G as in Good H as in Happy

Essentialist Realist

February 18, 2005

Here's a recent Will Wilkinson essay on evolutionary psychology.  The perspective on capitalism--or at least a fluid and powerful market--is much as one would expect from the Cato Institute.

As Immanuel Kant famously remarked, "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." But, in the words of philosopher Denis Dutton,

It is not . . . that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material.

Evolutionary psychology, by helping us better understand human nature, can aid us in cultivating social orders that do not foolishly attempt to cut against the grain of human nature. We can learn how best to work with the material of humanity to encourage and preserve societies, like [our] own, that are not only beautiful, but will endure.

Via Wilkinson's own Fly Bottle, which also points to an interesting discussion of the relative futility of microfinance schemes in the absence of a functioning institutional infrastructure.

It is plausible to take the measure of saplings before hanging helpful schemes on their branches.

Better Blinks

February 7, 2005

Super Bowl oriented interview with Malcolm Gladwell (of Blink) suggesting practical strategies to educate the unconscious mind that makes the "in-a-blink" decisions.

Especially,

• immunizing to extreme stress
• immersion in data & experience until the "thin slice" comes from the core. 

Via Seth's Blog.

The Money Economy

Thinking of the purchases we want to make this week, the services of a website consultant, a prepared meal or two, CDs of a conference we could not attend, shelter and clothing, how could it ever be done by barter?

She Made a Little List

January 20, 2005

The New York Times published this story in 1985.

Gorham, Me.--A little more than seven years ago -- separated from a man who had made her feel so terrible about herself that she could no longer write stories--Carolyn Chute sat down and wrote instead a list of what she wanted in a man.

What she put down, said Mrs. Chute, who eventually regained the self-confidence not only to write stories but to produce a first novel that has brought her critical and popular accaim, was this: Green Work Pants. Black and red flannel shirt. Black hair. Black Beard, Brown eyes. Green truck with fish and game decals. Loves guns but loves animals. From the Cornish area.

The Cornish area of Maine is a more rugged land of mountains and forests, or mountain men. It was essentially a mountain man she was describing, a strong and gentle one. She even painted his picture: black hair parted in the middle, dark, deep-set, magnetic eyes, strong straight nose, beard like a black bib framing his face.

Then she went looking for him. With her daughter and sometimes her grandmother along, she drove the wooded roads of Maine, searched  the taverns, showed people her list.  “Have you seen this man?” she would say.

“Then I went to a turkey shoot,” she said, “ and I couldn’t believe my eyes – it was him.” He looked exactly like her portrait.

She was too shy to approach him, but “about two months later, I was in a barroom, and he just walked up to me and stood there looking at me with a big smile on his face.”

The man she had come with was in the men’s room. “By the time he came out of the bathroom,” she said, “we were off in a corner, talking about our chickens.”

If that seems improbable and irrelevant to literature, consider this: Carolyn Hawkes, then 30, married Michael Chute, then 22, and began to write again; and in the relentlessly poor but loving life they have made together for the last seven years, Mrs. Chute found the raw material and strength to produce her extraordinary first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

("A Life of Poverty Becomes Art," By Dudley Clendinens, Jan 30, 1985, p. C13. Accessible only through fee to archives.)

They're still married.

Courtesy of kottke, make your own free, user-friendly, simple, shareable, sometimes magical to-do (TA-DA) lists, a little lagniappe product from the Basecamp project management people.

Let's see, Dark gabardine suit, Red silk tie. Salt-and-pepper hair. Hazel eyes. White roadster. Otherwise frugal. Lives in Austin...

Hey, it works! (xo to DW!)

Update:
Incantations and visualizations and little lists are highly suspicious to a reader. 

I could really get going on this subject of what men want and what women want, if I wanted to, re that Dowd Piece recently -- but it would turn into a rant. [ed--o yes please.] Suffice it to say Carolyn Chute's approach typical of the rigidity, perfectionism, self-deception, and self-defeating magical thinking of educated women in their mating searches.  If it worked for her, great, but her method is a recipe for disaster.

Cats, Kings, Republics

January 3, 2005

In a diverse republic it is tempting to adopt the mind-set that all those Other Idiots' votes are getting in the way of proper policy and governance.  But, contrary to the one assembled in the pristine mountains of  Plato's mind, the US republic does not aim or even allow for the rule of the philosopher-king, individually or as a class. The 20th century has chillingly demonstrated that certain high-sounding intellectually-compelling Procrustean theories can set a society on the Trans-Siberian track to nowhere. As it turns out, provincials and shopkeepers muddling through with decent unphilosophical pragmatism, enjoying one more day free of catastrophe, is not bad, not bad at all.

The prolific Richard Posner states it clearly.

Rawls and others have thought that religious beliefs shouldn’t be allowed to influence public policy, precisely because they are nondiscussable. But this view rests on a misunderstanding of democracy. Modern representative democracy isn’t about making law the outcome of discussion. It is not about modeling politics on the academic seminar. It is about forcing officials to stand for election at short intervals, and about letting ordinary people express their political preferences without having to defend them in debate with their intellectual superiors.

This cuts directly to current questions of political health. The belief regularly surfaces that creating more political forums, increasing participation -- especially "dialogue" -- in all kinds of political activity, could cure what ails US. That formulations and statements rule. Of course they do, in the mechanics of lawmaking, to be governed by law and not the vagaries of individual men. 

But the voter is not under that obligation, neither as to candidates nor in the policies (s)he supports. Judge Posner's remarks change the refraction, putting the populace's decisionmaking in softer focus.  Why each votes as (s)he does is less important than that we, those of us who do, vote as we do.  The opportunity, and the outcome. Pass/fail grading of those who have, or might, govern us.

So, as in so much else, the vote emerges from reasons the mind may not grasp or find fully explicable, particularly to the satisfaction of adversaries rooted in a different landscape of priorities, emotions, and intuitions.

Humans evaluate their lives and choices based on perceptions that span the entire context, 360 degrees times 360 degrees. The process does not operate neatly enough always to be distilled in commonly understood words and grammar.  Limiting legitimacy to discussion can be as imbalanced as an old-fashioned strength ordeal with the shot-put. Especially if the ground is uneven for those who have devoted their energies to something other than fluency, good diction, and wide reference, and who are strangers in their routine lives to sometimes idiosyncratic rhetorical rules. The earmark of a power differential is the right to demand an explanation from another human being, and to evaluate its sufficiency. It is a mercy of every citizen's individual freedom: I need not answer an exit pollster. To decide my vote, I may look to a person's acts and demeanor, and what they signify as to character, integrity and robustness; whereas others may require speech to ground their conclusions.

Power where equality is professed marks a deficiency of love, said Jung. In the sphere of equal citizenship, a term more useful than love may be good will, which in partnership with authentic intellectual curiosity can shift the undertaking of "discussion" from insistent interrogation or sterile repetition of arguments, to a muted beginning of comprehension and friendship where none existed before.  Com-panis, sharing and breaking and perhaps even blessing, bread.

Judge Posner's and others' entry into the blogosphere is welcome, and marks an important expansion of its field and depth of consideration, raising foundational issues hardly ever found in Wonkette. A cat may look at a king, and an archosauria may link, all in good order in cyberspace, to a judge.

Now that's discussion.

Face in a modern society

More on social transition in China, from the Intersection.

On a city street, a brush between a well-dressed couple and a poor, dirty porter triggers riots. Professor McCracken's discussion raises three interesting principles. 

• The clash in transitioning societies between the prestigious' Don't you know who I am?  and the modern citizen's Who do you think you are?
• The fact that many social benefits are extra-economic.  In this instance, honor, "face," the show of respect.  I am always bemused that people do not exploit this kind of value-added concept in, for instance, designing wages or other remuneration.
• The apparently officious and self-privileged (and, by implication, rich) participant in the argument was an official of the Communist Party, the principles of which presumably offer the populace release from the shackles of the masters in the ruling class.

--It should be mentioned that the Chinese Communist Party, in the interest of maintaining social stability for the regime, is said to have forced the man to appear on television and to declare that he was not a member of the Party.--

It is very likely that there was a long lineage of class suspicion between the protagonists here.

The US is fortunate that there was never a hereditary aristocracy here, and so, even though some are better educated and more moneyed than others, there is not any  assumption of an independent right to autocratic behavior separate from role or immediate position.  A DuPont or Rockefeller or Teresa Heinz Kerry whose money disappears  soon learns to be treated like anyone else. An aristocratic lineage (I know a few expatriated ones) adjusts with difficulty to a levelized society, and may carry a bit of deprived ressentiment into it.

In addition, in older hereditary societies the same old rulers tend consistently to surface as the new rulers or high-level managers, with different titles and claims.  Whereas, here, no one can say Abe Lincoln, or Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower, were old aristocracy in disguise. Usually even when the more privileged rise, as many accuse George W. Bush of doing, real foreign aristocrats hoot at them as fraudulent American pretenders (a differently-directed Who do they think they are?).

Less Dismal, More Intriguing

Interview with admired (by Marginal Revolution) economist Brian J Loasby:

Economics as communication and decision-making schema.

Yes, the work that I did at Birmingham was very closely related to decision making. It led to the rather simple point that if you are going to talk about decisions, you have to start by saying “Why did people feel there was a need to make a decision about that particular matter?” ...One thing that really interests me about decision making is the way in which problems are formulated, and the obvious connection here with organisation: that organisational design is, as I think of it, quite very consciously intended to lead to problems being formulated in particular ways.

Economics as an understanding of the principles of how change happens organically in many media.

Evolutionary economics simply [means] that you need three things: one is that you need some kind of system that generates variety and two is that you need some kind of selection processes, and, three, you need some kind of persistency.

Economics as a school for empathy.

Exchange involves putting oneself in other peoples shoes. If you think about this, this famous quotation - the butcher, the brewer, and the baker, and about appealing to their interests, well, you cannot appeal to their interests unless you know what their interests are.

Passions, Nations, History

Mystery Achievement points to "Spengler" 's very long view of politics, religion, nations. In this order. What is virtue when consolations, customs, identities fade?  Deeply human questions, swept under the carpet for millennia, arise again now. Most of us stir for a moment, nod, and doze off again.

Selected updates.

Calmer News on the News Front

November 28, 2004

Here's recognition that if a news outlet is telling the truth, and not slyly spinning it or withholding relevant facts, the Blogahadeen out there in the dunes are friends. As Glenn Reynolds says, it's something Big Media can exploit -- free fact checkers.  Fact-checked from every angle, and the fact-checkers themselves fact-checked.  A kind of epistemological evaporation, until the material, including the rhetoric it wears, is distilled. If the original story tries to persuade and conceal at the same time, however, behold, a swarm of pyjama'd locusts, devouring fruit and leaves to stalk and root.

Distributed intelligence, that's the watchword.

Update:  More on the blogosphere as spontaneously-ordered cosmos. Via <marginalrevolution>.

Now, if the once-impeccable New Yorker can just find a way to use us to purge the occasional typo and leap-of-faith partisan assumption...

Update: Via Instapundit, a view of news in the Brave Near Future. 2004, the year everyth.ing began. By 2014, a universal platform fabricated  from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, cross-referred with Friendster social-network tools. Computer rhetoric that filters, orders, and delivers custom-content for each user. The New York Times has gone off-line, a newsletter for the mostly elderly and elite. 

Was there another way? Eight-minute video with dire tone, plausible scenario, no answers. Suggests that readers who dig for a breadth of perspective can find it, to an unprecedented degree. Passive readers, on the other hand, may and will merely reprise the circle tour [euphemism alert] of their pre-existing outlook and that of their social environment.

Poverty, weath, wisdom

October 4, 2004

The Social Affairs Unit is a UK think tank "famous for driving its coach and horses through the liberal consensus scattering intellectual picket lines as it goes [and] for raising questions which strike most people most of the time as too dangerous or too difficult to think about.” (The [London] Times)

The SAU has released Wealth And Poverty, A Jewish Analysis, a 1985 essay by Jonathan Sacks, now Chief Rabbi of the [British] Commonwealth.

What I have tried to show is the way in which a religion can be the effective context of debate, by cultivating open argument and valuing it as such, by seeing the argument itself as the religious experience, rather than the passion or the persuasion. I have described a particular model of the interaction between secular expertise and religious judgement, and the way in which that judgement might have authority. We have seen the range of ways in which a religion might attempt to alleviate poverty; not least of which was the enriching of its cultural possibilities. And I hope we have seen some of the dangers of extrapolating from Biblical sources to changed economic circumstance.... / It is an impartial tradition - not a side-taking tradition. "…the one thing Judaism rules out ab initio, by specific Biblical command, is a bias to the poor." Digby Anderson, 1985 [some typos resolved]

Renouncing automatic bias, toward the rich or toward the poor. Acknowledging those positions neither as fixed, nor signifying more or less humanity.

...The emphasis of so many Christian pronouncements has been exhortatory, perhaps they would prefer "prophetic", a call to care and conscience for those in need. The virtues of that approach are obvious but so are the vices - it can and has led to a simplistic and even a one-sided representation of complex issues....the aim of this report and others in the series Taking Thought for the Poor, is more constructive, to show what positive thinking would be like.

Its fresh air, kindness, and clarity commend the essay to the policy afficionado as well as to students of the beauty, pleasure, and universal necessity of intelligent generosity.

And the possibility of removing from discussions of economic welfare even some of the seemingly automatic accusation, frustration, partisanship, and class warfare:

Priceless.