Re Things, processes, dialectics, individuals (by ANG666 on 01/21/2004)

"...Bush is locked into a historical process not of his making, fighting a battle that was forced on him by terrorists created in part by earlier actions of the power he represents."

IF you were to curb your presumptions you might have a chance at genuine understanding. So U.S. power is the cause of fanatics attacking the U.S.? Could your assumptions and perceptions be more leftist-cliche and unreasoned? Since the 70s Saudi Wahhabism has held as its goal the undermining and Islamization of the West (not unlike our indigenous terrorists - the progressive left). And that is merely a foundational percept advanced by the Islamic faith and its doctrines. U.S. actions, past and present, are about as influential as say, the actions of a child infested with head lice. All the parasite considers is the presence of a warm host. Read Spencer's ONWARD MUSLIM SOLDIERS if you have the open-mindedness for a scholarly analysis of the Islamic phenomenon. The Saudi clerical plan to undermine the West was conceived long before the U.S. had any significant political involvement in the ME, although Britain was making enemies during that time. You sport the word Imperialism like a deadbeat drunk sports a lurid tatoo. Educate yourself rather than following your emotions. There's adequate, reliable literature for the former.

Re:Things, processes, dialectics, individuals (by ANG666 on 01/21/2004)

"One knows that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself — and so on.”

Not so self-evident as you'd prefer it to be.

I find food necessary for my subsistence. But that is not born of accident; my body is a necessary result of my parents' desire and intention of procreation. My survival, as well, is a necessity as I would not choose starvation or suicide. And that is no accidental choice or misunderstanding. Will and choice are fundamentals that, in some persons, do not submit to further dissection. Starting points. Engles first intent was to undermine rationality, a demon that if left to its natural course would ultimately undermine his utopian dream. Read some Hayek.

quick reply to ANG666(by kerrb 0n01/22/2004)

reply to ANG666:

Thanks for the Hayek and Spencer Onward Muslim Soldiers referrals - you've given me a bit of reading to do, I've had a quick search and both authors seem well worth reading - I can't promise a quick evaluation of their positions but I will have a close look at Hayek in particular and eventually get back to you

I use the word Imperialism to mean a stage of capitalism where the country involved exports capital to other countries, so, of course, the US fits that definition

Your suggestion that US actions in the ME, such as support of Israel, has not contributed to the targetting of the US by Muslim fundamentalism strikes me as being ridiculous - sure they hate the West (modernism) in general but the target of 9/11 illustrates that they hate the US in particular

You identify food, procreation, survival and free will as necessities, devoid of accident and accuse Engels of having a utopian dream

My quick response to that would be that the whole process of biological evolution occurs by a process of natural selection of random variation and there are lots of accidents involved in that process. But I think the points you raise here deserve more than a quick response so I need to read Hayek and a few other things, like Dennett's Freedom Evolves first.

Hayek and Engels (by kesa on 01/22/2004)

ANG666 scoffed at this quote from Engels:

"One knows that what is maintained to be necessary is composed of sheer accidents and that the so-called accidental is the form behind which necessity hides itself — and so on.”

and then went on to say:

"Not so self-evident as you'd prefer it to be. "I find food necessary for my subsistence. But that is not born of accident; my body is a necessary result of my parents' desire and intention of procreation. My survival, as well, is a necessity as I would not choose starvation or suicide. And that is no accidental choice or misunderstanding. Will and choice are fundamentals that, in some persons, do not submit to further dissection. Starting points. Engles first intent was to undermine rationality, a demon that if left to its natural course would ultimately undermine his utopian dream. Read some Hayek."

____________

My comment:

I didn't know much about Hayek until tonight but after looking around on the web and dipping into Virginia Postrel's book The Future and its Enemies I've now got a bit of an idea.

From what I've been able to work out, telling Bill to "read some Hayek" doesn't make much sense at all. Despite his enthusiasm for free market capitalism, Hayek's views on the role of necessity, chance and human rationality are in some ways rather similar to Engels'.

For instance Milton Friedman (the economist), descrines Hayek's most significant contribution to economic theory as having explained "how our present complex social structure is not the result of the intended actions of individuals but of the unintended consequences of individual interactions over a long period of time, the product of social evolution, not of deliberate planning."

Hayek's mission was to defend free market capitalism against collectivism and central planning. I don't know enough to describe his views in detail but it seems to me that there's a progressive side to them in that he is against the idea of aiming for stability and equilibrium, arguing along the lines that it’s a mistake to see an economy as evolving towards some sort of static end-point, that to try to guide it in the (perceived) correct direction will lead to trouble because "in the real world change is constant". So he was against attempts by capitalist governments to develop central, top-down economic plans - and of course he was also against what he saw as "socialism" in the USSR (ie socialism = a state run economy).

I won't attempt to launch into a discussion about why I would characterise what Hayek called "socialism" in the USSR as "state capitalism". At this stage I'd rather just say a bit more about Hayek's arguments against central economic planning because its interesting to see how despite being characterised as very right-wing, he also shows a good understanding of the way things develop, change and move forward (continuously) - and on this level his way of looking at the world is certainly not the refutation of Engels that ANG 666 seems to think it is.

Here's a quote from an essay he wrote (in 1945) called "The use of knowledge in society":

"I have deliberately used the word "marvel" to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for "conscious direction"--and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously--should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of out utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.

"The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up."

End quote

______________

If I wasn't too tired (rapidly losing brainpower here..) I would attempt to say more about Hayek's views on self-organising systems because contrary to what ANG666 implied, there is clearly a similarity between his views and some of what Engels wrote in the section of "Ludwig Feurerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (see the excerpt from this that Bill posted yesterday). Interestingly, in the 1920s Hayek was involved in ground-breaking work in the neuroscience area! He worked alongside Hebb (famous neuroscientist) to produce the Hebb-Hayek synaptic connection model of learning, memory and classification (e.g. the so called Hebb-rule, Hebbian synapse or cell assembly model). In 1954 he finally published an account of this work along with a theory of the human brain as a distributed neural network - foreshadowing the current connectionist approach to the modelling of cognitive processing by many decades. I would say that this early interest in the structure of the brain would have been very influential in sugesting to him that far from being "fundamentals", the huiman capacity for "will" and "choice" are emergent features of very complex systems (vast interconnected networks of (individually dumb) neurons. His model of the brain involved no central boss or supervisor - the similarity to his economic model is obvious.

A final point which doesn't flow directly from the above (I'm definitely too tired to connect it properly)"

When Engels talks of "what is maintained to be necessary" being "composed of sheer accidents" he's not talking of something being accidental in the way that being involved in say, a train derailment is an accident. He uses the word "accidental" for any event that didn't have to happen (in the sense of being somehow inevitable). One can do something intentionally but its still "accidental" because it wasn't necessary for that event to occur. In that sense anything we choose to do is "accidental" ( or contingent) - in contrast to any process that unfolds ineveitably (like growing older). So although it could seems as though Engels sees human beings as lacking agency - as somehow proceeding through life via a series of unintended accidents, this isn’t correct.