While Dennett takes up Darwin's Dangerous Idea, really the most dangerous idea ever printed is not something from Marx or Hitler or Mohammad but from a Scottish thinker called Adam Smith. His opus magnum the Wealth of Nations published in 1776 introduces us to the idea of the Invisible Hand of the markets.
Its the same idea that Dennett is talking about. The idea that forces of nature are behind all aspects of humanity, that we can replace humans with mechanical machines. For Dennett both Humans, Human Will and Consciousness can all be explained in terms of impersonal mechanical forces of nature.
This is actually SRH and Dennett is not wrong. You cannot explain Humans in terms of Humans. Inventing a great Human in the sky called God to make humans is logical folly. To explain human intelligence and design in terms of another designer is pointless, nothing has been explained. To explain the diversity of life on this planet in terms of another celestial life is pointless. There is no explanation and nothing being said in all these statement and beliefs.
So far so good. So why am I about to take Dennett and Smith to task?
The problem is that as Dennett would agree himself when we move the debate from God into the World we are moving the explanation from something we don't understand to something else we don't understand. There is a lot more to the world than we can understand. Quantum Physics is constantly throwing up new things and science will forever pursue ever changing theories of the world. "The World" is not so discrete as to be grasped in any amount of thinking and philosophy.
This is the essence of SRH. "The whole" can never be explained because it would need to explain itself, and that becomes a pointless loop. Explaining everything looks like great achievement until you realise you used everything to do it. If you explain Everything in terms of Everything then you may as well go back to God. If you don't already know what everything is then how can you explain everything? Human endeavours of explanation must always base their explanations on something else. We explain A in terms of B which means A can never become B and the world is necessarily split. The opening endeavour of mankind to explain something in terms of something else, already had us doomed to live in a divided world. We were doomed from the start. Everything will always be unexplainable.
So Dennett desire to explain will always be limited.
Now Adam Smith. His idea is that the price of things is best found in a "free market." The issue lies in that word "free." He actually meant a government regulated market where property rights were protected by law and coercion and mafia like behaviour was clamped down on. Each individual buying what they wanted at the price they felt fair, and working for the income they felt fair to get the money they felt they needed was the best way to match labour and consumption, supply and demand.
He is not wrong. Although there is a better system. Since you have a government in charge to stop wrong doing, why not a system of giving like religions preach. In an exchange system like Adam Smith envisaged you need 2 factors to complete a transaction. You need the buyer and the seller to agree. The buyer must have the money and the seller must have the goods. This eliminates all the possible transactions where the buyer does not have the money. This leads to borrowing where buyers have to arrange debt and it actually slows the system down. In a system of giving then only the supplier needs complete the transaction. And the religions argue with increased throughput and velocity you end up with a more efficient economy which is actually wealthier than Smith envisaged and so the giver actually ends up with more for that initial risk of giving without receiving. Religions tend to say you receive 10x what you give. It would be interesting to model this and see if its true. The great fear of course is cheats. People who take but never give. Smith's free market is based on this idea that in exchange economies everyone comes out of the transaction happy so there is no further processing. But this isn't actually true when people have to borrow. There us all the fall out of debt payments even after the transaction has cleared. As we see in the world today Smith economics leads straight into a world of debt and actually incomplete transactions where debt takes centre stage. The world is currently facing a vast liquidity problem from FX Swaps amounting to $25 trillion. This is more debt than the entire wester economy. It means no actual transaction in the West has really completed for many years and has all been done on credit. If we are never going to complete our transactions then what was the point of exchange economy anyway? Why don't we just give what we can to those who need it like the Pre-Smith teachings always said we should?
But the really dangerous part of Smith far worse than this self-destructive economy above, is that people think they need only work and shop for themselves. His idea is based upon and cements the idea of the Ego as a self contained unit in an economy cut off from everyone around. If this single cellular automaton just shops for what it wants, and works for a sufficient income then the economy and society as a whole will be best. But this completely reduces the human being to a box with inputs and outputs and society to just a collection of cells. This may make sense to an C18th Enlightenment thinker, but it is really pure darkness. Where for instance did the English language that Smith was writing in come from? Where was the exchange that occurred to ensure that there were reader for his work? How much is English language worth? Who is selling and who was buying? Its a nonsense. English language comes to people in the British Isles like rain or sunshine comes from the Sky. It is free, and that free is the real free that enables life to happen. If birds and plants had to pay from water and sunlight then there would be no life on the planet at all. The real free market actually is free! A mother does not charge her child for the labour she invests. A parent does not charge for teaching their child English. The heart does not charge the person for beating every minute of their life. The brain does not charge for even thinking all this. It all just happens naturally. This is the real "free market." As the religions say everything comes from and belongs to God so there is nothing for us to claim or own, Even the work our our hands is only possible because we were given hands at birth. None of it belong to me. And in fact as explored elsewhere in this blog there is not even a me.
So Dennett and Smith far from explaining Wealth and Consciousness and Human Existence they have simply thrown out 99% of what is there and then forced the remaining 1% into a rigid box of algorithms and systems that they think stand alone. In fact all Dennett's explanations and all Smith's Wealth come from the 99% they have ignored. No A then not way B can be explained in terms of A. No free world of natural abundance or society of humans and then no wealth at all.
These are small thoughts in a world more vast (and necessarily so) than we can imagine. What is dangerous about Darwin and Smith is that they make people think small, and believe that is all there is. It is the throwing away of 99% that Enlightenment thinking trained people to do.
Its no accident I think that Smith published in the same year as America gained independence. America is the smallest place on Earth, the one that thinks biggest but with the smallest brain. It seems 1776 was a special year when Mankind, rather than face the puzzle of the vastness of the world, decided instead to throw away everything they could not see clearly and gain certainty from what was left. It was the year we gained illumination by drawing closet to a dimming candle rather than increase it brightness. It was the year that the West born and the year that Mankind died.
SRH remains as the thorn in the Enlightenments project. That Totalitarianism that the West sort from its inception, that Totalitarianism where every human on Earth thinks enlightenments thoughts and lives in enlightenment harmony and understands a universe with enlightenment totality, that Totalitarianism which the West sees in anyone who opposes the totality of the west: that Totalitarianism is its own weakness because what is left for the Conquer when everything is conquered?
No comments:
Post a Comment