4/6/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 103

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/6/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 103

French revolutionaries, like 19th Century Radical Republicans, were unable to conceive two ideas that could have led to more egalitarian societies, in each case:

1. That centuries of exploitation – working the land for someone else’s benefit – might give people (peasant or freedman) a “property right” in the land greater than that of the titular owner who had been exploiting them, and,
2. The idea of cooperative ownership, i.e., of former plantations in the U.S.A., or things like mills (“banalités”) in the French case.

4/4/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 52

This blog has been disused for a while. Hardly anybody ever read it, so I decided to hardly ever write for it. But now I’ve decided to use it, for a while at least,  to start posting comments on things I am reading, copied from my notebooks. These are not edited, and particularly not made to function as stand-alone essays. I.e., I have not tried to paraphrase the arguments from the books that I may be discussing. The first book I’m doing this with is Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology”. Page references are to the 2020, hardcover, English language edition, published by Belknap Press.

4/4/20 Piketty “Capital & Ideology” p. 52

Sometimes I think Piketty does not know how much of historian he is not.

I’ve been trying to project his tripartite model onto the classical, and, to a lesser extent, the ancient world.  Greece and (pre-Christian) Rome didn’t really have a priestly class. They didn’t really have a military class, either. The main categories were citizen, non-citizen free people, and slaves. In later Roman society, the military was professionalized, as was the (Christian) priesthood, but powerful landowners stood apart, not primarily military nor priestly (nor clerical, intellectual, or administrative). The military was not a socially privileged class in the way of the Medieval nobility, although it could provide a path, for some, to wealth and political power, even supreme civil power.

It seems to me the trifunctional society in Europe rose from the barbarian invasions. The ruling class was, perforce, military, since the conquerors consisted of a numerically small military elite. The clerical class they inherited by their adoption of Christianity, and the clerics were useful to the rulers because, (1) they believed their souls needed saving, and, (2) they needed scribes and clerks (and disdained to do that work, themselves, and, (3) because they needed some respectable class to absorb second, and especially third, fourth, etc. sons in a society committed to non-partible inheritance (although that wasn’t true in all parts of Europe, I guess.)

For the ancient (Mediterranean) world, I don’t know enough. Based on what I do know, the trifunctional society MAY have fit at least some cultures in the Middle East. Not sure about Minoan and Mycenean societies. It seems a stretch to apply it to Egypt.

May have fit China, Japan, Korea better, especially if the clerical class is understood to be a class of educated administrators, and not necessarily religious.  India, okay probably, although the caste system was more complex. [He actually has a much more thorough discussion of this, later in the book.]

I think it’s a stretch at best to try and fit this “trifunctional” model on the Muslim world, also. Maybe. Not sure.

I mean, I don’t know enough about all these societies, but based on what I do know, trying to divide their social arrangements into these three specific classes seems to do violence to the facts.

[See additional comments made on 4/12/20.]

Freedom

When I was a very young man, back in the early 70s (some time before decided, around the early 80s, that I was actually a socialist) I I read a book called “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” by self-styled libertarian Harry Browne, and decided that I, too, was a libertarian.  I later realized that what I liked about the book (and still do, at least in my fading recollection) has little to do with libertarianism as usually conceived.  It  is a theme that does run as a thread through libertarianism, submerged beneath a fetishization of property* and a mytho-heroic cult of the individual**, but it is far broader.  It is a theme in philosophies as old as classical stoicism and as new as the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir.  This is the theme that, in the truest sense, freedom is not something that we strive for, but something that all humans inalienably have. 

In this idea of freedom, freedom is defined as the ability to choose between real alternatives.  This freedom is always constrained, by what the existentialists called “facticity” – by circumstances outside of ourselves that limit the alternatives actually available at any given time.  But the choice is real – and this is the only kind of choice we ever really have.  What we usually think of as “freedom” is to have a choice between more attractive alternatives.  This improvement of the conditions of choice is something that humans can often accomplish, but only if we start by exercising our freedom; by making good choices between the actual alternatives available to us, right here and now.

Hoofnotes:

*A case in point would be the political philosophy of Robert Nozick.

**Courtesy of Ayn Rand, I take it.  (Her, I haven’t read.)

Thoughts on Democratic Socialism and intersectionality

These are some thoughts on how I might word the part on the interplay of class and other forms of oppression in an “Introduction to Democratic Socialism” talk – as an alternative to the usual, “We know that race and gender oppression are not subsumed under class, but…”

Early in the socialist movement, socialist analysis tended toward economic reductionism: all historic forces, all forms of oppression, were subsumed in the concept of “class”.  Modern Democratic Socialists realize that this analysis is not correct.  The oppressions that people suffer because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristics of their identity, each has its own history, its own dynamic, which is intricately wrapped up with their class position (as each also is with the others), but not dependent on or uniquely determined by class.  This kind of analysis is called an “intersectional” one, and modern Democratic Socialists understand that an intersectional analysis of oppression is required.  Democratic Socialists oppose all forms of oppression and exploitation, whatever their source, and our vision is of a world in which all people are equally valued, and equally free.

If Democratic Socialists still focus largely on class, it is because – who but us?  The history and experience of our movement uniquely position us to understand and appreciate the roles of class and class exploitation in producing injustice in the world.  In many ways, this focus and these analyses are the particular contribution that we can make, as socialists, to modern liberatory movements.  It is important that class as a source of oppression be understood, and fought.  There is no implication that class is the only source of oppression, or even, in many cases, the most important.

There is one unique feature of class oppression that is worth pointing out.  Human differences based on race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, are to be embraced and celebrated; only the oppression is to be opposed.  But ending class oppression pretty much depends on ending a system of production based on economic class.  In struggling for gender justice, we seek a world in which social forces targeting  people’s gender do not negatively impact their well-being; we do not necessarily seek a world in which nobody has gender*.  But it is perfectly reasonable that the struggle for economic justice should end in a classless society, and this has historically always been a goal of socialism.

*This is not to say that “gender”, in a future, non-oppressive society, will be understood the same way as it is now.  There are many ways in which our culturally determined concepts of “gender”, “race”, etc. are determined by, and serve, the oppressive situations in which we currently live.  Part of struggling for liberation is a struggle to redefine these things appropriately; but not, necessarily, to obliterate the underlying reality.  Understanding that “race” is an artificial, unscientific concept, originally constructed to falsify moral legitimacy for oppressive systems of colonization and slavery, does not mean we seek a so-called “melting pot”, from which all of our descendants ultimately come out the same hue.  But a socialist economy, with all the productive forces of society collectively owned and controlled, with no division into “owners” and “workers”, i.e., a classless society, is a perfectly reasonable thing to seek.

An Atheist Invocation

The universe is an empty thing, bound and developing according to the logic of its nature, but devoid of mind, consciousness, or purpose. In this mindless universe, living things evolved from replicating chemicals, and these living things evolved a new thing – purpose, will, desire. Because replicators with a sense of purpose were often more successful at leaving prosperous progeny than those without one.

One of these species of replicators is our own. And we have evolved so many purposes, goals, desires. Some time ago, long before we were human, we discovered that we could accomplish some of those goals better if we worked together – and we developed community, solidarity. But others of us love to place their personal goals above the goals of others – to dominate the community in their selfish greed.

I celebrate the solidarity of our human species that lets us, alone in an empty universe, work together for our common, noble goals, and overcome the powerful few who would set their selfish, private goals above the good of the community, and I celebrate the human, compassionate spirit that gives us the strength to fight, and overcome, the forces that would oppress us.

Natural Selection’s Reasons

If we say, “I have a good reason for being here, today,” and “The reason you slipped is because there is ice on the path,” we are using the word “reason” to describe two very different concepts.  Both deal with cause-and-effect.  My reason for being here (whatever it may have been) caused me to come, and the ice on the path caused you to slip.  But one sentence involves a purpose.  I had goals in mind, and in pursuit of those, I used my ability for mental analysis (another sense of the word “reason”), and made the decision to come.  But no sentient being (presumably) had a goal in placing the ice on the path, let alone in causing you to slip thereon.  In that case, the word “reason” refers to an explanation only, and not to a purpose.

Interestingly the dictionary does not well distinguish these two senses of “reason”.  At least, the Webster’s edition that I consulted gives as the first definition “a statement offered in explanation or justification,” which, it seems to me, specifically conflates the two concepts – a justification involves a purpose, an explanation need not.

The distinction between these two concepts is very important when considering the workings of evolution by natural selection.  There are reasons that certain traits are selected (preserved), in the sense that there are explanations for their selection, but they were not selected “for a reason”.  Evolution has no purpose in selecting them.  Evolution is not, in fact, an agent that can conceive a purpose.   There is no end goal for the process of evolution.  In Aristotelean terms, evolution has efficient causes; it does not have final ones.  Evolution is a mechanical process  - as mechanical as the process of fusion in a star producing heat and light.  Everything accomplished by natural selection has a reason why it happens (explanation);  it does not happen for a reason (purpose).

It is hard to keep your head wrapped around this distinction.  We are so used to conflating the two concepts.  I do not think our use of the same word for both is the reason (explanation) for the conflation.  I think the conceptual conflation is the reason for the multiple meanings of “reason”.  For us, in our daily lives, so many things are explained, at least partially, by the reasons that people have for doing the things they do.  It is natural for us to think of chains of events in terms of purposes.  It is natural for us, also, to project agency onto things that do not actually have it (onto events that do not actually have a sentient agent behind them).  This is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called our “hyperactive agent detector”.  Being a Darwinian, he of course posits explanations – reasons – for how we might have evolved such a characteristic by natural selection.

Now waitaminnit.  Suppose we evolved a hyperactive agent detector, as Dennett suggests, because it was safer to err on the side of imagining a non-existent agent, for instance imagining a tiger when we hear the wind in the grass, than to possibly ignore a real agent (by assuming it is the wind when it is really a tiger).  The consequences (cost) of one class of error are greater than those of the other.  But don’t we have a purpose in evading the tiger?  Isn’t evading tigers a goal of ours?  So doesn’t purpose enter into the process of natural selection?  Don’t we have a reason for evolving that trait, as well as there being a reason why we did?

The answer is that, while yes, we may have a purpose in evading that tiger, no, that purpose does not influence the process of natural selection.  If I think I hear a tiger, I may well decide I want to get away; I conceive a purpose – to escape the tiger.  This may cause me to climb a tree. (Well, a really skinny tree.  Tigers can climb trees, I think, but they’re heavier than I am.)  My purpose may be intimately involved in my actually escaping the tiger.  But it had nothing to do with my possessing that nagging anxiety that asked, “What is that sound?  Was that a tiger?”  If Dennett’s hypothesis is correct (I suspect it is), then proto-people who possessed a hyperactive agent detector were more likely to survive, and have offspring, than proto-people who did not.  The fact that they may have DESIRED to survive and have offspring was not causally efficacious in the natural selection process.  In fact, the desires to survive and to have offspring (or at least, to have sex) THEMSELVES evolved, by natural selection, by exactly the same purposeless but explicable process:  proto-creatures that didn’t have such desires (or didn’t act as if they did, anyway) tended not to have descendants.

It is not necessarily true that purpose – the ordinary purposes of people like us – can NEVER have a role in natural selection.  Darwin, after all, modeled the idea of natural selection after the kind of selection practiced by (for instance) human stock breeders, who allow only animals with certain desirable traits to reproduce.  Humans are in nature, and stock breeders are an important element in the environment of their animals, just as are predators the environments we collectively call “the wild”.  Calling one form of selection “natural” and the other not is at least a little bit an artificial distinction that comes from a definition of “nature” as “everything but humans”.  But we humans and our cultures also constitute a very, very important part of our OWN environment.  Artificial selection can produce significant phenotypical changes in a very small number of generations – geological time scales are not required.  Mightn’t humans also have evolved to conform to our own cultural expectations, not just culturally (by learned/taught behavior), but also biologically, by natural selection, i.e., by genetic change?  Jonathan Haidt thinks so (and cites other researchers).  To some extent, don’t theories of group selection and the evolution of morals depend on something like this?  At the very least, it seems that such a hypothesis, if true, would strongly support certain group selection theories.

But the idea that humans and their purposes form an important part of the environment in which natural selection of humans takes place is very different than saying that evolution itself has a purpose, or that any specific trait arises “for a purpose”.  As easy as it is to slip into that kind of language, that just ain’t the way it works.  From time to time, new traits arise.  The ones that work well stick around, simply because they work well.  The ones that don’t work so well, go extinct.  If everything seems to fit in the end, it’s because the things that fit are the ones that are still around.  For now.

Advantages

Conservative parties have a certain natural advantage over the Left that I don’t think I’ve ever heard discussed.  If your goal is the preservation of the status quo, then much of the way forward may seem relatively clear – just do more of the same.  Among other things, this may make it easier to build consensus in your own party.  If your goal is change, on the other hand, particularly if it is revolutionary change, then the same degree of clarity may be missing.  You may have a theory, but practical experience of the world you are seeking is, by definition, absent.  Is this one reason the Left tends to dissolve in schism?

Of course, objective conditions may make a mockery of expectations based on the conservatives’ experience.  Then, they will fail, and times will change.  Then, the Left may be swift and flexible enough to grasp the whirlwind.  If not us, then the fascists.  They are arguably even better at this than we are.

[Side note:  Don’t try to read too much analysis of current events into the above.  This was mostly generated by some historical musings.]