We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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While I was pondering the ideas of historicism last week, my thoughts also chained through a number of associations and arrived at an interesting question: “Could humanity actually be sent back to the Stone Age?” I arrived at this question by way of cyclical history and thoughts on whether a single species could actually provide more than one data point on the sequence and timing of social, philosophical and technological innovations.
My own answer was “No”. I will explain with a thought experiment.
First imagine a maximal disaster, whether natural or human caused, that does not wipe out the species. This means we must guarantee there is a large enough breeding population left over somewhere in the world such that after the event or period in question, the population is able to rebound rather than decline to extinction. My guess is we need somewhere in the range of 1000 individuals, with a typical age and sex distribution. They do not all have to be in one place, but they do have to be within a distance that allows intermarriage between groups. If there were 10 groups of 100 dispersed over some distance which is no more than a few days to a week travel by foot or horseback, I would consider that a viable population.
It seems unlikely any event would leave only one such pocket. Possible… but not very probable. I will be assuming for my baseline a surviving population on earth of perhaps one million, scattered about in small groups in out of the way places across vast distances. The Himalayas, the Andes, islands in the Pacific, places like some of the Outer Hebrides or the Falklands, small towns in the Rocky Mountains and such.
Even if a place starts out smaller than 100, we may presume that small groups of one or more survivors will tend to congregate together for safety and to reach a critical mass of manpower and skills for survival. In this, some of those isolated ancient villages may indeed have the edge.
Now comes the question: does this actually reset humanity to the stone age? I think the immediate answer is no. Most places in the world simply lack people with hunter-gatherer skills and even for people who do manage to figure them out in time to not die of cold and starvation it will not be enough. They will want more out of life. Most will join with others they run across and will rapidly transition to a more familiar lifestyle with farming at its center. Even amongst town and city folk there are those sufficiently skilled in growing things in garden plots. This will be much superior to life in temporary lean-to shelters where survival hinges on running down a deer in the dead of winter.
In the most likely scenario, the majority of survivors a year on from our hypothetical will live in such places, whether they are communities with a long history of self sufficiency or new ones which have learned the hard way, ie Plymouth without the friendly natives, is immaterial in the long run.
One might then presume we will fall back to an agrarian stone-age rather than a full on hunter-gatherer stone-age. If so, one would be very wrong. The survivors will at the very least have knowledge of the way things were and of what was once possible, even if they do not know how. The intelligence spread of the survivors will be no different than the intelligence spread of the general population today so effort will go into recovering capabilities that make survival easier. I suspect that some locations would be forging metals within a few years and some would be back to the iron age and even steel within a few decades at most. Trade would pop up very quickly because the survivors would be used to trade and specialization. One location might supply some quantities of one ore and another location a different one and yet a third location will specialize in mud brick oven smelters with bellows of wood and animal hide and molds of sand or clay. Tallow from animal fat might be used for wax to make lost-wax molds.
Now with the ability to make iron, steel is not very much harder. Labour intensive perhaps, but it has properties for tools and farm implements that will make that effort worthwhile. If you can make ploughs and tools, you can build a foot treadle lathe. If you can do that, you can copy a Lee Enfield rifle, just like Afghan villagers did at the turn of the previous century. Perhaps muskets are easier for a start: black powder is not hard to make and the materials are not that uncommon. Urine was a key ingredient and the source of a lively trade in London five hundred years ago for just that reason. Flint is not exactly rare and acquiring it will be the cause of yet more trade.
So we have rather primitive firearms almost as soon as we can make decent iron.
Now here is one you might not have seen coming… electricity. Humans knew how to make batteries thousands of years ago. All you need is a clay pot, an acid and simple materials for the anode and cathode. Good wire is a problem, but people will just deal with what they have until they can figure out how to do better. Iron is not great, but if you have nothing else? In any case, there should be loads of copper to be mined out of the detritus of the dead civilization. There will be loads more than are needed at first and stripping raw materials from the old cities will be the source of a lively trade and wealth for the traders.
If you have electricity from batteries, you can do electroplating. Of course, if you get your hands on copper wire, low quality motors and generators can be made by hand. I did so from a few nails and a bit of wire when I was perhaps ten or twelve. I am sure an adult with a lifetime experience of fixing broken farm implements could do much better. You can drive them with wind power. Windmills are not terribly taxing to build.
But wait… there is more. Radio! Somewhere someone is going to remember that if you can find crystals of Galena, you can make a cats-whisker receiver. As for the transmitter, a spark gap telegraph key might be enough to start with, and antennas are just wire.
What about transportation? Inefficient steam engines will not be difficult to make and boat building will not be forgotten; we will still have horses and the making of wagons using steel rimmed wheels and of shoes for horses will be well within the abilities of a local blacksmith shop.
What we would not have is a very large part of modern medicine as it relies on techniques that cannot be implemented in a blacksmith shop. What we would have is a true knowledge of anatomy, the causes of disease, the symptoms of all the now untreatable disorders, and some idea of what we could only do… if we could re-invent genetic engineering and manipulate DNA again.
So my guess is, the absolute worst non-extinction event that can happen to the human species will see us back to the 17th Century (plus radio, steam and a few other amenities) within a generation or two.
Lord, what a time of adventure it would be! Swords, muskets, sailing ships, radio and a nearly empty world with magical items scattered across it and there for the taking.
As I proceed deeper into Popper, I have pondered his ideas on ‘historicism’, the idea that one can define a set of laws of history. Within the context he is arguing I must say that he is correct. Popper argues such laws are unscientific because they are not falsifiable. This is true for the case of all of which I am aware, whether several millinnia ago or within recent memory. But is it a true statement or is it an over-application of inductive reasoning?
I do not think we know enough to make that general of a statement about the possibility of historical laws. With the knowledge at hand we are probably on safe ground to agree that racially based, class-based and simple projections of past events onto future history are non-starters. So what would it take to really have a ‘Seldon Theory’?
Science requires data. Hypotheses must be based on data and should be falsifiable by uncovering new data or effects which are sufficiently counter to the predications of theory so as to bring its viability into question. To do that with history we need not one history but many. True, we can analyze numerous Earthly civilizations from different times and places, but that is not enough. We simply do not have enough detail about many of them. Perhaps new developments in Archaeology will one day make such data available, but for the present we have only a small number of historical, independent civilizations from which to work.
Even worse, were we to generate a theory that was applicable to such pre-technological societies, those theories would still fall upon the same problem when looking at what comes after, because once technology arrives on a planet, the boundaries become fuzzy very quickly and you are back to having only one data point. You cannot build a theory on a single data point. Even worse, we are in a technological civilization in which the rate of change grows more rapid with each passing year. How can you generate any sort of prediction about a world with wildly different characteristics from your own, none of which are knowable to you? How could a Scientific Historian of, say 1950, predict much of anything about a world with global access to virtually all of human knowledge, blogs, twitterers, computerized phones more powerful than Colossus and a third world that is not quite so third any more?
The simple answer is: “They would not have had a prayer of being right.”
So have I proved a Theory of History is impossible? No, far from it. I have simply framed the obvious limitations of the data available to us. It is insufficient to allow anything like a hard science of history to develop. That does not mean such data will never be available. Let us posit one possible future in which there might be true scientists working in such a field…
It would be some hundreds if not thousands of years hence. Humanity has gone to the stars and we have studied the histories of hundreds of other sentient races. We have put our AI’s to work for some decades to analyze and categorize; we have looked at vast amounts of cross-galactic statistical data; we have framed the areas where mathematical Chaos reigns and know the likely set of outcomes. Our learned future historical scientists are arguing over what experimental data is required to falsify their theories: ie, can we find a civilization X in which Y occurred?
Then and only then could we say that history is a science. Of course we still do have a problem. Unless we run across an elder civilization willing to talk to us, we still cannot predict our own future at all. We can only do so for civilizations at earlier stages of development than our own.
Thus Popper still wins the argument against Historicism as a self-analysis tool even in the far future.
After having it sit on my book shelf collecting dust for half a decade or more, I finally picked up Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and It’s Enemies” as I had nothing left that was less daunting in appearance for my late afternoon lunch/dinner/coffee break. Whatever else I may get from it, whether I find myself agreeing or not, I most certainly found it a generator of ideas and flights of wild fancy, some of which I will now impose upon you.
First, I have only ever read parts of Plato. A few chapters here and there over the years. I have tended to use my deep thinking reading time for people more like Hayek and the other free market economists and thinkers. Thus I was utterly and totally unprepared for the shock of the Platonic quotation that headed Volume I:
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace — to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals… only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”
I do not think I have ever had such a horrified awakening to such pure evil in my life. If this is what Plato’s philosophy espouses, then nearly anything built upon him is likely to be totalitarian and I can easily see the direct line from him through the Hitler’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s and Pol Pot’s of well over two thousand years after his demise.
Watch this outstanding commentary on political correctness in academia and the culture and naked lies in the media called MSNBC & The Great Liberal Narrative: The Truth About The Tyranny of Political Correctness.
And I know Bill and he is a really great guy, a true gentleman. But Bill… stop calling them liberal. We are the true liberals.
PJTV really is getting some truly great stuff up lately.
There is a subject that we often return to on Samizdata when discussing things, and that is ‘meta-context’. This is the frames of reference, the unspoken assumptions, the underpinning world view if you like, within which people see things and discuss them. Context is usually explicit, whereas meta-context is implicit and very much in the background.
This is a useful concept for understanding why discussions get framed in the manner they do. When the meta-context of two people is widely divergent, they tend to talk past each other, because much of what they say will not be what the other person understands. A great deal of the success of the statist political establishment comes from their control of the meta-context, so that in the minds of many, much of what states do simply goes without saying… that is just the way it is, even if on a contextual level a person is not predisposed to like or trust the political establishment, the state’s basic purview is essentially a given and thus not really pondered deeply, much like the sun rising in the morning.
So when David Cameron and Gordon Brown exchange meaningless ritual barbs in the House of Commons, we hear an exchange between two people with somewhat different politics and personalities, but they are as one at the meta-contextual level. Each understand the other completely on a great many levels and both understand instinctively what are the ‘proper’ limits of their political ‘disagreement’.
So when someone comes along who does not share meta-context, all sorts of interesting things happen. Not only is there going to be a profound non-meeting of minds, there is going to be both misunderstanding and often great antipathy as people struggle to fit the opposing person’s views within their own meta-context, assuming things that are actually not the case at all and imputing meaning that tell you far more about the person doing the imputing than the person they are discussing.
And so I present you with Randy Cohen, who blogs for the mainstream statist-left newspaper the New York Times as The Ethicist. The article which caused my meta-contextual antennae to start tingling a few days ago was titled How not to talk about health care. → Continue reading: So genuine opposition is… unethical?
The other night I attended a talk by Tara Smith, a philosopher from the University of Texas who has written a number of good books, such as this one. Her talk was at a private event so I am not going to relate the exact details of what was said, but one thing that struck me during the Q&A session was when a guy in the audience, who clearly disagreed violently with Prof. Smith’s views, began to state that she “did not get” certain ideas (which he presumably agreed with).
I really dislike this verbal tactic, although I occasionally find myself lapsing into it, and I should not. When we say that someone does not “get” something, such as not “getting” rock music, or clothes fashions, or a political creed, or whatnot, what they really are trying to say is that “X does not like or agree with this because he or she is an idiot or is blind to the wonderfulness of it.” I remember, back in the days when he was cheerleading for George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan was a particularly bad offender, writing about how X or Y did not “get” the threat posed by Saddam/etc and so forth. Even if Sullivan was right at the time, this tactic smacked of saying that smart, clever people like him understood what was going on but those who did not were in some ways deficient in their reasoning.
Jamie Whyte, about whom I have written before, has a great book debunking these lazy ways of thinking and arguing. Well worth the read.
Books that try to convey important philosophical ideas can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to read. Much as I liked Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for the sheer sweep of the novel and the way it tackled all manner of topics, I’ll be the first to concede that some folk out there will find that type of book a daunting read. But a shorter, and highly engaging, example of something rather similar has been out for a few months now: “Old Nick’s Guide To Happiness”, by Nicholas Dykes.
I will not give the plot away but to say that Mr Dykes’ novel is based in the wilds of Scotland, focusing on what happens when a young man, who is shortly to head off for Oxford as an undergraduate, gets lost and hurt during a hiking expedition in the Highlands, and how he falls in with a rather unusual couple living there. There are lots of discussions of philosophy and ideas along the way, but is done in such a charming way that the reader, whatever their views, will not feel they are being lectured at. Admittedly, if you are a religious fundamentalist, deep Green or hardline collectivist, then this book will drive you nuts.
I have known Mr Dykes for several years and he has been a regular writer for the Libertarian Alliance, among other places. I liked this book very much and I hope Mr Dykes tries his hand at another novel. As he realises, abstract treatises are all very well, but if you can convey ideas through the medium of fiction, with strong characters, a good plot and plenty of engaging detail, it can be far more effective. The Left, if I can be permitted to use that term has long understood this – it needs to be understood by those who work in the broadly classical liberal tradition, too. And the same point applies even more, perhaps, to the world of TV drama and films.
Many people say that the poll tax funded BBC no longer matters – but I do not agree.
The BBC matters less than it once did, but it (or rather parts of it) is still considered a source of serious discussion – and things said on the BBC go into the schools and colleges (via teachers and university lecturers – the sort of people who still actually listen to things like BBC Radio Four) and even into the entertainment media – as BBC money is still a major source of funding for comedians, and actors and even pop singers like to be thought of as “intellectual” so they follow what other people tell them are serious ideas.
The BBC is not all “Eastenders” and other soap operas; it still considers itself in the business of spreading ideas (although, of course, even the soap operas spread ideas and attitudes) and the Reith Lectures, named after the founder of the BBC, John Reith, is what BBC thinks of as the high point of its “High Culture” mission.
Of course the vile taxpayers may not actually listen to the Reith Lectures, or understand them if we did, but watered down and adapted forms of the ideas expressed in the Reith Lectures will be used to “educate” our children and even “inform” popular entertainers, so whether we listen or not is not really relevant from the point of view of the BBC.
The Reith Lectures this year are to be delivered by what the BBC’s advertisements describe as “one of the world’s great philiosphers”, Michael Sandel, actually a Harvard professor who has spent his entire academic life repeating the statist mantras of the late John Rawls. In this context, see Antony Flew’s examination of the ideas such men stand for, which Flew gives in such works as “Equality: In Liberty and Justice”. → Continue reading: BBC Harvard ‘Philosophy’ is based on lies
There is a Reuters story quoting a survey suggesting that the recession could trigger a general increase in violence around the world. As is always important in these kind of claims, we need to be sure that correlation between two things – violence and economic uncertainty – is not being conflated with causation. Consider: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early 1990s when the world, in general, was quite prosperous, albeit coming out of a short recession in countries such as the US and UK, when the price of oil had also been falling. The violence that broke out in the MEast later in parts of Africa (think Sudan, think USS Cole) took place in the middle to late-1990s, a period when emerging market economies were generally on the rise. The exceptions may prove the rule: what I think is true is that places that are felt, rightly or wrongly, to be unfairly excluded from a global prosperity are often likely to be unstable, and quite violent, but not always.
In fact, it is even arguable that greater prosperity might even cause some forms of violence if reactionary/religious groups regard such wealth as a defilement of whatever it is they want to protect. (I happen to think that explains why some anti-globalisation folk are often, in essence, reactionary snobs). That in part explains the argument of those who said that the West was attacked on 9/11 not for its supposed transgressions in the Middle East, but for its wealth and freedom per se.
Where I think economics does play a more direct role is where you have regimes that are financially busted, with few remaining resources, and where they greedily, and desperately, eye other, resource-rich nations nearby. That explains some, but not all, military campaigns. As in the case of Japan during the 1930s, a hunger for raw materials, coupled with a militaristic ruling ideology and elite, led to the Japanese conquests in parts of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. The same happened with Argentina and its invasion of the Falklands Islands in 1982 (the islands are supposedly close to some very big oil reserves). Ceasar’s conquest of Gaul had a partly economic incentive (all that gold, slaves, etc). And so on.
There may also be some evidence that the more prosperous we are, the more tolerant we are, too. In fact tolerance, which is allied to liberty, and prosperity, are faces of the same coin. In the minds of the great Victorian champions of free trade, such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, free trade and peace went hand in hand. A bit naive, maybe – trade routes need to be protected against thieves and thugs – but it is a view based on an essentially benign view of how most of us live our lives, given half a chance.
Mike Oliver (who blogs as ‘Mr. Integrity’… currently off-line) spotted an interesting article over on National Review that for once does not try to give Rand a kicking.
BB&T – and its open defence of rational/individualist/objectivist philosophy, a credo that runs counter to 2000 years of Judea/Christian/subjectivist/marxist ethics and deeper subjectivist planks that link those categories. Explicit defense of reason – I say!
Yes, such businessmen do exist, they are not merely the stuff of a well-known novel. As opposed to at least a large plurality of “business leaders” who seek always to cultivate government/business linkages, contracts, and of course regulations that “rationalize” their sectors (with such government rules used to ossify the industry with them – the privileged businessmen- commanding a degree of non-market control over that business sector). In history classes the U.S. trends now massively underway was how Fascism was defined.
But modern lovers of the State seem to have conveniently blanked that out. Anyway BB&T stands out from the crowd. What is most curious on a meta-level about this online article is that it comes from NationalReviewOnline.
National Review has been and until now at least was always the most outspoken and spewing opponent of Rand & Objectivism. Denouncing Rand’s rational philosophical base. NR has always been at its core, and explicity so – Buckley’s first book was titled God and Man at Yale) a subjectivist, religiously-planked political credo, arguing that God and a belief therein is the basis of capitalism and individual rights, etc. No wonder over the decades so many young potentially-bright students have mistakenly linked (as their professors would have them do) capitalism, or such that we have had in the U.S. that is labeled “capitalism.” with a religous or non-rational philosophical base.
Many of those students, not realizing the subjectivist, A-is-not-A base of Marxism, therefore sized-up the two choices – of an ethical code based on mysticism (the Buckley-type defence of “capitalism”… or Marxism… which to so many seemed a “scientific” or otherwise rational view of the world. And tended to opt for the later – either Marxism or many of its falsely-“humanist” variants.
Anyway, National Review was on the side of mysticism and held that banner high while viciously attacking Rand and her atheism – almost foaming in their attacks over the years. Well, perhaps even that changes with new blood at National Review? No, it’s probably just the failure of one of their higher editors to notice that one of their writers slipped this article onto their online site. Well, in any case it is an interesting article about the current times and the role of ideas: ideas taken from reality then applied back to issues of dealing with reality.
“There is no doubting that materialism can be a cause of spiritual emptiness and no doubt there are a lot of people who “starve for want of luxuries.” But it is always easy to regard another man’s things as superficial and another man’s pursuits as greedy, while one’s own belongings have sentimental value and one’s own pursuits are profound (or at least harmless indulgences). It is even easier for self-righteous 30 year olds to regard older men with families as leading lives of desperation, while impressing themselves with the depth of their spiritual access.”
– Timothy Sandefur. He subjects Henry Thoreau, darling of the back-to-nature types, to a ferocious take-down. Read the whole thing.
“Even those who have never taken seriously utopias of classless societies and pure socialism have been seduced in the course of the last 100 years into falsely concluding that the critical role in society is the perogative of envious dispositions whom a single concession would supposedly placate…The time has surely come when we should stop behaving as though the envious man was the main criterion for social and economic policy.”
– Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, page 427. In the light of last week’s terrible UK budget and its levelling intent, his book repays reading. It often enrages egalitarians when they are told that much of their views are a rationalisation for envy, but that rage perhaps suggests that such a charge touches on a truth they would rather not contemplate for long.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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