manwithoutqualities

I’d like to plug a book co-authored by a correspondent of mine, Lila Rajiva. The subject matter should have some appeal to swarm theorists and others interested in complexity theory be they economists or political theorists. Lila Rajiva offers the following outline of the book’s subject matter. 

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Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets (Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva, Wiley, August 31, 2007) takes for its subject the difference between the knowledge of experience (what Nietzsche called erfahrung) and the knowledge derived at second and third-hand from the opinions of others (wissen).

The difference coincides with the difference between our private worlds and what the authors call the “public spectacle” of the market-place and politics, where mob behavior reigns.

Using insights from socio-biology and ethology, the book suggests — through a playful array of anecdotes from history and current events — that it is genetics and the mating game that make us prone to the fallacies of the mob, whether played out in bubbles in the art market or in witchcraft hysteria in baroque Europe. Human beings are hard-wired to spread our genes farther than our rivals’, they write, and that leads us to form in-groups and out-groups, which, in turn, make us easy prey to fashionable ideologies and the ideologues who dream them up.

It little matters what the ideology is. Imperialists and communists, religious crusaders and democratic triumphalists have all made a mess of things. The problem, it seems, lies in the scale of things. The human brain is simply too poorly equipped to handle groups of a size larger than that of the typical tribal community or military unit. Much larger, and any organization starts needing a bureaucratic structure to function at all. Then come the apparatchiks…..and all the farce, folly, and tragedy of the “public spectacle.”

Mobs, Messiahs and Markets is not a pop sociological tract by any means but simply “the home inspector’s report on the wormy wreck of government policies and prescriptions” that experts and ideologues are selling us. And it suggests that the answer lies in returning government to a far more limited role and looking toward history and experience to guide our behavior rather than an ever-increasing body of regulations. “Mobs” proposes, albeit irreverently, a nation of law, rather than a state with a surfeit of laws.

As the insightful political theorist Michael Oakeshott suggests, that distinction is the essential difference between a “civil association,” concerned with the ‘adverbial’ rules of conduct needed for free individuals to get along and an “enterprise association,” which sets itself specific goals and is willing to pass endless laws to reach them. By doing so, the particular enterprise association called the modern state ultimately sacrifices the individual entirely to politics.

But where anyone wants to go is not something that can be decided by the mob, say the authors. Neither the mob inside us in the form of self-deceiving logic, nor the mob outside, in the form of popular slogans. Telling heaven from hell or blue skies from pain is something each individual must do for himself.

That, the authors conclude, is why the study of our past and our traditions might be a better avenue to reliable knowledge about human behavior, economic and political, than the study of abstract mathematical models.

The authors have no prescription as to what to do. But they do have one as to what not to do.

“As the Good Book tells us,” they write, “we ought not to put our faith in princes and powers; we ought not to be taken in by the “public spectacle.”