
Radio: This derives from the theoretical physics of James Clerk Maxwell (d. 1879), who mathematicized the experimental work of Faraday. The mathematics is not simple: it is several levels above ordinary arithmetic.
Practical life can be seen as a limitless array of activities designed to shift things from one place to another. E.g. I work in the garden with pots -- shifting earth and plants. I go inside to wash my hands: shifting earth from under my fingernails into the drainage system. I get into my car to visit a friend: shifting the car and my body a couple of miles along the streets. I talk with him: i.e. with my throat, tongue and lips I shape and shift small lumps of air in complicated patterns, thereby creating what we call sounds, which have meaning for both of us.
Newton's Second Law of Motion is the common theoretical underpinning of all of this.
So much for things and the simplicities of objective comparisons. Now, to return to people and the complexities of subjectivity.
For more than a thousand years in Western Europe this official Christian definition held sway, more or less. But it was always an uneasy consensus, and the fragile unity fell apart after the Protestant Reformation. The break-up was initiated by Luther in 1517 AD. Luther's movement started out ostensibly as an attempt at Reform, but soon the factions defined themselves intransigently, and there developed a series of Schisms and a patchwork of separations. From then on there was no longer a united Western Christendom. For a couple of centuries after this, in Western Europe, there were several big battalions of alternative beliefs, plus a cacophany of small sects. Many regions at one time or another produced each its very own Messiah, its charismatic spiritual leader who had all the answers. And of course there was plenty of violence; the usual welter of blood: Believe or die...
This situation could have stabilized permanently, right up to the present day. Fortunately it didn't. There were Compromisers: several groups, and movements -- overlapping -- who showed a way of going beyond this dreary stasis, much of it based on bigotry and hatred.
The items of the Secular Trinity -- Separation of Powers, Toleration, the Market Order -- are all closely connected. Those who devised this trinity concluded that, beyond a few simplicities, there is no objective definition of Human Happiness. It is a Will-'o-the-Wisp, and the pursuit of such a non-existent can be very dangerous. A modern counterpart is the attempt of the Global Warming Lobby (see below) to control or make constant the earth's climate -- i.e. to discipline or make static something which is inherently dynamic and continuously variable. This is a gigantic and impossible project which, if pursued sufficiently energetically, could have consequences just as ugly as those which attended the attempt to set down the correct line on the notion of Human Happiness.
Lest one get carried away. The Secular Trinity arose at a particular time, in response to a particular situation -- notably as an articulation of the unbearable disgust provoked by the seemingly endless cycle of Wars of Religion.
Its appearance at a particular time does not preclude its containing elements of permanent importance. I think it does contain such elements. The questions are: How important are they? What are the limitations? What are the difficulties which are not touched upon?
Here I can give only a few elliptic hints at answers. More later.
[T]o heirs of the Enlightenment, such as myself, the reasons for the very existence of religion have remained an absolute mystery. Nor is this a minor matter: not to understand religion is, quite simply, not to understand nine-tenths of human history. There is no mystery about why there is farming or industry, why there is instruction of the young, why there is architecture, medicine, or law. But the most salient fact of all human history is this: that all those things, and many others, have almost always been suffused through-and-through with religion, and subordinated to it...Why did religion remain for him 'an absolute mystery'? He was not lazy. Typically he didn't shirk the hard slog of intellectual investigation. Why didn't he put in the work to solve this mystery? The essay itself -- commenting on the ideas of Julian Jaynes -- purports to be an attempt at a solution. But it carries little weight, since it was written towards the end of Stove's life, after he had made dozens of historical pronouncements.
[The Oracles and their Cessation / 1989.]
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The end: a greater degree of physical well-being.
The means: scratching.
The end: to assuage hunger and thirst; to regenerate mental vitality.
The means: modest eating and drinking.
The end: to be at Paddington.
The means: travel by Tube.
The end: to discourage commuter parking.
The means: regulation of parking.
The end: a continual free supply of Western manufactured goods.
The means: construction of an imitation apparatus of reception and docking, without however any of the substantial apparatus of manufacture, or the necessary transport planes.
Over the last few years there has been much discussion of the climate of our planet, Earth. One influential group -- loosely affiliated, and world wide: the Global Warming Lobby -- maintains that human activities, and especially those associated with the generation of Carbon Dioxide, are causing a steady increase in average planetary atmospheric temperature. It is further maintained that this increase, unless halted, is likely to have effects which will be catastrophic; it is sometimes also maintained that, beyond a certain point, the increase may be irreversible. By and large this group has been successful in winning the battle of Public Opinion. Western Governments sometimes act in accord with Public Opinion, especially when they feel that such actions may help to win the next election. Many of them have begun enacting regulations in line with the views of the Global Warming Lobby.
The end: to slow down, and perhaps halt, over a period of decades, the increase in atmospheric temperature.
The means: the enactment of innumerable detailed regulations, affecting industrial and social activities, especially regulations designed to reduce the emission of Carbon Dioxide.
The desires of not one but of several thousands of persons are being considered.
Some kind of summation of preferences is being attempted.
But aren't personal preferences supposed to be subjective and unquantifiable, and therefore not summable? Forget all that. Act as if they are: one man, one vote.
Restriction from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm. To deter commuters? And yet, only a mile or two away from me, there happens to be a Controlled Parking Zone where restriction holds from 10 am to 12 noon, which would seem to be enough to deter the commuters.
9.30 am to 4.30 pm has several other effects:--
It inhibits conviviality, turning a social visit into a logistical exercise, an episode of anxiety.
It leads to the creation of a Sub-Department of Bureaucrats: a set of full-time Traffic Wardens, in smart Official Uniform, who have an interest in generating fines by interpreting the regulations as rigorously and harshly as possible. Which they do, thereby adding markedly to the GSIAI (Gross Social Irritation Anxiety Index).
Because of its ubiquity, and frequency of effect, this kind of Regulation -- along with other similar Traffic Regulations -- sets the citizen continually against the rulers. Ultimately leading to a condition of permanent Distrust, even Hatred, of the State. A dangerous condition, with irrational and schizoid strands; schizoid, because in a modern, large society we know no way of doing without the State.
Regulation makes it more difficult, and more expensive (the artisans pay, and steeply, for temporary parking) for householders to have artisans come and make repairs to their dwellings.
[I have not considered whether some kind of reasonable end could have been achieved by quite other means. More on that later.]
Nowadays all but a few Western National Governments have become as untrustworthy, mendacious and corrupt as those of most other regions of the planet. (Historically, these other regions have had such ethically sordid Governments as a matter of routine.) Although there are numbers of individual Western Scientists who have behaved with integrity, in regard to Global Warming many of the Scientific Establishments of the West -- supposedly representing majorities of their profession -- have disgraced themselves, rivalling their National Governments in moral turpitude.
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