Wading Through Treacle: April 2020

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Christianity is historically puzzling

There are two particularly puzzling features of Christianity, at least to me.

1. How can we make sense of Jesus' message which is both aggressive:

Matthew 10:34-36: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household."

but also pacific:

Matthew 5:38-39, "You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also."

2. How did a religion which seems so contradictory, which was espoused by a failed Jewish itinerant preacher and which was largely rejected by his own people sweep to dominance in the entire Roman Empire within a span of less than 300 years?

These are questions which have been discussed for hundreds of years.

I find the terms of the debate also interesting: it's a prototype of the current culture wars. On the one hand we have a still-powerful theological community emotionally invested in Christianity's claims; on the other hand we have scientific/historical attempts to discern the truth of the historical Jesus and to track the real historical dynamics which led to Constantine and the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE).

It takes real moral courage to peer beneath the mythologising texts of the Gospels to seek kernels of rational truth - the results are not an easy read for believers. The authors I trust most seem to be almost 'on the spectrum' in their committment to truth and their unwillingness to compromise in order to 'avoid giving offense'.

For the historic Jesus I went with Ed Sanders (who favours the apocalyptic prophet model). His book is almost like a thriller or a detective story, and he paints a compelling figure of Jesus. A lot of what Jesus said and did makes sense if he truly believed the Kingdom of God was actually going to arrive - in some transcendent sense - in a matter of days or just a few weeks at most. And Jesus did plainly believe that.

Amazon link

Sanders soft-pedals the resurrection, stating only that something real to the apostles must have occurred. It's plain that Sanders sees this as a sequence of visions for the profoundly emotionally-disturbed followers of Jesus following the crucifixion, as was recounted for Paul.

As far as I can tell, all the post-crucifixion narratives are non-historical. Here is what Bart Ehrman has to say:

"To sum it up, not only during war but also in times of (relative) peace the Romans publicly humiliated and tortured to death enemies of state precisely in order to keep the peace. Jesus was condemned not for blasphemy, not for cleansing the temple, not for irritating the Sadducees, not for bad-mouthing the Pharisees, not for … well, not for anything but one thing. He was crucified for calling himself the King of the Jews.

Only Romans could appoint the King. If Jesus thought he himself was going to be the King, for the Romans this would have been a declaration of war (since he would have to usurp their power and authority to have himself installed as king) (I’m talking about how Romans would have interpreted Jesus’ claim to be king, not what he himself may have meant by it). They may have found it astounding, if not pathetic, that this unknown peasant from the rural hinterlands would be imagining that he could overthrow Roman rule in Judea.

But Romans didn’t much care if someone was a megalomaniac, a feasible charismatic preacher, or a bona-fide soldier in arms. If the person declared “war” on Rome – which a claim to being the King amounted to – the Romans knew how to deal with him. He would be publicly tortured and humiliated, left to rot on a cross so everyone could see what happens to someone who thinks he can cross the power of Rome. There was no mercy and no reprieve.

And there was no decent burial, precisely because there was no mercy or reprieve in cases such as this. After the point was made – after time, the elements, and the scavengers had done their work – the body could be dumped into some kind of pit or common grave. But not until the humiliation and the punishment were complete.

Yes, it’s true that in Jesus’ day, the country was not in armed rebellion against Rome. There was a general peace. But this is the very reason *why* there was peace. Would-be offenders – insurrectionists, political enemies, guerilla warriors, rival kings, enemies of the state – were brought face to face with the power of Rome in a very gruesome way, and most people, who for as a rule preferred very much not to be food for the birds and dogs, stayed in line as a result."

This seems to be the consensual view amongst scholars of the historical Jesus. Note that:

"Mark is the sole source for Joseph of Arimathea. The other three just copy. Mark uses two sources for Joseph. The first is a fictive recreation of Priam, who in Homer seeks the body of Hector. The second is Gen:4-6, where Joseph the Patriarch ask Pharaoh for permission to bury Jacob (Israel). Arimathea is an invented name: in Greek: Ari is best, math is teaching/doctrine, aia is place. So, Best Doctrine Town."

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I'm about to move on to my second area of puzzlement. Here I choose as my guide this:

Amazon link

From the description:

"How did Christianity become the dominant religion in the West? In the early first century, a small group of peasants from the backwaters of the Roman Empire proclaimed that an executed enemy of the state was God’s messiah. Less than four hundred years later it had become the official religion of Rome with some thirty million followers. It could so easily have been a forgotten sect of Judaism.

Through meticulous research, Bart Ehrman, an expert on Christian history, texts and traditions, explores the way we think about one of the most important cultural transformations the world has ever seen, one that has shaped the art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics and economics of modern Western civilisation."

I may have more to say later once I've had a chance to read it.

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Incidentally, do you think Razib Khan is being brave in making these interesting remarks about the origins of a similarly monotheistic religion?
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Sunday, April 26, 2020

What's it all for?

"Our political system is not designed to take the United States in a specific direction. If anything, it was designed to prevent political whims of the moment from leading to tyranny. For Beijing, by contrast, the purpose of politics is to serve the nationalist project of comprehensively modernizing and developing China. It is about time we paid attention to the ideas and institutional processes that drive this effort."

From the testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the hearing on “A ‘China Model?’ Beijing’s Promotion of Alternative Global Norms and Standards” March 13, 2020. “How Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’ Should Have Ended U.S. Debate on Beijing’s Ambitions” by Daniel Tobin (14 pages, PDF).

Cited by The Scholar's Stage.
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I still remember my teenage epiphany: the moment I realised that the UK as a nation wasn't "for" anything. The government had no over-arching goal, no overall mission. We were not hell-bent on reaching the stars at any cost.

It was a while before I realised that this was generally true of the advanced capitalist countries (except in periods of existential war).

Joining together in groups (we are a social animal) is not spontaneous. It requires common cause. Historically causes were not in short supply: the sheer necessities of survival, defence and the rituals to placate an unpredictable world all build communities.

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The Chinese have a long agrarian history - thousands of years of communalism - which deeply informs their culture and ideologies. They also have a national, shared grievance against the foreign barbarians who destroyed their final dynasty and subjugated them more than a century ago. They have been badly treated and want to get back to where they think they belong. On top.

The Chinese mission, currently dressed up in Marxist language, is not a universalist one.

A rich, peaceful capitalist country has no national mission. Its economy thrives on mass atomisation: a flexibility which lubricates the endless churn of the economy. For some people, loyalty to their company or to its underlying mission provides a cause worth adhering to.

In many cases, not so much.

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Hence we have movements: particularly of the young and idealistic. The movements select those whose inclinations align and are shaped in turn by the social needs of their adherents: meaningful activities; a strong ethical narrative thread; social status.

For these elective movements of choice rather than necessity, it hardly matters what the movement's programme is or whether it's even coherent, because in the end it's not about that.

Not at all.
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Saturday, April 25, 2020

My developing views on Marxism: a retrospective

I have been a Marxist since my late teens. In my early twenties I was a member of the International Marxist Group, British Section of the Fourth International. I was learning Leninist-Trotskyist politics and didn't dwell on Marxist economics.

From my mid-twenties I couldn't see any prospects of a Bolshevik-style revolution anywhere in the world. Politics was put on a back-burner while marriage, family and career took centre stage. My intellectual preoccupations in these decades were maths and physics, artificial intelligence, computer science, telecoms network design and so on.

In my sixties my curiosity resumed. I've had time to come to terms with Marxism, to engage with the volumes of Capital, the many books on Marxist economics, and to investigate what Marx actually wrote and believed. I documented this journey through the posts below.

My final conclusions? Marx's methodology is good, his approach to sociology is correct. He's not in the business of peddling self-serving illusions about the way societies work. He lacks, however, a good theory of human nature, which leads him astray as regards the concept of communism. He underestimated how successful capitalism turned out to be and the myriad ways it can successfully address many human needs. Revolution is indeed off the agenda; capitalism is actually threatened by its relentless drive to total automation.

We need to integrate into Marx's general approach what has subsequently been learned about human beings: their material drives, their psychology and their differences, to develop a more profound and truthful sociology.

My summary view: From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology).

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Here are my posts on Marxist theory:

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Adam Carlton, co-author on this blog, wrote this story on total automation: Super-Fab.

Friday, April 24, 2020

"Super-Fab" by Adam Carlton

1: Charity

     They first arrived in charity shops, no-one knew from where. In appearance they were like microwave ovens: cubical things, cavities whose front door came with a screen rather than a metallised window. Soon, however, their true function became apparent: they fabricated things.
     Mrs Chigwell from Bournemouth Children’s Aid took delivery of the parcel. The charity shop was on the high street, one of a cluster. She had been manning the counter for half an hour but business was light. Squally rain outside had deterred passing trade, though as she surveyed the racks of old books and dingy clothes she could see one or two regulars hunkered down at the back, waiting out the heavy morning hours of a long, tedious day.
     The doorbell rang and a young delivery man walked in, staggering under the weight of his package. Mrs Chigwell gave him a tentative smile and beckoned him to place it on the table they used to sort through donations. It seemed quite heavy and cumbersome and at first she thought it might have been a mis-delivery from Amazon. They surely weren’t expecting anything, or at least she hadn’t been told. But Amazon didn’t make those kinds of mistakes, did it?
     Mrs Chigwell beckoned her daughter across to help. She was so proud of Julia. Doctor Julia she reminded herself, with that advanced degree from Imperial College up in London. Julia was down for the holidays, helping her out in the shop. She'd know what to do.
     Julia and her mother carried the box into the kitchen at the back of the store and got it unpacked. The instructions were written in a curious variant of English but were not hard to understand. The first thing to do was to plug the machine into a wall socket.
     Mrs Chigwell smiled. Her passing thought was that they were on the receiving end of a practical joke. It was very elaborate, she thought, could this be something dreamt up by Mr Harris who managed the shop? It was getting near Christmas and at a stretch she could imagine it was the kind of thing he might do, something to lighten the spirits. Could it be fairy-lights?
     Julia read from the instruction flowchart. She mused for a while, trying to make a decision. Finally she said, “I’d like a nice cup of hot chocolate.” Mrs Chigwell openly laughed: her daughter was such a tease. The machine promptly replied--Mrs Chigwell gave a small start of alarm--asking her to open the door and place inside various pieces of food rubbish. It listed the kinds of things it wanted.
     The deplorable state of the kitchen (no-one had cleared up recently) sufficed to provide several slices of stale bread, a plastic bowl of cold, discarded chips and a cup full of water. Mrs Chigwell was again reminded of a microwave as the box hummed, giving out a slight smell of ozone. Five minutes later there was a soft chime and the screen flashed a ready message. Inside Julia found the garbage had been transformed into exactly what she had asked for. She cautiously sampled the piping-hot drink--it turned out to be delicious.
     Children’s Aid in Bournemouth was just one of thousands of outlets which received a ‘Super-Fab’ as they became known. The Internet buckled as people experimented, tested and speculated as to how they worked, racing to confirm that they were indeed trustworthy. A consensus grew that they were the very latest in 3D printers. There were no obvious limits as to what they could produce, provided they got the right raw materials and the result would fit in the box. And they really worked, did just what they advertised.
     So that was the very earliest understanding of the devices. That, and the fact that no-one seemed to know where they had come from.
     Mrs Chigwell set the machine up in a corner of the shop and advertised free food and drinks to the passing homeless people of Bournemouth. The cost to her was volunteer time, power from the mains and leftover rubbish and water which the machine consumed as raw materials. She was not the only one, and in this small way the sum of human happiness increased a trifle in Britain’s run-down towns.

2: Replication

     The machines had an unexpected party piece: they could produce themselves. This was discovered by way of a joke request from Perry Zhang, a student at Manchester University on the second day after the machines surfaced.
     Perry made his humorous suggestion and, to his surprise, was asked to fetch various raw materials. He shoved in some old mobile phones, some plastic water bottles (full) and a few other household items until the machine professed itself happy. After less than ninety minutes the door opened and Perry was able to pull out a number of small rectangular units. After another feed and a further hour, more units became available and thereafter it was a simple matter for Perry to stack these into a cubical shape the same size as the Super-Fab--it turned out there was only one way to do it.
     A faint smell of burning emerged from the assembly as temporary partitions dissolved and internal connections welded tight, and then it became apparent that a second, identical unit calmly squatted in front of Perry. A copy had indeed been fabricated.
     The cost: Perry’s unskilled labour, some surplus electronic devices and other junk and three hours of electricity at the level of a one-bar fire. Perry tested the newly-spawned device until he was sure that it worked correctly, then he gave it to his girlfriend. He wrote up his experience on his social media page, mentioning that the device had told him it could produce a new Super-Fab of any size at all. Useful, it suggested, for making bigger things.

3: Production

     Bill Jones ran a small factory in Birmingham making clocks. He bought in parts from many suppliers and employed skilled workers and advanced machine tools to create his high-quality products. Since you could buy timing devices from many sources at rock-bottom prices, the clock-making business was precarious. Bill’s enterprise survived in an artisan niche, making quirky, individualistic devices for discerning bohemians and specialist customers.
     Bill was imaginative and a go-getter. He bought a Super-Fab from one of the middlemen-sellers who were rapidly springing up and tested it in a spare workshop next to his office. The machine asked for a sample of the clock Bill intended to duplicate. Bill settled on one of his more intricate and expensive ones, a specialist device the Navy used on submarines. The machine also requested the ’blueprints’ in standard CNC G-Code format.
     After some minutes of analysis, the machine requested a list of low-value raw materials--plastics and metals. Bill was easily able to procure these from the factory stockroom. Soon, after the usual humming and ozone, a duplicate clock emerged. Bill thought that it looked identical to those his factory regularly produced at some considerable expense. He sent it for testing; it passed with flying colours, well within all the tolerances.
     Bill thought long and hard.
     First off, I could get this machine to duplicate itself, he thought. Run a few cycles of that and I’d have a rack of them at next to no cost. Then I could let my highly-trained but expensive production workforce go, just keeping a couple of conscientious but unskilled guys to run the Super-Fabs. My existing machine tools could be recycled as raw materials. Then I could churn out clocks across my product range on demand.
     What would it cost? He thought about it: electricity, waste materials and a few ancillary helpers. His costs would plummet; he would make a fortune. But then he thought some more. His competitors were not stupid; they would surely do the same. The price of commodifying clocks would plunge to their basic cost of manufacture.
     And then he had a further thought: why will my customers need me? They could do this for themselves if they’ve got one of these machines. All they need is a blueprint, a specification and they can get that on the Internet just like I do. So in fact I don’t have a business any more. He immediately called his lawyers and arranged a crash meeting to liquidate his company. Would anyone be mug enough to buy it off him?

4: Macroeconomics I

     The effects of the explosion of Super-Fab numbers on the economy were not long coming. The machines could replace much conventional manufacturing which displaced workers from the labour market in droves. Consequently social-security and unemployment-pay demands had never been greater, yet as tax revenues fell the benefit system couldn’t keep up. In many cases benefits were time-limited--but future job prospects for workers in manufacturing had never been bleaker.
     This could have been catastrophic--except that there were now plenty of charities which would provide any worker or family who needed it with a free Super-Fab. Once they had the machine, plus scraps and an electricity supply, then they could make practically anything they needed. So the lack of wages wasn’t an immediate, life-challenging problem.
     Dependence on electric power was, however, an issue; the national grid itself became brittle. Some workers failed to turn up for work since they didn’t really need a full wage. But others, those expelled from the labour force, were finding it difficult to pay for power and other necessities such as rent.
     People discovered, however, that the machines could produce both solar panels and a highly-efficient battery. A new kind of battery pack (a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?) had been designed by some smart ‘makers’ as they were being called--leftist engineers in the emerging counter-economy.
     Soon networked Super-Fabs were talking to each other, exchanging raw materials and sub-assemblies. Some people of philanthropic bent with access to land used their spaces for giant versions of the Super-Fabs. These could produce artefacts as large as ships or aircraft--or transporters to take these giga-machines to wherever they were needed.

5: Robot

     Small businesses like Bill Jones’s clock factory were soon out of business. But perhaps that had always been expected with the march of automation. More surprising was the demise of service jobs such as plumbers.
     Catherine May was perhaps the first person to discover the astonishing versatility of her miracle box. As the puddle emerged from behind the washing machine she sobbed in despair. She had never been able to find a reliable plumber and this emergency was not to be born!
     A small sound, like a trap door opening, warned Catherine that something else was happening. Strange, vaguely threatening devices were emerging from a hitherto-unsuspected opening in her Super-Fab. Catherine desperately rushed across to her six-month-old child in its high-chair to protect it.
     Such instinctive caution was unnecessary, however. The miniaturised crawling and flying things approached the mass of pipes behind the leaking machine and began to inspect them. Soon a larger device emerged from the front aperture of the Super-Fab: something which had arms built for engineering, something that looked like a traditional science-fiction robot.
     Twenty minutes of clunking and squeaking, replacing and lubricating followed, completed by a small amount of mopping. The devices returned to the Super-Fab to donate their bodies for re-use; the machine announced that the problem was fixed.
     “How do you know?” asked a quavering Mrs May.
     “Everything a plumber knows, I know,” said the device with not a trace of pride, “I’m on the Internet.”
     And so plumbers, hairdressers and other personal-service companies were rendered obsolete--and consequently bankrupt.

6: Macroeconomics II

     Once they were networked and had access to limitless Internet skills, the Super-Fabs were able to substitute for vast swathes of the existing economy. But what about big engineering? What was the story on dams and motorways? These were exemplars of social artefacts, things which it made no sense for any one user to dream up or install even if their Super-Fab had the theoretical capability.
     In fact the Super-Fabs did have the capacity for heavy engineering. The networked devices were soon discovered to be mining, refining and transporting raw materials extremely cheaply--most of the cost was simply power. They would, however, do none of these things by themselves; someone had to request it. That someone could only be government. Private entrepreneurs had no personal use for such monstrosities since they could no longer figure out any way to make money from them.
     Why was that? Because with costs tending to zero, no private company could avoid being undercut by a competitor who could charge even less for the finished product. There had always been a left-wing criticism that some social needs were under-supplied because no capitalist would invest to provide the necessary product.
     The Super-Fabs, however, could produce human necessities at zero cost. They were like the blackberry bushes which grow in the natural world, offering their bounty to anyone who stretches out a hand, their miracle of sun-powered nanotech provided free of charge. The Super-Fabs would always crowd out a capitalist employer who could not price at cost and stay in business.
     Government was all that was left.
     What about the banks and investment? That too was a short story. The banks were impoverished by the drastic shrinkage of the capitalist sector of the economy, the lack of investment opportunities. But the role of money did not vanish. There was still a need for a means of exchange and a store of value. It was noted that the banks had predated capitalism and would outlast it, at least for a while.
     However necessary it might be though, Government was in crisis. Perhaps this refuted the communist ideal, or perhaps it was what Engels had meant by 'the administration of things rather than people'.

7: Governance

     The Prime Minister has arranged a private briefing at a secluded country house in Norfolk. This would have been in month three or four. The house is a fine example of Palladian architecture set in sculpted grounds. It has been rescued from the National Trust by a government which understands the periodic need for a refuge from everyday events.
     The PM sits alone in a large wood-panelled room, savouring the silence. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and the early spring sun sends shallow rays across the finely-mown lawns towards the lake. Birds take their leisure or skim the surface: ducks, he thinks, or perhaps grey geese. It’s hard to be sure at this distance. He sips his coffee and strives to be at one with the landscape. His momentary peace is spoilt by the muffled sound of the door scuffing open, marking the entrance of his civil service science adviser.
     “Who’s on first?” the PM asks.
     “The engineer.”
     “When do we get on to economic policy?”
     “This afternoon.”
     The first expert is wheeled in, a professor at Imperial College. The science advisor points her towards the lectern and its projection screen. The PM dunks a Brontë biscuit in his mud-coloured milky coffee--a secret vice--and sits back expectantly to listen. The engineer has been told to keep it simple. She explains that the Super-Fabs are part machine but mostly organic. Someone has expanded biology to encompass functions which are presently carried out by engines and electronics.
     “For example, mass-spectrometry and data packet routing are carried out by highly-modified biological organelles.”
     The Prime Minister has no idea what this means, so he does that thing politicians do, he changes the subject.
     “Do we know who did this? I mean, could we do this?” he asks.
     “It’s certainly beyond us,” replies the engineer, “It’s the kind of thing people have speculated about--synthetic biology. Probably designed by advanced AI systems. It’s certainly way beyond anything achievable by human experts.”
     “They tell me these Super-Fabs can now reproduce like amoeba,” says the PM, “So how smart are they? Are they spying on us?”
     The professor shakes her head in irritation.
     “Prime Minister, the really important thing here is the breakthrough to human-level intelligence. The AI systems on board these boxes can accomplish everyday tasks, like plumbing or car repairs or hairdressing, better than any human. They’re networked through the Internet and they learn from each other. They synthesise special robots and drones to do jobs and those robots come with a wider variety of sensors than humans ever had. They are so much more advanced than we ever imagined artificial general intelligence would be, surely the result of bootstrapping.”
     The PM doesn’t get this either but thinks it might be important; he glances at his science advisor.
     “She means a succession of AIs each designing a smarter version of themselves. In a few generations you might get to where the Super-Fabs are now. The problem has always been that very first step, the starting-off point. But it looks like someone finally did it.”
     The professor says sorrowfully, “You ask if they’re spying on us. Why on earth would they even bother?”

8: Abundance

     There is an evening debate at the London School of Economics. It's between two leading economists of differing persuasions. Only one will be invited to brief the PM, so the stakes are high. The chair-person addresses the student audience in the vast darkened auditorium.
     “It’s a great economic paradox we see today. The economy is in free-fall, a major contraction with bankruptcies everywhere. Yet people have never been so well provided for. Tonight we will attempt to find out why.”
     The format is a prompted discussion with the chair. The neoclassical guy, a professor based at LSE, opens by explaining that the Super-Fabs have changed the market-structure to such an extent that competition is killing existing businesses.
     “You may remember,” the professor says, addressing the shrouded mass of students, “how in your microeconomics course you were taught about perfect competition. Companies have to accept the market price on offer and a company’s profit is simply the general rate of interest.”
     The chair seeks controversy to liven things up: “But no company wants to be in that kind of a market, with no surplus funds for R&D, no spare capital for anything risky or speculative, no-one making any real money. It’s marginal whether to invest at all in a sector where perfect competition holds sway, isn’t it?”
     The LSE man smiles agreeably, waving his hand, “The Super-Fabs are dragging every sector of the economy into the very model of perfect competition. It's an excellent outcome. It's well-known this is Pareto-optimal for social welfare.”
     The chair mutters, almost inaudibly, “And yet the economy is close to collapse with an investment strike and no tax revenues.”
     “Not so fast,” interjects the heterodox professor from King’s College, taking on her LSE colleague, “All your talk of normal profits hides the fact that workers in a capitalist economy have to produce more value in the working day than they cost in their wages--that’s where the profits come from. But these machines, these Super-Fabs, aren’t paid wages. Once you have one you can produce goods and services at essentially no cost. The machines are even providing their own power supplies now--and sharing raw materials and components.”
     The chair-person hasn't heard this news.
     “Oh yes,” the King’s College professor confirms, “It seems that they’ve started doing those things. And once they show a new capability it spreads pretty fast.”
     The chair-person defends orthodoxy, “You can’t compete with free,” he objects, “No-one will invest. The economy is going to tank--unless,” and here he stares almost wildly at the assembled students, “unless they make the Super-Fabs illegal!”
     The heterodox economist rolls her eyes, “An employer will only invest if they expect to make money, but these machines are zero-cost slaves: both costs and revenues are tending to zero. That kind of competition is making capitalist production impossible. As my bourgeois friend here,” she points to the chair, “correctly states, you can’t compete with free.”
     The chair looks irritated at this faint praise.
     “However we have been here before,” she continues, “We’re transitioning to an economy the ancient Greeks or Romans would have been very familiar with. With automated slaves seeing to production there will still be plenty of administrative tasks, deciding those things which affect vast numbers of people. Greek and Roman politicians were justly famous. And we will have so much more in the way of resources. The Prime Minister may well be lauded as the Cicero of the new age!”
     There is applause at this, although some in the audience perhaps recall that Mr C. came to a rather sticky end.
     The King’s College economist is finishing up. “The Marxists always believed that capitalism would create the conditions for its own supersession. They thought it would have to be something violent like a Leninist proletarian revolution but that has never seemed remotely likely.”
     At this a small group at the back of the room unfurls a red banner adorned with a hammer and sickle and starts to hiss. But they calm down before they can be ejected; even they are interested in where the speaker is going with this.
     “But even Marx, you know, had some inkling of the truth. In his Fragment on Machines he predicted that capitalism would end up replicating and improving on every human ability, both physical and mental, thereby eliminating the need for human workers entirely. Capitalism is finally being vanquished not by the ascendant proletariat but by that class's very departure from the scene. And so we are where we are.”
     Amidst the applause it was enthusiastically agreed that King’s College would brief the Prime Minister.

9: Utopia

     Not every state in the world settled upon a managed transition like those in the advanced economies of the West. There were autocratic regimes which did indeed try to ban the Super-Fabs, imposing draconian penalties for possession. It was as if they had tried to ban breathing the very air itself, so they could maintain the sale of oxygen bottles.
     And so the world turned itself upside-down, roughly and smoothly, becoming a post-capitalist planet. It seemed there were a lot of things that ordinary, decent folk had always wanted to do. And now they had their chance.

10: Mallorca: some months later

     Julia lies on her beach-recliner next to Timothy's, listening to the quiet hissing of the waves. She is already regretting their impulsive hook up.
     Behind them, gleaming white rental apartments front the shoreline. There are no staff. With the complete hegemony of the Super-Fabs, hotels have finally become Le Corbusier's famed machines for living in. Julia beckons a passing beach-minibar for a refreshing chilled fruit cocktail.
     Timothy is from a well-off family--which had meant something tangible before the transition. He's currently working on his doctoral thesis: The Exogeneity of Moral Values within Marxian Ontology at Columbia University. The Old Philosopher’s work has achieved such a comeback over the last year.
     Julia herself is from the other side of the tracks, a sleepy, down-at-heel seaside town in England called Bournemouth. By grit and native talent she worked her way up to an advanced degree in ecology; her thesis on the dynamics of species in competition with each other.
     “Marx was right,” murmurs Timothy, mentally reviewing part of his own great work, “Once scarcity was abolished people were finally able to live up to their true potential.”
     “Yet the Super-Fabs can make guns, drugs and instruments of torture. They can and they do.”
     It’s a familiar argument: is the glass half-full or half-empty? Timothy isn’t really concentrating--these arguments bore him. He simply rolls out the standard rebuttal.
     “Most crimes disappeared when there was abundance. No need to steal, after all. Pretty much every human want is satisfied by something or other in the Super-Fab’s repertoire, there's no need to grab it by cunning, trickery or force. And the people’s police and justice system are perfectly able to mop up the rest, especially given the high-tech surveillance and enforcement kit the Fabs made for them.”
     Julia has been reading the local news reports. Something strange is stirring in the sun-baked volcanic interior of the island. Something which speaks to her professional training.
     “The global network of Super-Fabs now forms a completely-parallel ecology,” she says, “They're mobile and they reproduce. They were designed to serve us but things could easily go a little haywire. Some replication glitch, some programming error or hack would do it. Their and our basic interests are far from totally aligned. After all, God isn’t making much in the way of new territory, are they?”
      She sips her rapidly-warming drink.
     “The Romans were always most scared of a slave revolt, weren't they? That's why their punishments were so draconian.”
     Timothy doesn’t see how any of this could relate to his thesis. It seems orthogonal to the social relations of post-capitalist society, the economics of the transition to fully-automated luxury communism.
     Just scaremongering and doom-speak.
     Julia is not nearly as much fun as he’d hoped.
     Neither of them notices the black shapes emerging from the waves. Alligator-bodies with spectral eyes and laser-mouths crawling in their dozens out of the surf, here to recycle the garbage and claim their world for ever.

END

You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories" (2019)

and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Donatien's Children" (2022).

Feel free to purchase both!

Thursday, April 23, 2020

From Marxism to (methodological) nihilism (via sociobiology)

Amazon link

I was thinking again about Thomas Sowell's book which I mentioned back in March. Then I said:

"Great analysis of Marx's sociological and economic thinking. Best summary if you are already familiar with the economic concepts (c + v + s etc). But his conclusions, where he indicates why he is no longer a Marxist, are just ... terrible. Not wrong: just superficial, lacking insight.

Example thought: 'Marx's economics work is not used by modern economists: it's like it never existed at all'.

Right." [1]

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This is what I think Thomas Sowell should have said.

So here's the problem, well-rehearsed in the literature. It's not conceptually hard to understand societies in terms of organised and recurrent patterns of human behaviour. Modes of production are not hard either: they reflect different ways of organising viable human life whether by hunting and gathering; nomadic pastoralism (and raiding); agrarian slave-societies; feudalism - another agrarian form; capitalism - based on the separation of the mass of people from their own means of livelihood plus private ownership of the means of production; or state-socialism - where the means of production are (mis-)managed and (dis-)organised by a centralised bureaucratic state.

Marx does a good job of telling it like it is about the actual workings of capitalist economies - and other modes of production although his main interest and focus is capitalism. His is an insightful sociology. It has the ring of truth. Lots of consequences make sense, like the presentational-weakness of the state in advanced (pure) capitalist economies - the state is a servant, a tool of a status-quo, it supports the elites rather than being the elite itself, as it would be in more coercive modes of production.

But conventional Marxists admit that their doctrine does a poor job in explaining the family, nationalism and any form of society superseding capitalism. Again, the reason is familiar: human nature was under-theorised, over-abstracted and rose-coloured in Marx's own writings (species-being). Later in the tradition, blank-slateism, the theory that there is no human nature, it's all 'socially-conditioned' (what is this causal thing called society, I wonder?) became definitive, perhaps as the guarantor that communism could really be both different and even possible.

It's tempting instead to cite the relevant evolutionary biology, to think through what kind of agency biological humanity actually is. And there is a modern, well-attested sociobiological corpus to draw upon. We have a narrative about a rather physically-weak, highly-social but xenophobic primate still driven by primal needs as refracted through a strongly-social organisation.

The interesting sociobiological challenge: how to explain ultrasociality, the creation of mass non-kin societies unique in the animal kingdom? And the answer: people only really care about their kin and close friends, where said emotions mediate inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism. What is unique about humans is symbolic affiliation: rallying around the flag of some idea (nation, ideology etc).

Mediated by language and signs, enabled by language and abstraction, conducted in terms of fictive kinship (brothers and sisters, mother and father) the scalable results create an environment of superior fitness for those who can make it work. Empires are good for gene propagation, especially the trickle-down genes of elites.

This emergent, sociobiological truth does not bode well for the messianic side of Marxism which, after all, is the driver of its politics. If humans are like that, happy to have their biological needs fulfilled with food, shelter, mates, projects and causes, isn't capitalism sort of getting the job done? And doesn't the unbounded altruism seemingly required of a post-capitalist mode of production seem rather ... infeasible?

As E. O. Wilson famously remarked: wonderful theory, wrong species - he considered Marxism more suited to clone-ants than to humans.

So you can fix Marxism, complete it even, but then you see that all the moralism (evil capitalists, heroic proletarians, oppressed 'minorities') simply expresses the biological imperatives of groups in their different positions within the mode of production. And equally, of course, the biological needs of those articulating Marxist/leftist critiques in their own bids for status and position.

And it ceases to be clear that capitalism can't successfully address the biological (including the psychological) needs of those within its specific form of social organisation. And it becomes very unclear whether there even exists a variant form of social organisation which better leverages human psychology.

Of course, one can always envisage modifying human psychology itself - we could engineer human ants, the ultimate in human-domestication.

So a corrected, improved Marxism rooted in an evolutionary, genomically-informed sociobiology is a superior sociology. It's still subversive of elite status games, economic fractures and self-serving narratives but it crucially lacks a normative directional impulse. Crudely, it tells you how it is but does not suggest anything special to do about it, nor does it speculate teleologically about any predicted or superior future.

It gets worse. Once we conceptualise human beings as just a bundle of sophisticated biological drives, a bunch of self-replicating systems honed by evolution to be rather successful at time-of-writing, we see ourselves reduced (in the technical sense) to just another fascinating phenomenon of physics and chemistry. Who would have thought ...

The collapse of normative discourse into mere description: the ethics and manifest destinies of electrons, protons and neutrons.

Welcome to Nihilism: the derangement of the unanchored intellect.

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I myself try to resist this slide, despite its utterly compelling logic. I take my, frankly emotional, recourse in this formulation due to Lukács:

"Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.

Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders."

Dialectical materialism: an agent-centric view of situated history, carried through by real, biologically-valid human beings in the ecological circumstances in which they find themselves.
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Notes

[1] Marx was trying to analyse and understand capitalism as a particular form of human social organisation. This is not interesting to 'modern economists' who are trying to analyse for policy purposes the behaviour of firms, banks and governments within that mode of production. The human-activity substrate is abstracted away in favour of model-attributes represented by differential equations and equilibrium conditions. As a rough analogy consider the difference between a sports psychologist and a referee or umpire.
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Monday, April 20, 2020

You have permission to do nothing!

The psychology of lockdown: you have permission to read, relax, exercise and not worry about accomplishing anything.

Curious.

Amazon link (the cover is the Conversion on the Way to Damascus by Caravaggio)

I have just finished reading this astonishingly violent, immersive, visceral, sexual and situated account of Paul and the formation of the early Church. It wears its vast learning and research lightly. It's altogether brilliant. I was intrigued: wanted to discover more about the drivers and trajectory of the early church. Who better to consult than Michael White?

Amazon link

My briefest possible summary of his masterly summation/evaluation of the scholarship. Judea and Galilee were part of the territory administered by Herod the Great as a client-king under the Romans. According to Wikipedia: "Upon Herod's death, (4 BCE), the Romans divided his kingdom among three of his sons and his sister—Archelaus became ethnarch of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, Herod Antipas became tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, Philip became tetrarch of territories north and east of the Jordan...".

Archelaus proved incompetent and his provinces came under brutal and insensitive direct Roman rule. The result was a flourishing of Jewish messianic and apocalyptic movements. The Jesus movement was one such, rather apolitical and eschewing political violence, focused more on communal solidarity and egalitarianism as a precursor to the generally-held expectation of the imminent arrival of 'The Kingdom' and the overthrow of the Roman oppressors.

The Jesus movement added the belief that - following Jesus' crucifixion c. 30-33 CE - Jesus himself would lead the process in the Second Coming. The Resurrection (a concept already present in Jewish scripture and Graeco-Roman culture and myth) provided a guarantee, a kind of preview, of a generalised resurrection of the bodies of the faithful. Certainly without the inspirational 'visions' of the (bodily) resurrected Christ, the Jesus movement would simply have become one more failed Jewish cult.

Things did not end well, however, for Jewish apocalyptic expectations of imminent victory. The Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE was crushed by Vespasian and his son Titus. The defeat demolished ideological certainties. The Jesus movement outside of Judea (cf. Mark's Gospel) reframed the events as a delay, a clearing of the way prefiguring Jesus's forthcoming arrival; meanwhile the mainstream Jewish community reforming in Galilee initiated the Pharisee-driven rabbinical movement, laying the foundations for later Judaism.

The lines were soon drawn and the Jesus movement anathematised. Matthew's Gospel is a Jewish-Christian counter-polemic, a response to these intense pressures, written within the Jesus movement in Galilee at the time.

The Jesus movement persisted as a low-level Jewish sect but its message proved far more popular amongst gentile sympathisers. It had an appeal particularly to slaves, women and the lower orders - the first shall be last etc. As the social weight of the Jesus movement moved into the Gentile communities in Asia Minor, around the Adriatic and in Rome itself (Paul, Luke) the ideology of the Jesus movement decoupled from its previous deep Jewish, Old Testament roots becoming more abstract, more symbolic, more spiritual (John's Gospel). The community began to bureaucratise with rules for liturgy, leadership structure and an approved canon of sacralised texts.

The Jesus movement appropriated more of its surrounding Graeco-Roman culture, (esp. the Stoics) becoming pre-adapted to its subsequent role as social glue for the later Empire (out of scope for White's book).

Michael White presents an appealingly materialist understanding of the way ever-changing social conditions and pressures drive ideological creativity and innovation ... and then ruthlessly select for those which give meaning to the social tasks facing the sect's adherents.

It is a truth which should be universally acknowledged, especially today ...

Monday, April 13, 2020

Pictures of our times

One session of exercise per day

The hairdressers are all closed but we're prepped

Clare has the requisite skills

This is the twenty-first day of lockdown and R0 is (apparently) dipping below 1.

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Sunday, April 05, 2020

COVID-19 Notes: Politics vs Epidemiology

This whole COVID-19 thing has been a laboratory experiment in human behavior. The virus is invisible and for many people there has been no direct experience of the pandemic. So people's reactions are based on what they are being told and instructed to do via the media.

On the foreign TV stations today (CNN, EuroNews) there were video sequences of UK people enjoying the parks in the sunshine over this sunny weekend - in violation of the lockdown. In our own news channels (BBC, ITV) not so much. No copying, please!

The media find themselves in a difficult position: the government fears the fundamental irrationality of the masses and therefore declines to present the models from which they're working ... and the options they're considering.

The culture wars, in all their social momentum, aptly demonstrate how much political force can be assembled in support of nonsense. Who'd risk it?

The media could call them on this, but they also understand how dangerous it is: they hold themselves on a leash, ask seemingly-tough (but rather general) questions on secondary issues and don't challenge the inevitable obfuscatory replies they get from the politicians and health bureaucrats.

I agree this is both sensible and necessary: I merely draw attention to the fact that it's theatre. It also makes everyone involved look kinda stupid as they walk on eggshells.

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It's possible (while mixing a few metaphors) to read between the lines and figure out the small print of government strategy. Right now it's all about suppressing the early exponential phase of infections and building NHS capacity plus testing; in a month they will probably let the 'young' out - festooned with tracing apps - and keep the 'old-retired' cocooned. Not a hard sale. There will be much official wriggling around on 'intrusive' mobile phone apps to lubricate buy-in.

Come the summer the economy will reboot, in fits and starts, with some fumbling since the data on infections/immunity will still be too sparse and underdetermined.

Then as we wheel into the autumn the recession will bite in earnest. I expect 2020/2021 to be the lost years as the zombie-sector of the economy caves in with mass unemployment and bankruptcies.

The economic green shoots are postponed till late 2021.

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What are we doing? We have the exercise bike parked in the hall and we both do 5 or 10 minutes a day at a pant-inducing rate. I jogged the 1.2 km 'round the block' yesterday in a preliminary 7 minutes and 10 seconds; my target is a minute quicker.

Important to prep the respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

"Adam Bede" by George Elliot

Clare has discovered audio books on Kindle - now heavily discounted - and is pictured listening to "Adam Bede".

Amazon link

I am on book six of Chung Kuo and still engaged with the agents of progressive change being uniformly unpleasant and/or psychopathic while the T'ang leadership representing the status quo (= cultural death) are elegant, intelligent and refined. SF opera on the grand scale.