Thanks Mike, well said. If there are those who wish a longer version of this thesis, you might enjoy the great poem of Nikos Kazantzakis called "Odysseus, a 20th century sequel". He examines all of the assumptions around Alexander but embodied in the character of Odysseus. Odysseus' linear journey of self discovery goes through all of the great philosophical systems of Kazantzakis' world, plays them out to their logical end and ends with Odysseus in the Arctic after everything has collapsed as he muses with the character of death who looks just like him. He speaks of leaving nothing for death since he played it all out. But essentially it is a book about "cutting" the knot through conflict and war rather than learning the message and meanings by undoing and solving.
Mike, you never seem to stop amazing me. Thanks again. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 6:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: Academic Economists to Consider Ethics Code Arthur wrote: AC> http://www.wikisummaries.org/Capitalism_and_Freedom AC> AC> here is a summary of [Friedman's] views as shown in his book. Jeez, I understood that MF was an extremist bordering on fruitcake. The summary of his book indicates that he was a religious fanatic. REH replied: REH> Friedman's world seems made up of fishermen and shepherds. REH> .... REH> For the life of me it sounds like cancer. It's a system within a REH> system that has no connection or responsibility to the system REH> beyond its own growth. The Doctrine of the Free Market, a la Friedman, is reminiscent of the late primordial "soup" containing single-celled organisms, colony organisms and primitive multicellular critters. Of course we don't know exactly what was going on then but we have respectable guesses. Unrestrained competition for lebensraum, energy, nutrients etc. between all -- eukaryotes versus prokaryotes, swarms versus colonies. Exchange of information as, e.g. in the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria. Growth was success. Cooperation was risky and happenstance, a matter of chemical statistics. What a wonderful, productive system/environment that was -- the entire world of modern global biota nascent in the free market soup. Fast forward a billion or so years to "fishermen and shepherds". It was still commonplace, AFAIK, to respond to a real or perceived threat by slaying the men, enslaving the women and children and ploughing their land to salt. But notions of ethics -- that humans had intrinsic value and living like primordial organisms, well, just wrong. A patchy, glimmering awareness of We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. didn't begin ex nihilo in 1776. Fast forward again a few millennia to a modern understanding of cancer. Cancer is a reversion of the homeostasis and deeply integrated cooperation of highly evolved life to the winning strategy of imhabitants in the primordial soup. But ancient bacteria didn't really care about each other, their families, their neighborhoods or their progeny. Friedman & company think that the evolution of culture, of society as an emergent phenomenon of human biology, should revert to the mechanisms and yes, the ethics, of the primordial soup. This barefaced failure of intellect offers this advantage: Everything can be reduced to a single-valued equation function. As students learn about simple algebra, they see single-valued functions. Then they meet square roots. Sqrt(x) has two values. X^2 + Y^2 = Z^2 engenders a circle only if both values of Z are included. Too, too confusing, eh? In many scientific and theoretical disciplines, it's becoming increasingly obvious that difficult things can't be understood with single valued linear equations. The mathematical constructs needed are knotty and gnarly and, often, refractory to analytic solution. But if you make an ex cathedra dogma of single-valued self interest, of cash value of anything, of net profit or net share holder value, you can simply dispense with all the complexity, ambiguity and debate and get on with things. In such a frame of reference, Alexander's cutting the Gordian knot was a bold stoke of decisiveness. Alas, what Alexander did was to reduce the problem at hand to a single-valued function, effectively destroying the whole context of the problem. Left as an exercise for the reader is imagining Gordian solutions to social problems that arise from embracing pure free-market dogma. For added credit, explain how "pursuit of happiness" will be implemented in the resulting social structure. -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
