Fatal Conceit

God is an economist, the Devil is a sociologist

2009-02-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

I realized this while taking an introduction to microeconomics test today. I am taking that class purely for the fun of it and from day one I have felt in econ class the way I do in church; that I am learning specifics about things that I have always known are true.

I have not done any of the readings for the class yet because each point is so easy to grasp due to it being so self evidently true and irrefutable. This is definitely not the case in any of my classes that use sociological theory in which I read everything after which I am still not convinced the principle is correct or that it actually said anything at all!

Since I have not done any of the readings and the TA teaching the class is bound to not go over everything that the Econ professor who made the test years ago would have gone over, there were a number of things on the test that I had never learned/been taught before. After the initial panic of not knowing the answer I realized that the answer was obvious and unequivocal. After the test I cracked open the class text book to see if I was right and I was.

What I'm pointing out is the consistent and self evident truthfulness of economics. With that in mind I have decided that God is an economist (or more specifically a microeconomist). The laws with which God judges us are unchanging and unviolatable. They are universally applicable and are broad enough to take into account the differing backgrounds, circumstances and perspectives of everyone. While being broad however, God's theoretical toolbox still yields very revealing and relevant understandings of its subjects.

The Devil, on the other hand, is a sociologist. He thinks he knows us. He thinks he understands what we do and why and pigeonholes us by stuffing us into labels and roles that he assigns based on what he thinks are the causes and ends of our desires.

The Devil's theoretical toolbox is overflowing with labels, methodologies, theories, frameworks, roles. And no matter the uniqueness of the subject to which these tools are applied, the Hellish Sociologist comes to the same absolutist and unfair conclusion after his "science" has rendered us a shapeless uncomplicated blob, violently labeled and treated according to the whims of whichever tools he decided to use in any given instance.

God's toolbox is uncluttered and boring. Only a few universal laws take up any space. The subjects of His study are the same after being examined and measured as they were before. Instead of the tools shaping the subject, God's laws measure what we really are and tell us what must happen if certain ends are desired.

In economics the laws are absolute and the results are relative to the case. The subject of the study is preserved at all costs. In sociology the laws are relative to the whims of the observer and the results are absolutely what he wants, irregardless of the unique case of the observed. The goals of the sociologist are preserved no matter the damage done to his specimen.

One divine, the other infernal.

Barack Obama for President

2008-03-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

I just watched the Barack Obama "Yes We Can" video for the second time. I wanted to make sure I wasn't in an impressionable mood when I first watched it, but now I can honestly say the video, and the speech it is taken from, is inspirational, exciting, and powerful.

Yes We Can

Those are empowering words. It is most likely derived from the "Si, se puede" slogan of Cesar Chavez's labor movement of the '70s. It is an inspiring message for free citizens that anything is possible, corporations can be bested, governments can be changed, if enough band together.

Yes We Can

As Barack said, "It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation."
This however, ignores the second great "creed" that runs through our founding documents.
We Shall Not

Men (in the gender insensitive parlance of those times) derive their rights and powers from "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" not from Government.
Yes We Can

Then, "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." In other words, to secure the greater part of our freedom and power we voluntarily cede some of it to a government.
We Shall Not

Even with this limited relinquishing of power by the people, the threat of tyranny is still possible. This time however, it comes from the people themselves. To combat this, the principle "We Shall Not" is expanded to "We Shall Not Through Our Government." We shall not use the government to establish or prohibit religion, abridge the freedom of speech or of the press, prevent people from arming themselves for self defense, deny due process of the law or a trial by jury, or anything else that we have not specifically empowered the government to do in this founding document.
We Shall Not Through Our Government

Yes We Can

An inspiring call for cooperation amongst free people. But when an elected official uses this to rally support, when those powers ceded by the people can enforce it?
Tyranny of the Majority.
Mobocracy.

Yes We Can

But should we? We the People truly can do anything, yet the American system is designed to be "a government of laws and not of men." So while all power derives from the people (Yes We Can) we limit our own powers by enthroning law as king (We Shall Not) and by putting strict limits on that thing which enforces the law (We Especially Shall Not Through Government).

Yes We Can

Throughout the "Yes we can" speech, Barack says we can provide healthcare for all, prevent jobs from moving overseas, pay teachers more, create an alternative to foreign oil, alter the global climate, all be the same (Equality), all have a job (Opportunity), all be rich (Prosperity), make people like each other ("heal this nation"), and make the entire world be what we thing it should be ("repair this world"). Most would think these are worthy goals. I do. Though some are impossible (opportunity and prosperity), and some I think are wrong (repair this world, Equality), Yes We Can try our best, without using force, to make these dreams reality. But government is force. If Barack Obama were a motivational speaker or a preacher who had no intention of using government force to realize his dreams, I would support him and probably even donate to him.

But as a candidate for president he is the very definition of a demagogue...and no, that is not a good thing, at least it shouldn't be...not in these United States.

Freud's New Religion

2007-11-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a paper I just wrote for my class on studies of religion. Feedback is very welcome:

A comparison of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber reveals many similarities as they were both pioneers in their fields and both spent a great deal of time studying religion. But their approaches to the study of religion were very different. Ultimately, Freud’s theories are inappropriate to meaningfully contribute to the understanding of religion because they are unprovable. Looking for laws that explain and govern religion, Freud’s approach resembles the natural scientist studying the inanimate. This is flawed because unpredictably complex humans are at the heart of the subject. Weber however, refused to even define religion and instead examines religion on its own terms and tries to understand it in its own unique context (Verstehen). His approach does not require acceptance of absolute universal frameworks but merely nominal definitions to facilitate communication. Weber’s method is thus superior because it is nominal, broadly accessible, and respectful of the uniqueness of religious experiences.
Freud sought the noumenon of religion, its origins, and its future. His hope for an empirically verifiable discipline to understand religion is clear when he stated, “When one has lived for quite a long time in a particular civilization and has often tried to discover what its origins were and along what path it has developed, one sometimes also feels tempted to...ask what further fate lies before it and what transformations it is destined to undergo." (357) Freud believed that “it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life."(363) While this has proven true when dealing with the inanimate, the human mind remains an unpredictable variable.
Freud defines religion as a functional phenomenon. He said the divine has three tasks: “[it] must exorcize the terrors of nature, …must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate...and…must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”(360) Freud is here declaring a universal maxim that precludes individual and unique views of religion. There is no space here to go into the flaws of functionalist definitions of religion but suffice it to say that Weber does suggest functional purposes for religion but still refrains from making a universal definition, functional or not, and this is the error that Freud commits in his treatment of religion.
Max Weber rejected the hubris of Freud’s approach and did not assume to tell humanity what it really thought or believed. Instead, through Verstehen, he approached religion in its own context and let it tell its own story. Weber did create ideal-types which acted as definitions but they were not universal definitions because they were merely “abstractions to assist sociological analysis and ultimately enhance understanding.” (211) When examining the roles of the priest and the magician, Weber makes no universal assertions about them but reports and examines the different things they “may be.”
In contrast to the scientific approach of Freud, Weber’s antipositivism, a view which he introduced to the social sciences, does not seek to reconstruct the origins of religion. When discussing the primacy of certain deities Weber remarks, “Since these developments are concealed from us by the mists of time, it is frequently no longer possible to determine why some particular type of deity achieved superiority over others.” (231) This is in sharp contrast to Freud’s reconstruction of the origins of religion based on a presumed prehistoric Oedipal drama. Weber does not presume to prophecy about the unknowable yet he still proposes whys to his question of deities but again his suppositions are prefaced by the academically honest “may be.”
Freud’s contributions to the understanding of religion are very much de-validated by his clinical attempts to understand and quantify religion. His functional yet unprovable definitions of religion require the acceptance of virtually a new religion, and do not result in a better understanding of humanity’s religious experience. Weber’s methods, using admittedly arbitrary labels, though only for the sake of facilitating discussion, allow for unique religious experiences to be unique. At the same time it adds to the understanding of religion by presenting the researcher’s experiences and impressions without requiring the student to adopt a new metaphysics.

To Chop the Fat Man

2007-10-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

Do the ends justify the means? Chopping the fat man is a hypothetical question some friends and I came up with to question categorical imperatives. I'm sorry if anyone who reads this doesn't like unlikely hypotheticals but if you can figure out a better way to focus in on a principle let me know. It goes like this:

You and six friends and caving. This cave is very remote and uncharted (i.e. nobody else goes there or knows about it) and there is definitely only one way in or out. This way out is a very narrow slit in the rock. You all are leaving and one of your friends is first. Unfortunately this friend is quite overweight and he gets hopelessly stuck in the only way out. He is so wedged that he can neither go further in nor come back out. Of course every this is done to try to get him out but now time and air are running out due to raising anxiety and the only source of air being partially blocked by your portly friend. One uniquely prepared person in the group has a hatchet. The only way out is to remove your friend and the only way to remove your friend is to make him smaller quickly. Two choices remain: die with your six friends or chop one of them up with a hatchet so you and five others can live.

I know it's improbable and silly but remember the purpose is to remove all factors away from the choice of chop or not chop. Those who believe in God are usually tempted to pray and wait for divine intervention. Waiting for a Deus ex machina is not appropriate here because we want to know what I should or shouldn't do, not what some other being would do, divine or not.
Left to yourself the question now is; do the ends justify the means of not. Consequentialist ethics, utilitarianism, holds that the ends do justify the means, i.e. and action is "good" or "bad" depending on its consequences. The flaw in this is you can never know all the consequences of your means. Deontological ethics assign values of right and wrong to actions (means) independent of their consequences, so the ends never justify the means. I.e. it is wrong to lie even to save someone's life. In this case the categorical imperative tells us it is wrong to kill innocent people (your fat friend) to save others.
If the ends don't justify the means you can't kill your fat friend. However, you also can't not kill him because the ends of not murdering your friend (good) would be justifying the means of killing yourself (bad). Now what? Do the ends justify the means after all?

...and that's how they got me to vote for Lyndon LaRouche!

2007-10-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

Last week I was walking down the street and I was stopped by a guy who was sitting next to a table set up on the sidewalk with a display of political journals and a big poster of Dick Cheney's face with the caption "Evict Cheney!" He asked me, "Do you consider yourself a political person?" I was just then coming from a discussion I had just had about socialism and free markets and I emphatically said, "Yes I would." Now that discussion I was just coming from had ended like a number of similar discussions I had been having where an awkward "I don't want to talk about this anymore" kind of stops the conversation in mid discuss. I was worrying that I'm kind of disagreeable or too argumentative. Now suddenly someone comes to me with a discussion so I figure this will be a good exchange. He starts out showing me a magazine, which features on the cover a picture of F.D.R and a caption warning of the end of all the things Roosevelt did for us. In the top corner was a picture of an old guy that my new friend pointed to and said, "Well, have you heard of this geezer LaRouche?" Now I had just heard of LaRouchies a couple days before as some kind of aggressive cult so I didn't know anything positive about these guys but since he seemed to want to talk about politics and he had a magazine about F.D.R. I said, "No I haven't heard of him but I do disagree with F.D.R about everything." He said, "I don't think you disagree with everything." I said, "Yep, everything point." He said, "What about fascism?" I said, "What about fascism?" He said, "Would you rather Hitler won?" I said, "Well, it wasn't our fight." When I said that he got a horrified look on his face and said, "You're crazy!" He then turned around and went back to his table as fast as he could. I went home and read about this group and apparently they are an extreme left wing political cult which believes in arcane conspiracy theories and uses psychological intimidation to recruit and influence their members. Now I'm not passing any value judgment here. I just want to point out that they are really really into politics and you would think they would at least be good for a closed minded fight about leftist policies. Maybe I just found a timid one, but it seems like at worst he would have said, "You're crazy and here's why. F.D.R. did etc. etc." and at best "Really, why do you say that?" Living in Egypt I had lots of questions about how Muslims live and worship, but when I would make an observation about a meaning of a verse in the Qur'an or one of the functions of fasting for me personally I was always told I was wrong and they quickly corrected me with the traditional view or interpretation. I love tradition, cultural solidarity, social mores and the like, but when billions of individuals are make millions of decisions each day coming from unspeakably numerous backgrounds there might be a few ideas out there that work for me better than my own ideas and experience. Maybe not. But how will I ever know if I don't listen.

Prolegomenon

2007-10-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

I had better start by explaining the title. Friedrich Hayek called his last book "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism." Obviously it was a polemic against the political system which Hayek fought against throughout his life, but one of his most fundamental arguments is against positivist philosophy. That is the source of the fatal conceit. The belief that one can know better how another should live their life is the conceit of socialism and it stems from positivism. I don't claim to be an expert on philosophy but here I mean positivism as only knowing something through observation and experimentation. Positivism was behind every scientific discovery that our modern lives are built on and when used in the natural sciences it is really just being honest about inquiry. In other words, positivism works great when trying to understand objects, especially inanimate objects as they are more predictable. Everything positivism studies is objectified and this can cause problems when the object is its own subject. Things that can think tend to not enjoy being experimented on (objectified). Even if it is painless, experimentation (objectification) is demeaning especially if it aims to understand the object's behavior. Remember the guy on Ghostbusters whom Bill Murray kept zapping to get him mad (and get in good with the co-ed)? Why is the idea of being a "rat in a maze" or a Guinea Pig so infuriating? Because it objectifies. Social scientists like Freud tried to make human behavior a science. He tried to tell us what we were "really" thinking. Could anything be more demeaning? That word itself is very interesting; to take away meaning, in other words to objectify. For most of the social sciences, to approach their subjects positivistically would require that free will be an illusion.

Of course we have to be able to know something, and gaining knowledge through experimentation and experience is a very mature method to go about knowing those somethings. Yet positivism when it is used to understand rational creatures cannot extend further than one's own skin. Writing in the context of opposing political views Professor Hayek wrote, "All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest." (Constitution of Liberty, I don't have the page number handy). In the argument against interpersonal positivism in general we need just to replace "all political theories" with "everyone." We all think, "You just don't get it," or "We just see things differently," or even "I don believe that." Behind all these thoughts is the idea that, when it comes to what we are thinking, the other is ignorant. And very often they are, but maybe, just maybe, they actually do understand the issue better than you. That's the assumption we make when walking into a class room, that the teacher knows the subject better than us. We then learn from him, replacing our prior knowledge with better knowledge. Better must now be defined. As humans we generally want more of things that give us pleasure in either the short or long term. To be good in a utilitarian sense a thing must, among other things, tend to be successful in fulfilling its purpose. A student who replaces his heliocentric view with his teachers Copernican view first had to allow that maybe, just maybe, the teacher's knowledge was better. The positivist philosophy however tends to close the book on issues. How can I learn without acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, my tried and true ideas and presuppositions could be wrong.

This blog is named for that dangerous tendency to rest on the laurels of our understanding and refuse to learn because we already know. This topic has been on my mind a lot lately because of experiences I've had in my new home of Seattle both at school and socially. I don't expect to remain exclusively on this topic but I guess it will be general theme for now.