The Lesson of the COVID Mess

I think it is pretty clear, by now, that the masks and the shutdowns and the vaccine mandates that were pretty universally applied by the world's governments during the COVID era Did Not Work.

And there is a real possibility that the government actions and mandates Made Things Worse.

Of course, I am biased here. I believe that, in general, government action Makes Things Worse.

Why? Because governments are an expression of politics, and politics is all about uniting to defeat the Enemy. And then sharing out the loot among the supporters.

And that is all.

Five hundred years ago there was little doubt that every human community needed a brave king to defend it from marauders and looters. And the way for a human community to thrive was to conquer and plunder. Anyway, that's what all leaders did, and nobody seemed to have much of a problem with that, except for the people on the receiving end.

But then emerged the modern economy in which ordinary people grew their own food less and less and labored instead for wages that they used to pay for food.

And the natural conservatism of the peasant -- for whom an agricultural mistake could result in starvation -- began to be supplanted by the creative experimentation of the business entrepreneur.

In the last 200 years, with one entrepreneurial revolution after another, the average real income of people in the developed nations has gone up by 30 times. You could look it up.

Nobody predicted it; nobody planned it. In fact, if the powers that be had an inkling of what was coming they would have strangled the baby in its cradle.

But the culture of the lord in his castle dies hard. Today, we don't have many lords in castles, but we do have lots of administrators in offices.

This is weird, because the science™ says that the world works not by top-down planning but by "creative emergence." Somebody has an idea, it works, and lots of people copy the Somebody's idea, and the world changes.

Thus, it is not surprising that the administrators in their offices all responded to the COVID crisis with top-down plans and regulations and mandates. That is what administrators do.

And administrators do not respond to changing conditions the way that markets do, by making bets on the future. They regulate and command. And then, long after the fact, they change their policy in the dead of night hoping that nobody will notice.

Because they are government they cannot make a mistake, because there is only one thing for a political or administrator to do when he makes a mistake, and that is to resign. That is why, when they make a mistake, they deny it and blame saboteurs and wrecker.s

In fact, I would say that the mistakes of the COVID era issue mainly from the necessity that administrators and politicians cannot ever admit a mistake.

When political leaders and their administrators make a mistake there is really only one thing for the people to do. They must form a mob and embarrass their leaders into resigning and leaving the leadership for others, sadder and wiser after the event.

This, of course, is the sense of René Girard's Scapegoat mechanism. We all get together to blame someone for what went wrong, and then come together and live happily ever after.

But I think that the whole COVID experience is telling us that there must be a better way, a different way from top-down administration and ukase. A way that issues out of modern science and its present doctrine that the world works by way of creative emergence: people having bright ideas that work and everyone else going along. Not because someone forced them but because humans naturally want to do what works.

Could that happen after the COVID screwup? Maybe, but I wouldn't place a bet on it.

Self-Creating Universe 8: Making Sense of Life

Clarke develops the idea of emergentism as a worldview, in the sense of the German notion of Weltanshauung, a narrative, or "conceptual scheme," that attempts to bring the aspects of existence into a unifed story about the meaning of life, and to rediscover the sense of the sacred in a reintegration of the art and humanities with the sciences. 

But what do we value most in life: what do we regard as sacred. For Clarke, the emergentism that understands 'human persons as agents and self-creators is a reflection  of the sacredness of nature itself as a self-organizing, self-creating cosmos". It re-enchants the disenchanted universe of the old materialist-mechanical model. Instead of the pessimism of Christianity and Sin and the Fall, we can take heart in a view of "this emergent world of unending creativity as sacred" with the idea of "God" as our name for creativity in nature. But what of destruction and death? There is a a complementarity between creation and destruction, and the notion that we fight against violence and evil is a sign of "moral and religious emergence."

How does emergentism speak to the moral life, about "the good life, about ethical principles, about human morality, about rights and wrongs, justice, honesty, and compassion?" Clarke proposes to develop an "autopoietic ethics," self-generating and self-developing. If human life is self-creative, so then can human ethics.

But does that pitch humans into nihilism, where everything is permitted? Clarke thinks not, asserting that even traditions developed with God's authority "we are still the creators and interpreters" of God's authority. We do not become altruistic by "learning rules or commandments... but by becoming altruistic persons". It presupposes a "long and often agonized 'conversation of mankind', an "ever-developing "communicative rationality." Is this just egoistic "self-realization"? Clarke thinks not; we are social beings in a network of interdependence genuine self-realization means the self-realization of all beings. However, this is not easy, as the critics of both Marxist equality and liberal freedom demonstrate. Perhaps the Green philosophy, with its vision of "close affinity with the natural world" is a better approach, with "adaptive, self-regulating systems" rather than command-and-control. But does this approach extend beyond the human species? Yes, but not too far. Clarke feels that his approach to morality aligns with Buddhism and the Tao.

Now Clarke moves on from the moral life to the spiritual life. What does that mean in an emergent philosophy?

Next: Emerging Futures.

Self-Creating Universe 7: Making Sense of Human Nature

How do we understand human nature, our "being-in-the-world from an emergentist perspective"? And that obviously, has to do with our notion of human consciousness, and our notion of human "freedom." The idea is to get beyond the old question of free will vs. determinism. Can emergentism throw new light upon human "free will?" Clarke proposes to develop a model to understand human action "as a natural, albeit non-reductive, emergent phenomenon."

Clarke proposes to develop his idea based upon the notion of human agency, that humans make choices in the world not just consciously, but "in terms of our biological inheritances, languages, social customs, and external circumstances and demands." And, human agency is understood "not only   in personal terms but as a collective process... as nations, tribes, families, businesses, or teams."

We humans like to think of ourselves as special, but Clarke identifies agency-like behavior in almost all living things. Thus the idea of "protoagency" in living things as basic as "a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient" that seems to "act on [its] own behalf and [is] able to detect and respond appropriately to both nutrients and threats". Thus agency could be an emergent property of living things that becomes more complex with more complex living things.

Clarke does not want to think of agency or free-will as "random and unpredictable" but rather as "the production of order by means of human agency, individual and collective."

But how does agency work, since agency is a top-level property of living things, while science generally likes to explain the complex in terms of the less complex? The answer is to assume that emergence works from the top-down as well as the bottom-up. This applies at the social level too: it is not possible to understand the operation of society purely from the behavior of individuals. Society clearly affects individuals. This "downward causation" also applies to the mind-body question. Mind and body must be connected and mind must have an influence on body.

In understanding the behavior of a human agent... we need to take into account different levels of understanding -- physical , biological, psychological, and spiritual.

Yet we are also an unity "in which these different levels overlap."

So Clarke proposes a view that "one level of phenomena or type of property... is dependent upon another level... while at the same time not being reducible to it." And that applies to the interdependence of mind and matter. 

Another vexed question is the question of "purpose," that seems obvious in a world created by God, but problematic in an naturalist presumption. Clarke thinks it is better to talk about "function" rather than "purpose." And the same applies to the notion of "progress." Clarke decides to reject a teleological tending towards some "ideal goal" while accepting that there seems to be, in the emergent understanding of the universe, some sort of "urge to create" that seems to move towards "more diverse, complex and self-ordered beings."

And then there is the question of morality. Is morality, and our understanding of morality, progressing? And does the concern about violence, "our horror of wars," and "famine, disease, poverty and injustice" might be regarded as "indications of moral and religious emergence." On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe, as with Kant, it helps "to proceed as if something has a purpose" even if it doesn't.

How about extending purpose and functions to values? Wittgenstein says that the world is the totality of facts; Sartre says that values are a creation of our "subjective conscious freedom;" Whatbout the "fact-value" debate? Can we achieve a "naturalization of ethics?"

There is Darwin proposing that pre-human species display a kind of "protomorality." Others show that many animal species have a sense of fairness, empathy, and help others in distress. And there seems to be an evolution in this, not just from apes to humans, but also within the human species, as in the evolution of the common law, that combined a connection with tradition with "constant reflection and adaptation." There seems to be a kind of creatvie emergent order, where values are concerned.

Next: Making Sense of Life.

Self-Creating Universe 6: Making Sense of Emergentism

What is emergentism? Is it a Theory of Everything or a "ghostly last stand for metaphysical mysteries?" Paul Davies thinks that "emergentism is a new scientific paradigm;" Imre Lakatos thinks of it a "progressive research programme," meaning that it is fruitfully combining together in various fields that is "going somewhere and it gaining support on the way."

Clark's notion is that, while emergentism falls short of a unified model of science, at least provides a consistent language "applicable to a whole range of phenomena" with concepts such as "dynamic systems, chaos, complexity, and self organization." It seems to be a comfortable compromise between unified theory and Paul Feyerabend's notion of "anything goes." And that influences the experience of scientific enterprise: not as crystalline, but a human discourse "involving a converging practice and mutual influence between our best theories in science."

And perhaps its very uncertainty and unpredictability brings into question the eternal dream of "ultimate certainties and universal foundational principles" and that is a good thing.

But how emergent and creative is emergence? There are two explanations: the weak explanation is that "living beings [only] appear to be relatively independent of their chemical constituents." Living things are just a consequence of their complexity. The strong explanation is that, say, in the emergence of life, there is something that is "irreducible" to "nonliving entities." Some thinkers limit this to consciousness versus non-consciousness. But Clarke prefers a general idea that we can't reduce new phenomena to its constituents. It is just useful to "make sense of nature as being driven by... a creative principle."

There's a problem with this, that it seems to contradict the idea of entropy, that the universe is running down from order to chaos. The argument is that living things are not like steam engines, but can export disorder into the environment and import order from it. They "dissipate" entropy, or used-up energy, into the environment. According to Ilya Prigogine

such processes of transformation, of self-organization and self-creation, lead to the formation of new system which are not apparently or readily explainable in terms of preceding conditions or constituent microscopic processes.

Thus, "small fluctuations may iterate and kick-start an entirely new transformational process. Such "turbulence" may lead to new organization or to "disintegration and disorder," e.g., creation of a new species or extinction of an existing species. This goes beyond traditional Darwinian natural selection theory to propose change by random mutation and adaptation to propose "self-creative, emergent processes," for random mutation by itself should lead to disorder.

Another way to think of this is in the notion of "play" or "playful variation on old ideas," a breaking out of "rule-bound or goal-directed behavior." The point of it all is that it accounts for chaos and creation in purely naturalistic terms. No need for something higher or supernatural.

Another speculation is that "the spontaneous formation of new kinds of order might be explainable in terms of quantum coherence" as suggested by quantum theory. But Clarke doubts whether this applies or explains emergence. Self-organizing phenomena -- especially humans -- "are not strange in the way that quantum processes can be strange."

But is an explanation of emergence in sight? Probably not. It is likely that the current "unpredictability of emergent complexity" demonstrates the primitive state of our state of knowledge, or ignorance, rather than the way nature works.

Clarke raises the question whether emergence is "description" rather than "explanation," but then decides, with references to Newton and Einstein and Wittgenstein, that all science is description, the "how" rather than the "why." The "why" is for theology.

How does emergence relate to fundamental concepts of philsophy like "being?" Does emergence mean new levels of knowlege, or new levels of being. Clarke argues that emergence doesn't really fit any of the previous accounts of reality. It does not assume all the world is "matter," nor does it divide the world into two, material and mental. Clarke argues that

[Emergentism] runs counter to both monistic and dualist philosophies, and in their place offers instead a dynamic, process model in which being comes to be understood, not in terms of unchanging qualities or features or essences, nut rather of continual change punctuated by relative equilibrium.

But is he saying that emergence means something coming out of nothing? Not quite, he suggests: not "a "something for nothing" but a "more from less,"that the potential is there, but not yet realized.

What about God? Does not the concept of emergence suggest the present of a creative intelligence in the universe? Recently, the concept of "intelligent design" in nature has been advanced, and a number of people have questioned the adequacy of Darwinian evolution to accont for the "'irreducible complexity' of living beings." But Clarke would rather not go down that path.

We can now see that the astonishing coherence of the universe, clearly evident at many levels, is not a static or eternal one, but is a highly complex dynamic process, one in which harmony, disharmony, order, and chaos are complementary performers and transformers over deep time.

In other words, we don't know. 

 Next: Making Sense of Human Nature

Self-Creating Universe 5: Acts of Creation

"Creativity is a key idea in all facets of emergentism." Something new and unexpected occurs.

Out of chaos comes order and out of order comes life, and out of life come the "ten thousand things".

Karl Popper speaks of creativity as the greatest riddle of cosmology, "that the universe is in a sense creative." 

Creativity, the word, first appeared in English in 1875. Now it is a fashion: everything has to do with creativity. On the one hand it is associated with accelerating changes in science and business competition and in responding to challenges. On the other hand it is criticized by the left as being elitist and imperialist. Philosopher Roger Scruton called it "a fad for self-indulgent exhibitionism".

But Clarke wants to connect the interest in creativity with the relevance of emergentism.

In the old days, only God could be creative, and to talk about humans as creative was to trespass upon God's work. But then Spinoza suggested that maybe nature could be a "self-activating agent," and Coleridge proposed that nature was "one connected whole... a living being rather than a collection of parts... with creative powers within itself." 

This ties in with Kant, who wrote about each part of an organism producing the other parts, "so that it will be both an organized and self-organized being. And in his Critique of Pure Reason he "painted a picture of human knowledge in which the mind actively constructs the world" with the rational mind involved "in the shaping of knowledge." Thus, also, the artist in not "primarily an imitator, but a creator." Thus Wackeroder who portrayed "the artist as a priest who cooperates in the divine creative act"; Schelling pronouncing art as "a holy, creative, elemental power of the world." Then Fichte and the idea of self-creation: "I am wholly my own creation."

Thinkers in the 19th century developed the notion of self-creation. Marx argued that we create history with our labor; John Stuart Mill wrote that we are like a tree that grows and develops itself. Even Samuel Smiles that "self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual." Then there is Nietzsche: we "must take upon ourselves the task of self-creation" as man "become a work of art." Thus the physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop who sees us opening ourselves to "a kind of deep, inner creativity that is woven into the very fabric of nature."

In the 20th century thinkers have zeroed in on the idea that language is the agent of creation. Thus Noam Chomsky wrote that "The normal use of language is... a creative activity." Thus Freud and later psychologists looked at the potential for understanding "irrational forces locked up in the unconscious" through the talking cure. Or Jung proposing "transformation of the self" through the "creative dialogue" that leads to individuation. We can alter our states of mind by working on the brain, So, with Fromm, man's existence is "a problem he has to solve." Or Foucault considering that "one's life become a work of art." And this is experienced by some as a "democratization of the spirit" with people creating their own spiritual goals and methods. Thus the ex-Dominican priest Matthew Fox who moves theology towards the "cultivation of the sacredness of creation." And the celebration of the creative work of women down the ages, "whether as mothers, workers, or artists."

The idea of creativity moves from individual minds into movements. Thus Toynbee saw a civilization as "a dynamic, self-organizing entity" and revolutionary movements took the ideas of Marx and attempted "the creation of a new kind of humanity. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s sought to create a new kind of consciousness, "to wake up and discover, even to create, our new selves." The point is that they experience creativity as not just for God or a "few privileged individuals" but something in which everyone can participate.

Natural science is experienced as "one of the great cooperative creations of modern times" and in Thomas Kuhn as revolutions when a prevailing paradigm is transformed by "a new set of assumptions and terminologies." In Karl Popper the paradigm notion becomes the social interaction of evaluation and the possibility of the "falsifiability" of a theory by others.

The postmodern movement has a different take on creativity, reacting perhaps against a "totalizing" notion of the creative individual as a "transcendental subject." One way to approach creativity differently is to experience creativity as "play," and out of play come stories and narratives, "not as a mirror of the world but as something extra and unpredictable emerging from it," as Derrida puts it. So, "meaning is never closed but always deferred." And this is allied to the notion of reality as socially constructed that goes back to Kant. Thus creativity is a "conversation of mankind" rather than the brilliant "all-embracing world view."

Of course, some thinkers want to "depreciate the idea of creativity." But at least emergentism allows for the creation of new ideas without "divine mysteries" and other authoritarian structures.

Next: Making Sense of Emergentism

Self-creating Universe 4: Emergence of Consciousness

Although we take it for granted, the "conscious human mind" is "perhaps the most complex of emergent phenomena": our "conscious inner self." And the "origin and nature of consciousness" has been continually debated in the modern world. Materialism and positivism tend to want to marginalize consciousness as "an epiphenomenon, a rather odd by-product of the brain."

Whatever it is, human consciousness includes awareness of the external world of "colors, sounds, smells," shapes, pleasures and pains. And the inner world of "sensations and images." Then arises "the world of mind and thought and spirit, the sense of self".

William James introduced the notion of "stream of consciousness," the constant flow of "thought, feeling, sensation". And he pointed out that our "rational consciousness" is but one form of consciousness. We now understand "altered states of consciousness, including visions, hallucinations, trances, lucid dreams, and mystical and near-death experiences" that were once thought of as manifestations of God or the devil or madness.

Yet we think of ourselves as a "unitary self," the whole universe of experience that we reduce to "I am." William James called this the "essential unity" of consciousness, and Kant wrote of "a transcendental unity of apperception."

[W]hile the doors of ours senses open up to a plural world of sights, sounds, and feelings, our minds make sense of these by drawing them together and synthesizing them into a unified whole.

This sense of unity is linked to the notion of "agency", the capacity we seem to have to "steer and direct our actions." At the same time we tell a story about ourselves and seem to be "self-creating."

We need a "natural history of consciousness" to link the "unique qualities of consciousness... with its origins in the womb of nature."  But meanwhile, we seem unable to connect the fact of our material selves with the experience of our conscious selves. Why do we have consciousness? In other words, what role does consciousness have in evolution?

Clarke proposes four characteristics of consciousness:

1. Although it's not material, it is still a natural phenomenon.
2. Animals have consciousness, not just humans.
3. The brain and consciousness are connected.
4. But brain and consciousness are not identical.

The question then arises: where did consciousness come from? Does everything have a "mind-like quality" be it ever so primitive. Clarke finds the idea hard to square with the notion of creation in the Big Bang. Still, it certainly seems that consciousness emerges out of something less developed, as vision is present in some animals as "light-sensitive cells," and then develops into more improved and specific vision. Perhaps consciousness is like that. 

Clarke divide consciousness into two: sensibility, the "power of sensation" of the world and also "the internal world of the body." For instance, pain, for pain is not "one of life's misfortunes" but the way that we avoid and minimize injury. And then there is the sensation of sex.

But consciousness is also integrative.

[V]arious primitive sensations are collected and integrated into the faculty of extended awareness in a way that is beneficial to the whole organism.

One obvious advantage of integrated consciousness is the ability of an animal to deal with "hostile threats". And it is self-organizing. 

But how does consciousness evolve? Clarke looks at "typically human forms of consciousness" and how they evolve as "self-organizing phenomena" and how there seems to be a "growing autonomy of consciousness."

First, there is creativity. Karl Popper calls this the ability to deal with new and unexpected situations: flexibility.

Then there is language. And we are not just talking about human language, but the ways in which other animals, such as ants and bees, communicate to one another.

Then there is self-awareness. And humans seem to have a radically different kind than animals, and involves the ability to construct a narrative about ourselves, past, present, and future.

And then the question arises: how far can consciousness go? Clarke proposes the idea of an extended mind that reaches out and makes contact with the rest of the world out there. He means "altered states of consciousness" and out-of-body experiences: "a sense of being at home in the universe." Can this extension of consciousness be comprehended by science? We shall see.

Next: Acts of Creation

Self-Creating Universe: 3. Re-emergence of Emergentism

After the 1920s emergentism went into retreat, because of the success of mechanistic approaches to genetics following the discovery of genes and the molecular structure of DNA with Watson and Crick in the 1950s.  Also it was thought that psychology should be based on behaviorism, a mechanical approach emulating the method of physics.

But in the 1960s emergentism revived with neuroscientist Roger Sperry who

rejected a purely reductionist view of human consciousness and argued that mind emerges from, though is not identical with, brain function and, moreover, it possesses causal powers and so is not a mere epiphenomenon, or inactive by-product, of the brain.

Then Karl Popper and John Eccles argued that many of the properties of the living world are emergent.

Consciousness itself was characterized as 'an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection', and the self-conscious mind of human beings was... 'an emergent product of the brain.'

But biology maintained a reductionist orthodoxy that everything was chemistry. But then C.H.Waddington proposed that "organisms must be studied as whole beings" and his student Brian Goodwin proposed that "order in living beings emerges by a process of self-organization and that new and more complex beings which emerge possess capacities that are not reducible."

Thus Terrence Deason writes that the atoms in our body may once been inanimate bits of matter.

Nevertheless together in your living body they now share a mode of existence that is quite distinctive and discontinuous from their separated inanimate existences.

This holism, that organisms are more than the sum of their parts, went nuclear in 1975 with physicist Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics. He argued that the basis of quantum theory had been anticipated in "Eastern philosophical traditions." In The Turning Point Capra asked us "to see the world, not as a collection of particles, but as a seamlessly connected whole."

This sort of paradigm shift had been anticipated in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that science advances not just by incremental discovery but also sudden transformation, an "unpredictable emergence of something new."

Reductionism and determinism still have their place, but meanwhile the holistic approach is becoming dynamic, expanding from the static analysis of how "complex wholes are constituted but with the ways they evolve, adapt, self-organize" and emerge. Not that anyone has come up with a "science of complexity."

And emerging from this is the notion of "self-organization." For a living system is self-organizing. And adaptive.

Another facet of the idea of emergence is a revision of understanding of chaos. The traditional meaning is Platonic, that order is the consequence of the impostion of order on chaos. But in the emergence era, it has shifted, that

a complex phenomenon such as a weather system or a living organism may be intrisincally deterministic and will demonstrate orderly patterns of behavior overall, but in detail, their behavior in undecidable.

They "are suspended uncertainly between order and chaos" and it is "this randomness which gives to chaotic systems a creative potential". This provides a way to explain nature's "remarkable capacity for producing an infinitely varied world of great, if fragile, order and beauty."

Canonical examples of emergence as explanation include the Big Bang creation story, and the day-to-day experience of "fluidity, color, temperature and friction", the differences in behavior between elements and chemical compounds, and the creation of life, the economy, and language. However, present science has established that the properties of chemical compounds "can be explained by the properties of electrons" as established by quantum mechanics.

Next: Emergence of Consciousness

Self-Creating Universe: 2. In the Beginning

Emerging Speculations

Emergentism has a long history. Humans have been thinking about "creation, order, evolution, and chaos" for a while. There was the ancient Greek Anaximander

who suggested a kind of evolutionary cosmology in which things emerge spontaneously from a single primal substance and through a cyclical process of generation and destruction give rise to an infinity of worlds of which our own is but one.

Then Heraclitus, who "believed that nature must be understood as a process of ever-changing flux and change." The Roman Lucretius proposed that "Nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters, and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods."

But then came Plato. Influenced by Pythagoras, he "sought to demonstrate that the order, beauty, and harmony of the cosmos could be explained in terms of a set of relatively simple mathematical principles" and the "perfection of eternal Ideas or Forms."

Here we can see the opposition between the naturalist presumption and the eternalist presumption, between emergence and eternal order. Then Aristotle came along and split the difference. He believed in a First Cause, but also in "the dynamic processes of the natural world." Aristotle was interested in biology. However, Aristotle still believed in a world in which Nature "is a cause that operates for a purpose."

The Renaissance began the process of 

a long struggle to establish a purely naturalistic way of understanding the world and of making sense of human existence without the presumptions of an eternalist cosmology.

First, it rediscovered ancients like Epicurus, and also, through the age of exploration, the philosophies of India and China. Brahmin thinking allows for "spontaneous evolution out of unconscious being;" Buddhism allows for a universe "undergoing constant change, eternally renewing itself"; Taoism allows things to "create themselves from their own inward reflection."

Initially, the Renaissance was eternalist, with Newton advertising "the wonderful uniformity of the natural world... 'the effect of... a powerful ever-living Agent." But then came Kant. First,

he constructed... a dynamic cosmology which pictured the universe arising through purely natural causes from an original vortex of material particles.

Then, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant proposed a way to differentiate "organisms and mechanisms." Organisms are self-organizing entities.

A living thing thus displays purposes, but unlike the watch, it has no purposes beyond itself... Moreover, the order within a living being, for example between its various organs, is not imposed from without either but emerges through the interrelationship of its parts and between the parts and the whole.  

Kant inspired Schelling to develop his Naturphilosophie, driven by an immanent spirit, Geist.

Geist emerges and becomes actual through the self-organizing, time-bound processes of nature itself. "We must think of the emergence of the world" was his manifesto for a new evolutionary philosophy of nature.

This immanent process was emphasized by Goethe, "for whom... life... was seen as a matter of striving, movement, development and growth. Darwin developed the idea of the "evolution of species," and Hegel developed "a philosophy of universal becoming in which the world self-creates out of dynamic, ever-changing processes".

From Being to Becoming

Richard Baumer, historian of ideas, sums this shift as "a transformation from being to becoming, from a static to a dynamic view of nature". And this is reflected in understanding politics, science, technology, and culture as "a tale of transformation... full of strife, ingenuity and change." Schopenhauer, of course, experienced all this change as the "source of our woes" and Spencer as an evolution to more complex forms. But Marx saw evolution as a struggle between opposing forces, "the struggle of real people and real social classes."

While philosophy and politics and evolutionary science all experienced a universe of change, in physics as late as 1900, William Thompson could say that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." Newton's mechanism reigned supreme. But then Roentgen's x-rays and Marie Curie's radioactivity showed that "atomic elements were not immutable." And then came relativity and quantum mechanics. Paul Davies:

When quantum theory was properly developed in the 1920s it turned science upside down and swept aside many deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature of reality.

And yet Nietzsche had already prophesied "nature as a continuum of energies and as 'a play of forces and waves of forces... a sea of forces flowing and rushing together'". Thus in the 1920s Whitehead would "place the flow of time and process at the centre of his philosophy." And Heidegger proposed that being was not timeless, but "being-in-the-world of conscious human persons who... are thrown into the world." Thus reality is not eternal, but temporal.

These revolutions in science, culture, and society were, in turn, leading towards completely new worldviews... that penetrated deeply into the fabric of everyday lives.

The Coming of Emergentism

It was G.H. Lewes who coined the term "emergence" in his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind.

[H]\e held that more complex phenomena such as minds and living beings could not be explained solely in terms of less complex, nonliving things but represented new emergent phenomena which he took to be more than the sum of their simpler component parts. 

John Stuart Mill had already noted that poisonous substances such as sodium and chlorine combine into table salt, which is "life-supporting."

Henri Bergson in his 1907 Creative Evolution:

It emphasized the temporal and ever-changing, constantly flowing nature of the world, and the continuous creation in nature of new life forms.

Bergson influenced three British thinkers, including C.D. Broad. Broad proposed physical reality composed of levels of ascending complexity, where the higher cannot be deduced from the lower. In particular "the properties of the conscious mind cannot be deduced from physical processes." Consciousness is an emergent property. 

The zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan rejected the Darwinian notion that "nature makes no jumps." He

took the view that evolution is relatively discontinuous, making irregular jumps rather than by regular and smooth transitions.

Against Wallace, who believed in a supernatural cause for evolution, Morgan called for "evolutionary naturalism." Meanwhile Samuel Alexander proposed that God is the goal of history, rather than its prime mover. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed the "progressive emergence of ever higher, yet more integrated and more perfect levels of being" with each level a new synthesis in which human thought, the noosphere, emerges from the living world, the biosphere.

Next: Re-emergence of Emergentism.

Self-Creating Universe: 1. The Cosmic Riddle

Can there be meaning in the universe without God? Modern science has seemed to invalidate the notion of God as the creator and minder of the universe; it has increased knowledge about the universe enormously, but it has not achieved much in explaining the meaning of life. Many people have tried and are trying to rectify this problem.

It is difficult not to be amazed at the creativity of the universe, how a "seed that can produce in a few weeks a beautiful flower." How human children "can develop complex capacities... without much drilling from... parents."

But is this miracle the work of a "divine creator" or something that arises "at a lower level from nature's own innate powers"? And if it comes out of nature, then how?

Clarke proposes a worldview he calls the

naturalist presumption... that we are situated within a real, natural world from which we have evolved... yet are able to use our evolved intelligence to make (some) sense of it and (some) sense of our lives.

The old way is the

 eternalist presumption which... locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world that we can experience through our sense.

But Clarke is not proposing mere materialism, for the the materialism that dominated in the Enlightenment has not seemed to work out so well.

More recently, the terrible wars and human suffering and the perpetuation of poverty, inequality, injustice, and prejudice into and beyond the twentieth century have led to an increasing sense of disillusionment in spite of the enormous social and political benefits that the Enlightenment has bestowed on the modern world.

So his naturalist presumption

gives a key role to mind and to spiritual values, not as echoes from a higher world, but as... nature's irresistible urge to create.

The encounter between naturalism and eternalism has spawned the idea of emergentism; it asks the question

how is it that out of the simple emerges the complex, whether it be molecules, viruses, plants, animals, the human brain, the conscious mind, human society, or the works of science, art, and literature?... How does order come out of chaos?

Traditionally, humans have answered this question with "God." But Clarke proposes to answer it with a naturalist presumption. But the problem is that if "God is dead" as advertised by Nietzsche, how do we recover meaning, from the materialist worldview that replaced the God-centered world?

In Clarke's emergentism there is something else. For instance, in biology. A "living organism" is made out of chemical elements, to "complex constituents... cells... organs... living beings... living communities."

At each level , new properties and laws emerge that cannot be understood or predicted from a full knowledge of the lower levels.

 Clarke experiences this as a paradigm of self-organization. Thus, according to Stuart Kauffman,

the creative power of nature and of the universe around us is 'so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us.'

It is as if the "'sacred' can be brought down from heaven to earth.. without projecting the source of this creativity on to... [an] eternal realm of being."

Next:In the Beginning.

No. The Rulers Really Do Believe

There's a Michael Goodwin piece out today about how the Dems are doing their usual blame game to explain why things are going wrong: Big Grocery, the "supply chain." Or even ordinary Dem voters, per Paul Begala:

“I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, OK?” 

Of course, as I point out, that is the way that the primitive mind works. There must be a fault, and most likely it isn't me, but that guy over there behind the tree.

But I had an Aha moment over the last couple of days, with the Biden administration announcing it was going to have to change the "messaging."

They really do believe their agenda. They really do believe that the planet is going to fry unless we cover the world with solar panels. They really do believe that systemic racism is the worst thing since sliced bread.

That's the way to understand the White House decision to change the "messaging." The program isn't the problem; the problem is just that "we" haven't communicated it properly to the American people.

The crazy leaders aren't the problem; the doubting followers are the problem, as Paul Begala tells us.

As in: Napoleon's crazy idea to invade Russia wasn't the problem. It's the soldiers that didn't fight hard enough at the Battle of Borodino. 

Let's concede that Joe Biden is an average pol that doesn't have an idea in his head. But he knows enough to wish that he had been a civil-rights campaigner and to develop the wish into an actual fantasy of being there. He knows enough to know what the other people around him believe and to imagine that he believes it too. He knows how to recite the responses.

So, the rubbish that the three liberal justices were talking when the Supreme Court was deciding on vaccine mandates: really, those liberal justices really believe!

Justice Sotomayor's reported meltdown over facemasks: yes, she really believes the lies and rubbish that has been coming from government experts for the last two years.

And you would believe too if your only media was regime media and your only friends were liberal friends and your only teachers were liberal teachers.

Now, of course, if you are in politics you naturally embrace ideas that call for bold leadership, that call for you to lead the people to the Promised Land. And, of course, you are tempted to believe in traitors or bad "messaging" when things go wrong.

And so the "march through the institutions" and the canceling of opponents. Because we are right, and they are wrong. And people are going to die if the racist-sexist-homophobe opponents get to set the agenda. So, the only solution is that people like us need to lead all the institutions in society. To save it from disaster.

That is what they believe, and that is what their friends believe, and that is what regime media teaches them to believe.

The Zman has a piece up today on how "the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts." And the way the system works is that, when the people get fed up they can exchange the in-party's experts for the out-party's experts.

But, people like me ask, what if the whole idea of government by experts is a crock? What if, according to the latest science, top-down expertism is folly, because the way the world works is through the emergence of new ideas and new people that just happen to have the right answer? I've just started a fairly accessible book, The Self-Creating Universe by J.J. Clarke, that is sifting all the ideas of the last two centuries to say that the creativity of self-emergence is the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how it deals with politics and the welfare state. After all, the book is written by a guy, a former philosophy professor that doubtless experiences himself as an expert.

Yes, of course the rulers cheat; yes of course they beat up on the opposition. And of course we hold them up to ridicule when they cheat and when they screw up.

But, I think, it is vital to remember that, besides all the cheating and oppression, they still believe. As political and religious leaders have always believed, down the ages. And don't think that Napoleon on St. Helena didn't still believe.

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.

Karl Popper: The Emergence of Criticism

Karl Popper is famous for his notion of falsifiability. La Wik:

Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinised with decisive experiments.

Or, as my guy F.S.C. Northrop wrote: "knowledge begins with a problem," or when existing theory doesn't work in a particular situation. In his Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper Bryan Magee explains things thusly.

The old model of scientific method was:

1, observation and experiment; 2, inductive generalization; 3, hypothesis; 4, attempted verification of hypothesis; 5, proof or disproof; 6, knowledge.

According to Popper, it goes like this:

1, problem...; 2, proposed solution, in other words a new theory; 3, deduction of testable propositions from the new theory; 4, tests... observation and experiment; 5, preference established between competing theories.

Actually, I describe the process a little differently, as 

1. Problem with the old theory;
2. propose a new theory;
3. Make predictions;
4. Survive attacks on new theory. 

Until a new problem emerges. And it will. And I think that my description of the problem is better than Magee's. Maybe you have a better idea.

But then Magee goes on to say how radical this new approach is, not just in science, but in life. He calls it "the emergence of criticism."

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

There is One Truth, and you'd better not mess with it, peasant. 

But let us be fair. There was a very good reason for that in the days Before Science. Supposed you, Farmer Joe, changed the routine of farming that had successfully brought food for the table to your household. What's the odds that your brilliant idea is wrong, and your family starves?

We can see how this works in the recent COVID experience. The government and its bureaucrats decree what is going on and what to do about it. Any disagreement is banned by the media as "disinformation."

Nothing new here.

But we live in a critical age. Magee:

Popper believes that... the first schools to not only permit criticism but encourage and welcome it were those of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece... This spelt the end of the dogmatic tradition of passing on an unsullied truth, and the beginning of a new rational tradition of subjecting speculations to critical discussion.

In the old days, if society had a wrong theory, the whole society would die. Under the new dispensation, where criticism of existing theory is permitted, the wrong theory dies instead of society.

It is important to understand how radical this is: to allow heretics and intellectual rebels to argue their point. Humans are not programmed that way. We want to believe in the truth of our religion and our way of life, and it is extremely frightening to allow an open discussion of competing ideas. 

So Popper explains the emergence of Marxism. Marxism is a religion that pretends to be scientific and to predict, with scientific precision, that society will trend towards a perfect world because Marx claims to have discovered the "Natural Laws of capitalist production...  [and to] lay bare the Economic Law of Motion of modern society." You could call it the last stand of Newtonian mechanics.

It is natural, Magee says, for the modern "emergence of criticism" to inspire an opposite faith, in the One True Marxism. That's because the responsibility of searching out the best path to the future is terrifying, and most of us would rather leave the heavy lifting to the priests and the politicians.

Only, of course, if we leave everything to the priests and politicians, then when they are wrong we will all die. Hey Mao! How yer doin' pal?

Popper argues that the culture of criticism requires that we go forward piecemeal. We discover a problem, we propose a solution, we find it works, sort of, but not quite, so we admit our error and revise the solution. It's all very messy, and we humans don't like mess.

Indeed, I argue, the problem with churches and governments and hierarchies is that the leader is not allowed to admit a mistake. In the recent retreat from Afghanistan you can see this operating. President Biden cannot admit that his plan to withdraw was an absolute clown show.

It's not just that Biden made mistakes; the point is that social leaders down the ages have never been able to admit mistakes. The problem is nicely illustrated in the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven. If things start going wrong in China it is a sign that the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven, and that means the end of the dynasty.

That is the old world.

But in the new world we accept that things are going wrong all the time, that we will be butting up against the limit of our knowledge all the time. But that's OK. It's not the end of the world. In the new order we try to figure out what went wrong and come up with a better idea, and try it out.

In a way, the Apollo 13 disaster shows us the modern can-do spirit in action. Two days into the flight in 1970 an oxygen tank in the Service Module failed, and this meant that there wasn't enough oxygen to sustain the crew in the Command Module. What happened next is that a team back on Earth went into a room with all the equipment available on the spacecraft and figured out how to jury-rig life-support for the crew long enough for them to return to Earth.

In other words, "Houston We Have A Problem" is the very essence on the modern culture of criticism and adaptation. We something goes wrong we don't all start pointing fingers at each other. Instead we figure out a way to solve the problem, and when anyone comes up with an idea, we test it to see if it will work.

Tell that to the politicians and activists.

There's a piece in Unherd today that acts as a corrollary to this. "Life is one big status game" is about how people always listen to socially dominant people, and how people are always taking advantage of social dominance to beat up the peasants with virtue-signaling. This is Old World.

New World is that techy nerds are out there in Nowheresville thinking up whacky ideas, and that every now and again one of them comes up with a whacky idea that works.

New World is adapting to climate change rather than completely changing energy use in accordance with a grand plan of Building Back Better from the rich guys in the World Economic Forum.

New World is ten thousand different schools trying out how to educate kids, rather than slavishly following the latest One Size Fits All No Child Left Behind ukase from on high.

"Intelligent Design" Just Means "We Don't Know"

Lefties and the like have liked Darwin's theory of evolution because it demolishes the notion of God creating the world, and the fishes and the animals. And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

The lefty religion stands or falls on the verdict that pre-lefty religion is all superstition and bigotry. And that lefty prophets have come down from the mountain with tablets of justice and equality that will save the planet.

So Darwin must be true.

But now it is becoming pretty clear that random mutations to DNA cannot explain the emergence -- or creation -- of new species.

So there must have been "intelligent design." Some-thing or some-one or some fill-in-the-blank must have designed things. So says Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

There's a good piece by David Gelernter in the Claremont Review of Books that goes into the whole question of "Giving Up Darwin."

Intelligent Design is a good way of describing the notion that the way that living organisms develop make it seem as if there were an intelligent designer in his organism shop assembling new ideas for organisms and sending them out into the universe care of Galactic UPS.

But I propose: why not just say that God Did It. And I have a deep and sophisticated philosophical reason for saying so.

In my view, the notion of God is an astonishing and deep and sophisticated philosophical way of dealing with the primary fact of human life.

We want to know the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as recited ad nauseam in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, but we don't.

We don't know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So we make it up, and the author of this universe kit is a chap we call God. This is because we humans like to gin up a reason for the things we do and thereby justify both our noble acts and our unspeakable crimes. And ordinary wiving and thriving.

Making God the author of some mystery in the universe works like a champ until our human knowledge expands enough to understand the mystery in question.

But there are always millions of unexplained mysteries left over. Let's say that God is in charge of all those mysteries.

For instance.

Back in the day we humans reckoned that the gods on Mt. Olympus ran everything, including the day-to-day battles of the siege of Troy described in The Iliad. If one group of gods thought the Greeks had been having things too much their own way they would insist that the other gods let the Trojans win the next one.

But by the time that The Odyssey got written, humans had a lot more personal agency, and were not above tricking the immortals so they could get their human way. The lovely Penelope was responsible for keeping those Suitors at bay, and young Telemachus knew that he had to do something about the Suitors. What was that all about?

Close to our own time, we had the mechanics of Newton, which seemed to suggest that everything in the world was determined by the relentless billiard ball determinism of Newton's equations. So where did free will or mere chance come in? Did God do it?

Well, we sorta solved that one with quantum mechanics which developed the math to show that, until some event happened, the so-called sub-atomic particles existed in a fuzz of probability. Things didn't know what they were going to do until they did.

OK, so let's say that the fuzz of probability is where God exists. And, of course, there is the curious fact that the universe doesn't crystallize out of probability in just any old way, but according to clearly defined rules that can be represented mathematically, once we can figure out the math.

Right now, the easiest way to understand the creation of species and major mutations is by the notion of "intelligent design" or, less politely, God. But I expect that in the near future the "scientists" will discover some mechanism or probability function that explains how species creation works.

But the day after this magnificent discovery we will realize that underneath it is yet another mystery.

I say: why not just call that unfathomable mystery God and get on it.

Contra-deBoer: Anti-capitalist

I'm continuing with an analysis of Fredrik deBoer's left manifesto for 2016. My first piece was "Materialist". Now we look at his "Anti-capitalist."

deBoer states that the "moral and practical problems of capitalism cannot be reformed away". So the left must build a "post-capitalist world" to deliver a truly "moral social system".

This world would take advantage of the incredible productive capacity that capitalism has unleashed on the world and use it to spread material goods through a system of collective ownership. It would not eliminate private property entirely, but rather entail universal joint ownership and control of the productive apparatus of society.

"[M]aterial security and comfort" would not be "earned"; they are "the fundamental right of all humans".

[This world] would acknowledge that we’ve moved from an age defined by scarcity to one defined by abundance, even while it acknowledged that there are certain resource limits on the planet. It would achieve material egalitarianism while preserving aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity. It would operate under the assumption that removing human beings from the immediate need to work to live would not result in mass apathy and listlessness, but rather unleash a massive flourishing of creativity, productivity, and inspiration. 

Notice that the imperative for a "moral social system" as a replacement for the capitalist world goes immediately against deBoer's first topic, Materialist, in which he privileges the "is" over the "ought." For his, the imperative of a moral social system means that the practical success of capitalism, to the extent we understand it even now, counts for nothing against the moral imperative of a moral social system. Earth to deBoer: the people in any society, except for a few activists, think that their own moral social system is the best going. And what happens to "preserving aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity" versus the "moral social system" that the left movement has set up? The whole point of the aesthetic or philosophical or personal life, as practiced for instance by the left for the last century or so, is to imagine a new point of view. So what happens when that point of view, perhaps shared by a coterie of the most moral people going, comes up against the one true moral social system just implemented by the left movement?

The idea of implementing a truly "moral social system" also goes against the anticlericalism in the Materialist paragraph. This is something that is hard for people on the left to grasp. The best way to realize it is to assert that all the movements of the left are secular religions, and that each claims to have discovered the true "moral social system." When you talk about discovering or developing a moral social system you are talking about what St. Augustine did 1,500 years ago and St. Thomas Aquinas did 800 years ago. They were clerics putting together a moral social system for the benefit of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. And the question for people on the left is: what happens to the people that don't agree with your truly moral social system?

It is all very well to say that material equality and material security and comfort are fundamental rights of all humans. The question is: how? How does the material for the material security get produced? Obviously there must be a bunch of people out there producing the products and services that yield material security and comfort for all. But who decides? The answer to the question was made by Eric Hoffer half a century ago. Either the boss tells the worker what to do, or the worker figures it out for himself. If the boss does this (whether an actual boss or the voting community) then the moral social system is based on force. If the worker decides what to do then he needs some sort of feedback to tell him whether he is making the right product in the right way for the right use of resources. We know what this feedback is called; it is called the price system. And it is telling that whenever people say: we don't need no stinkin' price system, economic chaos ensues.

It is obvious to me what this new post-capitalist world is all about, with its new moral social system where there is no requirement to work and everyone gets to practice "aesthetic, philosophical, social, and personal diversity". It is a paradise set up for artists and writers, Dichter und Denker, as the Germans say. La Wik, in the original German.

Dichter und Denker ist das Ideal der Verbindung von Kunst und Wissenschaft, insbesondere der Philosophie, in einer Person oder Gruppe.

Here is the translation from La Wik:

"Poets and Thinkers" is the ideal of combining art and science, particularly philosophy, in an individual or group.

By the way, in German Wissenschaft doesn't just mean science, it "incorporates science, learning, knowledge, scholarship and implies that knowledge is a dynamic process discoverable for oneself, rather than something that is handed down."

On my Three Peoples theory, deBoer's ideal is the cry of the People of the Creative Self. They don't want to be subordinate serfs, working for The Man. They don't want to be responsible individuals, working on a dull family and a career. They want to be funded to think deep thoughts and imagine a great thing.

deBoer skates over the cosmic responsibility that the leaders and followers of the post-capitalist world are taking on. He assumes that it is a given that we humans can replace the capitalist world with another that is better and more moral. He assumes that we understand how capitalism works. He assumes that we can design the moral system and then implement it.

I'd argue, even as a raging pro-capitalist, that the opposite is true. We really don't have a clue how capitalism works. All we know is that, in the past 200 years the peoples that have lived under capitalism have experienced a 3,000 percent increase in personal material welfare. We know that, e.g., when the Chinese government switched from a socialist-inspired economic model to a capitalist inspired model it resulted in the biggest increase in material prosperity in human history. We know that, e.g., when the Venezuelan government replaced a so-so capitalist economy and started driving towards socialism, it visited economic chaos on the Venezuelans.

Let us imagine that the Chinese government just got lucky, and the Chavistas in Venezuela just go unlucky. But, as Napoleon said about generals: "Is he lucky?" In other words: never mind how he did it, did he get the job done?

I'm inclined to go with modern science and its chaos theory. Like the weather, the economy is a chaotic emergent system. Central to the notion of emergence is the notion that the interactions are so many and so governed by chance that it is impossible to understand or control it. You don't try to control the weather; you merely adjust to it.

But humans bridle at the idea that they are at the mercy of events. Central to the conceits of prophets, rulers, thinkers, moralists, and political activists is the notion that they can grasp the meaning of it all and reduce it to a formula, as in "moral social system."

I don't think so.

Back in Marx's day, he had a point about Anti-capitalist. Based on the science of the classical ecnomists, t looked like capitalism was going to result in immiseration for the workers and the middle class. Only he was wrong. Capitalism didn't immiserate the workers, it birthed unimaginable prosperity for everyone. Today, the anti-capitalist had better come up with a better idea than, oh, we'll keep the good parts, but trust us, we know what we are doing.

Nest up: "Antiracist."

"Who Killed the Enlightenment?" is the Wrong Question

The idea of the 18th century Enlightenment was ideological. It was to create a cultural and political movement to overthrow the dark night of religion and superstition, and replace it with the bright light of reason. In particular, its leading lights wanted to chop the trunks of kings and princes away from their divine roots, the association of kingliness with godliness. Guess who would replace the benighted priests and the unjust kings?

But as soon as the Enlightenment had got fairly started, it faced a Romantic rebellion at the turn of the 19th century. Romanticism pointed out that while reason might be necessary, it certainly wasn't sufficient. What about instinct, creativity, genius? Where is their place on the lighted stage of reason? The modern era has been impaled upon the horns of this dilemma ever since.

The problem is obvious when you try to understand modern government and the modern exchange economy. The more you try to reduce government and business to a rational system the more you create a structure that is as fragile as glass. If you touch it, the whole thing collapses. See Soviet Union, collapse of. On the other hand business, which is said to be utterly mechanical and soulless, keeps coming up with unexpected surprises -- cheap textiles, steam transportation, electricity, the internal combustion engine, electronics, information -- which it then tries to reduce to a rational system that lasts until the next surprise knocks everything into a cocked hat.

Inquiring minds have tried to square this circle between reason and creative surprise with the idea of emergence. They talk about the consequence of the flap of the wings of a butterfly and chaos theory and "emergent phenomena."

Therefore, to complain that liberals "killed the Enlightenment" misses the point, as much as conservatives that claim to represent reason while liberals rely on "feelings." Strictly speaking, the Enlightenment has been dead for 200 years. Creativity, not Enlightenment, is the god of the enlightened and evolved.

For me the last nail in the coffin is the moment in The Dialectic of Enlightenment when Horkheimer and Adorno write:

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.  That is the only aim...

Enlightenment is totalitarian...

Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.

The point of the Enlightenment was that it was a cultural and political movement to take over the religious and political power in 17th and 18th century Europe. And it succeeded rather tragically in France in 1789. Period, end of story.

But let us continue to talk of reason.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind argues that reason was developed by humans to to rationalize. He uses the research of French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:

They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning has having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasions, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.(p.89)

From my "Critique of Human Mechanics:"

[Haidt] found that people do not use reason to form moral ideas.  They have moral instincts and they use their reasoning minds to rationalize their instincts.  Moreover they do not use their reason to analyze their instincts; they use reason to criticize the moral judgments and behaviors of other people, and so he confirms the analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno that reason seeks to dominate.

The Enlightenment was a political project. It was a group of thinkers that wanted to sweep away the power of bishops and kings and princes and landed aristocrats and replace them with people like them. So the new class of intellectuals declared ideological war on the superstitions of religion and the injustices of absolute monarchy.

Why did they have to declare ideological war? Because that's the nature of politics. Government is force, so if you want to obtain control of the government it means that you must develop an agenda that relies on force, so you must gin up a justification for force. The usual thing to do is to accuse the current government of monstrous and evil injustice. We are used to modern accusations of injustice, but the same thing applied in the old days, when it was marcher lords like Harry Percy from northern England raging about the injustices of Henry IV down in London.

Disgraced me in my happy victories,
Sought to entrap me by intelligence;
Rated mine uncle from the council-board;
In rage dismiss'd my father from the court;
Broke oath on oath, committed wrong on wrong,
And in conclusion drove us to seek out
This head of safety; and withal to pry
Into his title, the which we find
Too indirect for long continuance.

Really, nothing has changed. Liberals were saying exactly this during the presidency of George W. Bush. Only they rated Bush as stupid, not cunning like Henry IV.

In the 18th century the Enlightenment thinkers were raging against Throne and Altar. But in the 19th century the educated youth found a new source of injustice in the wake of the extraordinary rise of industrial capitalism: the bourgeoisie. The capitalist bourgeoisie were exploiting the factory hands in the new manufacturies and Marx and Engels offered to lead the working class to smash the bosses and give back to the working class what the bosses had stolen from them.

This strategy was effective because the working class did feel exploited and did think that force was the only remedy. The Marxist ideology dominated the next century either in its pure form or in a diluted form, with Fabianism in England and Progressivism in the United States.

In the 1920s the Frankfurt School extended the exploitation theory from the working class to blacks, women and homosexuals. Thus the class conflict theory of exploited workers against the bosses, which needed the intervention of government force on the side of the workers, was extended to other marginalized groups. Government force would be needed not just to fight for the workers but to right the injustices committed against these other groups, and not to agree was to be a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

You can see the brilliance of this ideology. Nobody has discovered a way to push back against this agenda. You can gin up anything -- rape on campus, glass ceilings, police brutality -- and gin up a rent-a-mob and cry discrimination and injustice. Since the mainstream media always comes down on the side of the apparent victims, and anyone opposing the "social justice warriors" is automatically named and shamed as racist, sexist, homophobe, there seems to be no way to push back.

Then came the migration of people from Muslim lands, and Muslims were added to the cultural Marxist agenda. To criticize Muslims became "islamophobia." Any time that there was an Islamic terror event, the ruling class and its bribed apologists immediately worried about "islamophobia" and a "backlash." Never mind that at all times in the US the incidence of anti-semitism is about five times the incidence of anti-islamism.

But there is a problem. People expect the government to keep them safe. That is the number one core function of government. If Islamic fighters are killing people in Boston or in Paris, the people -- women, especially -- expect government to do something about it.

But that knocks the whole cultural Marxist game into a cocked hat, because the whole point is to keep the majority population cowed and afraid to criticize the ruling class by ginning up offence-taking in the marginalized groups, the little darlings of the ruling class, and threatening to name and shame anyone guilty of "hate speech."

And that's where we are today. The educated ruling class's ruling ideology is threatened by its internal contradictions. How can they stigmatize people for "Islamophobia" when the Islamists are actually out there beheading and shooting people?

This creates an opening for a conservative push-back against cultural Marxism. Politics requires an enemy, an "other" for "us" to fight against. For years, conservatives didn't have an "other", especially after the end of the Cold War. But now we do, and it's one of the groups that our liberal friends the world over have taken to their bosom as their special snowflakes.

Stay tuned, because it's going to get worse before it gets better.

But is has nothing to do with the death of the Enlightenment.