Organising the Chapter on Politics (6) — Getting Ahead of Myself — Notes on the Chapter's Conclusion

Image credit. While I was talking about my ideas, she was elsewhere in her thoughts.

Continued from here.

Here are just a few keywords to remind me of the ideas that I would like to propose in the concluding section of the chapter on politics.

Freedom as Creative Destruction

Overarching the entire argument of the chapter is the notion that freedom is a dynamic equilibrating order supporting a culture of unprecedented dissension whose potential for destructive and even violent discord is kept at bay by commensurate forces of sublimation and pacification. Freedom is an order of "creative destruction", where the anabolic (life/system building) elements are adequate to contain an overload and metastasis of the catabolic (life/system destroying) elements. 

The claim may be advanced that freedom is that condition in which the benign potential inherent in human beings is maximised to an extent that is unparalleled in human history. The idea of a maximisation, of course, is overdrawn and somewhat naive; but it points to something important as the possibility of the very criticism of this thesis attests to: 

No Option But to Prefer More Options to Less

Thanks to freedom man is presented with more options to organise his life, a significant class of which options enable man to adapt better to the world (of enhanced options). Among these options we find the right and the ability to doubt the benign character and desirability of the option-enhanced world of freedom.

All things considered, the free world resembles a research institute with an unrivalled capacity for experimentation and innovative output (representing genuine material advancement) produced under conditions of peaceful coexistence. A defence of (the results of) liberty will largely hinge on one's ability to argue persuasively that she produces an outcome of substantial net benefits and peace. According to this conception of liberty, she is distinct from partisan ideology in that she represents a procedural order within which almost any type of non-violent dissension, including ideological dissension is embraced. At the same time, liberty cannot be neutral, but she is wedded to a set of procedures and institutions that keep all forms of partisanship exposed to challenge and change.

7.       Results and Purpose of Freedom

7.1     Freedom as a Dynamic Equilibrating Order

According to Hilary Putnam,

Democracy is not just one form of social life among other workable forms of social life; it is the precondition for the full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems ... a requirement for experimental inquiry in any area. To reject democracy is to reject the idea of being experimental.

Quoted from, Westbrook, R.B. Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstruction the Logic of John Dewey's Faith, p.129

7.2     Freedom and Democracy

Basic to freedom is the capacity for choice in the human being. However, that capacity is useless when it lies idle, for choice is unattractive unless there is a power to follow it up and sustain it. Freedom extends the human scope from the ability to see choice to the empowerment to make intelligent and personally satisfying choices. If this ability is widely distributed among human beings, they become more adept at adjusting themselves profitably to their environment, including themselves.

7.3     Freedom as Choice, Empowerment, and Improved Adaptation 

 As against widespread belief, the dichotomy between facts and values is an error. Facts are value-laden. Without reference to values we would not be able to perceive facts, i.e. order our perceptions to present us with what we call facts. The conceit is dangerous that posits value-free scientific objectivity in sharp contrast to the "woolly" thinking that is supposed to be naturally characteristic of political and ethical deliberation. Both scientific and ethical thinking depend on a set of crucial/foundational values underlying them. These values help us to learn from mistakes, coordinate our efforts at solutions, and cope with the uncertainty inherent in the naturally open-ended projects of scientific and ethical inquiry, orienting us toward incremental and comparative improvements. 

Values need to be admitted, let out in the open, and be made part of the competition of propositions by which we seek to come to grips with the world around us. 

As I have been arguing for a long time, politics is a discovery procedure, no less than science or the workings of economic competition and markets.

7.4     Value-based Facts  — The Ubiquity of Values

7.5     The Wisdom of Freedom and Democracy

★★★

The Gliederung (including comments) so far:

1.       What Is Politics?

1.1     Politics — Wider Sense

1.2     Politics — Narrower Sense

1.3     Politics in General - Part of the Human Condition

2.       Politics under Conditions of Freedom

2.1     Freedom — Adapting to the Individualistic Age

2.2     Rise of Individualism

2.3     Politics and the State — Adaptations to the Individualistic Age

2.3.1  The New Social Persona - The Autonomous Individual as a State-provided Public Good

3.       The Politics of Public Goods

3.1     Political Participation - Organising the Permanent Redrafting of the Social Contract

3.2     Privatising Law and Life — The Individualistic State as Radical Privatiser

3.3     Disencumbering Justice by Auxilliary Forms of Legitimacy

Politics in a free society is a vast, subtle, and multidimensional cultural network that only as a whole gives meaning, effectiveness, and strength to its more visible institutions such as elections, parlamentarianism, and majority rule.

4.       Political Culture in a Free Society

4.1     Epistemological Functions of Freedom and Politics - Politics as a Discovery Process

4.2     Science and Freedom — "Moral Images" à la Putnam - Open-ended, Incomplete and Changing

4.3     Culture-Questioning and Culture-Shaping in Civil Society

4.4     Politics as Part of the Division of Labour in a Free Society

4.5     Politics and Poppers World 3

4.6     The Long Road from Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom

4.7     The System of Sociogenic Freedom — Politics - Improving State Technologies

We may look at freedom as the extension of man's tendency to diminish natural risks by increasing and adequately controlling social risks — freedom creates more open conflict but attenuates the level of aggression by sublimating it commensurably.

5.        Dynamic Conditions of Politics in a Free Society

5.1      Myths Denigrating Politics

5.2      The SO of Rationally Adapting to SO - The Evolution of Skills of Interference

The ability of man to adapt to evolutionary order (= SO = spontaneous order) is itself subject to evolutionary advancement. It is not at all "unnatural" for man to interfere with the natural evolutionary order, in fact, he has evolved to be able to interfere with it successfully. He is even cultivating an evolutionary tool of his own making: cultural evolution, which is far more "rapid-acting" than genetic evolution is.

5.3      Politics a Means of Economising on Vice and Detriment (especially Predation)

5.4      Politics — Leveraging 'The Ultimate Resource'

5.5      'The Political Habitus' — It Is Natural for Modular Man to Act Politically

The Subtle Ubiquity of Political Participation

It is a common, yet arbitrary, unwarranted, and certainly one-sided habit to conceive of political participation in a free society chiefly in terms of acts of centralised, categorical, and ultimate (as opposed to incremental, cumulative, and dispersed) public decision-making — voting a government into power, a decision by government or the electorate to leave the EU e.g.

Important as such highlight events of public politics are, they form only the tip of the iceberg, and, like an iceberg, may be thought of as being supported by a larger bulk less readily taken note of. Not only are the attention-catching rites of public politics undergirded by much pedestrian plodding that — while not seen in the limelight glare — does involve considerable political participation by the citizenry;  civil society is riddled with subtle and subliminal forms of political participation taking place below the threshold of (broad and generally shared) public visibility. Testing the mood of the party base or unexpectedly facing its backlash are among the innumerable instances of building a workable political atmosphere by increment and gradual accumulation. Organising (special interest) into a form fit to be acted upon by the ultimate decision makers is another case in point. However, these are examples that still belong rather distinctly within what I like to call the political infrastructure.There is still more invisible political participation going on outside of the designated stages of public politics.

A lot of what we do in those segments of civil society that do not belong to the political infrastructure is nevertheless political in nature, i.e. it is designed to preserve or change the order of human interaction — to wit, in ways that used to be controlled by political elites. In fact, it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between political elites and impersonal traditional and cultural forces that the former may more or less instrumental in enforcing. At any rate, the effect of the rule of these elites and cultural background forces was to close off large areas of the social universe for activities involving personal discretion by the common people.  

Privatised Politics

Roughly speaking, life was pre-organised for the common man, rather than him organising life of his own accord. This changes fundamentally in a free society, where the individual is making an impact on social affairs by virtue of seeking influence and taking decisions in ways that reflect the new social setting in which she is her own centre of strategic positioning in the games of human interaction. She makes the choice of her profession. She decides on the portfolio of knowledge and education she wishes to avail herself of. She decides herself which among the varieties of convictions (political religious etc.) to favour. She determines the political etc. allegiances she will commit herself to. She is the origin of initiative independent of governmental approval — founding her own firm, political party, circle of friends, choosing her own way of life, being free to build, expand, compose and rearrange a material base that will sustain her. And so on. These used to be decisions reserved to indefeasible authorities. By shifting responsibility to the individual not only do we witness a significant privatisation of political decisions that used to be heteronomously decided on — which shifting does not remove the political character of the issues at hand and hence only extends the area of politics into the private sphere — the scope of possible choices is widened massively introducing options never extant or considered before. Religious freedom — the freedom to personally choose one's religious affiliation — is perhaps the first significant example of relocating political decisions into the "sub-jurisdiction" of the individual. 

Privatised politics is politics by virtue of being a mode capable of solving the quintessential problem of politics: the management of political scarcity. Privatised politics is politics also by virtue of  shaping the political atmosphere and the legitimate options that we may choose from in order to be regarded as behaving in ways that are socially acceptable. Just think of the changes that familial status has undergone in the past 60 years: practices at risk of social ostracism such as divorce, giving birth and raising children out of wedlock etc. have advanced from negative to positive taboos, from being repulsed via social proscription to being hailed as worthy of social protection. 

In pursuing strategies that fall entirely in the realm of private action we often bring about political effects, both in terms of micro-politics and macro-politics. In a highly stylised manner, let me sketch a time-lapse scenario to show what I mean: private action leads to scientific advancement, which revolutionises agriculture; new private forms of agricultural production change rural communities, depleting them (by a combination of agricultural mechanisation and urban industrialisation) and later on rebuilding them as attractive suburban environments — altering the perception of the world in which one lives, thus giving rise to politico-legal changes. Such trends are driven by personal decisions, by private initiative, but nonetheless they change the frame of what counts as socially permissive. Of course, these developments will enclose strategies involving use of the political infrastructure; which only goes to show that private initiative begets public needs, while public responses will tend to accommodate and foster new private initiatives that then produce novel public implications and so on. Litigation in the private sphere, personal and commercial, is a prime example of the privatisation of politics or, if you will, the pursuit of politics by private means. Huge chunks of political scarcity are allotted to private parties to sort out. In turning to courts, private parties seek to influence each other, each hoping to secure social dominance for their interests by having the full force of the law support their concerns.

The Taboo against Corruption

The modern conception of corruption does not oppose the idea of taking influence so as to further one's particularistic goals; on the contrary, it is based on the idea that everyone is entitled to try to bring the public under the influence of their favoured perspectives. What the modern idea of corruption does object to is that anyone should be precluded from exercising the right of taking influence, and the signal aspect of the taboo against corruption that at once occurs to everyone on hearing the term — taking influence on terms that are generally prohibited — ineluctably follows from the precept that every citizen may act as a (special) interest and has a right to compete in the political arena for the recognition of his viewpoint. In other words, corruption is considered to consist in such activities as effectively turn influence-taking from a general right into a privilege of the few or indeed the lone crafty individual, as the case may be. Corruption is viewed as a travesty, threat and mockery of the proper ways — open to all — of impacting the public.    

It is tempting to characterise modern politics as the democratisation of corruption; however, for all its rhetorical effectiveness, the phrasing could not be more misleading. The point is that we have rules that constrain and let loose into the open those energies in us that seek to make an impact on the fellow citizen and the community at large. We can partake in such action only because all of us are equally equipped and equally frustrated in exercising our right to make a difference by persuasion.

6.       Forms of Political Participation in a Free Society

6.1     The Presumption of Democratic Participation - the Taboo against Corruption

6.2     Participation within the Political Infrastructure

6.3     Subtler Forms of Participation within the Political Infrastructure

6.4     Participation outside the Political Infrastructure

Continued here.

Organising the Chapter on Politics (5) — Emerging Gliederung

Image credit. A drawing of Letterkenny in Donegal, Ireland, without the modern buildings. Picture in your mind how building after building gets added to the open space. As the town changes so do the needs, the preferences of the people, and their reflection in politics, law and social custom.

Continued from here. 

Second part of the Gliederung:

The Subtle Ubiquity of Political Participation

It is a common, yet arbitrary, unwarranted, and certainly one-sided habit to conceiving of political participation in a free society chiefly in terms of acts of centralised, categorical, and ultimate (as opposed to incremental, cumulative, and dispersed) public decision-making — voting a government into power, a decision by government or the electorate to leave the EU e.g.

Important as such highlight events of public politics are, they form only the tip of the iceberg, and, like an iceberg, may be thought of as being supported by a larger bulk less readily taken note of. Not only are the attention-catching rites of public politics undergirded by much pedestrian plodding that — while not seen in the limelight glare — does involve considerable political participation by the citizenry;  civil society is riddled with subtle and subliminal forms of political participation taking place below the threshold of (broad and generally shared) public visibility. Testing the mood of the party base or unexpectedly facing its backlash are among the innumerable instances of building a workable political atmosphere by increment and gradual accumulation. Organising (special interest) into a form fit to be acted upon by the ultimate decision makers is another case in point. However, these are examples that still belong rather distinctly within what I like to call the political infrastructure.There is still more invisible political participation going on outside of the designated stages of public politics.

A lot of what we do in those segments of civil society that do not belong to the political infrastructure is nevertheless political in nature, i.e. it is designed to preserve or change the order of human interaction — to wit, in ways that used to be controlled by political elites. In fact, it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between political elites and impersonal traditional and cultural forces that the former may be more or less instrumental in enforcing. At any rate, the effect of the rule of these elites and cultural background forces was to close off large areas of the social universe for activities involving personal discretion by the common people.  

Privatised Politics

Roughly speaking, life was pre-organised for the common man, rather than him organising life of his own accord. This changes fundamentally in a free society, where the individual is making an impact on social affairs by virtue of seeking influence and taking decisions in ways that reflect an entirely new social role whereby she is her own centre of strategic positioning in the games of human interaction. She makes the choice of her profession. She decides on the portfolio of knowledge and education she wishes to avail herself of. She chooses among the varieties of convictions (political religious etc.) on offer. She determines the political etc. allegiances she is going to commit herself to. She is the origin of initiatives embarked upon independent of governmental approval — founding her own firm, political party, circle of friends, choosing her own way of life, being free to build, expand, compose and rearrange a material base that will sustain her. And so on.

These used to be decisions reserved to indefeasible authorities. By shifting responsibility to the individual not only do we witness a significant privatisation of political decisions that used to be heteronomously decided on — which shifting does not remove the political character of the issues at hand and hence only extends the area of politics into the private sphere — the scope of possible choices is widened massively, introducing options never extant or considered before. Religious freedom — the freedom to personally choose one's religious affiliation — is perhaps the first significant example of relocating political decisions into the "sub-jurisdiction" of the individual. 

Privatised politics is politics by virtue of being a mode capable of solving the quintessential problem of politics: the management of political scarcity. Privatised politics is politics also by virtue of  shaping the political atmosphere and the legitimate options that we may choose from in order to be regarded as behaving in ways that are socially acceptable. Just think of the changes that familial status has undergone in the past 60 years: practices at risk of social ostracism such as divorce, giving birth and raising children out of wedlock etc. have advanced from negative to positive taboos, from being repulsed via social proscription to being hailed as worthy of social protection. 

In pursuing strategies that fall entirely in the realm of private action we often bring about political effects, both in terms of micro-politics and macro-politics. In a highly stylised manner, let me sketch a time-lapse scenario to show what I mean: private action leads to scientific advancement, which revolutionises agriculture; new private forms of agricultural production change rural communities, depleting them (by a combination of agricultural mechanisation and urban industrialisation) and later on rebuilding them as attractive suburban environments — altering the perception of the world in which one lives, thus giving rise to politico-legal changes. Such trends are driven by personal decisions, by private initiative, but nonetheless they change the frame of what counts as socially permissive. Of course, these developments will enclose strategies involving use of the political infrastructure; which only goes to show that private initiative begets public needs, while public responses will tend to accommodate and foster new private initiatives that then produce novel public implications and so on. Litigation in the private sphere, personal and commercial, is a prime example of the privatisation of politics or, if you will, the pursuit of politics by private means. Huge chunks of political scarcity are allotted to private parties to sort out. In turning to courts, private parties seek to influence each other, each hoping to secure social dominance for their interests by having the full force of the law support their concerns.

The Taboo against Corruption

The modern conception of corruption does not oppose the idea of taking influence so as to further one's particularistic goals; on the contrary, it is based on the idea that everyone is entitled to try to bring the public under the influence of their favoured perspectives. What the modern idea of corruption does object to is that anyone should be precluded from exercising the right of taking influence, and the signal aspect of the taboo against corruption that at once occurs to everyone on hearing the term — taking influence on terms that are generally prohibited — ineluctably follows from the precept that every citizen may act as a (special) interest and has a right to compete in the political arena for the recognition of his viewpoint. In other words, corruption is considered to consist in such activities as effectively turn influence-taking from a general right into a privilege of the few or indeed the lone crafty individual, as the case may be. Corruption is viewed as a travesty, threat and mockery of the proper ways — open to all — of impacting the public.    

It is tempting to characterise modern politics as the democratisation of corruption; however, for all its rhetorical effectiveness, the phrasing could not be more misleading. The point is that we have rules that constrain and let loose into the open those energies in us that seek to make an impact on the fellow citizen and the community at large. We can partake in such action only because all of us are equally equipped and equally frustrated in exercising our right to make a difference by persuasion.

6. Forms of Political Participation in a Free Society

6.1     The Presumption of Democratic Participation - the Taboo against Corruption

6.2     Participation within the Political Infrastructure

6.3     Subtler Forms of Participation within the Political Infrastructure

6.4     Participation outside the Political Infrastructure

★★★

First part of the Gliederung: 

1.       What Is Politics?

1.1     Politics — Wider Sense

1.2     Politics — Narrower Sense

1.3     Politics in General - Part of the Human Condition

2.       Politics under Conditions of Freedom

2.1     Freedom — Adapting to the Individualistic Age

2.2     Rise of Individualism

2.3     Politics and the State — Adaptations to the Individualistic Age

2.3.1  The New Social Persona - The Autonomous Individual as a State-provided Public Good

3.       The Politics of Public Goods

3.1     Political Participation - Organising the Permanent Redrafting of the Social Contract

3.2     Privatising Law and Life — The Individualistic State as Radical Privatiser

3.3     Disencumbering Justice by Auxilliary Forms of Legitimacy

Politics in a free society is a vast, subtle, and multidimensional cultural network that only as a whole gives meaning, effectiveness, and strength to its more visible institutions such as elections, parlamentarianism, and majority rule.

4.  Political Culture in a Free Society

4.1     Epistemological Functions of Freedom and Politics - Politics as a Discovery Process

4.2     Science and Freedom — "Moral Images" à la Putnam - Open-ended, Incomplete and Changing

4.3     Culture-Questioning and Culture-Shaping in Civil Society

4.4     Politics as Part of the Division of Labour in a Free Society

4.5     Politics and Poppers World 3

4.6     The Long Road from Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom

4.7     The System of Sociogenic Freedom — Politics - Improving State Technologies

 

We may look at freedom as the extension of man's tendency to diminish natural risks by increasing and adequately controlling social risks — freedom creates more open conflict but attenuates the level of aggression by sublimating it commensurably.

5. Dynamic Conditions of Politics in a Free Society

5.1      Myths Denigrating Politics

5.2      The SO of Rationally Adapting to SO - The Evolution of Skills of Interference

The ability of man to adapt to evolutionary order (= SO = spontaneous order) is itself subject to evolutionary advancement. It is not at all "unnatural" for man to interfere with the natural evolutionary order, in fact, he has evolved to be able to interfere with it successfully. He is even cultivating an evolutionary tool of his own making: cultural evolution, which is far more "rapid-acting" than genetic evolution is.

5.3      Politics a Means of Economising on Vice and Detriment (especially Predation)

5.4      Politics — Leveraging 'The Ultimate Resource'

5.5      'The Political Habitus' — It Is Natural for Modular Man to Act Politically

Continued here.

Quote of the Day — Rilke on Living the Questions and the Answers

Image credit.

... be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue ... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into an answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

     Letters to a Young Poet — quoted from Realism with a Human Face by Hilary Putnam.

Sie sind so jung, so vor allem Anfang, und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein.

Quelle.

Organising the Chapter on Politics (4) — Gliederung Emerging

Image credit. I felt rather inspired this morning to continue with the work on my chapter on "politics" — I take the above painting to be capturing the experience of being hit by inspiration. Are we even seeing the Holy Ghost? It was a far more moderate affair with me this morning, needless to say.

1.       What Is Politics?

1.1     Politics — Wider Sense

1.2     Politics — Narrower Sense

1.3     Politics in General - Part of the Human Condition

2.       Politics under Conditions of Freedom

2.1     Freedom — Adapting to the Individualistic Age

2.2     Rise of Individualism

2.3     Politics and the State — Adaptations to the Individualistic Age

2.3.1  The New Social Persona - The Autonomous Individual as a State-provided Public Good

3.       The Politics of Public Goods

3.1     Political Participation - Organising the Permanent Redrafting of the Social Contract

3.2     Privatising Law and Life — The Individualistic State as Radical Privatiser

3.3     Disencumbering Justice by Auxilliary Forms of Legitimacy

Politics in a free society is a vast, subtle, and multidimensional cultural network that only as a whole gives meaning, effectiveness, and strength to its more visible institutions such as elections, parlamentarianism, and majority rule.

4.  Political Culture in a Free Society

4.1     Epistemological Functions of Freedom and Politics - Politics as a Discovery Process

4.2     Science and Freedom — "Moral Images" à la Putnam - Open-ended, Incomplete and Changing

4.3     Culture-Questioning and Culture-Shaping in Civil Society

4.4     Politics as Part of the Division of Labour in a Free Society

4.5     Politics and Poppers World 3

4.6     The Long Road from Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom

4.7     The System of Sociogenic Freedom — Politics - Improving State Technologies

 

We may look at freedom as the extension of man's tendency to diminish natural risks by increasing and adequately controlling social risks — freedom creates more open conflict but attenuates the level of aggression by sublimating it commensurably.

5. Dynamic Conditions of Politics in a Free Society

5.1      Myths Denigrating Politics

5.2      The SO of Rationally Adapting to SO - The Evolution of Skills of Interference

The ability of man to adapt to evolutionary order (= SO = spontaneous order) is itself subject to evolutionary advancement. It is not at all "unnatural" for man to interfere with the natural evolutionary order, in fact, he has evolved to be able to interfere with it successfully. He is even cultivating an evolutionary tool of his own making: cultural evolution, which is far more "rapid-acting" than genetic evolution is.

5.3      Politics a Means of Economising on Vice and Detriment (especially Predation)

5.4      Politics — Leveraging 'The Ultimate Resource'

5.5      'The Political Habitus' — It Is Natural for Modular Man to Act Politically

One of the adaptations to the historical fait accompli of individualism is that individuals seek to accommodate one another so as to maximise their personal advantage. In other words: they endeavour to influence one another in ways that are mutually/generally accepted as fair. A culture of challenging-and-accommodating one another begins to spread throughout everyday life. This creates a double link between individual lives and politics: firstly, people extend the 'political habitus' (the propensity to take influence on others) from their private Lebenswelt into fields of broader public impact. Secondly, the "political habitus" exhibited by man in civil society, that is, the ubiquitous and incessant exercise of taking influence on others to guard and advance personal interests, weaves a dense texture of relationships that are sensitive to effects imposed upon it by politics proper, and vice versa. In a word: politics (as pursued within the political infrastructure of a country) tends to emulate and seeks to humour 'the political habitus' practised millionfold in civil society, while 'the political habitus' will tend to protest against, resist, and correct unwelcome developments in higher level public politics. Both processes, inspiration and resistance devolving from civil society upon formal politics, work through a vast and intricate network of institutions, not all of which being part of the political infrastructure or only marginally so, while nevertheless bringing considerable impact to bear on the decision makers or the atmosphere in which their preferences are formed.

That's enough for today.

To be continued here.    

Staatsverschuldung (4a) - Inflation und Hyperinflation

 

Image credit. Eine der Radierungen von Königin Victoria, deren Verkauf sie zu verhindern versuchte.

Fortgesetzt von hier.

Everyone can create money, the problem is to get it accepted.

—Hyman Minsky

Hyman Minsky war der Meinung: Jeder von uns kann so viel Geld aus dem Nichts zaubern, wie er will. Schwierig sei nur, meinte Minsky, andere Leute dazu zu bewegen, dieses Zauberprodukt auch als Geld ernst zu nehmen.

Minskys geflügeltes Wort bezieht sich auf die Fähigkeit, eine allgemein gültige Währung ins Leben zu rufen. Das ist in der Tat ziemlich schwierig für den Normalbürger. Aber es gibt einen Trost.

Die meisten von uns können wirklich Geld aus dem Nichts erzeugen. Richtiges Geld.— mit dem man rechtschaffen Einkaufen gehen kann. Doch, doch. Das geht — es passiert jeden Tag, weltweit und rund um die Uhr.

Die einzige Voraussetzung hierfür ist, dass Sie kreditwürdig sind. Wenn das der Fall ist, können Sie zu einer Bank gehen und dem betreffenden Angestellten mit guten Aussichten auf Erfolg folgendes Ansinnen vortragen: "Ich hätte gerne Geld in die Welt gesetzt. Können Sie das bitte für mich veranlassen." Viele Banken werden Ihrem Wunsch gerne entsprechen, und nach Erledigung einiger Formalien — insbesondere nach Prüfung Ihrer Kreditwürdigkeit — nagelneues Geld für Sie in die Welt setzen. Eine Bank tut dies, indem sie Ihnen einen Kredit bewilligt und den vereinbarten Betrag Ihnen auf einem Konto gutschreibt, über das Sie dann für Ihre Zwecke verfügen können.

Es ist also so, dass Sie aus irgendeinem Grunde das Bedürfnis verspüren, sich Kaufkraft, die sie nicht haben, durch Schöpfung neuen Geldes zu verschaffen. Und wenn Sie kreditwürdig erscheinen, dann können Sie damit rechnen, dass eine Bank, die sich auf derlei Schöpfungsgeschäfte spezialisiert, Ihnen beim Geldmachen ex nihilo zu Diensten sein wird.

Noch nicht schockiert?

Es kommt noch schlimmer. Ich erzähle Ihnen keine Märchen. Allein deswegen, weil sie kreditwürdig erscheinen, wird es Ihnen in unserer Gesellschaft gestattet, Einfluss zu nehmen auf die uns alle betreffende Preisstabilität im Lande. Doch, wirklich. Indem Sie nämlich einfach so, ganz nach eigenem Gutdünken, neues Geld in die Welt setzen (lassen), tragen Sie offensichtlich zur Inflation bei. Sie und Ihresgleichen erhöhen nämlich mit Ihrer Kreditaufnahme die Geldmenge. Die Preise steigen, dass allgemeine Preisniveau wird angehoben. Und so bewirken Sie über die Jahrzehnte einen kräftigen Verfall der Kaufkraft meiner Währung. Nein, wirklich, dem ist so. Oder zahlen Sie Ihrem Friseur immer noch den Gegenwert von 1,50 DM für einen Herrenschnitt?

So, jetzt wechseln wir mal die Perspektive.

Erinnern wir uns an zwei Stichworte, die oben erwähnt wurden: Kaufkraft und Kreditwürdigkeit. Die Crux in aller Kürze vorab: wenn Ihre Kreditwürdigkeit richtig eingeschätzt worden ist, dann wird die zusätzliche Kaufkraft, die man Ihnen aus dem Nichts hat zuwachsen lassen, im Laufe der Zeit in eine zusätzliche Kaufkraft aller Menschen umgewandelt. Jedenfalls wenn eine genügend große Anzahl der bewilligten Kredite produktiven, den gesellschaftlichen Reichtum ausweitenden Zwecken zugeführt wird.

Vielleicht Sie selbst, und sicherlich viele andere Leute entschließen sich, Geld aus dem Nichts zu schaffen, weil sie Mittel benötigen, um aussichtsreiche Projekte zu finanzieren. Wenn diese Projekte erfolgreich sind, und viele sind es, dann haben Sie/sie mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit dazu beigetragen, die Produktivität der Wirtschaft zu erhöhen und das Produktangebot zu verbessern und zu vergrößern, und zwar so, dass ihre Mitmenschen sich bei einem Lohn, der einer gleichbleibenden Anzahl von Arbeitsstunden entspricht, mehr Waren und Dienste leisten können als zuzeiten, da die Verbesserungen, die Sie mit Ihrer geliehnen zusätzlichen Kaufkraft bewirken werden, noch nicht in Sicht waren.

Sie haben zwar die Geldmenge anwachsen lassen und die Inflation angeheizt, aber der Produktivitätszuwachs und die anderen Verbesserungen (Produkte mit neuen Möglichkeiten und besserer Qualität), für die Sie, dank des von Ihnen aus dem Nichts geschaffenen Geldes, gesorgt haben, übersteigen diese Nachteile/Effekte. Es geht uns insgesamt besser.

Worauf ich hinaus will ist dies: ein gewisses Maß an Inflation ist unverzichtbar in einer florierenden Wirtschaft. Eine moderate Inflation ist etwas Gutes, ein natürlicher Bestandteil des wirtschaftlichen Wachstums. Eine moderat inflationierende Volkswirtschaft versieht Menschen, die zunächst keine oder nur unzureichende Mittel besitzen, mit genügend Geld, um zu aller Gunsten produktiv zu werden — ein Fortschritt, der uns ohne entsprechende Ausweitung der Kredit-/Geldmenge vorenthalten bliebe.

Kreditaufnahme (= Geldschöpfung), Inflation und Wirtschaftswachstum (, d.h. die Zunahme der Qualität und Menge an wünschenswerten Gütern und Dientsleistungen) nehmen im Gleichschritt zu. Das ist die normale Situation einer florierenden Wirtschaft.

Genau: Kredit ist Geld. Wenn ich Kredit habe, wenn ich kreditwürdig bin, habe ich Anspruch auf Geld. Eine auf Kredit basierende Geldwirtschaft eröffnet die Möglichkeit eines fortlaufenden Fortschritts wirtschaftlicher Leistungsfähigkeit, um das leider längst verteufelte Wort vom Wirtschaftswachstum zu vermeiden. In Wirklichkeit ist Wirtschaftswachstum der Kern der Humanität und zugleich die materielle Basis für den Humanismus, wie ich in Theorie und Praxis argumentiere.

Die auf Kredit basierende Geldwirtschaft sorgt für eine ausbaufähige Leistungskraft des menschlichen Wirtschaftens, was wiederum die Basis schafft für mehr Kredit, mehr Geld, mehr (moderate) Inflation, größere Produktivität und mehr Wirtschaftswachstum, was wiederum eine erweiterte Grundlage schafft für mehr Kredit, mehr Geld, mehr Inflation, größere Produktivität und mehr Wirtschaftswachstum, was wiederum eine erweiterte Grundlage schafft für usw. Und so kommt es denn, dass wir heute einen deutlich höheren Lebensstandard genießen, obwohl unsere Währung deutlich weniger wert ist, als vor 50 oder 70 Jahren — wir also seit damals einer kräftigen Inflation ausgesetzt waren.

Deshalb sollten wir uns hüten, Inflation immer gleich als etwas Besorgniserregendes einzuordnen. Das hat nämlich den zusätzlichen Nachteil, dass wir immer gleich an Katastrophen denken, wenn der Begriff auch nur Erwähnung findet. Weswegen wir in Gedanken häufig viel zu schnell dabei sind, gar eine Hyperinflation zu prophezeien.

Die Gefahr besteht, dass wir uns dazu abrichten lassen, auf eine Vokabel so zu reagieren, wie das bestimmte Leute sich wünschen, die uns ein politisches Ziel "verkaufen" wollen. Wir werden nicht mehr informiert, buchstäblich "schlau gemacht", wenn Sie so wollen, sondern lassen uns in eine Fantasiewelt locken, ohne dass uns die Täuschung bewusst wird.

Nachdem wir uns klar gemacht haben, warum Inflation meist gar nichts Schlechtes ist, wollen wir uns im zweiten Teil genauer mit der Frage befassen, was eine Hyperinflation ist — wann also und unter welchen Umständen aus einer "hundsgewöhnlichen" Inflation, die uns nicht bange machen muss, sondern sogar lieb sein sollte, dann doch vielleicht irgendwann eine gefährliche Geldentwertungsorgie wird.

Fortgesetzt hier.

Organising the Chapter on Politics (3) — Towards a Gliederung (Structure)

Image credit. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of browsing the library of the gentleman depicted by Picasso in the above painting: Henry-Daniel Kahnweiler. I wish I could read any book in half a second and still retain and understand everything of it.

Continued from here.

This is not yet a Gliederung, really. I am just feeling my way towards it. But hope to come up with a Gliederung in the next post. The material that I have accumulated during the course of my research is simply overwhelming. I suppose, each of the below headings contains material enough for an entire book.

Anyhow, the below are very basic introductory aspects of politics. "Basic" meaning "important", or "overlooked at great cost". The significance of these basic features is that they facilitate understanding

• the invariance of politics in human history, 

• the elements underlying the inalterable anthropological character of politics, 

• the necessary presence of politics in a free society, and 

• the reason why freedom actually intensifies politics.

As for the last point mentioned, personal freedom for all citizens implies the need to improve conditions under which every individual is entitled to exert influence on their social environment to seek acceptance or compliance with their personal concerns—which is the essence of politics in a free society.

Democratised Politics and the Christian Soul

Politics assumes an entirely different nature once the right to practice it, i.e. to influence the social environment according to one's personal preferences, is equally distributed among the population rather than being available only to some members of society. This novelty redefines the set of admissible political acts and their consequences compared to the ancient model of natural inequalities among the social actors. The ancient paradigm, still fully dominant in Greece and Rome, was fatally punctuated with the emergence of Christianity, which gave relief to the individual by positing the possibility of a personal relationship between every human being and God, and an attendant private sphere of conscience and free will entailing accountable choices and responsibilities uniquely tied to man as the bearer of an individuating soul. It took almost 2000 years for the implications of Christian individualism to work out in the shape that we are accustomed to, and the free individual came into her own most fully only after the Christian prefiguration of modern liberalism had reached the stage of culturally dominant secularisation. (Damn it, this virtually forces me to add a section on that long-winded story.)  

★★★

Definitions and the Political Preconditions of the Release of Human Knowledge

Definitions of the subject matter as offered here and here, and in this post with its intriguing emphasis on the epistemological foundations of political behaviour. As for the last thought, it might be worth following up the conjecture that the epistemological potential of humans may require specific political circumstances to be more fully taken advantage of.

Politics and Socially Enforceable Behaviour

Here I introduce a basic aspect of politics — its role in organising enforceable behaviour in a community. While politics does involve layers of non-coercive activity, they are ultimately supported by and collapse without a fundamental layer of coercion. The state — being the monopolist of coercive power — is the ultimate enforcer of politics. 

Political Scarcity Creating Demand for Politics

From insights offered here, we may conclude that political scarcity — ubiquitous in all human communities —  necessitates (politics as) the management of discord, a task that may involve means of persuasion and compromise to a smaller or larger extent but will always require the reassurance of a system of enforcement. 

Any system of social order is sustained by power. Politics organises the system of power. Therefore freedom too depends on politics.

Politics — A Dimension of Cultural Evolution

Due to his superior intelligence and his ability to develop higher forms of self-conciousness,  man's political horizon is open-ended; man experiments with political possibilities; politics becomes integral part of cultural evolution which is the turbo engine of evolution compared to far more pedestrian genetic evolution. There is a natural evolutionary pressure in human communities to advance social technologies embedded in politics. Politics therefore is part and parcel of man's anthropological makeup. To be human is to practice politics. Freedom is a new stage in this continuous feature of the human condition. To actualise himself, man needs to do be politically active.

That is true in an instrumental sense, but also in a philosophical sense.

The Ontological Function of Politics

Politics is a way for humans to define themselves and their environment. Politics is a reality-building activity for human beings. Being active participants in constructing what counts as reality, humans inevitably revert to political means in order to make sense of the world in which they live.

Incidentally, the presence of voluntaristic and constructivistic elements in human efforts at dealing with what they perceive to be the real world does not at all entail that reality is altogether relative and a matter of arbitrary human construction.

To be continued.

Organising the Chapter on Politics (2) — Monadic Man versus Modular Man

Image credit.

Continued from here.

Monadic Man versus Modular Man

So, for the time being, I think, I shall start off and indeed enframe the chapter on the role of politics in a free society with the leitmotif of individualism and modular man (see also here for a crisp definition). Actually, I may further expand on the difference between monadic man and modular man in a sequel to the series on Misunderstanding Liberalism, hoping to demonstrate that in later exegeses of classical liberalism, individualism morphs into an ideal of independence from society, quite contrary to its original conception as being embedded in social relationships. 

For as classical liberalism actually presents the matter, rather than being somehow magically conjured into a position of self-subsistence, in becoming an individual, man is not at all disencumbered from strong social influences and new forms of communal ties that condition the terms of his relative autonomy. 

Individualism changes the nature of social relations but it does not mark man's departure from social dependencies into a new realm of self-sufficiency. This cannot be stressed enough. 

Once you put your finger on it, it stands to reason that man is always highly dependent on his social environment, whether he is a slave in ancient Greece or a self-made man of the 19th century or a modern bohemian. 

However, the liberal mystifier of individualism tries to persuade its audiences to follow him into a fantasy world of personal self-containment. This exaggerated notion of autonomy gives rise to a similarly stylised, putatively natural opposition between the individual and the state, from which false premise it is not illogical to deduce that politics — which is inevitably productive of collective decisions overriding personal independence — and personal liberty are at odds with one another. 

Hence the modern liberal's aversion to politics. 

Different Readings of Individualism - Monadic Rights and Relational Rights

Corresponding to this asocial reading of individualism is a monadic interpretation of rights and the law that contrasts with a belief in the relational nature of rights and the law. Viewed through monadic lenses, rights and the law are rooted in the individual, they are possessions of her. If no one interferes with these basic possessions of the individual, people will be at peace and the overall social outcome will be satisfactory. The individual is a world unto itself. Rights — as personal endowments of the individual — are of an absolute nature. 

In reality, of course, rights are relational, that is, they are defined and enforced by human interaction, i.e. through the social relations in which people encounter one another. They are relative (though not a matter of relativism) and relational, depending on how the interactions between people transpire. 

That, of course, implies a conclusion that dogmatic liberals of later generations abhor: liberty is negotiable, changeable, subject to alterations in the relative political, economic, cultural, and ideological power among competing claimants to the meaning of freedom. But that, I would have thought, one should expect and indeed welcome in a society of free and equal agents, in a society capable of accommodating the diverse and changing needs of human beings imbued with initiative and autonomous purposes — rather than a regime where liberty is anchored once and for all in a rigid set of absolute rights vested in the individual.

Sure enough, we will grant the individual a number of virtually absolute rights; however, their stability is not an end in itself, but a vehicle that is supposed to be instrumental in ensuring greater mutual adaptability among free and equal agents. You do not want some people to be protected against unwarranted, arbitrarily inflicted and unprosecuted bodily harm while exempting others from such safety. There are many other such rather absolute rights for the individual to enjoy; but they serve the purpose, among other things, to make fair and rational social negotiations among free and equal individuals on what it means to be free and equal feasible and productive, and they are subject to alterations, conditions, and revised interpretations arrived at by these very negotiations that target the meaning of freedom at a given place, time, and set of circumstances. See more on this issue here.

Rights and other determinations of the law produce a vast and complex network of relationships between legal implications and personal consequences. If these relationships are supposed to improve the lot of free and equal human beings the latter must be allowed to participate actively in discussing, defining, and changing these relationships, a large part of which task falls to what I call politics in a narrow sense.

But I am procrastinating. I should be much farther ahead with my Gliederung, which I shall tackle in the sequel to this post.

Continued here.

Organising the Chapter on Politics (1) — Individualistic Politics - Anthropocentric Freedom and Sociogenic Freedom

Image credit.

How do I start? What is the chapter's upshot? How do I get from commencement to conclusion? And what needs to be fitted into the intermediary road?

These are mere notes, intended to help collect my thoughts and find the broad outlines of a chapter's story line — bear with me if the writing appears terse and abstract.

Politics — Wider and Narrower Sense

I suppose, I shall begin with a distinction between politics in a wider sense and politics in a narrower sense. Politics in a wider sense is any effort to make one's social environment comply with one's needs. That would even include bilateral influencing, as in a situation where one spouse is trying to get his partner to accept his demands/desire (say, to go to a sports event rather than to the opera). So there is a good reason why we would refer to certain private activities in small groups or even bilateral relationships as "practising politics". But, of course, this is not the sense in which we more ordinarily speak of politics. Politics in a narrower sense suggests the idea that people try to make an impact on what counts in a community, usually understood to be of rather large a size, even an entire nation made up of millions of people.

The Politics of Freedom

Concerning politics in a narrow sense, I would like to introduce a further distinction, pertinent to our subject matter: politics. I argue that we can make out a clear distinction between politics in the absence of freedom and the politics of freedom — politics in a free society. 

This distinction is very important, because it implies a thesis that makes my account of liberty rather controvertible. Freedom, I argue, is defined by a style of politics quite specific to her. This, in turn, implies that freedom is first and foremost a political phenomenon. We create freedom by acting politically, by practising politics and practising it in a uniquely peculiar way. A free society is necessarily a highly politicised society. High levels of political activism are the hallmark and sine qua non of free societies. 

Anthropocentric Freedom and Sociogenic Freedom

Politics in a free society marks progress that takes us from anthropocentric freedom to sociogenic freedom. 

Anthropocentric freedom is a kind of freedom everyone is capable of; it is the human disposition to act according to one's volition. Even a toddler has plenty of moments in which the little human is anthropologically free. Parents can tell you a thing or two about it. 

Anthropocentric freedom is not yet socially coordinated; it requires social coordination. Acts of anthropological freedom can be inconsiderate and ruthless, even self-destructive and exceedingly anti-social.  Our first encounter with politics is in the cradle and the playpen, when our parents try to coordinate our anthropological freedom (acts of volition) with theirs.

Politics, both in the wider and the narrower sense, is the effort to coordinate people's anthropocentric freedom. Everyone has that disposition to act according to his will, but some among us are able to assert their dispositions more successfully and make them more dominant than those of others - though not even the parents of a baby or tyrants holding sway over a people succeed in it entirely. 

Pre-Individual Man

In acting out our anthropocentric freedom we inevitably confront the same anthropocentric freedom of others, which issues in some kind of more or less satisfactory coordination among the disparate ambitions for freedom, including retreat, subjection, and annihilation. In fact, annihilation, the threat of it, violence, and exploitative subjection of the powerless by the powerful dominate the style in which the social coordination of anthropocentric freedom is carried out in larger communities throughout most of human history. 

The organising principles of politics prior to the ascent of freedom target the individual truncating it by 

authoritarian repression and coercive instrumentalisation, 

hierarchical stratification in an order of natural and immutable inequality, and 

subordination of the person to cultural stereotypes. 

Mutual dependence and submission to ancient common customs, possibly more dominant than violent repression in early small groups such as those of gatherers-and-hunters, do not seem to suffice in larger communities where physical oppression lies close to the surface of order and hierarchy in society. 

Stark and impregnable inequality appear natural to man in pre-liberal human relationships and social orders. A feature partly supported by ideology, partly by the facts of material life. There is not yet within reach a culture nor an economic base capable of sustaining a community where every human is of comparable status — not in every regard, but with respect to highly momentous issues such as support and protection by the law, access to political power, to economic opportunities and other life chances.

Ascent of the Individual

But then, nudged by the rise of Christianity and slowly gestating throughout the entire medieval epoch, Europe gives birth to an entirely new form of human identity: the individual. The spread of individualism as an increasingly predominate cultural pattern within the Christian hemisphere opens up a completely new way — sociogenic freedom, as I call it — in which anthropocentric freedoms are being coordinated in society. Every person is given the same share in certain basic endowments — freedom and equality — whose proportions must be heeded in all the manifold ways in which human relationships may be shaped, changed and multiplied. The specifics of this equal endowment need not detain us at this stage of the argument — what matters is this altogether new perspective whereby, whatever the natural and legitimate inequalities among human beings, they are not absolute any more but must be reflected in relation to the new constraint that every individual is fundamentally equal to and as free as any other individual in certain important respects.

"[T]he core of Christian revelation was the 'grace' which the Christ offered to all equally. That grace held out the prospect of an individual relationship with divinity which transcended social relations and required a new understanding ... " of the individual human being. [Siedentop, Larry (2014), Inventing the Individual. The Origins of Western Liberalism, Penguin, Random  House, UK, p. 312 ]

Coordinating Autonomous Agency

In the era of individualism the task of politics assumes a new dimension. A vital new side-constraint is to be taken into consideration. With the ascent of the individual, the community needs to deal with a new concept and a new material reality: a person's autonomous agency. People act on their own, following up  their private purposes. Individual autonomy on a mass scale must be factored into what politics is trying to achieve. This cannot be accomplished without inviting the individual into the political arena, the commanding heights of politics. You cannot cope with the constraints and pressures of an individualistic world unless you allow the possibility of mass political participation.  If you want to succeed in politics and the holding of power, you need to know what individuals do, what they think, and what they intend to do, and you need to accommodated these data to the minimal satisfaction of those who implacably produce them.

At the same time, if you do, you stand to earn tremendous advantages in term of power and effectiveness, and you are likely to entice an entire population to accept constraints on their freedom so that political power, that you have turned into a service industry, will be able to shower them with goods, public goods, that the individual of its own accord cannot provide but benefits from so as to become a more effective individual. 

The key to understanding modern politics is that it is an adaptation to the individualistic character of society. Neither the individual qua individual nor the specialists in violence and governance can escape from the individualistic nature of society, and hence modern politics is being constantly subjected to the litmus test of how well its measures and institutions help people to be effective individuals.

Rather than an atomistic circumference, rather than a monadic sphere, individualism is a tissue of social relationships set in a complex cultural environment, and it is its thoroughly social character that is a challenge to politics, and needs to be addressed by it.

There is no need to idealise the individual — she is the fundamental constraint for modern politics. There is no need to worship individualism — it simply is the stuff from which society must be made in the present age, for better or worse.

Continued here.