The Economist of last week reviews the latest book of Henry Kissinger who, at 99, does not seem to have changed intellectually (“The Vision Thing: Henry Kissinger Explains What He Thinks Makes Great Leadership,” July 21, 2022):
In his latest book, Mr Kissinger, an unofficial adviser and friend to many presidents and prime ministers, considers how six leaders from the second half of the 20th century reoriented their countries and made a lasting impact on the world.
These leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon (of whom Kissinger was Secretary of state), Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. I would say it is not clear what most of of them, if any, did besides “reorienting their countries” or “their societies,” as the Economist writes, which means bossing people around. It is not clear how these leaders have contributed to advancing the liberty and dignity of individuals. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher is the exception, but we may have doubts that the world would be much different or worse if she had never existed. One can argue that these statocrats at least prevented worse people for getting in power, but that does appear to be Kissinger’s argument.
It seems that, for Kissinger, history is and should be the product of the actions of good and bad leaders. We can hope that God will give us good ones. Since I haven’t read the book, I am open to surprises, but this impression, as conveyed by the Economist’s reviewer, looks consistent with what a casual observer of Kissinger’s career and occasional reader of his newspaper articles can gather.
The reviewer ends by quoting what he says is the book’s warning:
No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.
What does that mean? How can society lose faith in itself? How could it first obtain faith in itself? How can society impugn anything? Where does one find society’s self-perception? Does she reveal it through our collective mouth? Whom does she speak to? I suspect that Kissinger’s answer to the last bit is: to the great leader (flectamus genua), who, he writes on (thanks to Amazon’s “Look Inside”!), represents “the generosity of public spirit which inspires sacrifice and service.” Like, say, Nixon ordering a break-in into the Watergate building? Many of Kissinger’s half-dozen idols, if not Nixon himself, have likely done even worse.
I suspect that Dr. Kissinger has no knowledge of the welfare-economics and social-choice literature that have thrown substantial doubts on the usefulness and even the mathematical possibility of viewing society as something like a big individual of which we are the cells and the leader is the brain.
This line of reflection, I think, points out to the fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the socialist and the conservative, who both favor collective choices over individual choices; and, on the other hand, the classical liberal and the libertarian, who (1) understands that we can only analyze society through methodological individualism, and (2) accepts that, from a normative viewpoint, only human individuals ultimately count and that they count equally.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Jul 31 2022 at 12:03pm
I think of Konrad Adenauer and Lee Kuan Yew as being “good guys” who helped make their societies freer. Adenauer did much to support de-Nazification in Germany while not being (obviously) anti-German, and supported Erhard’s activities, and Yew helped separate Singapore successfully from the Malaysian state.
Am I wrong?
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 31 2022 at 1:06pm
David: You certainly know more more than me about Germany in the immediate post-war period and I would trust your opinion on that point. I am not sure about Singapore, which looks like an authoritarian “capitalist” country (at least if we believe what Cris Lingle said after fleeing the country).
James Beckman
Aug 2 2022 at 4:56pm
My response to this relies heavily on my Ivy League education: history to examine facts and logic as perused in philosophy to examine when one thinks we always make ASSUMPTIONS. Example, when meeting people in civilian life I assume the vast majority are peaceful. This is good enough as we have our life experiences–for the most part we survive and even prosper. However, as a junior Marine Corps officer in Vietnam & the adjoining Okinawa, southern Japan, I assumed everyone not wearing an American uniform was likely a threat. Thus, when an Officer-of-the-Day on Okinawa, I was called away from the base to the adjacent bars with word of a fight, I went into a local civilian bar with my .45 out & cocked. I saw two drunk GI’s with knives out about to fight over a hostess. With hardly a thought, I fired my .45 into the ceiling and used tough talk about killing both with one shot each if they didn’t drop their weapons. They quickly saw a young Marine Officer who was about to kill them. They dropped their weapons & allowed my Staff Sargeant to cuff them. In combat in Vietnam I took the opporsite view about every person who WASN’T wearing a US uniform. Later my Regimental commander complimented me, saying he had much tougher assignments, to send me into Vietnam to map areas for the eventual arrival of my division & more. That spontaneous action “made” my career in Vietnam, allowing me to break my hip when jumping out of my chopper early to avoid enemy machine guns. Yes, those assumptions are critical. Oh, I also learned to work with our intelligence agencies, mostly the CIA.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 4:41pm
James: Interesting stories. I would reformulate your first sentence (assuming I understand it well) as follows: We always need theories to know which facts matter (what you call “assumptions” where the conclusions of your intuitive theories, like “Drunk GIs go crazy when competing for a woman”.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 4:57pm
James: Interesting stories. I would reformulate your first sentence (assuming I understand it well) as follows: We always need theories to know which facts matter (what you call “assumptions” where the conclusions of your intuitive theories, like “Drunk GIs go crazy when competing for a woman”).
David Seltzer
Jul 31 2022 at 12:08pm
Pierre, when F.A. made his appeal to socialists of all parties he asked they understand that individual rights are paramount in society. As I recall, I emailed you a short note entitled Central Planning A Bowl Of cereal. If a consumer flips a coin to make choices, (1/2)^n, as n approaches infinity, the probability of a central bureaucrat’s ability to allocate resources efficiently approaches zero.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 31 2022 at 1:29pm
David: I just retrieved your note. I did not find my reply (?), though. A socialist might reply, like Schumpeter, that the planners don’t have to flip a coin, for they have ““a general knowledge about what kind of people the comrades are.” But even then, of course, the comrades do not all have the same preferences, so the planners’ task remains impossible.
James Beckman
Aug 2 2022 at 5:10pm
Indeed, Socialists come in many varieties, as you know, Pierre. Germany now has a Democratic Socialist Chancellor, and certainly does not see eye-to-eye with V. Putin, who is a very different kind of Non-democratic Socialist, or Communist. Of course, Putie served in Germany & Poland, post-WW II, as a KGB agent–somewhat secret police, & often likely to have dissidents disappear as well as to poison their tea.
Monte
Jul 31 2022 at 8:20pm
Interesting, but not surprising, that Kissinger would choose Nixon over Reagan. Reagan consistently ranks within the top 10 U.S. presidents as a seminal leader and agent for geopolitical change, a distinction that Nixon has never even come close to sharing.
Nixon and Kissinger were “partners in power” whose “love of secrecy, unparalleled ambition, and need for approval” produced “a flexible approach to the truth.” It’s also been revealed in taped conversations that both thought Reagan was shallow, with negligible brains and limited mental capacity, yet Kissinger happily served on Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory board.
Both Reagan and Nixon left a lasting impact, but, I would argue, on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Monte
Jul 31 2022 at 8:30pm
Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing. – Ronald Reagan
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 1 2022 at 12:47am
Monte: Thanks for the link to Hanhimaki’s review of Dallek. The more I know about Kissinger, the more I see him as not only ignorant of social and economic theory, but also as a totally immoral person. His kind must bear a large responsibility in our current predicaments.
Ramagopal
Jul 31 2022 at 11:15pm
Pierre You say ” I haven’t read the book, I am open to surprises, but this impression, as conveyed by the Economist’s reviewer”. Perhaps it would have been more fair to Kissinger if you commented on his views aftet reading the book yourself.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 1 2022 at 12:33am
Ramagopal: It is to be fair that I noted that I hadn’t read the book and was open to surprises, including from the readers of this blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to read all books.
Mactoul
Aug 1 2022 at 6:37am
Your number (1) is hardly tenable.
Plus it is not classic liberalism a la Adam Smith. He never made such claims. Indeed, the political nature of man implies that there are three irreducible levels of human organization: the city or the polis ie the political community, the family and the individual.
Jon Murphy
Aug 1 2022 at 8:03am
Your point about Smith is incorrect. He was an ardent methodological individualist. His entire moral system (Theory of Moral Sentiments) is individualistic and in Wealth of Nations he routinely refers to various collectivist notions as “absurd.”
Smith did not believe that the preference of a single individual should always dominate, sure. But his unit of analysis was always individuals and impacts on other individuals.
Jon Murphy
Aug 1 2022 at 9:24am
I find this statement interesting. On its face, it seems incorrect. I am having a hard time thinking of a single political or family action that cannot be reduced to individual actions. What are some examples?
Warren Platts
Aug 1 2022 at 4:28pm
This is an old philosophical problem. The question is whether there are emergent properties of wholes and whether they can be “reduced” to the properties of their parts, and if so, does that entail that the emergent properties don’t exist? Correct answer: yes, yes, and no.
A simple example is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Clearly, a single straw cannot break a camel’s back. Therefore, the property of camel-back-breaking has to be a property of the whole pile of straw.
Of course the total mass of the straw pile can be reduced to the masses of the individual straws in the sense we can concoct a mathematical theory that says total mass equals the sum of all straws, and once total mass exceeds an empirically determined threshold, the camel’s back will get broke.
But does that story entail that the emergent property of a straw-pile camel-back-breaking does not exist? I would say not. Indeed, at first the straw pile lacks this emergent property until it’s total mass exceeds the threshold value, and then it does.
It would be the same with societies & political units.
Jon Murphy
Aug 1 2022 at 5:57pm
Ok? I don’t know of anyone who denies emergent properties exist, but maybe there is one or two out there. Who knows.
Anyway, it’s irrelevant to the point of irreducability. Emergent properties can be reduced to individual actions. That’s what economics (including macroeconomics) is all about.
Mactoul
Aug 1 2022 at 9:37pm
What is the difference between England and France, for instance?
Or is there no difference and these names exist only in geographical sense and have always existed in that sense alone.
Any individual comes to be in an already existing political community that inevitably forms him and particularly forms his mind. There are no bare individuals.
There are no sexless individuals either. There are men and women and family exists due to their complementary nature. All individuals come to be in a pre-existing family.
However family is not autonomous unit of cultural transmission and thus political community is necessary.
Mactoul
Aug 1 2022 at 9:42pm
Point is that individual actions are not always intelligible unless you take into account the political and family levels.
Consider the entirety of justice system. A man sentances another man to death by hanging. And it is not regarded as murder. Even more starkly, killing in war vs killing in gang fight.
Jon Murphy
Aug 1 2022 at 10:12pm
True. Context matters. But that does not mean that families or polities are not reducible. Indeed, the mere fact that context matters to understand individual actions is evidence that polities and families are reducible to individual actions. Further, note that your examples (hangings, killings, the make-up of France or England) are all appeals to individualactions. In other words, your examples show that we cannot understand polities or families without understanding their parts; families and polities are reducible.
Mactoul
Aug 2 2022 at 8:45am
I would say that all attempts to derive political community from individuals have failed– attempts like social contract.
Political community arises spontaneously wherever there are people. And there are no people without being embedded in some political community.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 8:57am
True. More evidence that the polity is reducible to individuals and their actions.
Jim Glass
Aug 2 2022 at 9:34pm
I don’t understand the point of this whole discussion. Of course all humans are individuals.
Every raging mob that ever lynched somebody, pogrommed its way across eastern Europe, raped and murdered in Nanking, massacred Tutsi in Rwanda, etc., etc., etc., was composed of individuals. But they weren’t acting as individuals, they were acting as raging murderous mobs.
So what’s the point of saying saying “all human activity is performed via actions of individuals”? If it is some argument that group behavior doesn’t count — cultures don’t have meaningful characteristics, group psychology isn’t real, sociology doesn’t matter — because all humans as individuals always act individualistically, that’s so absurd it’s silly:
“You’re all individuals!”
Humans are the most social of animals, by far. Evolution has programmed a myriad of social and group behaviors — many potentially dangerous and very destructive — into our individual, personal genomes, every solitary one of us.
That’s how our powerful interpersonal and group instincts are “reducible” to an individual level. We are individually coded for group actions.
(Somebody says: ‘Chemistry is reducible to physics’. Ok. True enough. Is there a point to it? Maybe not. If there is, it had better not be: “When playing with dynamite I can ignore the rules of chemistry because only physics counts.”)
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2022 at 3:13pm
They were, though. Each individual made a choice to act in that mob. There is no overarching “mob mind” or anything like that. The consciousness is the individuals.
Jim Glass
Aug 3 2022 at 9:40pm
Each individual made a choice to act in that mob. There is no overarching “mob mind” or anything like that.
Remember that when a raging mob comes to kill you — as mobs did all those others…
“There is no such thing as group psychology, group social behavior. All these people are coming at me with such unanimous purpose and emotion only after individually and separately considering the matter and deciding to so, each just like all the others. Hey, if I inspire such a unanimous reaction among so many different individuals, I must really deserve it!”
It’ll make you feel better. 🙂
The consciousness is the individuals.
A meaningless tautology. Unless you can provide some meaning for it.
If your meaning for it is that group behavior resulting from the processes of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology doesn’t exist, that doesn’t work.
Jon Murphy
Aug 4 2022 at 8:20am
Apparently not given you deny that very point.
Again, the point of methodological individualism is that the individual is the unit of analysis. In mob behavior, there are emergent properties, but those emergent properties are a result of individual choices. Indeed, that is why we can identify, arrest, and prosecute members of a mob for criminal acts.
There is no mob consciousness separate from the individual actors. It may appear as though there is, but in reality there is not.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 7:13pm
Jim Glass: You might find some interest in my reply to Mactoul below where I give the example of the collectivist methodology of Marxism. The difference between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism/organicism is crucial.
Warren Platts
Aug 1 2022 at 5:06pm
I’ve always found this argument to be something of an ontological cop out. I understand the concern: e.g., the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson argued in a paper not long after World War II that belief in states as superorganisms necessarily, or at least tends to lead to Nazi-like totalitarian states that stomp on individual rights.
But that is not an argument against the reality of state polities; that’s hiding your head in the sand. If states are superorganisms, we should accept that reality and deal with it.
Do states have brains in the form leaders? I would say not. The organization is more amoeba-like — there is no central brain function. That said, the problem-solving capacity of human societies is rather prodigious. Well, at least we’ve managed to survive the last 10,000 years without killing ourselves. Indeed, the total biomass of Homo sapiens is exceeded by only two other animal species: Bos taurus, and Antarctic krill. So we must be doing something right, I guess.
So if we accept the reality of states as problem solving things-in-themselves, one is led to ask what do they “want”? Realist international relations experts like University of Chicago prof John Mearsheimer will say that they “want” to survive. So it’s an evolutionary problem. Those societies that possess emergent properties conducive to longevity will tend to be the societies we observe.
Given that various state polities have beginnings and ends, and vary in their emergent properties that affect their longevities, then where does that leave classical liberalism & libertarianism?
Now, I am not going to argue that the reason we should organize society for the maximization of individual liberty is just because that promotes the longevity of the superorganism. No: we want liberty for its own sake. That’s a bottom line, overriding value.
On the other hand, if it’s the case that societies organized to maximize individual liberty tend to be short-lived, that’s a problem, isn’t it? Yes, because if such a society collapses through sheer dysfunctionality or gets absorbed or genocided by a totalitarian Empire, then our individual liberties go out the window.
Thus the challenge for the libertarian theorist, imho, is not to challenge the **reality** of society, but rather to explain how such a society can be constitutionally organized such that individual liberties are maximized, while at the same time enduring that such a society will tend to have high survival probability.
Mactoul
Aug 1 2022 at 9:49pm
The Why of a political community is to realize its Way.
American polity exists to realize the American Way.
The Way is partly formalized in the Constitution and partly the folkway of the American people
Each individual had slightly different version of the Way and politics consists in each individual striving to realize his Way.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 8:58am
So, politics must be reduced to the individual. It cannot be irreducible if politics is each individual striving to realize his way
Mactoul
Aug 2 2022 at 8:54pm
The Ways that individuals seek to realize are political. One is seeking to realize libertarian Way, another paleoconservative. Both irreducibly political.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 9:07pm
Nah. They’re reduced to the individual, as you state in your first two sentences.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 9:50am
I was thinking about your post last night. Something didn’t make sense to me and I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I think I figured it out now:
Prima facie, there appears to be a contradiction in your underlying theory. You talk about emergent orders and then immediately lead into “superorganisms” and their “wants.” But that’s contradictory. If an order is emergent, then the order that emerges is not a superorganism. It may appear as if to be a superorganism (think, for example, Adam Smith’s invisible hand discussions in TMS, WN, and History of Astronomy), but it is not.
On the other hand, if an order represents a superorganism, then the order is not emergent but rather planned.
You need to pick one or resolve the contradiction. Either your assertion that society is a superorganism is incorrect or your assertation that society is “amoeba-like — there is no central brain function…” with “emergent properties conducive to longevity” is incorrect. The former assertion is more statist. The latter is classically liberal.
Warren Platts
Aug 3 2022 at 3:05pm
I see what you’re saying. You want to draw a qualitative distinction between dynamic, self-organizing systems where order spontaneously emerges from consciously designed systems. I would counter by saying that the ordinary usage of “superorganism” simply is a name for dynamic, self-organizing systems where the complex integration is especially pronounced & remarkable. One can still make your distinction, but it’s more a matter of degree than quality.
William Morton Wheeler in his seminal “The ant-colony as an organism” described ant societies “a kind of communistic anarchy, in which there is ‘neither guide, overseer, nor ruler.” So that’s not really a planned order, yet the ant colony is the paradigmatic superorganism.
(Modern researchers have found that in a typical ant colony, there will be a big percentage of slackers that don’t do much of anything but live off the surplus of the productive workers. Of those, for every 4 or so productive workers that actually construct something useful, there will be like 3 destructive ants that actively tear down what the productive ants built! A rather apt description of American society, I dare say!)
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2022 at 3:18pm
So, then, what does the phrase “superorganism” get us? It seems more to obfuscate than clarify by giving the potentially misleading impression that there is a “higher consciousness.”
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 2 2022 at 11:27am
Warren: I think you will find many answers to your challenge in Hayek’s writings on precisely this topic starting in the 1940s. For a very basic roundup and precise references, see my answer to Mactool below.
It’s interesting that you cite George Gaylord Simpson. Perhaps I already told you this in a previous exchange on this blog, but he was one of my preferred authors as a late teenager. It may be where I got the ideas that I found in Hayek (and other classical liberals) a decade or so later.
On social anthropomorphism, you may like to have a look at my recent TIR article “The Impossibility of Populism.” I should have reread Simpson when I was researching this article.
Warren Platts
Aug 3 2022 at 2:15pm
Pierre: They finally digitized the article I was thinking of: Simpson’s “The role of the individual in evolution.” It was actually published in 1941, in the early stages of WW2. He makes very clear how an organicist view of human society as a superorganism leads to totalitarianism:
Of course the all the major combatants in WW2 were big empire states, USA included. As such, they were all totalitarian, at least with respect to their colonies. The US & the UK couldn’t very well allow the franchise to Filipinos & Indians — otherwise they would vote for independence, as they did after the war once they were allowed.
Does it follow that totalitarian empire states are superorganisms, whereas relatively free, democratic nation states are not? I would say no. They’re just different species of superorganisms. Myrmecologist Nigel Franks (1989) describes army ants as the most integrated and as the most democratic of all ant societies in that the new queens literally run for an election of sorts by accompanying the foraging column in broad daylight; workers will take turns riding on the back of the giant queen candidates, absorbing their pheromonal campaign messages; those workers then communicate the message to the rest of the workers; finally one queen is “elected” by a majority of workers later that day. (“Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence” American Scientist Vol. 77: 138-145)
Thus it would seem even classically liberal and/or libertarian societies cannot escape the superorganism. Leviathan is real, working his powers: that’s why we must keep a vigilant eye on him.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 7:07pm
Warren: Three things. First, thanks for the George Gaylord Simpson article. Second, while methodological individualism helps analysts understand society (sociology was useless until it borrowed rational choice from economics), social organicism and collectivism (which are very close) are basically useless: see my reply to Mactoul below. Third, it is crucially important to realize that methodological individualism is not “methodological democratism”–just as individual liberty is not collective liberty.
One door that I discovered some decades ago to enter these issues is Hayek’s 1946 article “Individualism: True and False.” I just discovered that it is available online (I cannot vouch for this rendering, since I haven’t read that version, but FEE must have been careful). Chapter 6 of his The Counter-Revolution of Science, also available online, might also be useful (the two parts of the book appeared in Economica from 1941 to 1944).
Monte
Aug 2 2022 at 4:47pm
I disagree. Kim Jong-un and the WPK in N. Korea, as well as Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan and the DPT, Afwerki of Eritrea and the PFDJ, and (until recently) Baghdadi and the Islamic State represent brain centers from where all coordination and regulation of activity initiates. Each of these totalitarian regimes, like ant colonies, are highly integrated by their communication system and caste-based division of labor and basically meet the definition of a superorganism. By contrast, American society (like the alien lifeform in John Carpenter’s The Thing) is composed of individual cells that act out of self preservation.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 2 2022 at 5:40pm
Monte: Even the most totalitarian systems cannot control its “cells” like an individual’s brain controls its own. Indeed, they need repression against traitors and smugglers. Sometimes, the armed arm (literally, for somebody who believes in the social organism) of the state turns against against its brain and kills it against its will and not by accident! Even the metaphor does not work. It is worth reading Hayek’s 1973 Rules and Order (although The Counter-Revolution of Science is easier to read and perhaps simpler for my purpose in this conversation):
Monte
Aug 3 2022 at 12:07am
Pierre,
I’ll take up your offer to read those books as time permits, but I remain unconvinced that totalitarian regimes do not, in effect, control their (citizen) cells. Consider, for example, this observation by the free market-oriented, highly respected, and well known German economist, Moritz J. Bonn, in his Symposium on the Totalitarian State (February, 1940):
Bonn further elaborated that those leaders who embrace the ideology of government by decree feel justified, in that “subjects for an autocratic, though, benevolent, form of government, because they had not yet developed the capacity of governing themselves, might be assumed to lack the economic and intellectual status…to prove their fitness for self-government.” Thus, the “benevolent dictator”, by virtue of his (or her) executive power, rules supreme, a system within which the law loses all sense of stability and equality for its citizens.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 6:25pm
Monte: You are right that totalitarian regimes try to control individuals like the brain controls the cells–or, more exactly, the motor functions of the body. But they find it very difficult, including to loot a non-rich society because individuals don’t produce to be looted.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 8:53pm
Monte: Just right now, I tumbled on an example of how even a totalitarian state cannot control individuals like the brain controls fingers or face muscles. I found Hayek’s book Individualism and Economic Order on a Russian website (http://www.library.fa.ru/files/Hayek-Individualism.pdf). The site self-description is “Library of Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation.”
Mactoul
Aug 2 2022 at 8:58pm
The political community is formed by complementarity of the ruling and the ruled elements. The ruling elements are generally also the thinking elements. It is in the discussions and the public opinion, we find activity of the thinking element.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 9:07pm
Thus the political is ultimately reduced to the individual.
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2022 at 7:04am
Here’s my point:
Methodological individualism simply means that individuals are the choosers. Society doesn’t choose. Family doesn’t choose. Polity doesn’t choose. Only individuals. The aggregate results of collectives are ultimately reducible to individual choices. The fact you have to point to “ruling elements as thinking elements” proves this. Any collective cannot be usefully understood without looking at individual actions.
Warren Platts
Aug 3 2022 at 2:34pm
True, but why stop the reduction there? Individual choices are further reduced to subconscious psychological processes & ultimately to neurochemistry that are in turn reduced to mere physical processes. Indeed, if reductionism is taken seriously, we are face to face with the fact that there is apparently no free will. That is, “choice” is an illusion caused by utterly non-psychic, physical processes that practically by definition make no choices. Hmm…
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2022 at 3:17pm
Not quite. Those aren’t reductions in the same way. Psychological processes and neurochemistry aren’t choices being made. We’re talking choosing here.
Some do go that far, though I do not think scientific evidence supports such a conclusion.
Monte
Aug 3 2022 at 4:00pm
But methodological individualism (MI) is rendered meaningless within the ideological confines of a religious (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) or imperial (Kim family-Mount Paektu bloodline) cult. Individual autonomy is forfeited, either voluntarily or by default, and continuously suppressed under threat of punishment (eternal damnation, banishment, imprisonment/execution). Figuratively speaking, there is only the whole. All non-conforming parts are sanitized. These themes are meticulously addressed in Bonn’s The Crisis of European Democracy and The Crumbling of Empire. Jay Lifton also explores their implications in his book, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry.
As a predictive model for understanding an economy where priority is given to the individual, MI is sufficient. But in the complete absence of liberty, all that remains is “the intensity of the people’s feelings for and devotion to their leader.” This coincides with Hayek’s claim that to believe that freedom can be achieved by a collectivist system is “the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.”
Jon Murphy
Aug 3 2022 at 5:05pm
I don’t think it’s rendered meaningless. Lots of good methodological individualists have done fascinating work on those types of organizations.
Warren Platts
Aug 4 2022 at 6:47am
So you’re saying that “choice” is the one thing in the universe that isn’t reducible; that choices are somehow “atomic” and not a product of physical brain functioning. But that would seem to require a non-physical, sui generis “chooser.” Perhaps a soul, or an entelechy of sorts? Unfortunately, there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of souls.
Indeed, if choices were not caused by underlying neurochemistry, then choices would not be affected by things like drinking a 12-pack of beer, or suffering a massive stroke, PTSD, or taking anti-depressant drugs. Consequently, the atomic rational chooser that is the supposed bedrock of economic theory must be conceived of as, at best, a simplified idealization, a useful myth. Didn’t a guy win a Nobel prize a couple of years ago for exploring this very issue and then drawing the conclusion that individuals require societal “nudging” as a result?
Jon Murphy
Aug 4 2022 at 8:24am
I don’t know how to respond to this. Your line of reasoning isn’t clear. Your first sentence is an incorrect interpretation of what I said, the second clause of that sentence is also factually false. The second sentence seems unrelated to the first (I don’t see how you go from the first to the second). And the third is entirely unrelated to the first two.
Jon Murphy
Aug 4 2022 at 12:32pm
Let me get things back on track:
The point of the original post is that collectives as a single mind do not choose anything. Society cannot lose its faith in itself because society is an emergent order of many individuals acting, not an actor itself. A person can lose faith in himself. A society cannot. To say society loses faith in itself would be like saying a computer loses faith in itself. Surely, one can see how the phrase “a computer loses faith in itself” is absurd. Any actions a computer undertakes is the direct result of the user; the computer doesn’t choose to do anything.
That is what we mean when we say that the emergent order of a society is reducible to individual choices. We can point to the choices made and the constraints the choosers and how they led to the emergent order. Society, or any emergent order, is the “result of human action but not human design.”
How people chose is generally irrelevant to the question of a conscious and choosing collective. Whether people choose randomly, they have a soul, they are merely the product of chemical reactions, or something else entirely doesn’t matter. Whether one takes the literal model of homo economicus or the more holistic of a reasoning & thinking individual, both are capable with methodological individualism. What matters is that the collective is not choosing. The behavior of the collective is the result of many choices, not the collective chooser itself.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 6:17pm
Jon: Yes. See my example below of the proletarian whose class is exploited.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 10:07pm
Warren: You write:
That’s a difficult question. Each of us, however, knows that he can throw the book out of the window or not, and that he would choose to do it just to make the point if the book did not have some value. Moreover, if free will did not exist, it would be difficult to imagine that any sort of objective search for the truth is possible (because everything must be predetermined). I would conclude that I am losing my time on this blog, and so would likely do all the other commenters and bloggers here.
Jim Glass
Aug 6 2022 at 9:11pm
That evidence is extremely conflicted. Psychology and sociology have a MOUNTAIN of hard data showing that people who believe they can exercise their will to choose to better their lives achieve much better life outcomes than those who don’t. (See even Victor Frankl on who survived Nazi concentration camps, of which he was one.) OTOH, hard physics is predominantly (not universally) read as indicating the universe is deterministic, and thus free will is just an illusion.
But methinks the physics community has earned the right to be very modest here. I mean they have no idea what dark energy and dark matter are — 95% of the universe!!! — have no idea what quantum mechanics “means”, have no explanation of “consciousness”(!!) … once could go on and on … but we should let them rule on the free will issue?
I think everyone should adopt the true scientific attitude of “we don’t know” … but also embrace a modern version of Pascal’s Wager — and bet everything that we all have free will.
If we’re right, and do, we get better lives; while if we’re wrong, and don’t, it doesn’t matter. So we can only win.
While if we bet the other way and are right, we don’t have it, it makes no difference; but if we are wrong, and do, but act like we don’t, we wreck our lives. We can only lose.
QED
Mactoul
Aug 2 2022 at 9:41am
Consider a brick house. Is it reducible to bricks?
You may say a house is bricks arranged house-wise. But the house is again smuggled in. So, the house isn’t reducible to bricks.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 9:53am
In a literal matter, yes, in that I can bulldoze it, but I know that’s not what you mean.
The house is reducible to individual bricks. The house qua house is made up of bricks (and other elements). The house emerges because of how those elements are laid out. The house does not exist before the bricks and the house cannot be understood without understanding the bricks themselves. IOW, try describing a brick house without referring to its elements.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 2 2022 at 11:15am
Mactool: The basic problem you raised was solved by Hayek in his Economica series of articles “Scientism and the Study of Society” (1942–1944), later incorporated in his The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952), especially Chapter 6 and 8. The argument is also reformulated in Vol. 1 of his Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973). Briefly, it is obvious but uninteresting to say that a whole is more than the sum of its parts if, in the whole, you include the relations between the parts. The whole is still only understandable in terms of its parts. This is consistent with what Jon said in response to your challenge.
Mactoul
Aug 2 2022 at 8:52pm
And the parts are only intelligible in terms of the whole. There are no bare pre-political humans. You would deny to people the liberty of forming the laws they would freely live under. The individuals are formed by the political community and one cannot conceive of a human otherwise.
Jon Murphy
Aug 2 2022 at 9:09pm
It’s perfectly easy to consider a person separate from the polity he just happens to live under. We do that all the time.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 5 2022 at 6:13pm
Mactoul: Consider the following example. Assume we both believe that the workers are exploited by the capitalists (it’s easy to see: the latter get much more money out of production than the former). We want to understand the implications of this fact for the likely evolution of society. As a Marxist, I use methodological collectivism. Since it is obvious that the exploited working class is impoverished by the exploiting bourgeoisie, the former will not accept this forever and will revolt against the capitalist class. As a methodological individualist, you try to understand the behavior of the exploited class in terms of individual interests and actions. Revolting raise the problem of collective action: if an individual is the first to revolt, this will bring him nothing else than repression and perhaps death. Moreover, he has a chance, however minuscule, to become a capitalist himself and to go down in history in another way than by dying young. Most individuals will react in the same way, there will be few who will be throwing Molotov cocktails, and the proletarian revolution is unlikely to come. See Mancur Olson on this. Moreover, since the working class is exploited, I look non-stop for evidence of its impoverishment. You, trying to explain society as the result of individual actions, cannot but observe that indeed at least some individual proletarians are buying Henry Ford’s first automobiles.
Jim Glass
Aug 6 2022 at 4:33pm
Jim Glass: The difference between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism/organicism is crucial.
Of course it it. So let’s look at it all more closely….
One thing that Smith, Marx and Hayek had in common is that none of them had a clue about evolutionary psychology, as it didn’t exist in their times. Can’t blame them for that! But we know about it. So take a simple example of emotional mob in action. Is the best explanation for it methodological individualism or collectivism/organicism?
You’ve seen stampedes. Some big hoofed creature gets spooked by something — perhaps, in error, by nothing — then instantly a great mob, er, herd of them go running off in the same direction with the same great speed and high emotion. Better not get in their way! But how do we explain this?
Is this some sort of “superorganism” in action? Nah. Is it “collective” action? Nope. As Jon Murphy says, “There is no group mind” … “consciousness is in the individual” … “Methodological individualism simply means that individuals are the choosers. “
But wait … 100% of a population instantly acting identically in such a complex pattern is the result of every separate member making an individual choice? REALLY? (Where are the herd members choosing to stand around thinking “What’s up?”, “She’s nuts”? Etc. ) This reduces the meaning of “individual choice” out of existence. How does methodological individualism explain this?
It’s a conundrum. There is no explanation — ‘group organism’ or ‘individual’ –until we realize behavior is rooted in the genome. Then the answer is simple: Generations earlier an ancestor was easily spooked into running from perceived danger, real or not. As this increased the survival rate, and as the strategy of running increases in effectiveness with the number of runners, the “get spooked easy and run fast” gene rapidly spread through the entire population. Indeed through many species (schools of fish, flocks of birds, etc.)
Thus this “superorganism” “group action” is explained at the level of each individual’s DNA, and methodological individualism is saved from many conundrums — such as explaining how really nasty herd behavior in humans (pogroms, the Rape of Nanking, the Rwanda genocide) is all supposed to be the result of a multitude of “individual decisions”. It’s all as per…
Libertarians aren’t up on this? I can see why they don’t like it. It provides individual-level plausible explanations for all kinds of entirely real, functionally “group” and “collective” behaviors that they don’t like — far beyond the realm of Hayek 1940s. Some of which Kissinger might be talking about in his book.
It’s the genes that tell the bovines to “herd up and run”, their higher brains never get a chance to think and decide about it. (Because if they stopped to think and decide, they could be dead!) Human society is far more complex than bovine society. Do you think such genome determined instincts driving and organizing our group social behaviors aren’t running through us?
Jim Glass
Aug 6 2022 at 8:04pm
[Following up to myself…]
For the “Hayek 1940s”-type methodological individualists, here’s the result of an empirical experiment, successfully replicated many times (in many variations), for them to explain…
Researchers wish to understand why partisanship (typically political but can be about anything) becomes so emotional and vehement, even unto violence, in our modern world — when it is far more productive to civilly consider and negotiate differences. Why do we act against our own interests on such a large scale?
So they take normal, typical members of the general population and identify those on opposite ends of a partisanship scale, call them Group A and Group Z. All are “average voters”, nobody is rabid.
As we know, the leaders of partisan groups tell many what I’ll call here “obvious lies”. The study gives participants brain scans as they are shown obvious lies told by leaders of both sides. The hypothesis: Partisans will hand-wave away their own side’s lies (‘Gotta get along with the team’) and get angry at the other side’s lies (‘deceitful lyin’ liars!’), fairly rational behavior. But the result, ominously, is the reverse and worse.
Partisans take the other side’s lies in stride (‘There they go again.’) but don’t see their own side’s lies at all. Their own lies are suppressed below consciousness — and much worse: the brain releases chemicals providing an emotional reward for the suppression (‘I carry the righteous sword of justice!’) Partisans are pretty much literally addicted to believing their own lies. (Does anybody see the likes of this on Twitter, or elsewhere about?)
How does 1940s methodoligical individualism explain this? Why would an individual decide to believe what he knows is not true? What’s the benefit of believing what you know to be true is not true? How can one even do that???
Update with evolutionary psychology and an explanation is clear enough. Remember how violent 300,000 years of human evolution has been…
OK. So back then your tribe sees another tribe on the next hill waving sticks and yelling at you. Are they coming to kill you? What to do about it? The payoff matrix is much like with the bovine herd. You decide to …
[] Civilly consider things. If you are right OK, but sooner or later you’ll be wrong and the other tribe will kill you. So your genes pushing “be civil” will be purged.
[] Kill the other tribe first. This is best strategy for your genes to survive – but for highest probability, high motivation is needed, in case the other tribe really knows how to fight. So the kill gene becomes a hate-and-kill gene. “They’re “N*z*s coming to kill our children and skewer our women!!” Just as in the bovine case, your brain doesn’t have time to think about it at all – that risks death. That’s why your genes reward your brain for not thinking about it.
If you are right, your genes have best chance of survival. If you are wrong — the other tribe was just waving “Hi!” — your genes survive and their civil ones get purged. Win-Win … well, for you.
All of which pretty much made sense for 300,000 years. For the last 2,000, maybe not so much. But our wiring changes slowly. The hate-and-kill gene remains in us, to be triggered by those who gain by triggering it, against Jews, Chinese, Tutsi, Ukrainians… As do a whole lot of other, let us say, now sub-optimal genes as to social and group behavior.
It makes civilization a challenge.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 7 2022 at 1:34pm
Jim: Your very interesting post raises some fundamental questions, to which my short reply cannot of course do justice. My claim is that evolutionary psychology does not negate methodological individualism in the social sciences—a point that many practitioners of the hard sciences often do not grasp because they don’t understand economics and rational choice. Here are four remarks in this perspective:
1) How far Hayek’s evolutionary cultural theory was from evolutionary biology is debatable, and you may be right that he was not close. You can find a good review of this issue in Jack Birner’s “F.A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order: An Evolutionary Perspective” (2015).
2) The influence of evolution on individual preferences does not really matter because, as Hayek argued, economic analysis starts where biology and psychology end. This is reviewed by Birner’s as well as implicit (at least) in Richard Posner’s Sex and Reason (1992).
3) Note how Hayek’s argument on tribal instincts is consistent with the view of evolutionary psychology that you expound. Liberal civilization, he argues, requires countering our evolution-inherited instincts. See his The Fatal Conceit and my anniversary review of this book in Regulation.
Birner express it this way:
4) I share your admiration for Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976, 1979). I don’t know if Hayek (who won his Nobel Prize two years before the first edition) read the book, but he should have. Although Dawkins, like many hard scientists, seemed prisoner of political collectivist values, he admits that man can rebel against his genes (notably pp. 200-201)—even if his rebellion is a rather naïve one that seems to be limited to political altruism. In modern social science (that is, in modern economics), this means that the individual can bypass his genes and acquire other preferences, with the help of the right institutions, as it has been necessary for Western civilization to develop.
My conclusion is that, even if we accept the advances of evolutionary psychology, which I think we should, we can still only explain society by starting with the individuals preferences he has and the economic-social-political constraints he faces. His preference function includes evolutionary determined preferences of the sort you mention. In sexual matters, the examples given by Posner show how many of these preferences individuals share within one sex. (An interesting and perhaps more difficult research agenda would be to inquire to which extent James Buchanan’s approach is consistent with evolutionary psychology.)
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