09.21.08
A question from Darwinian Conservatism blog
Larry Arnhart from Darwinian Conservatism blog issues a challenge:
Larry Arnhart said,
September 21, 2008 at 5:48 pm ·
Could you explain your alternative assessment of the bailout proposal based on your “eonic effect�
Link here to generate trackback
This is a good question, but I can’t quite answer it despite my opinions on other grounds, and it should be said that the eonic explanation is long, we would have to presuppose all its findings, which is not realistic if you haven’t read the book. We can try a short version. And it should be said at once that the eonic effect is on a scale of five thousand years to double that, ten thousand, and micro episodes on the scale of this bailout aren’t computable from the eonic model’s assessments. Basically the eonic effect whisks evolution away to a higher level, with economies in the foreground as a different system.
My objection is that Darwinism is not a tool to answer the question. The eonic effect isolates evolutionary theory on a different level, and makes economies independent subsystems.
Wilson makes the not unreasonable case for regulation, but its basis in the Darwin take on bee hives isn’t complex enough as theory to handle societies plus economies.
Arnhart is at least consistent.
Wilson and Arnhart are making assumptions about self-organization which have never been demonstrated to hold for either cultural or economic systems. There is a case for self-organizing economic systems but the eonic effect shows that ‘self-organization’ in cultural terms is something different. Hayek blended cultural and economic evolution as ‘self-organization’ in a non-theory that is hot air, and nothing more than hot air. There is NOT A SINGLE theory of self-organization that is scientific that can be applied to civilizations and/or economies (and they would have to be distinct). Meanwhile group selection theory here is like one of those flying contraptions with bat wings that preceded the invention of the airplane. It is a Darwinian fantasy that explains nothing about civilization (and wasn’t present in Mandeville or Adam Smith, these two weren’t Darwinists).
Even Hegel was closer.
This is THEORY MADNESS. Natural selection fails on a key point, so a sophistical theory of group selection (followed by kin selection) is invented to save the theory, and then, without this having been verified save for wooly speculations about bee hives, it is applied to social systems, then to figure out the recent bailout.
YOU”RE ALL MADMEN, driven to terminal muddle by Darwin’s bogus theory, which he stole from Wallace.
_____________________________
Now the long spiel, I recommend reading the book, or various modules on line at eonic-effect.net.
The eonic effect separates historical theories from economic theories, and thus, strictly speaking doesn’t answer any questions about how to manage economies. Furthermore the eonic effect is completed ca. 1800, and ceases to apply to our present, a powerful yet odd feature of the eonic model.
However, we can see that the modern transition does give a powerful boost to capitalism, and just at its climactic emergence moment. As a leftist interpreter of the eonic effect I must remind myself of this important fact. Changing capitalist basics isn’t easy, as Marx would have agreed! The communist experiment was a miscalculation of dynamics, whatever its logical merits as an abstraction. The timing and slingshot momentum of capitalism has, so far, made it look like the driver of history itself, but if we expand our scale of observation, we see that is not so. A fan of capitalism, then, has a powerful argument from history in his favor, but ought to be nervous about the far future, and better informed about the past. Capitalism as we know it now is a mere moment, two centuries in length, with a long gestation, and many prior cases that resemble it, but still, a brief experiment. No universal generalization is safe then, across history into the future.
Economies come and go. The eonic effect works on a different scale, and has probably, in any case, ceased its action, leaving the issue of the future up to a series of free choices by humanity about how to live. Marx’s logic seemed to indicate that sooner or later a different system would emerge. But given the circumstances of the socialist experiment, it is clear that the system reverted to its first born of the modern transition, capitalism. So a new crisis of this system, who knows where it will lead. Discussions about the ‘end of history’ are mostly nonsense. The discussion has lost its basis, due to the confusion of terms. In terms of the eonic effect, we can ask a different set of questions, based on the perception that democratic emergence and the birth of capitalism have strong directional correlation with the larger eonic sequence. No more, no less. The issue is whether modernity can maintain its achieved freedoms, as opposed to, say, the Greek experiment which was so short lived.
This, however, is not legitimation of capitalism, as such, merely the observation that a particular kind of economic system is characteristic of modernity (along with mercantilism, which has had a longer reign! And was never really abolished.) There is no absolute reason, based on the eonic effect, that we should accept such a system, for the simple reason that we have rapidly deviated from its initial conditions, which were statements about freedom of commerce. We don’t live up to Adam Smith, so we live in an imaginary version of the whole game, evidently. Look at all the economic systems associated with the eonic effect, capitalism is only the last, and greatest (in scale) (you can also argue that primitive capitalism has always existed, but nothing like the modern form, a genuine new form that could claim the term). Nothing entails its evolutionary immortality as a system. To make that clear, consider Kant next to Adam Smith. Kant was a champion of Smith, no doubt, but he demonstrated via the connections of liberalism, right, ethics (categorical imperatives), the chameleon quickchange costuming from capitalism to socialism (without realizing it). Note that the Marburg Kantian Cohen called Kant the true founder of German socialism! Who is the spokesman for modern society, Adam Smith as an economist, Kant as a liberal with ‘deductions about freedom’, or anyone else associated with modernity…? Kant unwittingly prophecies via the categorical imperative the teleological explosion that occurs as Marx and Adam Smith collide. Kant’s system is also imperfect, but it gives us a clue to the nature of the convulsion that suddenly befell the first born child of the modern transition, a new system of economic liberty, later dubbed capitalism, and made the beneficiary of lavish sophistries by its agents of propaganda. Marx’s Communist Manifesto is one of the greatest pieces of propaganda for capitalism, btw, whoopee, globalization, and then.
I say this because the logical complexity of modernity shows us not a simple result, but a nexus of logical wholes that can shift from one thing into its seeming opposite.
Economies are subsystems inside the civilization systems that are fretted by the eonic pattern. All three are different. (Modern) Capitalism, relative to the eonic effect, is an experiment of centuries duration, compared with something operating since the Neolithic, in units of millennia. If that experiment fails, eonic evolution will pick up several millennia later, perhaps, and do something different. In the meantime, what people do with the economy they live in is not determined by the eonic effect. We are slowly but surely moving away from the eonic effect, and need to track our deviations from that seminal period. It would seem the eonic effect has completed its action, and leaves a capitalist world in its wake, with many latencies that will rise to challenge is claims on the future.
Thus the question of the bailout is indeterminate, but seems symbolic of the whole nature of the system, a powerful symbolism of ‘free markets’ versus something else. The bailout might effect the future of various corporations in a Darwinian metaphor, of survival or not, but it is not really evolution.
I have liberal/leftist sympathies but these don’t really answer to the issue. What is the best procedure with the current economic situation we have? I might say one thing, and change my mind tomorrow, and should be wary of quickie explanations for complex situations about which I have little information.
Whatever the case, Darwin’s theory is not going to tell us the answer.
How men should behave is a question of ethics, not economic or evolutionary theory.
A system using Darwinism to justify the ‘selfishness’ of capitalist interaction is one with a shaky claim on the future, so who knows.
One thing the eonic effect shows us is the relationship of systems and free agents. There are never binding deterministic laws that agents can’t override. There is no rule that says we must live with the ‘invisible hand’. History creates capitalism, not the other way around. So we also, can create capitalism, or uncreate it, modify it, etc…
There is something silly about capitalist ideology. It claimed to abolish mercantilism. But it only did so superficially. Economies have always been complex bundles of contradictions. The attempt to produce a streamlined logically pure ‘capitalist’ economy is about an abstraction and only succeeded up to a point, and has no absolute logical basis, and soon encounters its own reality check. The system has to swing back to something that acknowledges it latent character.
The eonic effect enforces the discipline of computing together all the ‘emergent’ factors of modernism.
And that includes, e.g. democratic emergence. The parallel emergence of capitalism and democracy confuses us, but at the same time shows the reason why economic reasoning in isolation always miscomputes (the point is so obvious we tend to overlook it). Market systems emerging collide with democratic systems emerging, and socialist democrats (as opposed to communists) move to blend the two. I see no reason in the spectrum of possibilities therefore why socialism (definition required, with a critical division point with Communism and the absolute abolition of private property question) isn’t just as much a potential outcome of modernity. Communism wishes to do something far more drastic, abolish private property, a real whopper that would buck the trends of multiple historical streams. No logical or historical reason why that can’t happen, but it doesn’t look likely soon, since it already happened and didn’t persist. I say that because we have scrambled together socialism and communism, factored democracy out where democracy was crucial to its birth, and so on.
To use the eonic effect we have to trace the histories of all these things, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, etc, or else we are dealing in fictions. We often notice how far we are from the seminal commonsense of Adam Smith. So what system do we in fact live in? Not Adam Smith’s system.
So as to the bailout question, well, I have failed to derive an answer, an honest non-conclusion.
My opinion, not based on eonic explanations ad infinitum, is that a phase of neoliberal capitalism might be shifting to a new computation of itself, as it so obviously did in the Great Depression, but predicting the future is difficult, and the basic contradictions of the whole game (made clear from Kantian logic) have never precipitated so far the final demise of that first born of modernity, so-called capitalism. But as the system moves to weaken democracy its equally powerful first born twin (!), the democratic impulse will move to generate a new hybrid.
Note: I didn’t mean to denigrate ‘communism’, as such, only its historical manifestation. Merely to distinguish (as did Marxists) socialisms of various kinds and communism pure, which is still a conceptual novelty of history and a complete unknow, witness its grotesque abortive birth in Bolshevism. And to note that the abolition of private property is a stage beyond ‘socialism’ in many versions defining the term.
My point was merely that, before the spurious monstrosity ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ entered like a virus to corrupt thought, the idea of socialism was a variant of the democratic idea, and that given the class divisions suddenly manifesting in the first stages of the Industrial Revolution, the meaning of the term ‘democracy’ spontaneously shifted to variant terminologies. We should note that the term ‘democracy’ was even until Marx’s period a word in search of its definitions. The battle for its meaning was lost by the left who proceeded to invent a new term, which then suffered the idiocies of misunderstood marxist propagandas. If we look at the revolutions of 1848 we see how the battle for democracy produced unpredictable results, leading to premature post-liberal ideologies that have often confused the issue of democracty/socialism. Not all, of course, will agree with this account.