100. The Republic: Part 1a

Note: This post is the one hundredth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Note also: this is a continuation from post 98.




"I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha.
One way or another"

One Way or Another, Blondie



In the first chapter of 'The Republic', Plato sets out to demonstrate the flaws in the some of the conventional views of what justice is. He does this by, in the words of Jane Jacobs, 'syndrome hopping'.

The way it works is that when given a notion of justice that corresponds to the commercial syndrome, Socrates will then trip the person who suggested it up by putting the commercial notion of justice in a guardian setting, and then vice-versa when a guardian notion of justice is presented.

First off, he asks the businessman, Cephalus, to define justice, and Cepahlus suggests that justice is the repayment of debts, a commercial sort of answer. So Socrates then asks if one should return a weapon to a friend who is not of sound mind, which is a guardian type situation where clearly loyalty and concern for another takes precedence over the commercial virtues of honesty and keeping a promise.

Led in this Guardian direction, Polemarchus who has taken over the argument for his father Cephalus, goes with it, and is led by Socrates into a guardian view of justice which is that giving people what they are owed really means giving good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies.

Socrates then switches back to a commercial argument, suggesting that, as in the the commercial syndrome, it is not right to harm anyone since that will have a negative effect on their well-being, so the idea that part of justice is doing harm to one's enemies (true in a guardian context) must not be right (as seen in the commercial context).

Next, the sophist Thrasymachus enters the fray, with a new twist, offering a definition of justice, quite popular to the present day, which borrows the self-interested parts of both syndromes to build a selfish 'monstrous hybrid' as Jane Jacobs would have called it. Thrasymachus maintains that justice is simply the interest of the stronger or as we might say nowadays, that 'might makes right'.

In his response, Socrates focuses on the inappropriateness of bringing the Commercial syndrome notion of self-interest into the Guardian role of being the ruler (as opposed to the alternative approach which would have been to show the inappropriateness of bring Guardian virtues of deceit and force into a commercial venture).

First, Socrates responds via allegory to various professions such as medicine where fulfilling the duties of that profession successfully entails serving the interest of the subject (e.g. the patient, for a doctor) rather than serving one's own interests. He notes that if people ruled for their own interest, then it wouldn't be necessary to pay people to take on the job in most cases.

Next, Socrates asks about the relationship between the just and the unjust. He shows that in professions, the just, for example, doctor, only professes to exceed in skill non-doctors, not other doctors. His point is that it is the just who only claim to better than the unjust, while it is the unjust who claim to be better than everyone, just or unjust alike.

At this point, I couldn't help but be reminded of the experiments on cooperation conducted by Robert Axelrod, in which a simple tit-for-tat strategy (that only punished the unjust and cooperated with the just) proved to be the most successful in the tournament.

Finally, Socrates points out that even thieves need a willingness to forego their own interests, lest they fall to fighting amongst themselves and all ending up getting long sentences in a prisoner's dilemma (i.e. their lack of unity will preclude them from being effective in any meaningful way).

At the end of book 1, Socrates admits that while he has repeatedly pointed out what justice is not, he has yet to make any progress on saying what justice is.

He leaves that challenge for a later book, and I'll have to leave it for a later post.

99. Self-Interest, Hypocrisy and the Commercial Takeover

Note: This post is the ninety-ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I don't have enough time this week to do justice to the rest of 'The Republic' so instead I just wanted to mention this post by Paul Krugman.

Krugman starts by referencing a Mel Gibson movie from a few years back that was entitled, 'The Patriot' but featured a protagonist who was unwilling to fight for his country until his own family was attacked, and then embarked on a campaign for personal vengeance. Krugman links to an essay by Michael Lind that explains how this is hardly an example of what is normally referred to as patriotism.

Krugman sees a similar confusion when wealthy people who support measures that will benefit the poor or middle class are attacked as hypocrites (for example) for not being selfish.

Says Krugman,

"Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry 'Hypocrisy!'

...

If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being 'inauthentic' because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest

...

So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn't: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn't hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!

...

Lind's essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can't comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

Another example, that Krugman doesn’t mention is the field of 'Public Choice Theory' which is premised on the notion that neither civic virtue nor patriotism exist.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight this post from Krugman because what he is observing is what I have observed myself, and what provides some of my motivation for pursuing this series of posts. It seems as though commercial syndrome virtues are gradually driving out guardian virtues in our discourse, to such an extent that classic guardian precepts such as patriotism and civic virtue are now seen through a commercial lens as either hypocritical or incomprehensible for a growing percentage of the population. And on that note, it's time for a vacation, see you in a few weeks...

98. The Republic, Part 2

Note: This post is the ninety-eighth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

In this post, I'm going to talk about 'The Republic' by Plato. In 'The Republic' Plato sets out his vision of the ideal state, but in this week's post, I just want to cover chapter 8, near the end of The Republic, in which Plato sets out the other types of states and how, starting in his ideal republic, states decay from one mode of government to another over time. Plato wasn't trying to say that this progression is always exactly followed and the introduction that I read was quite dismissive of the realism of Plato's proposed progression, but personally, I found his description to be quite true to the history of our own culture - which is a little worrying since he claims that democracy is followed by tyranny.

Anyway, the first alternative form of state that is first to emerge from the ideal republic is one that Plato says corresponds roughly to the Spartan model and he refers to it as Timarchy, or "the government of honour". The government of honour differs from Plato's ideal Republic in that the ruling class has begun to be corrupted by a love of money so that they maintain private stores of wealth and build castles to protect them. In addition, the state is governed by a warrior-king rather than a philosopher king and there is a near constant state of warfare.

(note: The Republic is written as a dialogue. In this book, Socrates is doing the talking and his friends Glaucon and Adeimantus are playing the role of agreeable yes-men.)

"In the honour given to rulers, in the abstinence of the warrior class from agriculture, handicrafts, and trade in general, in the institution of common meals, and in the attention paid to gymnastics and military training—in all these respects this State will resemble the former [Plato's ideal Republic].

True.

But in the fear of admitting philosophers to power, because they are no longer to be had simple and earnest, but are made up of mixed elements; and in turning from them to passionate and less complex characters, who are by nature fitted for war rather than peace; and in the value set by them upon military stratagems and contrivances, and in the waging of everlasting wars—this State will be for the most part peculiar.

Yes.

Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please."

As he describes each state, Plato also describes the sort of person who inhabits that state, and shows how each personality type derives from the last.

"He [The man in the Timocratic state] should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.

Yes, that is the type of character which answers to timocracy.

Such an one will despise riches only when he is young; but as he gets older he will be more and more attracted to them, because he has a piece of the avaricious nature in him, and is not single-minded towards virtue, having lost his best guardian.

Who was that? said Adeimantus.

Philosophy, I said, tempered with music, who comes and takes up her abode in a man, and is the only saviour of his virtue throughout life.

Good, he said.

Such, I said, is the timocratical youth, and he is like the timocratical State."

Plato's description of a society that is warlike and contentious, filled with brave men who build castles and live under a 'government of honour' certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to the medieval period and its code of chivalry.

In Plato's telling, the 'Government of Honour' eventually gives way to an Oligarchy, "A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it."

"The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is the ruin of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law?

Yes, indeed.

And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.

Likely enough.

And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

True.

And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.

Clearly.

And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected.

That is obvious.

And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man.

They do so.

They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work."

Plato notes many defects of Oligarchy, including the inability of the Oligarchs to carry out a war successfully, the corruption of having the same group of people doing too many tasks - running both business and government, and the creation of class warfare between the wealthy class and the poor class.

The match isn't quite as good, but again, there is a resemblance between the oligarchy that Plato describes and the period of the Industrial revolution, the inequality described by Dickens, powerful 'robber-barons' who controlled the government, a long period with (relatively) little warfare, societies where government was reserved for those with a minimum level of wealth, and a great growth in global trade and wealth which was not particularly widely shared leading to the rise of marxism and communism.

Next Plato describes the descent from Oligarchy to Democracy. Basically, where the Oligarchy retained a level of self-discipline, as needed to allow for the accumulation of wealth, in a Democracy restraints are thrown to the winds and people can do as they please.

"And then democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power; and this is the form of government in which the magistrates are commonly elected by lot.

Yes, he said, that is the nature of democracy, whether the revolution has been effected by arms, or whether fear has caused the opposite party to withdraw.

And now what is their manner of life, and what sort of a government have they? for as the government is, such will be the man.

Clearly, he said.

In the first place, are they not free; and is not the city full of freedom and frankness—a man may say and do what he likes?

'Tis said so, he replied.

And where freedom is, the individual is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases?

Clearly.

Then in this kind of State there will be the greatest variety of human natures?

There will.

This, then, seems likely to be the fairest of States, being like an embroidered robe which is spangled with every sort of flower. And just as women and children think a variety of colours to be of all things most charming, so there are many men to whom this State, which is spangled with the manners and characters of mankind, will appear to be the fairest of States."

Again, Plato's description of democracy bears a strong resemblance to our current society that emerged from the World Wars of the early 20th century. Plato notes that the primary characteristics of Democracy are freedom and liberty. So much so that even slaves, women and eventually animals are given the same liberty that is normally reserved for men. But Plato believes that the primacy of liberty and the accompanying unwillingness to allow for any restraint is what sets the stage for tyranny to emerge from democracy.

"By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them.

How do you mean?

I mean that the father grows accustomed to descend to the level of his sons and to fear them, and the son is on a level with his father, he having no respect or reverence for either of his parents; and this is his freedom, and the metic is equal with the citizen and the citizen with the metic, and the stranger is quite as good as either.

Yes, he said, that is the way.

And these are not the only evils, I said—there are several lesser ones: In such a state of society the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; young and old are all alike; and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety; they are loth to be thought morose and authoritative, and therefore they adopt the manners of the young.

Quite true, he said.

The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other.

Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?

That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at any body who comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with liberty.

When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you describe. You and I have dreamed the same thing.

And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority, and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.

Yes, he said, I know it too well.

Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny."

Plato describes how idle spendthrifts, who are unwelcome in most states, but "in a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power" come to try and squeeze the wealthy class for their money, leading the wealthy to fight back and become more like oligarchs, leading to an escalating battle until finally the people back a champion who takes their cause against the wealthy and the spendthrifts and this champion is able to seize power under the mantle of serving the people, who don't realize until it is too late how their champion will turn upon them and become a tyrant.

One of the most compelling parts of the chapter is where Plato describes how the tyrant is driven by necessity into a more and more depraved existence, forced to drive out all the best and brightest from society since they will be seen as rivals to his power.

"At first, in the early days of his power, he is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets;—he to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one!

Of course, he said.

But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

To be sure.

Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him?

Clearly.

And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.

He must.

Now he begins to grow unpopular.

A necessary result.

Then some of those who joined in setting him up, and who are in power, speak their minds to him and to one another, and the more courageous of them cast in his teeth what is being done.

Yes, that may be expected.

And the tyrant, if he means to rule, must get rid of them; he cannot stop while he has a friend or an enemy who is good for anything.

He cannot.

And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy; happy man, he is the enemy of them all, and must seek occasion against them whether he will or no, until he has made a purgation of the State.

Yes, he said, and a rare purgation.

Yes, I said, not the sort of purgation which the physicians make of the body; for they take away the worse and leave the better part, but he does the reverse.

If he is to rule, I suppose that he cannot help himself.

What a blessed alternative, I said:—to be compelled to dwell only with the many bad, and to be by them hated, or not to live at all!

Yes, that is the alternative.

And the more detestable his actions are to the citizens the more satellites and the greater devotion in them will he require?

Certainly.

And who are the devoted band, and where will he procure them?

They will flock to him, he said, of their own accord, if he pays them.

By the dog! I said, here are more drones, of every sort and from every land.

Yes, he said, there are.

But will he not desire to get them on the spot?

How do you mean?

He will rob the citizens of their slaves; he will then set them free and enrol them in his body-guard.

To be sure, he said; and he will be able to trust them best of all.

What a blessed creature, I said, must this tyrant be; he has put to death the others and has these for his trusted friends."

In book 9, Plato goes on to describe the miserable existence of the tyrannical man, a mirror of the miserable state that he governs. The miserable life of the tyrant is Plato's final answer to the question of whether it is better to live a life of virtue or vice, since it is vice that leads to tyranny, and tyranny leads to the misery of the one who practices it (obviously I'm oversimplifying here), but that is not the main point in this post. In this post, I just wanted to highlight the prescience of Plato's description of the succession of states and how well it seems to correspond to our own pro(re)gression. We can only hope that he was wrong about tyranny following democracy, or at least that it will follow on sometime in the future after we have passed on ourselves.

97. Guardian Syndrome Derangement Syndrome

Note: This post is the ninety-seventh in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Today's post is about a group of people who excel at creating prosperity via trade, but find themselves politically oppressed, the fruits of their labours taken from them with little recompense. In response, the oppressed group undertakes to escape their chains, using trade where necessary and force where necessary to make their way to an unoccupied piece of land that they can call home, one where they will be free from political oppressors who would use force to take their wealth.

The bible contains a story like this, the story of the Jews escaping from the Egyptians and eventually finding their promised land - a story that Jane Jacobs cites in 'Systems of Survival' as a good example of how the same group of people can find success by alternating between using commercial syndrome morality and guardian syndrome morality, depending on which is appropriate in the circumstance.

But today's topic is not the Bible, but rather something less concise, the book 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged, the setting is the United States, in the era when railways were still the main form of transportation and planes were a relatively new invention. The U.S. government seems to be run by a collection of corrupt businessmen and politicians and is descending into a mix of fascism and communism. In response, a group of leading industrialists decide to 'Go Galt,' destroying or abandoning their companies, leaving society behind to join a secret community in a remote part of Colorado.

The story, which tells the tale of how the government gradually escalates its level of unprincipled interference with business, is quite lengthy, but luckily the leader of the industrialists, John Galt, sums up Rand's philosophy in a pithy 100 page speech.

Unsurprisingly, as a businessman, John Galt's primary sympathy lies with the Commercial Syndrome. This is made clear enough early on in his speech when he assets that,

"There is a morality of reason ... man's life [is] the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement."

Galt recognizes that, unlike the Guardian syndrome in which most of the precepts relate to interactions between people, the commercial syndrome contains a number of precepts that apply to man on his own, in his battle against his own laziness,

"You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island - it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim ... that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today - and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves."

Just a little bit later, Galt lists some of the virtues needed for his moral system, a list which generally matches up pretty well with the commercial syndrome:

"rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride."

Finally, a bit later, Galt expresses the commercial basis of his morality explicitly,

"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love friendship, his esteem- except in payment and in trade for human virtues."

The message is clear, the trader only acts in his own self-interest and cares not for the interests of others. I emphasize this not to criticize, but to contrast with a later point that Galt makes (which we'll get to in a bit).

As for comfort and convenience, Galt makes clear over and over again that this is the primary purpose of existence, perhaps most memorably when he asks,

"who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress."

Only a commercially minded philosopher would take the time in his manifesto to extol the comfort of the inner-spring mattress!

Naturally, in a moral system based on trade, using force is a big no-no for Galt,

"Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate-do you hear me? no man may start the use of physical force against others."

Galt spends so much time repetitively criticizing those who would use force for corrupt purposes that it is easy to lose track of the fact that he does condone the use of force when necessary. Perhaps the most remarkable passage of Atlas Shrugged is this one, where Galt describes when he will use force.

"It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil."

The story backs this statement up, containing a number of instances where Galt and his fellow tribe members throw comfort and convenience to the winds and sacrifice themselves by showing fortitude, employing force and fraud, discipline and obedience in order to successfully fight physical battles against their enemies. On one instance there is a pitched battle vs. troublemakers at a steel factory, in another case, there is a hostage to be rescued.

So notice what has happened here. Galt spends 98 pages of his 100 page speech talking about how the only set of moral values that exists is the commercial syndrome, where self-interest rules, comfort and convenience are paramount and force and fraud are verboten. But then in the other 2 pages he sneaks in this alternate world where, when violence is initiated, suddenly action must be taken, and now force and fraud are not just allowed, but required, and the person undertaking them is expected to be proficient in their use. Not only that, but these actions of force and fraud must only be undertaken in a spirit of sacrifice, in which comfort and convenience are discarded or put at risk, and it is acting in self-interest that is now forbidden!

Later on, Galt allows that government is needed to enforce rules, to retaliate against those who would commit violence, and to defend the state against enemies from outside. Sadly he never seems to explain how it is the people doing this will be paid, or how they will be restrained from using their power to enrich themselves.

I think that if Rand hadn't been inflicted with such a strong a case of Guardian derangement syndrome (or Guardian syndrome derangement?), much like the one that got Thorstein Veblen, she probably could have set out a pretty reasonable pair of moral syndromes that matched up fairly well with Plato and Jane Jacobs. It's just too bad her work is filled with so much distracting pointlessness (such as the endless insistence that reality is real or that only gold can be 'real money') that it takes away from this message.


---
As an aside, one of the more ludicrous story elements in 'Atlas Shrugged' is the notion that society collapses because a couple of hundred industrialists head off to Colorado for a while. Which is fine, the story is meant to make a point, not to be plausible, but I thought it was interesting to point out why Rand needed such an unbelievable plot point in her book.

The great weakness of a collection of traders is that they are all out for their own interest and that they are (by definition) incapable of acting in a collective manner. Their nature is competition, not monopoly. In the real world, if Steve Jobs left for Colorado and destroyed the Apple company, there are plenty of others willing and able to manufacture phones and provide a service to download songs from the internet. If General Motors shut down, the other car companies could easily pick up the slack. But in Atlas Shrugged, Rand is constantly creating little mini-monopolies by insisting that there is only one company that can make steel properly, only one railway that can run a decent operation, only one person who can find and produce oil, etc.

Rand needs these monopolies in order to allow her collection of industrialists who go on 'strike' and leave for Colorado to have an actual impact on society, instead of just looking foolish. But Rand, who was so attentive to the nature of the commercial syndrome - the competition, the lack of solidarity that would prevent any strike action from being successful, really should have known better. After all, even the Bible, which certainly doesn't shy away from implausible pronouncements, didn't try to insist that Egyptian society collapsed because it couldn't function without the Jews, so that Moses could come back to give the Pharaoh a long, tedious, 'I told you so.'

Site Note

Just a quick word today to note that I am still blogging, just taking a break during Vancouver's one month of nice weather this year. Most likely I'll return to posting next week.

96. Guardian free zone?

Note: This post is the ninety-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week I'm going to cover a thought experiment I've been turning over in my mind for the last few days. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs explains that Communism is what results when the guardian syndrome takes over the commercial syndrome. With the breach in the 'shun trading' precept from the Guardian syndrome, the Guardians took control of commerce leading to a failure of the commercial precepts (innovation, efficiency, honesty, dissent, etc.) as they were superseded by Guardian precepts such as (make rich use of leisure, be fatalistic, be exclusive, etc.) But what I wonder is, what would happen in the reverse scenario? What if a group of people decided that they would be governed by commercial principles only rather than guardian ones?

My first thought was that, since one of the commercial precepts is to shun force, the only way this community could survive would be to completely avoid all guardian types who would be willing to use force to seize any wealth generated by the commercial activity. Thinking of this I was reminded of the origins of the great trading nation of Venice, in an out of the way lagoon that was safe from the marauding guardian types running rampant in those days. Of course, any member of our hypothetical non-violent commercial society could take over the whole enterprise if they resorted to force, given that the commercial folks would be unwilling to use force to resist. So the commercial society would have to be extremely careful about who was allowed in, since only 100% acceptance of their morals would be a stable situation.

Given the constraints on the use of violence, it seems completely infeasible to me that a pure commercial society could exist for any length of time, or even form in the first place.

In order to make the commercial society at all viable, there needs to be some mechanism for dealing with those who would use force against it. A location with natural defenses (such as an island in the case of England, another great trading nation) would help, but could never be a complete solution. The logical commercial solution would be to hire mercenaries to enforce the rule of non-violence, much in the way that medieval aristocrats had stewards to trade on their behalf.

Of course, the difficulties of this approach are obvious and were well explained by Machiavelli. The mercenary, must be at least two things: willing to use force, and motivated by wealth. It seems clear that the mercenary will eventually decide that they can make more wealth by turning on their paymaster than by simply accepting their pay.

Another option would be for the commercial folks to make an exemption in their rules of non-violence to allow for vengeance to be taken against acts of force or fraud. In other words, when dealing with a person who does not follow their commercial code, they in turn would choose to use a different moral code, one that condones violence as an act of vengeance against those who initiated violence. But this still causes some issues. A google search for the term 'costly punishment' will uncover lots of academic work which has focussed on the question of whether it makes sense, from the rational commercial syndrome point of view, to take vengeance against someone who has used force against you. The trouble is that the act of taking vengeance benefits the whole commercial society by protecting it against the incursions of someone willing to use force, but the cost of taking vengeance (punishing the perpetrator) falls solely on the person who does the punishing.

Researchers starting from a premise of rational self-interested behaviour have struggled to explain why people are willing to go beyond what is 'rational' in their willingness to punish those who have wronged them. But of course, if people have a moral value of taking vengeance this puzzle disappears, much as the Mancur Olson explained that a moral value of loyalty or cooperation could mitigate the puzzle of how collective action can be sustained by large groups.

You can see where this is leading, I'm sure. The commercial society has two options if it wants to survive: the corrupt, unstable, syndrome-mixing solution of hiring mercenaries, or the establishment of a second set of morals, one based on a willingness to take vengeance, even when it is not in your own self-interest to do so, one based on a willingness and an ability to use force effectively.

There seems to be an asymmetry between the two syndromes, reflecting the lack of proportion between the armed and the unarmed that Machiavelli described. The guardians can take over the commercial syndrome and society can still run, albeit not as successfully as it would with the two syndromes kept separate. But the commercial syndrome simply can't exist without guardians. Seen in this view, much of the structure of our government, from the Magna Carta on down, can be seen as an elaborate scheme devised by the commercial folks to maintain the existence of guardians while constraining their ability to interfere with the commercial syndrome as much as possible. Balance of powers between legislatures, senates and executives, term limits, constitutions backed by legal systems, democratic elections, media watchdogs, etc. all serve (or at least can serve, if circumstances are right) to constrain the ability of guardians to take over the economy.

Beyond these institutional mechanisms, I see two other bulwarks against the guardian takeover of the commercial syndrome. The first is simply strong guardian morals. The shunning of trade by guardians, the fortitude that disregards material wants, the willingness to sacrifice for the community, all of these traits serve to prevent the guardians from using their privileged position to enrich themselves at the expense of the economy. The second is the existence of competition between nations. This seems a bit counter-intuitive, since competition between nations can take the form of war, which is the most guardian of all activities, but war requires resources to be prosecuted successfully, and a country which maintains a strong commercial culture will have more economic resources to devote to the war effort. And aside from war, the citizens of the country with the weaker economy will naturally want to see their country imitate the country with the stronger economy. We could see both of these forces at work in the Soviet abandonment of communism in favour of capitalism.

Similarly, it seems to me that two of the great flourishings of commercial life occurred in Greece and in Europe, and that both of these emerged from geographical areas where the terrain, combined with the technology of the time, favoured the creation of a number of small competing states.

Anyway, this was just another random train of thought post, the next post will examine the source of this bout of meandering.

95. Beyond Guardian and Commercial Ethics

Note: This post is the ninety-fifth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

This week's topic is German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his efforts to discover a 'genealogy' or origin for our moral sentiments.

The first time Nietzsche takes on this question is in 'Human, All too Human,' in the chapter, "On the History of the Moral Sensations." There's two main passages in this chapter that seem relevant to our series on ethics.

The first, is paragraph 94, 'The three phases of morality hitherto':

"It is the first sign that animal has become man when his actions are no longer directed to the procurement of momentary wellbeing but to enduring wellbeing, that man has thus become attuned to utility and purpose: it is then that the free domination of reason first breaks forth. An even higher stage is attained when he acts according to the principle of honour; in accordance with this he orders himself with regard to others, submits to common sensibilities, and that raises him high above the phase in which he is diverted only by utility understood in a purely personal sense; he conceives utility as being dependent on what he thinks of others and what they think of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality hitherto, he acts in accordance with his own standard with regard to men and things: he himself determines for himself and others what is honourable and useful.; he has become the lawgiver of opinion, in accordance with an ever more highly evolving conception of usefulness and honourableness. Knowledge qualifies him to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honour and recognition to momentary honour and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual."

There are a couple of points to highlight here. The first is the notion of patience or prudence, favouring the long run over the short run as central to morality, in particular to personal morality that maximizes one's utility. The second is the division of morality into a personal stage based on utility and an inter-personal phase based on honour. How similarly this resembles our split between a guardian syndrome filled with precepts governing our relations with others and a commercial syndrome which is primarily concerned with maximizing our own utility (although the commercial syndrome also covers inter-personal relationships manifested via trade).

The second passage is paragraph 45, 'Twofold prehistory of good and evil':

"The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who was the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital - is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful - is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man belongs to the 'good', a community which has a sense of belonging together because all individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man belongs to the 'bad', to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. ... Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes and castes."

Unlike the previous quote, which is never really revisited much in Nietzsche's writings, this notion of the twofold origin of good and evil will be discussed in much greater length, first in the chapter 'The Natural History of Morals' in 'Beyond Good and Evil' and finally at book length in 'The Genealogy of Morals.'

As he moves along, Nietzsche seems to become less certain about the morality level of Europe, and gradually begins to attribute the growing prevalence of 'slave' morality in Europe as being due to religious influence, from Christianity and Judaism. But the notion of two different systems of morality, one based on the ability and willingness to take vengeance and one based on non-violence persists in his thinking.

In 'The Genealogy of Morals' Nietzsche identifies certain cultures as 'noble races' that hew to 'master race' morality such as the "Roman, Arabian, German, Japanese nobility", as well as the "Homeric heroes and the Scandinavian vikings." This is contrasted with primarily the Jews, but also on occasion the Chinese as cultures with primarily 'slave' morality. It seems unlikely to be coincidence that the two cultures that Nietzsche identifies as being emblematic of a 'slave' morality that doesn't use violence or take vengeance are two cultures that are renowned the world over for the commercial success of their citizens.

Having said that, Nietzsche never really identifies salve morality with commercial culture. At first I thought that maybe that was just because Nietzsche was so guardian minded that he didn't even acknowledge the existence of commerce (even a guardian-type like Aristotle deigned to denigrate commercial ethics as base and shameful). But as 'The Genealogy of Morals' goes along, Nietzsche shows his awareness of commercial culture as he traces our notions of guilt and personal obligation and even justice back to the "...oldest and most primitive relationship between human beings, that of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor." So it wasn't that he was unaware of commercial ethics, he just didn't link it up with 'slave' morality explicitly.

So, it's not a perfect match, by any means, but still the notion of two ethical systems, one based on 'noble' races that are barbaric and love conquest and take vengeance and have good manners and one based on 'slave' races that shun violence, don't (can't) take vengeance and is associated with successful commercial cultures certainly lends some support to the notion that Nietzsche was working his way towards the notion of Guardian and Commercial ethics, although his remarkably strong guardian mindset may have skewed his observations somewhat.