09.28.08

The eonic effect, language, and the invisible hand

Posted in Evolution, The Axial Age, The Eonic Effect at 5:45 pm by nemo

In trying to justify the invisible hand idea, Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism moves into dangerous terrain, The Invisible Hand of Regulation in the Evolution of Language. First, Arnhart is right to paint a more complex picture of Adam Smith whose views don’t correspond to those of most free market theorists, and his use of the term ‘invisible hand’ is marginal in his works, at best. It has been seized upon as a shibboleth, and notions he didn’t have.

Arnhart then embarks on some statements about the evolution of language that are completely false.

Smith speaks of how a man might be “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” Thus, the idea of an invisible hand is the idea of an unintended order. Smith’s general argument is that all human institutions arise and change as systems of unintended order. It was this idea that Darwin picked up from Smith and the other Scottish philosophers as the basis for his insight into evolution as an unintended order in which apparent design could arise in the living world without the need for an intelligent designer.

Consider the case of language. In fact, Smith’s idea of the invisible hand as an unintended order was first stated in his essay on language–”Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages.” Language is an unintended order. Language is a highly regulated instrument for communication that has emerged from the verbal activity of millions of people over thousands of years without anyone having intended the outcome by deliberate design. So, for instance, those of us who speak English have inherited our language as a customary legacy of a long history of linguistic practices, and each of us contributes to the evolution of the English language by every utterance we make, without being able to predict or to intend the outcome. Our language has been enriched by a few great minds like William Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible and by the many small minds of ordinary people in ordinary speech.

This is a good example of the way Adam Smith’s original thinking about economies, whatever its merits, starts to become a universal generalization that is simply false. Now we have human institutions and language, both very different things, given the ‘invisible hand treatment’.

Consider first the evolution of language. It is false to say Darwin explained it. He confuses the ‘micro’ evolution of languages as they differentiate with the larger question of how language evolved as such. These are two different things, and we have no proof that ‘natural selection’, the invisible hand, could have produced such a complex new function in man. We have no proof that spontaneous order processes (what the blazes are those???) produced this function in man. Similar statements apply to human institutions. These again don’t just spontaneously evolve.

Here it is useful to give some consideration of the eonic effect, which shows some remarkable facts about the evolution of cultures and of language, indeed of art. We see that behind this invisible hand nonsense there lies a long-range ‘macro’ process or evolutionary driver that partitions into macro and micro levels. This macro processes touche on the issue of the emergence of institutions, and indirectly on the evolution of language. We can see, for example, that much of the linguistic art at the highest level springs not from spontaneous ordering, but from its association with this macro process.
Consider the Axial Age: a complex evolutionary acceleration associated with massive sudden advances in many areas, and much great poetry, for example, in the Greek Axial. This arises in tandem with the Axial interval and wanes immediately at the conclusion of the interval. This and many other examples shows us how the ratchet effect in development is accompanied by a macro driver. It is not spontaneous in the invisible hand sense.

It is important, essential to study the evidence of the eonic effect, because in the void of correct data, correctly seen, we will inject false explanations where they don’t belong and can do a lot of harm.
Questions of evolution are far more complex than we think and one reason the Adam Smith analogy gets so overused is that in our bewilderment we seize on a simplifying idea. And that is misleading oversimplification.

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