From Wikipedia: "There is scholarly debate on the extent of William Warren Bartley's influence on [The Fatal Conceit[4] Officially, Bartley was the editor who prepared the book for publication once Hayek fell ill in 1985. However, the inclusion of material from Bartley's philosophical point of view and citations that other people provided to Bartley[5] have led to questions about how much of the book was written by Hayek and whether Hayek knew about the added material. Bruce Caldwell thinks the evidence "clearly points towards a conclusion that the book was a product more of [Bartley's] pen than of Hayek's. ... Bartley may have written the book".[6]"
I suspect Dave may have just found this biographical background interesting (and I agree), but it is humorous given that Bartley was a strong opponent of justificationism.
I think of Hayek's atavism thesis as being a thesis about modern govelist politics. It is part of an explanation of the fact that classical liberalism does not persuade even though it is good. The thesis, as I see it, is that with human nature, which hasn't changed much since 10,000 BC, there are buttons that, when pushed, have an influence on the man—they are not wholly determinative. One set of buttons are very "band-man". The question is whether the culture that man finds himself in pushes those buttons. Changes over the last several centuries have produced public cultures that very much push the band-man buttons: (1) Throughout since the 15th century, technology, beginning with the printing press but continuing down to print culture, photographic journalism, radio, telephone, tv, film, internet, etc. (2) The rise of the nation-state. (3) Democratism. (4) Trashing of God and the concept of higher law. (5) Modernity's general complexification/disjointedness/fragmentation of society. These elements have given rise to fashioning the nation-state as the band. Team America, Band America, becomes the image or insinuation. Politics then pushes all of the band-man buttons about common experience, encompassing sentiment ("the people's romance"), presuppositions about knowledge, presuppositions about voluntary membership, presuppositions about common purpose and cooperation, presuppositions about social organization, presuppositions about the sufficiency of primeval instinct, etc., etc. With such button-pushing now rampant and even institutionalized (Mike Benz's "whole-of-society" approach, "the Long March", etc.), the Democrat or Republican next door does not oppose the govelization of social affairs nearly as much or as consistently as he ought to. Thus, historical developments (in technology, in culture including religion, in polity formation and organization, etc.) figure into the story of how liberalism was once ascendant and then govelization became ascendant.
Presumably in the past our various buttons that have previously evolved for particular functional reasons were often temporary obstacles to particular adaptive changes. So evolution had to learn roughly how much to allow old buttons to weaken in response to new opportunities. If so it is a bit of a surprise to find old buttons so consistently a problem re this new opportunity which has been pretty established for quite a while.
I think that's fair. But the problem remains. Consider Weight Watchers versus State Watchers. Think about how much more challenging it is—for the patient's motivation and knowledge—for State Watchers to have sway as opposed to for Weight Watchers to have sway.
This inspires me to remember key concepts of karma and the system of reincarnation in the morality plays, and in cultural stories of the religious texts found in most of Asia, but not in most of Europe. The distinct contrast in conferences within a minority religious community that I, by chance, grew up within, repeatedly showed that a full volume of texts globally provides references in terms of enduring moral and ethical questions, at a better utility for reference in trying to search out reasonable ideas for resolutions in modern living. Ironically, this contrasting quality to living critically, regarded by neighbors as not accessing these references, is usually said to seem spacy and excessively idealistic, lacking practical value morally and functionally. This can become a definitive part of living outside the norms seen daily in the TV news commentary programs and related essays all around, and it necessarily predicates the decision to exist, such that you must be defiant to a pervasive voice of criticism that you are not being realistic. The solution has been not to take anything personally, and specifically to focus on work with applied information technology works, where, as a result of actual financial and medical science methods yielding materially experienced results, people otherwise critical, will shrug off a non-normative strangeness in favour of the utility of founded solutions. As your referenced scholar and also yourself mention, in context to the challenges present, the real issue is the amount of information which involves defined problems and the spectrum of possible solutions. Therefore, none of us, on either the so-called capitalist side from essays by Adam Smith or those mid-1800s texts, and also the ancient morality plays and stories enduring in our cultural literature, meet up solving everything visible before us in the challenges present here and now. Because, regardless of wanted ideals for answers, Dale Carnegie did not live in a pioneering Western American environment where the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere spells severe weather, massive global climate change and terminal failure of large regions of agricultural resources. To become fixed by resolve, to one theory or the other, is to anchor yourself on this beachhead, to a definite length of chain before the coming tidal wave. What if you find out you got the needed length of that holding chain wrong? It's always been understood that critics will say the method of so-called "new thought" as an approach is too loosey-goosey, but the fact is that those stuck in the mud of their own insistent dogma are just as trapped as any of us could be. When they say some of the hypotheses I've published could be found to be wrong, they don't like my reply, which is that I always reserve the right to change my mind. But in a more karma-referenced viewpoint, like it or not, that is usually how the reply must be said. Do we want perfect answers because that is what we need? Or do we want perfect answers here and now, because something driven by fear does not like a universe that is constantly an ocean of moving waves, dynamically self-recreating every moment, as it evolves in a mix of something like cyber and biological evolution that is somehow cosmically combined? We make history in our process of both systems, where sometimes capitalism refers an answer, and then other times a more socialist answer works. Maybe one idea here is just to try your best as possible to keep a good karma in general. There may never be a tight, concise, humanly defined paragraph to answer the enduring questions in this process. It's a big universe and makes no apology for being so. But still, thank you for insightful review of this paradox. Those do seem to exist. They seem to endure.
I added a bit on sex to the post.
From Wikipedia: "There is scholarly debate on the extent of William Warren Bartley's influence on [The Fatal Conceit[4] Officially, Bartley was the editor who prepared the book for publication once Hayek fell ill in 1985. However, the inclusion of material from Bartley's philosophical point of view and citations that other people provided to Bartley[5] have led to questions about how much of the book was written by Hayek and whether Hayek knew about the added material. Bruce Caldwell thinks the evidence "clearly points towards a conclusion that the book was a product more of [Bartley's] pen than of Hayek's. ... Bartley may have written the book".[6]"
How is that relevant to the issues I raise in this post?
I suspect Dave may have just found this biographical background interesting (and I agree), but it is humorous given that Bartley was a strong opponent of justificationism.
It's not at all. Just relevant to the atributions to Hayek.
Nice post.
I think of Hayek's atavism thesis as being a thesis about modern govelist politics. It is part of an explanation of the fact that classical liberalism does not persuade even though it is good. The thesis, as I see it, is that with human nature, which hasn't changed much since 10,000 BC, there are buttons that, when pushed, have an influence on the man—they are not wholly determinative. One set of buttons are very "band-man". The question is whether the culture that man finds himself in pushes those buttons. Changes over the last several centuries have produced public cultures that very much push the band-man buttons: (1) Throughout since the 15th century, technology, beginning with the printing press but continuing down to print culture, photographic journalism, radio, telephone, tv, film, internet, etc. (2) The rise of the nation-state. (3) Democratism. (4) Trashing of God and the concept of higher law. (5) Modernity's general complexification/disjointedness/fragmentation of society. These elements have given rise to fashioning the nation-state as the band. Team America, Band America, becomes the image or insinuation. Politics then pushes all of the band-man buttons about common experience, encompassing sentiment ("the people's romance"), presuppositions about knowledge, presuppositions about voluntary membership, presuppositions about common purpose and cooperation, presuppositions about social organization, presuppositions about the sufficiency of primeval instinct, etc., etc. With such button-pushing now rampant and even institutionalized (Mike Benz's "whole-of-society" approach, "the Long March", etc.), the Democrat or Republican next door does not oppose the govelization of social affairs nearly as much or as consistently as he ought to. Thus, historical developments (in technology, in culture including religion, in polity formation and organization, etc.) figure into the story of how liberalism was once ascendant and then govelization became ascendant.
Presumably in the past our various buttons that have previously evolved for particular functional reasons were often temporary obstacles to particular adaptive changes. So evolution had to learn roughly how much to allow old buttons to weaken in response to new opportunities. If so it is a bit of a surprise to find old buttons so consistently a problem re this new opportunity which has been pretty established for quite a while.
I think that's fair. But the problem remains. Consider Weight Watchers versus State Watchers. Think about how much more challenging it is—for the patient's motivation and knowledge—for State Watchers to have sway as opposed to for Weight Watchers to have sway.
This inspires me to remember key concepts of karma and the system of reincarnation in the morality plays, and in cultural stories of the religious texts found in most of Asia, but not in most of Europe. The distinct contrast in conferences within a minority religious community that I, by chance, grew up within, repeatedly showed that a full volume of texts globally provides references in terms of enduring moral and ethical questions, at a better utility for reference in trying to search out reasonable ideas for resolutions in modern living. Ironically, this contrasting quality to living critically, regarded by neighbors as not accessing these references, is usually said to seem spacy and excessively idealistic, lacking practical value morally and functionally. This can become a definitive part of living outside the norms seen daily in the TV news commentary programs and related essays all around, and it necessarily predicates the decision to exist, such that you must be defiant to a pervasive voice of criticism that you are not being realistic. The solution has been not to take anything personally, and specifically to focus on work with applied information technology works, where, as a result of actual financial and medical science methods yielding materially experienced results, people otherwise critical, will shrug off a non-normative strangeness in favour of the utility of founded solutions. As your referenced scholar and also yourself mention, in context to the challenges present, the real issue is the amount of information which involves defined problems and the spectrum of possible solutions. Therefore, none of us, on either the so-called capitalist side from essays by Adam Smith or those mid-1800s texts, and also the ancient morality plays and stories enduring in our cultural literature, meet up solving everything visible before us in the challenges present here and now. Because, regardless of wanted ideals for answers, Dale Carnegie did not live in a pioneering Western American environment where the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere spells severe weather, massive global climate change and terminal failure of large regions of agricultural resources. To become fixed by resolve, to one theory or the other, is to anchor yourself on this beachhead, to a definite length of chain before the coming tidal wave. What if you find out you got the needed length of that holding chain wrong? It's always been understood that critics will say the method of so-called "new thought" as an approach is too loosey-goosey, but the fact is that those stuck in the mud of their own insistent dogma are just as trapped as any of us could be. When they say some of the hypotheses I've published could be found to be wrong, they don't like my reply, which is that I always reserve the right to change my mind. But in a more karma-referenced viewpoint, like it or not, that is usually how the reply must be said. Do we want perfect answers because that is what we need? Or do we want perfect answers here and now, because something driven by fear does not like a universe that is constantly an ocean of moving waves, dynamically self-recreating every moment, as it evolves in a mix of something like cyber and biological evolution that is somehow cosmically combined? We make history in our process of both systems, where sometimes capitalism refers an answer, and then other times a more socialist answer works. Maybe one idea here is just to try your best as possible to keep a good karma in general. There may never be a tight, concise, humanly defined paragraph to answer the enduring questions in this process. It's a big universe and makes no apology for being so. But still, thank you for insightful review of this paradox. Those do seem to exist. They seem to endure.