The impact of the heavy snow showed up the weakness of capitalism very clearly to me: a socialist economy would be able to redirect huge resources much more precisely and efficiently than the fragmented capitalist industries watching their profit margins at every turn. That said I was brought to consider more how BAA might be operated as a capitalist venture than to use it's failure as a demonstration of Thatchers far reaching errors. If we can mend capitalism would it be better than a mended socialism? My only problem is that I still see Capitalism as working superficially in a society of competitive and selfish individuals better the socialism but intrinsically it remains illogical and flawed; Socialism on the other hand is fundamentally rational but superficially fails because of errors in the Western cultures. It seems absurd to justify Capitalism based on a human culture that is flawed. And so here we are at the big challenge: is Human Culture and Society flawed? A summary of this blog's positions says yes and also how.
It is Xmas and the church is spreading the message of peace and goodwill. The Archbishop of Canterbury calls for the rich to shoulder more of the burden of the economic down turn, there is the (brilliant) adaptation of "The Christmas Carol" on Dr Who this Christmas Day (most satisfyingly well thought out by Stephen Moffat - lots of SRH in there) and the general looking after the poor. But I have always wondered why there are poor at all and why they have and always will exist. The Christian message is missing something. Well this blog seems to have the answer and now i see it vividly.
Firstly Wealth is Relative. It is a simple idea but gets held up the the belief in "needs". Whatever a human situation there will be a hierarchy of value. Even if it comes to dying some ways of dying are better than others. "Needs" are a red herring completely - this should be apparent hearing kids learning English and, realising that want is not as good as effective as need, decide to need everything. Once we realise that Wealth only exists in relation to other things then naturally it follows that a wealthy society must have a poor also. This is not an accident it is fundamental to the concept of wealth.
Secondly is the idea of Power. This is the other type of hierarchy. Humans exist in a society that is dominated by relative social status. We judge our position, obviously, relative to other people. A friend's girlfriend was saying that she was offered a better title at no extra pay, the title supposedly being the reward of the new workload. What has confused me about authority hierarchies, but now I understand, is that obviously systems of organisation must exist in order to harmonise complex groups of people working together. "Orders" mean that information and responses to new information can rapidly spread through a complex network. Certainly in the army an order enables very fast and accurate implementation of plans.
Yet lots of people who take up positions of authority seem to confuse this with something else. It is I now see the hidden notion of status. By being in power people can consider themselves "better" than other people. It is the instinct of status and hierarchy.
So why does all this exist? The obvious place to look is biology. Higher animals have very complex dominance structures. I discovered on BBC Autumn Watch this year that even birds at a feeding table have strict dominance hierarchies - and these aren't even considered to be social organisms. Dominant individuals will take control of the food resources with progressively marginal individuals getting less and less control. When a predator strikes and the birds scatter, researchers have found that the most subordinates return first - I am guessing because an empty feeder offers a high reward and so it is worth risking breaking cover. Once they have proven that the coast-is-clear then the dominant individuals return and take charge of the food again. Thus individuals experience risks from predation and also other birds on the feeder - and the two are balanced. I was surprised to find this in rabbits when I studied them at BSc but see that it is a universal phenomenon that predators offer a similar level of danger to one's own species and kin! The evidence is that Rabbits spend as much time watching for predators as for proximity to dominant individuals! This is the one thing that Darwin got wrong that there is nothing special about individuals being of the same species - fellow species members and even clan members are as likely to kill you as predators!
Dominance is expressed essentially through violence. Birds for example have very sharp beaks and they don't use them for feeding only! Rabbits don;t just use their powerful jumping feed to move they can disembowel with a single kick. So why do individuals go to such lengths to achieve dominance and be violent to other individuals? It is so that they can secure essential resources. The issue is not our own absolute fitness but our relative fitness. If we can ensure that no-one else breeds then we don't need to be that fit to secure all the future offspring and so spread this gene. Thus it pays to spend time upsetting ones competitors as well as acquiring resources. The balance depends upon circumstances.
So given the simple brutality of nature it is no surprise to find EXACTLY the same structure in humans. Humans find that rather than play the game straight it is actually beneficial to dominate other humans and ensure our mastery of resources that way. With humans, and the sophisticated way we can communicate our wishes, it is possible for dominant individuals to steal (tax) resources from others and get them to completely support the dominant individuals. Of course we do this because being in the hierarchy to a powerful dominant individual places us in the running for resources ourself (from which non loyal subjects are excluded) and also offers us protection from other dominant individuals who would wish to upset us.
Large populations can be supported within violent systems when resources are plentiful, but when resources become scarce it is the "poor" subordinates who die first. When food on bird feeders is scarce the strong dominant individuals will be able to secure the food better and so remain strong, while the subordinates will die. This ramping of fitness offers an inbuilt buffer to extreme environmental changes. It may be (and I like the idea of group level selections) that species that don't incorporate a hierarchy of fitness, when faced with sudden scarcity, experience the shortage equally through the population and all individuals out compete themselves and the population dies together. So in this view intrinsic violence is actually an adaptation to environmental heterogeneity. It would be an interesting test to see if dominance hierarchies are more ramped in species from temperate climates where winter produces a regular time of scarcity and so group level selection. In humans it certainly seems that it is the historically recent Northern tribes who have been the most socially organised and dominating in human history (Aryans, Mongols and Saxons especially). Anyway pure speculation here.
So Human Society and culture obeys the most fundamental laws of nature, and many right wing thinkers would happily stop there. But as this very argument shows humans exist on a higher level than mere resource allocation. One of my poorly realised argument against Dawkins is that "his ideas" do not have fitness: they don't obviously make his children fitter; and, if they are fitter memes of the mind, so that they spread, then the prevalence of meme theory is attributable only to what meme theory says and not being a theory of Truth we can't say that meme theory is True! Why Dawkins then gets so irate about other memes doing well I don't understand: it can only be because he secretly believes in Truth as the measure of fitness and this contradicts meme theory which is not a theory of Truth! This is SRH in action. It is incredibly hard to argue even after all these centuries of art, philosophy and religion, and these many thousands of words in this blog, but the Human Mind transcends the physical and even its own contructions. This is the realm of the essentially indefinable which has been called the spiritual. It intersects human society in this issue of wealth and equality.
We have only two choices. We understand that wealth is relative and so have to accept inequality; or we believe in equality and so must abandon wealth. It is the argument at the heart of spirituality and it is why those who seek the Higher Mind have such a difficult relationship with the material.
If we abandon wealth then we also abandon Hierarchy and this was difficult even for World spiritual leaders. Jesus most famously in Matthew 15 called a Canaanite woman a "dog" because of her low standing with the Jews. It was here commentators say that he had to face this side of his culture and understand that faith, and hence the Lord's power, extended outside normal social hierarchies. It was with Buddhism that we first see a spiritual leader teaching equally to all. This was as far as I know the first time that the idea of Equality arose (2500B.C.).
Our Western society is certainly a messy admixture of contradictions. We believe in professions, education and skills yet we also believe that the unskilled masses can run a country (or at least have the collective power to chose leaders to do highly skilled tasks). We believe that each person has equal power to vote, yet in the market place some people can buy multimillon pound pleasure yachts while some can barely buy a car... it goes on. Democracy is based upon an idea of equality that is completely (and essentially in places like the flight deck of a plane) absent. At least we have made the effort to incorporate this idea but democracy is just a superficial add-on the a society that is at root flawed because of its belief in wealth.
The great economists have resolved huge problems in markets, and modern oil based transport and communication have aided in providing us with an efficient trading world that rapidly distributes produce and information to maximise spending and money flow. Complex debt management has also increased the availability of credit and the flow of money. People have more to spend and more work to do. It is a miracle of wealth. (Personally I attribute almost all this apparent wealth to energy from oil rather than economics but I'll gloss over that here.) Most apparent of this success is the fact that people in the West don't starve any more. It appears to produce the solid basis for a belief in wealth. Yet Economic growth seems to contradict this notion of wealth. If there is an absolute wealth then at what point will we be satisfied? It is hard for modern people to realise but we are no more wealthy than at any point in history. At every point there have always been people more wealthy and less wealthy and we have always felt "as" wealthy as we do today. It is by focusing on this inequality that we get the sense of wealth. Indeed it is by the difference between things that we get the sense of physical matter at all. Wealth sadly for economics is not a real thing and it can't really be created or destroyed materially.
The problem that we face is the growing belief in this most basic and tragic idea that what is relative creates things that are absolute. Dawkins, and his cohorts are, unbeknown to themselves, no different from rabbits or tits on a bird feeder. It is a great irony that those who would seek to be better and correct are applying for status through arguments that apply also to the lowest organisms who have no choice whether to argue one way or the other. Surely Materialists can see that the very freedom to "apply" for this status places them beyond the level that they are applying to! This is the still poorly realised SRH idea. Dawkin's mind is master of the arena that he believes his lives within and wishes to confine himself within. If you can describe what your house looks like then you must have been outside so you are only choosing to stay inside and that the root choice of Dawkin's and all materialists and atheists' etc that wilfully clouds their vision.
Once we are brave enough to step outside we are faced with a huge challenge: are we ready to abandon wealth and accept equanimity and equality?
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