Kitcher vs. Singer: Two Views of Ev-Psych's Relevance

Sexual double standards. An instinctual moral sense. Innate tribalism. Tradition vindicated as functional. Markets vindicated as a natural process. It all begins to sound as if Darwin’s world is a rather conservative one (except for requiring no God, of course).

Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy of science at University of California at San Diego, wasn’t happy about this when I communicated with him about it a decade ago. “E.O. Wilson, it should be noted, was a genuine liberal, sometimes distressed by his own conclusions. Today’s Darwinian psychologists seem delighted with what they find,” charged Kitcher. “These endeavors are often defended in the name of free inquiry, and the investigators cast themselves as bold challengers of orthodoxy…In fact, they frequently succeed in capturing public attention precisely because they pander to old stereotypes, especially about the ‘proper’ roles of men and women…and any morally sensitive venture into the biological understanding of human behavior would be much more cautious.”

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For good or ill, it does seem that sociobiology’s impact is, on balance, a conservative one. But no less left-wing a figure than Princeton philosopher Peter Singer — notorious for his defenses of infanticide and bestiality — now says it may be time for the creation of what he calls a “Darwinized left,” and it is clear he means by this a somewhat more conservative, more sociobiological left.

Singer notes the practical limits that evolutionary theory puts on the left’s ambitions to transform selfish human nature. As he put it in a speech on the topic, “Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood.”

Singer acknowledges that a system that harnesses our instinctual self-interest may be wiser than one that attempts to eradicate or ignore it, and he even notes that arch-capitalist Adam Smith got this idea right two centuries ago. Singer goes further, arguing for the interrelatedness of self-interest and virtue on the basis of the insights gained from “tit for tat” strategies: “By being provokable, [tit for tat] creates a virtuous spiral in which life gets harder for cheats, and so there are fewer of them. Therefore cooperators do better because they are more likely to encounter another cooperator rather than a cheat.”

While praising altruistic actions such as blood donations, Singer recognizes that, as evolutionary theory would predict, our charitable instincts tend to taper off as the beneficiaries become more foreign, more anonymous — less clearly kin. If it is true that our desire to help others is motivated at the gut level by whether we think of them as kin, then we should make redoubled efforts to “expand the circle,” as Singer puts it, of our kin-like relations (and indeed some evidence, such as an aversion to incest even among adoptive siblings or collectively raised children, suggests that relatedness is to some degree a state of mind rather than pure genetics — our kin-regarding instincts can be fooled).

Echoing concerns of anti-urban Founding Fathers such as Jefferson (who thought anonymous city life makes callousness and bad behavior more likely) and concerns of modern paleoconservatives (who argue that a society of anonymous masses and immigrants may not make for good neighbors), Singer asks: “What structures can overcome the anonymity of the huge, highly mobile societies that have come into existence in this century and show every sign of increasing in size with the globalization of the world economy?”

Interestingly — and refreshingly — Singer does not call for a retreat from the increasing interconnectedness of the world but, contrary to many on the left, urges the embrace of globalization (in his book One World: The Ethics of Globalization). You can’t expand the circle of kin-like relations — and accompanying altruistic feelings — while severing the ties of trade between people.

Evolutionary Economics

In recent years, the closest analog to Spencer’s benign form of Social Darwinism may have been an obscure, short-lived movement centered on the book Bionomics by Michael Rothschild.  “The economy is an ecosystem,” Michael Rothschild told me.  For a short time in the mid-90s, this analogy became popular, especially with libertarians and other free-market advocates (though Rothschild, who makes no claim to being a biologist, eventually left bio-economic theorizing to start the more pragmatic software company Maxager).  The economy, says Rothschild, is “a virtual rainforest, and within that are not species but industries.  They’re comprised of organizations rather than organisms.  Those organizations exist in product market spaces, market niches.  Those organizations adapt, are shaped to survive, as in biological or ecological niches.”  Just an analogy?  Rothschild anticipates and even embraces this criticism, starting Bionomics with a quote from sociobiologist E.O. Wilson: “The key instrument of the creative imagination is analogy.”

Rothschild’s new economic lingo was well-timed, coming immediately after the collapse of Communism, when thinkers were groping for new economic metaphors less rooted in a central planner/technician mentality.  Rothschild likens business plans and procedures to DNA and corporate departments to cell structures, with similar economic influences sometimes giving rise to analogous corporate structures in places and times far removed from each other, just as similar environmental pressures sometimes create analogous biological structures in unrelated animals.  In some sense, economic competition, biological evolution, changes in tradition and culture over time, and the history of technology can all be seen as sorting processes, in which the codes that work tend to be preserved and proliferated while the ones that do not are weeded out.

But bionomics is a bunch of pseudo-science, charged New York Times columnist (now econ Nobelist) Paul Krugman in a column on Slate.  Still, Krugman patted himself on the back for drawing his own parallels, years earlier, between evolution and economics.  I asked Krugman how he thinks bionomics will be remembered.  “Evolutionary ideas are definitely going to play a significant role in economics,” he said via e-mail. “In many cases, an ‘evolutionary’ argument is the only way to predict the outcome of some games, and anyway eventually we will want to go beyond the usual assumption of utility-maximization for some deeper explanation of behavior.  But the bionomics guys have nothing to do with all this — just another small-time econo-cult, of the kind that crops up with regularity over the years.”

But I — like Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer, who recently wrote the evo-nomics book The Mind of the Market — think there’s more than faddishness to the idea that biological evolution offers at least a highly eye-opening analogy for market processes.  (Sometimes, they meld perfectly, as in discussions of monkey butlers and chimpanzee bartenders — but more on that next week.)

Evolving Tradition

Owen Jones, a professor specializing in law and behavioral biology at Arizona State University when I spoke to him several years ago, says that many human traditions seem less arbitrary — and seem to vary less from culture to culture — once you view them as functions of a common human nature. Traditions he explains, “are remarkably similar in several salient, non-random aspects. Patterns of jealousy, affection for children, attention to familial relationships, moral outrage at being cheated, and the like will capture a disproportionately large focus of cultural practices and traditions…think of marriage ceremonies as one modern epiphenomenon of evolved predispositions to mate…think of proscriptions against violence as a modern effort to reduce the manifestations of evolved aggressions.” So even the most carefully thought-out, new-fangled rules work with the raw material nature provided.

Tradition itself, rarely analyzed in scientific terms, can be thought of as an evolutionary sorting process, suggests anthropologist William H. Durham in his book Coevolution. It’s not a matter of “genes vs. culture,” nor “genes, then culture,” but of two parallel systems interacting and developing together down across the ages. True, traditions can be taken up or abandoned without their carriers necessarily having more offspring or dying, but since people tend to choose from the practices with which they are familiar, their menu of options will be dictated in part by which practices made people more likely to survive.

Most people choose from “thinkable” variations on the traditions they learned from their predecessors and contemporaries. Durham calls the slightly different tradition-bundles amongst which we choose allomemes (after Richard Dawkins’s term “meme” for a single catchy idea). Which of these bundles survive will depend partly on which ones appear to work, not simply on who lives long enough to have children — though that would obviously be one good criterion for judging which ones work. So tradition is partly a matter of choice, partly a matter of what made survival easier.

To give concrete examples: there is an obvious evolutionary reason that rules against murder and rules in favor of childbearing would tend to be propagated, while pro-murder and anti-childbearing codes would tend to be short-lived (as would religions that forbid all reproduction). The conservative idea that traditions have been vindicated by their survival over time makes some basic evolutionary sense, then — though some theorists, such as anarchist law professor Butler D. Shaffer, author of Calculated Chaos, caution that institutions begun for practical reasons, which were initially an aid to people’s survival, have a tendency to calcify into systems aimed first and foremost at their own preservation. Traditions themselves are competing to survive, you might say. Tradition, then, looks less arbitrary when viewed through the lens of evolution, but not perfect.

P.S. Speaking of traditionalism, I wonder whether the left — for consistency’s sake — will freak out over Obama’s new office of faith-based initiatives, as they did over Bush’s.  I suspect not.  (I, of course, say separate church and state and then dispose of both.)

Group Identity, Protest Groups

Far from being a license to behave like animals, sociobiology may give us a keener awareness of how easily our instincts can be manipulated, thus giving us more incentive to exercise self-control.

George C. Williams, with the Department of Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, was instrumental in refining theories about parental investment in offspring, but he’s wary about looking to nature for advice. He says natural selection is an “evil” process, and that we must be on guard against its selfish, biasing effects. “There’s terminology that evokes certain kinds of emotions,” says Williams. “In Henry V, the king calls his troops a ‘band of brothers.’ This idea that these guys standing next to me, all ready to shoot arrows at those horrible Frenchmen, these are my brothers and it’s my duty to keep them from getting shot at by the French, obviously creates a kind of paternal view of the king as the leader of the whole group. This kind of familial relationship…well, you don’t have to be a sociobiologist to understand this. It comes naturally to people. Feminists talk about ’sisterhood’ nowadays.”

It is easier to evoke a gut loyalty to family or tribe, even a pseudo-family or pseudo-tribe, than to something more abstract like a complex conception of justice. “Sociobiology,” he adds, “doesn’t provide a set of values that should be pursued. You have to decide what your values are, and then maybe sociobiology will tell you what tactics are likely to be effective in pursuing those values.” Sociobiology would also seem to suggest we be at least as wary of appeals to nationalism or race-purity as to left-wing calls for “solidarity.”

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Nonetheless, in 1997, anti-racist protesters at liberal Brown University, convinced that sociobiology encourages racist thinking, proudly likened themselves to the 70s anti-sociobiology activists. That prompted Kenneth Miller, a Brown biology professor, to defend sociobiology and free speech in the school newspaper. He recalled how lectures by the eminent entomologist and founding sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in the 70s “were met with frank attempts by activists to intimidate the scientist, his audience, or his hosts into calling the events off.” Miller questioned how long free speech at Brown would survive if activists still admire such tactics.

Sociobiologists may be able to explain even the outrage of the leftists in evolutionary terms, though. Richard Alexander, from the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, says we are designed to be a bit self-righteous. Since we have a mix of selfish and altruistic instincts, and since the people around us do too, we “gain not only from making ourselves appear more moral (altruistic) than we really are, but as well from being moralistic about others who are playing in the same game.” In the ongoing tit-for-tat game, it behooves us to appear more altruistic than the next guy.

Alexander argues that this subtle link between altruism and self-interest/kin-interest is what has confused philosophers for so long about the nature of humans’ moral sense. “It’s partly the inevitable and unending conflict inherent in all of this that keeps us from establishing definitive answers to those questions philosophers have engaged futilely for so long. The futility is partly that they and everyone else tried to do it while ignorant of evolution.”

P.S. By the way, my favorite example of someone trying to deny his group identity this week is Jay Carney, former Time Washington bureau chief, telling the New York Times that his new job is not evidence that he may have had political biases as a journalist. Sure, he’s Biden’s communications director now (at a time when many journalists have taken jobs with the new administration), but he says “I don’t see this as a partisan job at all,” in part because Biden values “bipartisanship.” Keep that standard in mind the next time a journalist tells you with a straight face that the media is “objective.”

The Evolution of Morality

University of Michigan political science professor Robert Axelrod set up a famous computer experiment, a tournament of very simple computer-simulated beings, detailed in his book The Evolution of Cooperation.  He wanted to see which basic behavior patterns would reap the greatest rewards in a world where the pseudo-beings could help or harm one another upon each encounter.  The tournament demonstrated that a “tit for tat” program, one that cooperated on its first encounter with another being and afterwards responded in kind to the actions of its neighbor (harm for harm, help for help), fared better than almost any other program, despite its great simplicity.  It rewarded cooperation and punished betrayal, instead of being either pacifistic or overly vengeful.

It may be no coincidence that almost all early ethical and legal codes were some variation on the simple idea of “an eye for an eye” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  These basic justice rules may be written in our nature after all, much as conservatives have sometimes contended.  Real human beings, much like the creatures in Axelrod’s simulation, are the product of countless generations of interpersonal conflict, with each succeeding generation (if the model is accurate) being slightly more likely to possess instincts for tit-for-tat behavior, since that is the most sustainable basic strategy: reward kindness with kindness, aggression with aggression (subsequent experiments have shown the even greater efficacy of a slightly modified formula, forgiving the first wrong but thereafter employing tit-for-tat).  Proto-humans whose instincts happened to tend in another direction — such as attacking anyone they saw, whether friend or foe — would tend not to form bonds, receive aid, or pass their antisocial impulses on to a new generation.  This theory is sometimes called evolutionary ethics.

Biologist Robert Trivers at Rutgers, who I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, says that perhaps his own greatest contribution to the field “was to show how cooperation and altruistic behavior find a ready home in evolutionary biology…[We] provided biology with a foundation for a sense of justice.  So, instead of seeing our sense of fairness and justice as being just cultural artifacts, which might in principle disappear with a different upbringing, you saw that there was quite a biological substratum for why we feel that way.”  Trivers’ view of evolution is upbeat enough that he even incorporated Darwinian themes into a marriage ceremony he officiated in California for two biologists, noting how their love was the end product of billions of years of creatures seeking one another out, intermingling to create something new, and feeling devotion to their offspring and kin.  He concluded with Darwin’s comment that “there is grandeur in this view of life.”

Fearing Eugenics, Resisting Sociobiology

Some might argue that the last thing the world needs is for the right to embrace Darwinian thinking.  What was the nightmare of eugenics, some on both right and left would ask, if not the misapplication of Darwinian ideas to right-wing political ends?  Nightmarish eugenics may have been — a perverse use of state power and pseudo-science to slaughter or sterilize those deemed unfit — but it was not per se a right-wing phenomenon.

Today associated with the death camps of the Nazis, eugenics was once considered common sense by well-meaning people across the political spectrum.  Margaret Sanger, revered by feminists as an early advocate of contraceptives, promoted them in part to lower the birth rate of undesirables.  In the minds of many in that day, eugenics was not so much a plan for racial war as it was a natural extension of the immense successes of public hygiene in eliminating disease outbreaks.  First eliminate cholera, then the mentally retarded, you might say.  The proto-fascists’ calisthenics, open-air hikes, and organic diets were all part of a larger ideal of health and purity that had no place for freaks and genetic defectives.  But witty socialist George Bernard Shaw, too, like many left-leaning early modernists, subscribed to a “superman” ideal (he phrased even his arguments for vegetarianism in strikingly masculine and triumphalist terms by today’s standards, noting in Preface to Androcles and the Lion that meat-eaters have suffered “the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers and bicyclists”).

Of course, just because evolution is an often-brutal process doesn’t mean we have any obligation to help it along, nor to steer it any particular direction (and if a retarded person could have survived and even reproduced were he not attacked by the state, then he is not “unfit” in any strictly Darwinian sense).  It is not the case that everyone who studies evolution harbors a desire to crush the weak — but that was pretty much the view that student protesters took of Darwinians in the 1970s, reacting against a new wave of interdiscplinary scholars referred to as sociobiologists, who strove to explain modern human behavior in terms of the evolutionary incentive structures that shaped our ancestors.  That intellectual endeavor was enough to get the scientists hounded off campuses by student protesters, who likened sociobiology to eugenics.  Though sociobiology has no political program, the late Stephen Jay Gould (whose own writings on evolution were often more admired by lay readers than by his colleagues) helped fan the flames by calling sociobiologists reactionaries (an online commenter, identifying himself as a student of University of New Mexico sociobiologist Randy Thornhill, once complained that Stephen Jay Gould was venerated as progressive while sociobiologists like Robert Trivers are called reactionary, yet Trivers was a Black Panther sympathizer and “Gould was sitting on his ass in Harvard, while Trivers immunized poor children in the Jamaican countryside!”).

What sort of ideas got the sociobiologists labeled right-wing?  Consider their Darwinian take on four hot-button subjects, as I look at them over the course of the next four days: moral intuitions, group identity, tradition, and economics.

Darwin for Conservatives

We know the expected pattern: the right objects to the theory of evolution, and a secular/left world stands by science.  But it has not always been thus.  Evolution has been employed to defend some fairly conservative social theories over the past century and a half, while the left’s own use of evolutionary theory has at times been as mystical as the thinking of the creationists.

Almost from the moment Darwin’s On the Origin of Species reached the public (150 years ago this November), though, people have been trying to squeeze more out of the story of evolution, to make it reveal purpose and teleology in the universe.  The results haven’t always fit easily into the contemporary right-left political spectrum.

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Take the Victorians: today, they’re sometimes deployed as the very symbols of sexual repression and capitalist callousness, yet they made a receptive audience for evolutionary theory precisely because they believed in Progress.  They had seen incredible advances in their own lifetimes — industry, electricity, steam engines, rising literacy (indeed, for all the praise the twentieth century heaped on itself, it couldn’t compare to the progress seen in the nineteenth century, when Westerners went from living much like medieval peasants to living with the telegraph and trolley car).  But was Progress, in retrospect, a left-wing or right-wing impulse?  For Hegel (to some extent) and for Marx (more obviously) it was a left-wing impulse, and one that was often described in quasi-mystical terms.  Hegel saw social change as God’s dialectical way of making Reason manifest in the development of the world, and George Bernard Shaw later took social change as evidence of an elan vital, or “life force,” pushing humanity toward a glorious, socialist, religion-free destiny.  (That blend of Progressivism and mysticism spawned movements like theosophy and is echoed to this day in New Age and hippie rhetoric.)

So are today’s right-wing critics of Darwin correct?  Was Darwin part of a left-wing triad, a kindred spirit of Marx and Freud, pushing humanity forward toward an illusory self-knowledge and breaking the bonds of traditional morality in the process?  Well, not quite.  For it is increasingly clear that Darwin had some conservative implications — and conservative effects.

The chief exponent of Progress in the nineteenth century, political theorist Herbert Spencer, believed the idea of evolution applied to more than biology.  Spencer also believed in laissez-faire capitalism and “the right to ignore the state,” what would today be called libertarianism (all this was fairly mainstream thinking in the Victorian era — today’s political writers can only dream of achieving the popularity and acceptance that Spencer did with volumes such as Social Statics).

For proposing that biological change over time was analogous to cultural change over time, Spencer is now remembered as the quintessential Social Darwinist.  That label has been enough for some to paint Spencer as a defender of the rapacious and powerful against the weak and impoverished.  But while Spencer believed in capitalism, individualism, and the cultural superiority of the West — hardly a set of a views that would qualify him as a leftist today — he saw those principles as winners precisely because they tended to foster peace, prosperity, freedom, and voluntary interaction, not violence and oppression.  Contrary to the image the public has today of Social Darwinists as exterminators of the weak, Spencer predicted that societies relying on authoritarianism and force would tend to collapse and, as it were, be weeded out of the political genepool.

In a way, the collapse of Soviet Communism 130 years later was more accurately predicted by Spencer than by Hegel, though Hegel’s dialectical thinking got renewed attention when Communism imploded, while Spencer wallows in obscurity.  Conservatives, instead of gloating that Marx is dead and Darwin will be next, should be rushing to embrace Social Darwinism.  But if conservatives fail to see that the Darwinists are in some sense on their side, postmodernist lit-crit types are beginning to see the connection, and on some campuses, left-wing professors have in recent years been expressing doubts about the validity of evolution precisely because it strikes them as too convenient an ideological fit with the prevailing attitudes of the (hated) Victorian era.  If left-wing students begin protesting when assigned Darwin or Spencer, perhaps conservatives will finally, reflexively, give these thinkers a sympathetic re-reading.

Welcome to the Month of Evolution

Just as my “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” blog entries last month noted the hundredth anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s birth, the “Month of Evolution” I begin today will include a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. He ranks with Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Albert Einstein among those who have helped us understand the basic rules by which the universe operates.

Though some are still troubled by its implications (or misunderstand them), evolution is a phenomenon hard to deny or overlook once the rather simple and intuitive idea is first articulated. In the broadest-applicable terms (not even specific to biology per se), where there is replication with variation (that is, variation relevant to the odds of members of the new generation themselves being replicated), successive generations will tend to resemble the more-prolific replicators of the prior generation, with the attributes of the population thus changing over time.

If biological evolution were not occurring over time, it would require an explanation (such as the discovery that all organisms happen to be identical and face identical environmental influences). Given the countless observed manifestations of biological evolution, from changing bird beaks to shifting bacteria strains, full-fledged Darwin-doubters are in as weak and delusional a position as gravity-deniers, so I’ll spend little time this month responding to them. As I do not claim to be a biologist or zoologist, I won’t attempt to write an introductory textbook either. But I will ask some questions about how the lessons of natural selection may or may not apply to other areas of our thinking.

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As it happens, just a few days ago, I tried to get into a party held by Pandora.com, which has become the music site I most often listen to for the simple reason that it employs a sort of evolutionary mechanism: You create a music channel to your liking by clicking on little thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols as any given song plays, training the resulting channel to repeatedly play songs of the sort you like and weed out ones you don’t. The system isn’t perfect — ironically, the channel I based on the band literally called My Favorite tends to degenerate after a few hours into a techno station no matter how much I try to train it not to — but like the Hayekian philosophy mentioned yesterday, Google, or Wikipedia (founded by Hayek fans), at least Pandora is generally marked by ongoing improvement and refinement, progress in the best sense of the word.

I’m not the only one who thinks so, apparently, since 3,000 people RSVPed for the Pandora party, and girlfriend Helen and I were unable to get in (another cruel blow in a week that brought word of the site Culture11, one place Helen’s been blogging, shutting down — if anyone out there’s inclined to give her other assignments). We did, however, make it to a small New York Young Republican Club party going on one block away at the same time — very convenient for an advocate of “conservatism for punks” and on a day that also assuaged my nerd facet by bringing the final issue of the momentous comic book Final Crisis. (The two NYYRCs, each bearing exactly the same name, are more a study in dialectical synthesis than Darwinian evolution, I suppose, periodically attempting to overcome their long-term schism.)

Two days later, we also visited Helen’s old stomping grounds, Yale, for a debate by Yale’s Party of the Right, an encouraging gaggle of eccentrics, contrarians, and extremists more philosophically stimulating than your average conventional Republican gathering (and there was at least one actual conservative punk, tattoos and all). These kids may yet generate some new ideas that will aid in a conservative renewal (much the way genetic diversity can increase the odds of a population springing back after a mass die-off, if you will — but please join me at Lolita Bar on Feb. 19 if you want to hear a fuller discussion about the right’s state of decrepitude or renewal — especially if you tell me within the next few days that you want to be the pessimistic half of the debate-pair). With a competitive intensity — and almost Polar-Bear-swimmers-like fondness for subjecting themselves to trials by combat, philosophical or otherwise — these young rightists were quite different from the more bland and conformist folk I recall among the College Republicans of my day. Almost enough to give one hope.

As it happens, one of the first philosophical disagreements recounted to me by a PoR member upon our arrival at Yale was about evolutionary psychology and whether ethical lessons can be drawn from it. I don’t think one can simply read “oughts” from the “is” of evolution, but as I’ll discuss in the days ahead, evolutionary theory, much like economics, can show us what is likely, what is at least possible, and what is probably unworkable. It shows us, for instance, that the imperative to reproduce is likely to be strong — and it shouldn’t surprise us that that imperative is inculcated by religions that tend to grow (“be fruitful and multiply”) and jettisoned by ones that tend to dwindle (the Shakers, the Hale-Bopp comet cult, etc.). Luckily, being a rational animal and knowing your nature doesn’t just mean having to submit to it (as the nasty and fatalistic old story of the fox and scorpion would have you believe); we can recognize our natural inclinations but, thank goodness, can also choose a different path, possibly a much better one.

Von Mises vs. Hayek

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Seven — Not Conservative?

From January 25-31, I’ve looked at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

Libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (the latter a Nobelist) may seem interchangeable to foes of the free market, but there are important differences. Mises was more of a rationalist, more narrowly focused on economics, and more inclined to think that even if all of the decentralized, far-flung empirical facts about the economy could somehow be aggregated by the government’s central planners, any resulting prices the government decreed would be “meaningless” — would in some sense not even be prices. That’s because the central planners would still have no magical, telepathic way of aggregating or even measuring individuals’ preferences in the absence of an already-free market that revealed the relative strengths of those preferences.

This is why the Soviet economic planning bureau, rather embarrassingly, could fulminate all it wanted to about being more economically rational than the market but had to use Western shopping catalogues as a rough guide to setting prices. You simply don’t know how much the public — let alone specific individuals, let alone the same individual at different times — wants a ham relative to a hammer relative to a ham radio. Every government intervention in the economy distorts the price system and does harm, obscuring this crucial information. Mises was not technically an anarchist, but he was thoroughly laissez-faire, and his economic arguments lead logically to libertarianism.

Yet it’s Hayek — the relative moderate who wrote a chapter about “Why I Am Not a Conservative” — who is the most philosophically interesting. Not because his policy recommendations are any sounder than Mises — they are sometimes mushy and moderate, accepting of government emergency measures at the margins — but because his thinking went beyond econ to encompass and help explain civilization as a whole, and in a way that I think still holds out hope of unifying left, right, moderate, and libertarian someday. He is (in some sense) not a conservative because he recognizes that tradition changes and evolves over time, as do economies and law codes. In all three, there is an ongoing weeding-out process (when they are working well) that retains things that work well and discards the things that do not.

If economies, law codes, and tradition are valuable at all, it is precisely because of this weeding out, and we should be very nervous not only when people claim that tradition was perfect from the beginning and should never change but when anti-market activists and politicians claim that the harsh corrective of the market should never weed out failing, badly-run firms.

If that sounds like Social Darwinism — a blend of the progressive traditionalism of Edmund Burke and the laissez-faire attitude of the much-maligned Herbert Spencer — then it’s time to reconsider Social Darwinism’s good points. Even the vilified Spencer never wanted a world where the strong crush the weak but rather the gradual weeding out and discarding of violent as well as inefficient practices and thus continual improvement (and greater peace) in civilization over time.

Hayek, more so than Mises, introduces the important (and realistic, you might say) element of time to our picture of econ and of morality itself. You might say that compared to the “3D” thinking I described in the first Week of Vexing Individuals entry on Sunday, Hayek offers much-needed 4D thinking. Not just a static set of rules or even an occasionally-reconsidered set of rules but a picture of the human race continually getting better at everything it does. That’s the world we all want to live in.

The analogue in biology — though biological change lacks direction, teleology, or conscious purpose, I must stress — is natural selection, so this entry forms a good segue from this “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” to my February “Month of Evolution,” which begins tomorrow. Onward and upward.

AND NOTE: February also brings our Thur., Feb. 19 debate — for which I still need a “no” debater — on the question “Has the Right Hit Bottom Yet?” (though it appears Ken Silber will argue “yes” and Heather Wilhelm will offer some comments from the political-activist field). If you think the right is still headed to even greater humiliation, defeat, and marginalization, we want to hear from you at a bar on the Lower East Side in three weeks. E-mail me.

Supreme Court Liberals (and Communism)

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Six — Liberal?

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

It’s still assumed by most modern liberals that their philosophy and its representatives in Washington, DC aid “the little guy” — though Hillary Clinton is surely becoming Secretary of State largely in order to facilitate her husband’s lucrative overseas business dealings, Barney Frank routinely shakes down banks and businesses by showing them advance copies of pending legislation and softening it later in response to their resulting political donations, Obama is pressing for billions to be showered upon well-connected big businesses (at least they will have their messianic hopes for the new president fulfilled, despite over two hundred economists, including three Nobel Laureates, signing this Cato Institute ad from the New York Times opposing Obama’s stimulus and government spending in general), and, perhaps worst of all, Supreme Court liberals — not the conservatives — voted as a bloc against the occupants of Susette Kelo’s house in New London, CT, saying the government had every right to take their house away in order to give the land to a powerful and lucrative business (while Howard Dean, in an astonishing lie, tried to claim on TV that it was the conservatives who’d voted for the Kelo taking).

I’m pleased to say two small chunks of pink-painted wood from the Kelo house (which was ultimately moved to another location with the help of volunteers) now sit on my bookshelf, next to my first edition first printing of Atlas Shrugged (and the Superman clock Jacob Levy gave me). I’m not pleased that so many liberals (the term greatly corrupted from its original, anti-government, pro-individual meaning), though smart people, continue to defend the state — and to claim that having liberals on the Supreme Court is a victory for freedom. (The situation has gotten too grim for me to keep politely humoring these people at parties, so my social life should start getting more interesting soon — but let’s get back to the Supreme Court.)

The one justice to express some sympathy for libertarianism — and get raked over the coals for it by evil statist Joe Biden in his confirmation hearings eighteen years ago — is Clarence Thomas. You’d think with the skepticism he’s shown in his decisions toward state power (writing the fantastic dissent in favor of term limits for members of Congress when liberalism thwarted that noble crusade, for instance) and toward implicit threats of racial violence in (some) Klan cross burnings (something I’m willing to see as more than just idle speech, depending on the likelihood of real violence in a given social context, though many libertarians might disagree), he might get a little more sympathy from other black Americans — but not in a crowd like the one I was part of Sunday…

•••

Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem hosted a debate on Sunday about whether religion is socially useful, and the moderator mentioned that Clarence Thomas was at one point in the seminary but was alienated by racism among the seminary students, hearing at least one celebrate when Martin Luther King was shot — causing Thomas to lose his Catholic faith for a time. This story makes me like Thomas even more, but the crowd mainly seemed worried that something sympathetic was being said about a Republican.

Indeed, the two sides in the debate were represented by a leftist (yet intelligent design-praising) priest and an atheist who, alas, turned out to be from the Revolutionary Communist Party, so I (being an atheist capitalist, like all right-thinking people) didn’t have too much sympathy for either side — as I told an inquisitive reporter for the RCP’s Revolution newspaper afterwards (though I can’t imagine he had time to jot down much of my comment, since he was explaining the oppressive nature of global capitalism to me at great length).

I was pleased, at least, that a large, camouflage-wearing guy at the back of the crowd, in asking the very first question, urged the communist, Sunsara Taylor, to explain how she could judge religion so harshly on humanitarian grounds when communism itself had murdered millions (exactly the question I had!). Astonishingly (unless you know the RCP is Maoist), Taylor flat-out denied that Mao had murdered millions, praised China’s mid-century achievements in raising life expectancies and standards of living, and even had the audacity to claim that China has been going downhill since the modest market-friendly reforms of Deng. A rightwing conspiracy, she said, has been duping us into thinking Mao is history’s most prolific murderer. (The only person to whom the RCP is apparently more loyal than Mao is their leader-in-hiding, Bob Avakian, for whom the non-hiding Taylor is technically on a book tour, apparently.)

Denying the tens of millions dead at China’s hands or the brutal political repression of the Cultural Revolution is sort of like being a Holocaust denier — and I wouldn’t be surprised if we had one of those in the crowd, too. There was, at least, a man who chastised Taylor for wearing what appeared to be a diamond necklace despite, as he put it, “the Zionists” running the diamond trade. In perhaps her only human and vulnerable-sounding moment, Taylor just said meekly that the necklace had been “a gift” — no defense of “the Zionists” was offered, of course. Another man objected to “retail” altogether (and I don’t think he was suggesting that wholesale is a better deal) and to technology, saying some of it is helpful but some is not.

One man, in a plea for pragmatism, noted that churches are discouraged by government from giving care to transients unless they can do so on a reliable daily basis, but no one (vocal) seemed to see this as an argument for a free market and against government. Everything tended to get shoehorned into the “capitalist system vs. blacks” narrative, tragically — and Taylor coldly said that aid from churches does little to foster a full-scale revolution, which is all that will truly help the poor.

•••

I have this much in common with that crowd, though: their moderator was from the skeptical/atheist Center for Inquiry — and so is one of our scheduled Debates at Lolita Bar participants for April 1, Austin Dacey, who will duke it out with Rabbi Simcha Weinstein.

But more about that debate in a couple months — in the meantime, if you’re as expert on the squabbles of right and left as some of the people mentioned above, let me know if you’ll be in New York City on the night of Thursday, Feb. 19 and want to be considered as our defender of the “No” position in our impending debate on the question “Has the Right Hit Bottom Yet?”

Ken Silber will argue yes, and that the right has already begun to bounce back. Whether you’re rightwing, libertarian, moderate, or liberal — though preferably not a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party — perhaps you think Silber’s nuts and that the right is still plummeting downward. If so, e-mail me your credentials and maybe we can work something out.

Victor Niederhoffer Meets Jeffrey Friedman at the Junto

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Five — Libertarian?

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

The transcript part of today’s entry formerly appeared on Dawn Eden’s blog, with the title “Founded in Honor of Franklin, Confounded by Wild Tangents,” and is a glimpse of how random and odd the monthly meetings of libertarian investor Victor Niederhoffer’s Junto discussion group got, at least in those days.

I don’t know which raised greater doubts about libertarianism: speaker Jeffrey Friedman, editor of Critical Review, with his warnings that night in 2002 that all intellectuals should perhaps be more agnostic and less ideological about politics — or the diehard libertarians who made up most of the crowd.

PLEASE NOTE: the following quasi-transcript is not made up of quotes, just paraphrases, but is not wildly inaccurate, either (and in other Jeffrey Friedman transcript news, he e-mails to note that the transcript in Critical Review Vol. 22, No. 4 of CR’s recent Boston conference will show that his comments about Cass Sunstein were clarifying comments by me and another person who interjected, not just replying to my Sunstein-bashing, but now let us return to 2002):

JEFFREY FRIEDMAN [to Todd Seavey]: Do you know the procedure?

TODD SEAVEY: I think they do several minutes of announcements before letting the speaker talk.

VICTOR NIEDERHOFFER, INVESTOR AND LEADER OF JUNTO GROUP [starting the meeting]: Let’s hear a response to last week’s speaker.

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN [stands in front of group]: Ah, yes, well, it seems to me what with the significant military expenditures we are currently –

NIEDERHOFFER [interrupting]: Tell us what you do. Aren’t you involved in Human Ecology?

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: Right, yes, well, rather, but I shan’t have time to get into all that, you know.

NIEDERHOFFER: Tell us a little.

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: Well, it really is a whole new way of looking at the world and reminding us that humans co-exist with trees and the woods and all that. But as I was saying, we now spend on defense some 400,000 billion –

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: 400 trillion dollars?!?

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: Uh…ah…uh…rather 400,000 million dollars.

MEMBERS OF AUDIENCE: Just say 400 billion!! Just say 400 billion!!

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: I like to say “four hundred thousand…” because –

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: It makes it sound bigger than it is? [Twenty minutes pass in this fashion.]

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ [libertarian artist and author]: I saw a cool show on PBS about economics and some show on C-SPAN about Rand.

IRIS BELL [who looks sort of like an elderly Goth]: Yes, that C-SPAN series was dominated by the West Coast Objectivists…the East Coast Objectivists have realized that people do not listen to you if you call them evil.

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: I worry about the future, which was very much the theme of our speech last time.

NIEDERHOFFER: Isn’t there some connection you can make between your views on defense and Human Ecology?

ELDERLY BRITISH MAN: Well, this spending will affect the human future, I suppose. But I really don’t want to get into all that.

NIEDERHOFFER [without turning around, yells loudly enough to address a large, mysterious figure at the back of the room]: What about you, Mister E? What do you think the future holds?

“MISTER E” [speaks in grim, booming voice through large jowls]: Beginning in July, we will witness a series of increasingly severe natural disasters. Temperatures will fall. Talk of global warming will give way to talk of global cooling. Cold temperatures will inspire wars, as they have throughout history. The Chinese will invade Vietnam, as they do in times of cold and want. Vulcanism will increase, due to the wobbling of the Earth on its axis –

MEMBERS OF AUDIENCE: Vulcans? Did he say Vulcans?

“MISTER E”: Volcanoes! The Earth has a fifty-four year cycle of hot and cold periods, punctuated by storms and stresses upon the Earth’s mantle as our angle toward the sun changes…

MEMBERS OF THE AUDIENCE: [giggling, murmuring]

NIEDERHOFFER: Let me just say that instead of being bemused by ideas different from your own, you should perhaps listen to Mister E, who manages billions of dollars worth of investments and is perhaps the single greatest investor on the entire planet. He has the greatest meteorological minds on the planet on his payroll.

MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: Could we hear what the credentials are of the people from whom you’re getting this stuff?

“MISTER E”: My profit and loss statements are my credentials! This is no theory! It is fact! There won’t be enough sweaters to go around when the change comes!

[Ninety minutes into the meeting...]

NIEDERHOFFER [to Friedman]: You wouldn’t mind before your speech if we heard just a word from this fellow who’s just returned from Japan, where he moved right after World War II?

FRIEDMAN [graciously]: Not at all, Victor.

[A half hour later...]

72-YEAR-OLD WHO LOOKS FIFTY AND HAS TATTOOS ON HIS ARMS [standing at front and addressing the audience]: …and so, after having three children by that wife, who was part French and part Italian…

NIEDERHOFFER: But tell us why you were thrown out of Japan. Was it for selling the antique pistols?

72-YEAR-OLD WHO LOOKS FIFTY AND HAS TATTOOS ON HIS ARMS: Well, I’m gettin’ around to that [makes "globe-hopping" gesture with his hand, as if indicating different parts of the Earth]…

NIEDERHOFFER: I think I’ll have to say that you have the entire meeting to talk next time, but now we really need to get on to our speaker for the evening, Jeffrey –

WORRIED WOMAN [interrupting]: What about the picnic?!? We haven’t talked about details for the picnic!!

NIEDERHOFFER: No, I’m sorry, we need to move on… [Minute or so of chaos ensues.]

[Two hours into meeting.]

FRIEDMAN [to audience]: Hello, I’m Jeffrey Friedman…I’m a polisci professor and I edit Critical Review… The public is very ignorant, and there’s no way any of us can ever really hope to be experts about all the things government does, like exactly how best to run a school system, so that ignorance alone is reason to let people make choices in a market, where they can just give immediate feedback about whether they like something instead of having to get into big theoretical debates that no one has time for about how to improve a system. We’re all ignorant about most things, even about political theories, which is why we should always assume our opponents are not evil — they simply haven’t read the ideas we have and are therefore struggling to make an unworkable system workable.

“MISTER E”: I don’t know where you got your theories, but you’re completely wrong. The only way you get people’s attention is by calling them stupid and evil! And furthermore, you can’t fix the schools by just letting people shop around. You educators always think you can fix things, but the problem is that some people are just too stupid to be educated! You can’t turn an 80 IQ into a 120 IQ by fixing a school!

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER: Prof. Friedman, I have to agree. I work in a public school and there’s nothing we can do better that’ll change the fact that kids have lousy homes and want to be drug dealers because they realize they can make a hundred dollars an hour –

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: Hey, those kids sound pretty smart!

ASSISTANT TO NIEDERHOFFER: The problem with libertarianism, I think, is that these ideas are somehow bound up with a low rate of reproductive success. Socialists are outbreeding us, and they always will.

NIEDERHOFFER: It just so happens, I am myself writing a book on the topic of public ignorance, which I will describe to you now…Contrary to popular belief, when earnings are up, the stock market goes down…

[Fifteen minutes pass.]

NIEDERHOFFER: …and so, as in a story about demonic possession written by Guy de Maupassant, about a Frenchman who is possessed by a Brazilian demon while traveling on a cruise ship teaches us, or as Invasion of the Body Snatchers reminds us, the public can be taken over by bad ideas…

[Three hours into meeting.]

MEMBER OF AUDIENCE: Prof. Friedman, will you sign my copy of Critical Review?

FRIEDMAN [finishing up]: Sure.

SEAVEY [to Friedman]: Good night. Nice job.

FRIEDMAN: Thanks. Good night.

[Seavey steps outside into torrential rain and raises umbrella. Remembers that Friedman, who will probably not exit for some time, had earlier lost his umbrella and will have to carry books and papers with him in the rain. Seavey pauses, considers going back inside. Shudders, thinking he's probably heard enough for one night, and walks down the street. Fade to black.]

P.S. For a likely more sedate, academic, and ideologically non-rigid but still libertarian-influenced experience, by the way, you might want to contact my friend Peter Northup (now an NYU polisci grad student and formerly an undergrad taught by Jacob Levy, for those keeping track of all the University of Chicago connections in this month’s entries) at eudinaesis[at]gmail.com, since he’s starting a political book club.

Robert Mugabe Wants Your Land

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Four — Leftist?

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

It’s Wednesday, and if you think “hump day” is rough for you, consider Zimbabwe, with its 231 million% inflation rate and massive, violent land expropriation under the dictatorial Robert Mugabe. (Last year, one U.S. dollar equaled over 661 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars, a story people  might want to look into if they believe human laws can trump the laws of economics any more easily than they can the laws of physics.  When inflation’s that bad, I’d say your de facto currency system is technically barter.)

Yet Mugabe received awards — awards! — from American universities when he first took power, since he was, after all, a post-colonialist and anti-imperialist, and how could that be a bad thing, right? When girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer and I go to her old stomping grounds, Yale, in two days to attend a Party of the Right debate there, I’ll probably be within spitting distance of students — or at least aging professors — who still think Mugabe is cool, because at least he’s stickin’ it to the white man (by seizing white-owned farms and giving them to pretty much any Mugabe-serving thugs who happen along, contributing to the Zimbabwean economy’s collapse).

Oddly enough, one of my libertarian pals has Zimbabwean relatives by marriage, white ones, who hadn’t fled last I knew, which is about as strong a testament to people’s attachment to their homelands as I’ve encountered. If I were white and living in Zimbabwe but had family ties to London and New York City, well, I would not be living in Zimbabwe.

All this should be a warning to people of any political stripe — Middle East zealots, slavery-reparations-seekers, Northern Ireland combatants, even building preservationists — that once you open the bloody can of worms that is history and declare the settling of (inconceivably large and endlessly multilayered) past wrongs grounds for present-day property violations, there’s simply no logical end to it. You call me naive and ahistorical for wanting to just start from now with a clear and simple property rights framework? Spend a holiday in Zimbabwe and then tell me cultural grievances should weigh against econ.

Sander Hicks: Communism for Punks

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Three — Green?

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

It was an oddly capitalist chain of connections that led me to my Marxist friend, Sander Hicks. Through fellow libertarian Christine Caldwell Ames, who I’d known in college, I met Henry Hazlitt Foundation founder Chris Whitten, who heard at one of the libertarian Junto meetings run by Victor Niederhoffer (about whom more Thursday) about a search for new underlings by ABC’s John Stossel, who hired me and, two years later, Ted Balaker (now of the Reason Foundation), whose fiction-writing friend Katherine Taylor I met at a party hosted by U.S. Term Limits and Laissez-Faire Books founders Andrea and Howard Rich. And Katherine knows literary people, and that includes Marxist publisher and author Sander Hicks, who has now founded two publishing companies and the Vox Pop cafes/performance spaces.

As Michel Evanchik, moderator of the Debates at Lolita Bar said recently, Sander, ironically, “may be the most entrepreneurial person we know.”

And indeed, it was through Sander that I met Michel and yesterday’s Vexing Individual, L.B. Deyo, since I first beheld them when Michel moderated a debate in early 2002 in which L.B. defended globalization against Sander, who was then L.B.’s building super. Ironically for a building super, he was willing, very cautiously, to endorse vandalism (such as that which occurred against Seattle coffee shops and the like during the then-recent 1999 antiglobalization protests there) as an extension of protest. But back then, Sander was hoping for a sort of armed punk revolt against the capitalist establishment (and occasionally singing).

Since then, he’s become not only a cafe-owner, local merchants society member, and Gandhi fan — and thus presumably a bit less sympathetic to violence — but a Green Party activist (interested in subsidizing small businesses instead of big corporations) and, yes, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. In fact, I see that in his recent national “Inaugurate Yourself” tour, he sought to rally people to reopen investigations not only of 9/11 but of the assassinations of JFK and others.

And that reminds me: years after his Jinx Society debate against L.B., Sander joined us at the successor Debates at Lolita Bar to argue “yes” on the question “Did the Government Know in Advance About 9/11?” (a night during which I even met a woman from the 9/11 Truth sub-faction that believes no planes struck the World Trade Center, only being added in later digitally), and libertarian Thor Halvorssen e-mailed to object to the whole debate, asking what we’d do next, debate whether extraterrestrials are visiting Earth. I thought, y’know, a debate on UFOs isn’t such a bad idea. And so it’s likely we’ll do just that around June 3, assuming the local MUFON director, with whom I’ve now exchanged e-mails, remains interested. Presumably this in no way undermines my own skeptic credentials.

As for Sander, if you don’t catch him at a protest, you can find him doing business at one of the Vox Pop cafes.

The Dionysus/L.B. Deyo Dichotomy

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day Two — Conservative?

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

A shameful irony behind the Debates at Lolita Bar I host is that despite being organized by a property advocate, me, they grew out of meetings of the infamous and shadowy Jinx Society, an organization dedicated to “urban exploration” — i.e., chronic trespass in and around buildings, ruins, bridges, and tunnels.

Witness these excerpts from a now ten-year-old article about Jinx, starting with a quote about sneaking into events at hotels from co-founder L.B. Deyo, now head of Austin, TX’s Dionysium events (which I urged an Austin libertarian couple who came to our recent intellectual property debate to attend when they get back home):

“Know in your heart of hearts that you have every right to be there. One time I was on an elevator at a luxury hotel when some kids got on. I thought, ‘these troublemaking kids have no right to be in this hotel. I bet they aren’t even staying here.’ So naturally if any staff member hinted that I might not be a guest, I would be outraged.”

The agents of Jinx take a hotel raid seriously. “We don’t do raids just to pass the time. We’re busy people,” explains LB Deyo. “Upper-class intelligence. Business and corporate intelligence. The people who stay in upper-echelon hotels are often the people we need to find out about.” The people they need to find out about, or the Enemies of Jinx, are a scrap-heap of organizations including Freemasons, Mensa, Mother’s Cafe, and the PTA [and the U.N., as readers of the Jinx book, Invisible Frontier, well know].

Jinx ties the groups together by pointing out, “Whether their crimes are aesthetic, as with Birkenstock, political, as with the Khmer Rouge, or spiritual, as with the Scientologists, these subversives have worked for the corruption and the ruin of humanity and human culture!”

…Humor is far from the mind of Jinx. “Wouldn’t I,” asks LB Deyo, “have rather been beside a warm fire with a beautiful woman and a bottle of cognac, or poring over Swift?” His question lingers, staining the air with visions of fluffy towels and sipping martinis with the New York elite. “The only moral act in war is to end it, and we know no acceptable way to end our secret war with the Enemies of Jinx than to win it.”

Nietzschean? Dadaist? Surely Dionysian, surely boundary-crossing. But wait! Also conservative, as his avowed policy preferences have suggested in the past? Preparing for the Obama era ahead and its possible socialistic implications, he recently e-mailed this stark vision of the future:

Property: A bloodstained word, synonymous with rapine, cruelty and white supremacy, soon to be consigned to the viler, less progressive passages of history. Our children* will know of property only as a long-forgotten evil, like the Black Death or Three Dog Night.

*Rhetorically, of course.

Apres Moi, Deleuze and Guattari

Week of Vexing Individuals: Day One — Anarchism and Beyond

From January 25-31, I’ll look at individuals who somehow complicate our ideas about property rights or capitalism — in alphabetical order.

I’ve read Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc. — and hated them all, arrogant anticapitalist obscurantists that they are, turning vague whining about the culture into pseudo-arguments on economics shot through with the most pretentious variety of Marxism — but I have never, I confess, read the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. Nonetheless, in the ultimate act of deconstruction, I will form an opinion about them anyway. (I get the impression Guattari’s the interesting one, actually, taking an interest in relatively practical things like group-therapy dynamics and applying them to philosophical disagreements, while Deleuze, I gather, spends hundreds of pages trying to unravel metaphysics by doing things like criticizing the principle of identity.)

But the important thing for current purposes is that my ill-informed impression of these two Frenchmen is based mainly on the book cover to their work A Thousand Plateaus, a complex, Escher-like diagram/image that seemed to hint at what girlfriend Helen recently called “three-dimensional thinking,” a willingness to consider and reconsider things from multiple philosophical perspectives, hoping to change one’s own thinking instead of merely strategically outmaneuvering argumentative foes. (Her 3D thought analogy caused me to offer her my handy 3D glasses, meant to be used to perceive the multiverse in a comic book that came out last week. She declined, despite me noting that they are not merely cheap 3D glasses but, as the label clearly indicates, an Overvoid Viewer.)

Anyway, I gather D&G just offer more French lit-crit capitalism bashing, but what I was really hoping for was something more akin to “post-anarchism,” the post-structuralism-influenced view that freedom requires not just escaping manmade laws and remaining willfully ignorant of the laws of economics (the two pillars of conventional left-anarchism) but escaping stable ideology itself by constantly shifting one’s philosophy.

The anarchist sci-fi writer Robert Anton Wilson achieved something like a reductio of post-anarchism, without to my knowledge using the term, by trying to consciously switch to a new philosophy each day, at least for one period of his life (Foucault did something similar, in a slower way, but was too enamored of some absolutely nasty philosophies such as totalitarian Islam — and thus probably should have been disciplined and punished in a prison in Tehran for a while).

A willingness to change one’s mind without treating the change as damage is a wonderful thing — though being a relativist is not. All available evidence suggests that the world will not go away because you change your mind about it, no matter how much some self-aggrandizing navel-gazers might like to think otherwise. And it’d be a shame if you died in a car crash because you were distracted by questions about whether “momentum” is merely an illusory construct foisted on us by bourgeois scientists who fetishize and commodify Cartesian notions of order.

(Or were thinking about the fate of the multiverse as revealed this coming Wednesday in the comic book Final Crisis #7, for that matter.)

Still, it is worth valuing philosophical flexibility over rigidity. You’ve probably been wrong before. You might be wrong now.