Reposting this from the Low Content thread in hope to polish it a bit more here, if possible.
Clayton: @JJ: Great clip, I'm going to use that way of explaining the problem. I'll also note that the Blank Slate theory of human psychology plays a huge role in this dichotomy between biological evolution and market-based evolution. The mainstream view asserts that the mind is a blank slate - nearly infinitely malleable - that is filled in by culture. so that there is no such thing as human nature. Hence, there is no reason to expect "good outcomes" from a process of unregulated or decentralized competition for resources between human beings. Because the brain is a blank slate, the laws of biology and culture are fundamentally different. This is why challenging the blank slate theory of mind is so important to free market theory. Clayton -
The Blank Slate is so popular amongst 'intellectuals' since without it:
a) They wouldn't be able to remake humanity as they see fit, and
b) Capitalism might be something other than a temporary aberration.
If man has innate characteristics, it might just be that the intellectuals are powerless to reform him, and that the 'economic system' of capitalism just might be what man naturally finds best for his welfare after all. Such a conclusion is unacceptable.
The irony is, as Frank Chodorov argues, that the hardcore collectivist - somehow always cast as the planner in his socialist schemes and never as the planned - could be so as a result of immutable, hardwired characteristics.
Well the question still remains: how much is innate and how much is learned?
bloomj31: Well the question still remains: how much is innate and how much is learned?
That may be the wrong question. Even if the learning (nurture, teaching) part played a major role, it may as well be an innate (instinctual, evolutionary) propensity for parents, families and/or tribes to prepare their offspring for a better adaptation to an uncertain world. The individualist (free market proponent) needs only show that whatever innate (evolutionary) content a human inherits from his/her ancestors is enough to create a functioning "society" from the bottom-up, without the "help" from enlightened (or as Sowell calls them, "annointed") representatives of "society" guiding it from the top. The collectivist claim is that most of the "human" content (whatever makes each of us human) resides (is recorded) in "society" as a whole, not in the individual or his family/relatives/tribe.
In a hypothetical scenario where twenty Robinson Crusoe babies were left on an island (and somehow kept alive until the age of 15) the individualist would predict that they would likely cooperate and probably develop the concept of property, division of labor, and exchange. The collectivist would predict that without the "wisdom" of modern society to teach them how to be human, the teenagers would annihilate each other in one glorious burst of Hobbesian destruction.
I have to admit my thoughts on this are still rough and far from being polished to a satisfactory shine. Hence, this thread.
Aristipus, good post.
Aristippus: The irony is, as Frank Chodorov argues, that the hardcore collectivist - somehow always cast as the planner in his socialist schemes and never as the planned - could be so as a result of immutable, hardwired characteristics.
That is funny. Though it raises the question: How did this evolutionary (innate) characteristic manage to propagate itself to the present? Why are there so many collectivists among us?
z1235:Though it raises the question: How did this evolutionary (innate) characteristic manage to propagate itself to the present? Why are there so many collectivists among us?
If collectivism is a genetic feature rather than a mimetic feature then the simple answer is: because they were able to reproduce.
bloomj31: If collectivism is a genetic feature rather than a mimetic feature then the simple answer is: because they were able to reproduced.
If collectivism is a genetic feature rather than a mimetic feature then the simple answer is: because they were able to reproduced.
I know, and this is where it starts to get dark and scary, at least for me. What if the collectivist shepherds/herd, elite/drones, generals/cannon-fodder model for humanity is the most optimal one in terms of maximizing procreation and propagation of the species? Has anyone proven/shown that it is not? Why aren't we all John Galts, Mises', Rothbards? What if the vast majority of humans need, want, an are asking to be led, to be treated as a collective blob -- mere body parts in need of a brain to provide them with signals to move and give them purpose for their existence? The current state of humanity -- the outcome of evolution and natural selection at every level -- sure seems to be hinting in that direction. /rant
It could just be a problem of scale. We evolved in an environment of tight-knit tribal communities - much like extended family - where "central-planning" made sense because the leaders knew all the people they were leading by name. The modern State free-rides on the same psychological wiring but it exists at a mega-scale where the leaders must necessarily be ignorant of almost all the relevant information regarding the consequences of their decisions. So, even if you assume good intentions, the central-planners are simply incapable of getting it right.
The prejudice toward central-planning could just be a result of the fact that our brains still think they are back in the African savanna, in terms of what strikes us as reasonable principles of social organization. Your brain does not know what a television is. So, when you see the face of your Dear Leader on the television, your brain feels like you've actually met the person. Evolutionary psychology studies show this is a real phenomenon (see Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters).
Clayton -
Clayton posted a video of Daniel Dennett's presentation entitled "Religion As A Natural Phenomenon" which I greatly enjoyed.
Around the 42 minute mark, Dennett says "let's talk about domestication for a moment, how clever of sheep to have acquired shepherds."
He goes on to detail how domesticated sheep have outsourced a lot of their problems to human handlers in exchange for complacent servility.
Perhaps collectivist/statist humans have done the same thing to one degree or another.
I think that the reliance of most upon the decisions of natural elites was likely selected for evolutionarily. But, as Clayton notes, the distance between the average person and those viewed as natural elites is now so great that the supposed natural elites are in fact collectivist self-appointed 'experts', and are judged not for their actual conduct and the results of their decisions (as in prehistory), but by much less useful credentials.
much less useful credentials
Indeed. As an aside, I'm curious why they're going after him all of a sudden. What did he do to rock the boat?
I want to open up the subject of criticism of Rothbardian/Hoppean development of the contents of human nature using a priori methods.
For example, in Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 1, Rothbard says:
In natural-law philosophy, then, reason is not bound, as it is in modern post-Humean philosophy, to be a mere slave to the passions, confined to cranking out the discovery of the means to arbitrarily chosen ends. For the ends themselves are selected by the use of reason; and "right reason” dictates to man his proper ends as well as the means for their attainment. For the Thomist or natural-law theorist, the general law of morality for man is a special case of the system of natural law governing all entities of the world, each with its own nature and its own ends. "For him the moral law . . . is a special case of the general principles that all finite things move toward their ends by the development of their potentialities."[14] And here we come to a vital difference between inanimate or even non-human living creatures, and man himself; for the former are compelled to proceed in accordance with the ends dictated by their natures, whereas man, "the rational animal," possesses reason to discover such ends and the free will to choose.[15]
Hoppe plies a slightly different approach with his Argumentation Ethics - in essence, he states that anyone who is engaging in verbal discussion is implicitly granting the fact of self-ownership and, therefore, he cannot use verbal discussion to deny this fact. Therefore, it is self-evident or an obligatory assumption by virtue of the impossibility of the contrary.
By contrast, consider this passage from John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "founders" of the field of science called evolutionary psychology:
At a certain level of abstraction, every species has a universal, species-typical evolved architecture. For example, one can open any page of the medical textbook, Gray's Anatomy, and find the design of this evolved architecture described down to the minutest detail -- not only do we all have a heart, two lungs, a stomach, intestines, and so on, but the book will describe human anatomy down to the particulars of nerve connections. This is not to say there is no biochemical individuality: No two stomachs are exactly alike -- they vary a bit in quantitative properties, such as size, shape, and how much HCl they produce. But all humans have stomachs and they all have the same basic functional design -- each is attached at one end to an esophagus and at the other to the small intestine, each secretes the same chemicals necessary for digestion, and so on. Presumably, the same is true of the brain and, hence, of the evolved architecture of our cognitive programs -- of the information-processing mechanisms that generate behavior. Evolutionary psychology seeks to characterize the universal, species-typical architecture of these mechanisms.
[Emphasis mine]
In other words, the content of human nature (the peculiar attributes of the human brain/mind that determine human behavioral universals) is expounded by evolutionary psychology in a manner logically equivalent to the way that human anatomy is expounded - through detailed description of the particular features of human behavior, along with their evolutionary origins and their manifest roles in human developmental and survival.
Let me translate Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics in terms of human physiology instead of the human mind. Let's assume human beings don't have vocal cords and communicate solely through the use of their hands. Hoppe's argument is a lot like arguing that the human hand must exist because - without it - no one could have fashioned and operated the pens and keyboards required to write or type arguments. To deny its existence - while using it - is self-refuting. Therefore, the existence of the human hand is an obligatory assumption because of the impossibility of the contrary.
Such an argument is of no use in determining the specific features of the human hand and it is not at all obvious that any of the features of the human hand had to be exaclty as they are in order for human beings to be able to write or type on a keyboard. In fact, for any feature of the hand you care to mention, I can conceive of a modification which is substantially different but does not prevent humans from communicating with one another.
The scientist investigating human nature is interested in its specific contents. What are universal human behaviors? What are the laws (biological, psychological, praxeological, etc.) governing these behaviors? Whence did they arise? And so on. Unlike bootstrap arguments - such as Argumentation Ethics - which provide no specific contents of human nature and throw no light on the human condition, evolutionary psychology gives us an empirical methodology by which to answer specific questions about the particular features of human nature.
The brain, like the hand, has a particular "anatomy" and specific details about this anatomy cannot be discovered from logic alone or from any abstract argument. Only empirical investigation can fill out the picture of the details of human nature. This should not be confused with empiricism which says that all knowledge is empirical. But, surely, some knowledge is empirical - knowledge such as the details of human anatomy or the "anatomy" of the mind and, thence, human nature.
The moral case (what I believe is the most powerful case) for liberty rests on arguments that assume human beings have a nature that is discoverable and describable and which delineates laws of what sorts of social behaviors are or are not possible in human populations. For example, the socialists' wet dream of remaking human beings into self-disinterested altruists is not only ridiculous and infeasible, it is actually impossible. We know this because evolutionary psychology tells us that human self-interest is part of human nature and, therefore, it is "hard-wired" into every human brain in a way that no amount of cultural conditioning can ever defeat. It also tells us that behaviors such as sympathy and charitable giving are part of human nature, as well.
We don't have to hope or guess that this is the case, either. We can prove it is the case just like an anatomist can slice open the hand of a human cadaver and prove that all the joints described by an anatomy book are present, as described. Armed with this "anatomy of human nature", the moral case against social policies for centrally-planned economies becomes as strong as the moral case against a moonshot program to research unaided human flight through arm-flapping techniques (Rothbard). The government might as well take the equivalent value in housing as it intends to invest in such programs and simply burn the houses to the ground because all such expenditures are sheer waste. Shutting down the publicly-funded Marx-studies departments of universities would be a good start in this direction.
Aside from Pinker's Blank Slate, what books would you recommend on evolutionary psychology? I find this subject very interesting.
@bloomj: The book that got me started is Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (yes, they do!) by Kanazawa and Miller. It's funny, engaging and introduces "big ideas" without all the technicalia. 5-stars.