In that context, it made sense. ‘How close to my house – a teetotaler, should you be allowed to open a bar and why should I be able to tell you what to drink/serve in your house.’
In a wider setting – individual rights, for instance … not so much!
‘Your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins’ only if at least one of the following is true: – My arms are as long as yours AND I’m willing/able to defend my nose. – You are a civilized person. – We, the entire community, have reached the conclusion that we are better off, together, if we observe – and enforce, this rule.
The first sentence describes a situation of generalized conflict. Not necessarily ‘hot’ but, nevertheless, always ‘waiting to happen’. In the second situation, ‘one side’ depends, decisively, on the ‘other side’ behaving ‘properly’. Nice and commendable but what happens when one of them goes berserk? The third describes the de facto functioning of any civilized nation. Which nation, any nation, is composed of individual people. ‘Endowed’ with ‘free will’ and not always ‘well behaved’.
Hence the danger of narrowly defining freedom as a collection of individual spaces where each of us might do as they please – as long as the consequences of their actions remain inside that space. Which spaces would have to be constantly defended. Or could be extended, whenever any of the neighbors wasn’t on the lookout.
How about ‘our mutually respected individual liberty is the well deserved consequence of our collective effort to enlarge OUR freedom’?
Classical economy sees the market as the place where demand meets supply and prices are born.
‘Relative’ economics, which hasn’t been written yet, sees the market as the place where people meet to offer their wares and to fulfill their needs. In order to meet this goal, people negotiate prices and adapt their behavior/attitude.
Classical economics sees the market as being either free or ‘non market’ – a.k.a. ” “planned” economy“: the one which “is heavily regulated or controlled by the government, most notably in socialist or communist countries.” As an aside, while I fully agree with the notion that communist countries – ‘popular democracies’, as their rulers used to describe them, had organized their economies around strictly centralized decision mechanisms, I cannot but wonder how would a classical economist describe Hitler’s economy? Or ‘crony capitalism’?
‘Relative’ economics, which – I repeat, hasn’t been written yet, sees the market as being either ‘free’, ‘un-free’ – a.k.a. ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’, or ‘obsessed’. Of course, there never was such a thing as a completely free market, only functionally free ones. And I’m sure most of you fully understand what I mean. Also, it is clear what ‘un-free’ means. Any situation where a small number of people call all the shots for an entire market. It doesn’t matter a bit whether those few people are directly involved in the market – over which they ‘enjoy’ monopolistic power, or they are involved with – read ‘control the’, government. The determining factor here is the scarcity of decision makers and the chock-hold they have over the entire decision making process. The ‘obsessed’ market is the most interesting of all. For me, at least.
Remember “Tulip Mania”?
As with many interesting stories, there are at least two sides attached to this one also. One version describes the whole thing as a generalized folly which had ended only after the government stepped in while the other paints a considerably duller picture. Only nobody denies the fact.
That for whatever reasons, tulip bulbs had been – admittedly for a relatively short while, on a par with houses. Value-wise.
Did it make any sense? Then? For those involved, yes! Otherwise… Could they afford it? Had they been affected when the bubble burst? That depends on whom you ask… and whom you believe…
Does it make any sense now? Can we make anything out of it?
We can certainly explain what had happened. Holland’s was the most affluent economy of the continent and the wealth was sort of spread around. A lot of money was ‘sloshing’, a lot of people were looking for a way to ‘show of’ and tulips were the ‘thing of the day’. Does it make any sense now? Retrospectively, no. Not for me, anyway. Do we have an explanation for what had happened? You’ve just read a very condensed one. If you need a more elaborate version, try Veblen’s ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class‘.
Anyway, that’s the perfect example of an ‘obsessed’ market. Where the agents are free to do what they please but are obsessed enough to act in sync. As opposed to ‘in concert’.
‘Obsessed’ means that all present look in the same direction and react in the same way. Which might be a good thing – when a group tries to escape a fire. Or a bad one, when the same group is trying to gather food from a forest. If all of them are looking, exclusively, for a single type of mushroom, many other sources of food are neglected.
In a really – as in ‘functional’, free market, people display a variety of behaviors. Some suppliers are greedier than others, some are diligent, some are sloppy and others are dedicated craftsmen. Some buyers are more ‘relaxed’, others ‘stingier’. Some know their way around the market, others are ignorant. On the whole, a dynamic equilibrium is constantly negotiated among all these ‘free’ agents. Simply because there is a variety of opinion. When the market is ‘un-free’, the whole notion of negotiation and equilibrium disappears. The parameters are set by the ‘rulers’. And things go on only as long as the ‘rulers’ manage to maintain a modicum of normality. When the market is ‘obsessed’, things become really interesting. The agents maintain their apparent liberty – at least for a while. Only they don’t actually use it. All of them act as if pre-programmed.
And somebody sooner or later notices what’s going on. And turns the whole thing to fit their own goal. Which is, almost always, not so different from the ‘general’ one.
Tulip Mania was relatively benign. Nothing really bad had happened.
We’ve somehow managed to weather the recent financial melt down. Which had been the consequence with our obsession with money as the ultimate goal. Which obsession continues unabated.
De vreo treizeci de ani tot discutam despre ‘moștenirea lui Ceaușescu’. Ce-a dărâmat, ce-a construit, cum a plătit datoriile – lăsându-ne pe noi în foame și în frig.
De multe ori discuțiile astea se termină cu ‘aștia nu sunt în stare nici măcar să întrețină tot ce a construit Ceaușescu, darămite să continue’!
Ei bine, eu cred că suntem într-o eroare mare cât casa. Cât Casa Poporului….
Ceaușescu n-a construit nimic. N-a construit – și nici n-a dărâmat, nimic! Noi am făcut toate astea.
Că el dădea câte o ‘indicație’… Acea ‘indicație’ trecea întâi pe la CSP – unde devenea ‘indicator de plan’, apoi pe la ministerul economiei… și abia după aceea ajungea ‘pe teren’. Unde era pusă ‘în practică’. Iar toate aceste operațiuni erau îndeplinite de noi. De ‘Oamenii Muncii’. De la ‘orașe și sate’. Ceaușescu n-a dărâmat, cu mâna lui, nici o biserică și nici un sat. N-a construit nici un apartament și nici o fabrică. N-a scris nici o filă de plan și nici un borderou de materiale. N-a semnat nici o dispoziție de plata, internă sau externă. Toate astea au fost făcute de noi.
Că am ascultat de el…. Asta-i altă chestie! Că n-am fost în stare să-l contrazicem atunci când o lua razna… Și asta e tot ‘altă chestie’. Că s-a înconjurat el de oameni din ce în ce mai ‘ascultători’… și n-a mai fost cine să-l mai contrazică… până când situația devenise atât de ‘groasă’ încât chiar și cei mai ‘disciplinați’ și-au dat seama că ‘purceaua era moarta-n coteț’ și l-au ‘lăsat din brațe’… astea sunt deja istorie….
Dar mai rămăsese ceva! Ceva unde contribuția lui Ceaușescu fusese cu adevărat consistentă. Unde Ceaușescu dusese mai departe un început de tradiție – ‘Titulesciană’. De fapt, ăsta a fost singurul domeniu în care Ceaușescu – și România, în ansamblu, a avut un real succes.
Standingul internațional!
Relativa independență față de URSS, relativa apropiere față de spațiul Euro-Atlantic, relația bună cu statele ne-aliniate, statutul de mediator între Israel și lumea arabă…. Aceasta fiind, de fapt, și singura ‘punte de legătură’ dintre regimul ceaușist și cel post-comunist. Așa am fost acceptați în NATO și cooptați in UE. Ai cărei președinți ‘rotativi’ suntem în momentul de față…
Cum de ne-om fi ales noi tocmai momentul asta pentru a irosi și ultimul lucru bun ‘moștenit de la Ceaușescu’?!?
In these terms, science must be deterministic. No systematic study of anything might ever be made if not starting from the conviction that a given set of causes will produce the same results, over and over again. No laws attempting to describe any facts in general terms might be formulated unless starting from the same premises.
On the other hand, it was science itself which had taught us that:
And there are countless other examples of ‘in-determination’ which have been documented by scientists during their search for the ultimate truth.
Any chance of reconciliation?
Well… To start, I’ll note first that ‘determinism’ is a concept which had started its career in philosophy while ‘science’ has a more ‘complex’ origin. It might have been initiated by Christian theologians trying to ‘guess’ God’s will only they were attempting to fulfill that task by closely watching Nature – which was seen as the very embodiment of God’s intentions. In this sense, scientific determinism can be understood as the conviction that Nature must make perfect sense – must be completely explainable, simply because God’s creation – which includes Nature, must be perfect. OK, and since all theologians agree that no human will ever be able/should ever pretend to know God, what’s the problem in accepting that Man – collectively speaking now, will never learn enough to find a complete explanation for everything?
‘And what about the atheists?’
What about them? Oh, you mean the people who are sure that God doesn’t exist? Who are just as sure that God doesn’t exist as the staunch believers who are perfectly confident that God not only exists but also micro-manages everything? Under the Sun and beyond? I’ll just leave it there…
On a deeper level, there is no contradiction between ‘determinism’ – philosophically speaking, and scientific thinking. As long as we keep these two ‘apart’, of course…
‘So you are going to accept that science will never ‘know’ everything AND that ‘everything is a consequence of the previous state of affairs’ ‘ ?
Specially since entertaining a truly ‘scientific attitude’ means, above all, to be prepared, at all moment and without any notice, for all your previously held convictions to be contradicted by new evidence…
‘What are you trying to say here? That everything revolves around the manner in which each of us relates to the meaning of his own interpretation of each concept? That truth itself is relative?’
‘That man is the measure for everything?’
Yep! AND that man is also responsible for the consequences his own actions! In front of his own children, before everything else. For no other reason than it will be his own children who will bear the brunt of his own decisions.
The Earth is covered by atmosphere. Some of the gases might have belonged to the original ‘cloud’ which had given birth to the solar system. Others have originated from the Earth itself. And still others are a ‘consequence’ of ‘life’. Oxygen, for instance. And some of the CO2.
The land crust has rocky cliffs and fertile plains. While the rocky cliffs are a consequence of geology, the fertile topsoil is the consequence of the elements having eroded the cliffs, the debris being transported by flowing water, plant life taking hold and slowly transforming some of the minerals into organic matter, animals eating some of the plants and transforming them into feces, micro-organisms digesting/recycling those feces together with the dead plants and animal carcasses… And so on.
Making a parallel between a humble unicellular organism, let’s say an amoeba, and a proud ape we’ll notice that the role played by the amoeba’s membrane is fulfilled by a host of the ape’s organs. Skin, lungs, digestive system and kidneys are the first to jump up for attention. On a closer examination – amoeba’s membrane keeps the organism together and acts as a locomotion device besides performing the respiratory, digestive and excretory tasks, the ape’s bones and muscles start to beg for attention
But what about the brain? What role does it play? What is it? An ‘internal organ’ or just another descendant of the membrane? I’ll let you make that call. I’ll only mention that the brain ingests information, digests it and then ‘excretes’ decisions. Which coalesce into ‘fate’/’destiny’, are remembered as ‘history’ and eventually end up as ‘tradition’.
I was arguing yesterday that life, as a biological phenomenon, depends on membranes doing their jobs. Keeping the inside in, the outside out and managing the transit of substances. Nutrients in and excretions out. For some organisms, their ‘membranes’ also act as a thermo-regulators.
‘Watching’ a membrane in action, one might get the impression that it has been endowed with a certain ‘awareness’. The membrane acts as if it were aware of the differences between its inside and its outside. It recognizes what belongs where and keeps them there. It also recognizes nutrients for what they are – and lets them in, and excretions for what they are – and where they should be. OK, the membrane does what it does simply because it was ‘pre-programmed’ in a specific way, according to the genetic information each organism has received from its predecessors. There’s nothing supernatural involved here. For what we currently know, anyway…
Watching, as a dispassionate outside observer, the evolutionary process unfolding one might get the impression that life itself has a certain awareness. ‘Rules of life’, read genetic information passed along from one generation to another, are diligently updated to fit the changes in the environment. Nevermind that the whole process is ‘impersonal’, ‘goal-less’ and is fueled by haphazard trial and error, the end result is what we currently consider to be ‘learning’! That’s what we try to code into our artificially intelligent machines, don’t we?
Since communication itself is a process which implies the ability to differentiate between a ‘run of the mill’ situation and one special enough to warrant the effort to ‘talk’ about it, I find all these to be compelling arguments for life itself to be considered as implying certain forms of awareness.
According to ‘science’, life is nothing but a process through which (genetic) information is passed, with small alterations, from one generation to another and during which the environment is, however minutely, changed by whatever the living organisms do during their lifespans.
‘Individually’ – organism by organism, life takes place inside a ‘membrane’. Which you might call it ‘skin’, if you like. That membrane separates the ‘inside’ – the living organism, from the ‘outside’ – otherwise known as the ‘environment’. Each individual organism continues to be alive for as long as the membrane manages to keep the inside in, the outside out AND to properly regulate the exchanges between the inside and the outside. This being the moment when we need to remember that each living organism needs to eat, to drink, to breathe and to excrete. Meaning that it needs a more or less continuous flow of certain substances from the outside and to periodically clean itself. And the moment to understand that each organism continuously changes its environment. By incorporating some of it while feeding/breathing and by ‘polluting’ it when ‘throwing out’ the by-products of its metabolism.
For all the activity above to take place, each individual organism needs to follow some ‘rules’. It’s ‘membrane’ needs to ‘know’ which substances to allow in and which to keep out. Which substances to throw out and which to keep it. To perform all these duties, the membrane itself needs to be organized in a certain manner. For all to happen as it should, the ‘interior’ has to be organized in a certain – and specific, manner.
On the other hand, for any (set of) rule(s) to make sense, it has to be congruent to the situation it ‘attempts’ to manage. For instance, the rule about what substances are to be ‘allowed in’ has to be adapted both to the specific needs of the organism following it AND to what substances are available in the particular environment in which that organism attempts to survive/thrive. Since the environment in which the living process attempts to take place is subjected to continuous change – both as a consequence of organisms living in it and as happenstance happening, the ‘rules of life’ cannot be ‘set in stone’. For life to continue in a consistent manner, it has to preserve its rules while for life to survive in an ever-changing environment it has to adapt its rules to fit the changes in the environment. This being where evolution takes charge.
That’s why the life we’re familiar with, ours, is comprised of successive generations of many individual organisms which somehow pass genetic information (rules of life) from one another. The fundamental ‘trick’ which makes everything possible being that during the ‘passing’ process the genetic information is slightly altered. Sometimes with beneficial results – those individuals thrive and, eventually, new species appear. Other times, the results are tragic. The individuals which receive bad – read unfit, rules of life do not survive. Equally tragic is the fate of those species, otherwise ‘successful’ until that moment, which, at some point, are confronted by so momentous changes in their environment that they are no longer able to adapt. Dinosaurs are the first examples which come to my mind but the list is so long that we’ll never learn about all of them.
A pessimist might conclude that life is all about species and that individuals are expandable. Au contraire, mon cher ami. Since there’s no way in hell – or in heaven, for anybody to know which individual organism has that particular piece of information which will enable their successors to survive the next alteration in the environment it would be rather dense to consider any individual as being expandable. In fact, it was the ‘individualization’ of the living process that made possible the evolutionary process.
Life is about both individuals and species, simultaneously and with equal importance.
I’ve been asked this – who wasn’t?, for so many times that I’ve lost count… Only the last instance was different.
The context was a lot more serious than usual. We were discussing ideas! Individual, social, freedom… and we were doing it in English – my ‘second’ language. Hence I was a tad more alert than when chatting away in Romanian.
Have you noticed that in English ‘you’ has three meanings? A singular ‘you’, a plural ‘you’ and a formal ‘You’ which covers both singular and plural. In French we have ‘tu’ for singular and ‘vous’/’Vous’ for both plural and formal. In German ‘du’, ‘inhen’ and ‘Sie’. Only ‘sie’ – starting with small s, as opposed to capital S, means ‘they’… In Romanian, ‘tu’, ‘voi’ and ‘Dumneavoastra’/’Domniile Voastre’. Literally, ‘Your Lordship’/’Your Lordships’.
I’m not going to delve into Humboldt’s linguistic relativity hypothesis at this point. It would be very interesting but I have something else in my mind. I’m going to answer the question ‘personally’. Influenced, indeed, by Maturana’s opinion that human consciousness (self awareness) has blossomed at the intersection between our brain power, our ability to communicate verbally with each other and our emotionally driven memory.
So, who am I? Just one of you…
Neither of us could have existed independently. None of us could have given birth to themselves… obviously. But also none of us would have been what we are today without having been raised by and educated in our respective communities. By the ‘you’-s to which each of us belong.
On the other hand, none of these communities would have ever existed without the individuals who compose them AND without those individuals being self aware enough to notice their existence. ‘Their existence’ meaning both the existence of the individual personalities which compose the communities and that of the communities themselves.
To simplify matters a little bit, we – as individuals, depend on the well being of the communities to which we belong while we – as communities, depend on the self-awareness of the individuals who animate each of the communities.
If we add the piled up consequences of all the decisions we – as a species, have ever made we end up with ‘culture’ and the present state of the environment which surrounds us – also known as ‘civilization’. I’ll leave these for another time.
Only there are a few hurdles which will have to be negotiated first.
Which ‘truth’?
Mine? Which will set me free? Theirs? Which will set them free? Or ours? Which will set us free?
What is Truth in the first place?
What I believe in? What we believe in? Something which is out there and we learn about incrementally? In a collective manner but individually driven?
How can we find it? If ever, of course….
Agree to something which has worked until now? Listen to what those around us have to say about the/any matter? Do your ‘own homework’? All of the above, in a respectful manner?
Freedom is too bothersome?!? Have you considered the alternatives?
Nowadays, too many individuals are afraid of freedom. Specially of other people’s freedom, since other people’s freedom might bring in ‘unwelcome’ change. Other people’s freedom might challenge our established way of life. And why risk it?
Still interested? History strongly suggests that societies which had considered the stability of their ‘established way of life’ to be more important than the freedom of any individual member to respectfully question everything have eventually failed to preserve that over-cherished way of life. Simply because those societies had not allowed their individual members to adapt their mores to the changes which inevitably alter the ‘environment’.
Conclusion? Liberty is of utmost importance. For both individuals and societies, equally. And, as a matter of historical fact, real – as in ‘truly functional’, freedom can be achieved only together. By the individual members of a society, acting in concert. Through a robust mechanism of checks and balances – a.k.a. real justice, based on mutual respect between the members of the society attempting to maintain this arrangement.
Warning! Since we currently experience a growing distrust among the members of many societies – America and Western Europe included, no wonder that actual individual liberty is sliding down a dangerous slope. Simply because nobody is going to defend the liberty of somebody they do not trust/respect.
nicichiarasa 