What makes us free

In these happy days when one can almost believe that the Murdoch empire is finally in retreat, I come across a splendid quotation, almost two centuries old, that tells us a lot about the way we liberate ourselves from his ilk - and from other over-weaning corporate egos and the under-achieving politicians who play at representing us. It's from the radical journal Black Dwarf in 1817:

States must either proceed, or retrograde. While we contented ourselves with boasting of our advance, we have been silently, but rapidly falling back... The people ought to remember that they are the guardians of the constitution. Instead of that the simpletons expect protection from the constitution; which is in fact nothing but the recorded merits of our ancestors. The country that boasted of being free, because Magna Carta was enacted; when the least share of penetration would have taught us, that Magna Carta was enacted only because our ancestors were determined to be free. Our ancestors, with swords in their hands, and the tyrant John on his knees before them, would have been just as free, whether they had insisted on the signature of Magna Carta, or not. Their freedom was in their power, and in their will.

The author was Thomas Wooler (1786-1853). His words are quoted by Edward Vallance at the very conclusion of his Radical History of Britain.

A proper education

As all too many parents will be all too aware, it’s exam time again. All around the world, offspring are swotting up obscure facts about Tudor history how a dialysis machine works and the generic formula for making a salt from acid and metal, all ready to regurgitate it all again in sweaty halls all around the planet. And parents recall their own traumas, dredging an unwilling memory for the distribution of opal deposits in Australia and the difference between gerunds and gerundives.

I had it relatively easy: unlike most of my contemporaries (or indeed most reasonable beings) I used to do a lot better at exams than at course work, so the extra stress translated into extra marks I really didn’t deserve. But still, definitely not the best days of my life.

More to the (present) point, not the most useful either. But there the problem lies not so much in examinations as such as in the knowledge I was being examined on. Did I really need to know where opals are mined in Australia? No, more forcefully: under what possible circumstances would I ever want to know where opals are mined in Australia? I suspect that no one but an Australian mining engineer could possibly need that information.

Standard bitching about the education system, of course. And I have to admit that, it’s a little disingenuous. As a typical teenage geek, I rather liked knowing that sort of thing. I loved that sort of obscure information. Indeed, I positively cherished it. But can I really claim that it added to my education? I suspect not. Nor looking at so much of what my children have been examined on over the last few years, can I arouse any greater enthusiasm for the current curriculum.

The fact is – and I emphasise that this is a fact – is that, in far too many cases, what my children are learning is contributing nothing to their education. My daughter spent two years studying Tudor history. Why? Because it was the syllabus. But what did that teach her? Does she have a better understanding of life – her own life and the life of the society she lives in? Especially compared with what she might have been taught?

My impression is that schools teach based on the assumption that they are preparing the student for long-term specialisation in that topic. On that basis it makes sense for the curriculum to consist of so many apparent fragments – because if they study this topic long enough, it will all fall into place. By the time they graduate, they will indeed have a very good knowledge of their specialist subject.

But of course this is completely irrational. We can’t specialise in everything on the curriculum. Andin any case, it is far from obvious that even specialisation is best achieved by specialising from the very start.

So here is an alternative proposition: that at every stage in the education process – every break point at which students are winnowed out by a change of level - departing students finish their studies with is a fully rounded understanding appropriate to that level.

Take biology. What could a child who learns biology up to – but no further than – the age of 16 be taught that would pass this test? Well, what are the relevant topics? Diet, perhaps, or drugs or reproduction or basic environmental processes perhaps? Any of these, and perhaps a few others.

And what exactly would they be taught? I don’t know, but not, I suspect, the technical details of how the body or an ecosystem works so much as the ‘functional’ connections they need to know about – what different lifestyles entail, the real nature of the foods and (legal and illegal) drugs around them, and so on. Only later – at the point at which such things have a greater significance to the student because they can do something about them – would the technical details be taught.

This would plainly be much more of an education. It just wouldn’t involve anything like much modern schooling. On the other hand, precisely because it isn’t abstract technical knowledge, I suspect that this sort of education would be a lot more politically sensitive. What food company is not going to lobby against straightforward teaching of the facts of modern diet – the disastrous health consequences of how industrial food is made, transported around the world, and so on? What pharmaceutical company is not going to lobby against straightforward teaching of the facts of prescription drugs and the modern drug industry?

But that, of course, is very largely the point. A population that was no longer ignorant – not even its least educated member – about the world it inhabits would be better equipped to deal with the modern world – including changing it to suit their needs. Indeed, if I were looking for a recipe for eliminating political apathy, this would certainly be high on my list of innovations.

Likewise for every other topic. Personally I would replace the current obsession history teachers have with the Tudors and the origins of the First World War with a general course on world history – not the Euro-centric nonsense that condemns the vast majority of humanity to the void and ignores the real history of the modern world – and a more detailed political history of post-War Britain. And then between 16 and 18 I would teach the same things again, by with a greater focus on the mechanisms of globalisation and how Britain got to be like it is.

And so on. Even English would be taught quite differently – by looking at the use of language around us, in advertising, in politics, in the media, and so on. Conversely, would 16-year old biology students study dialysis? No, of course not. Nor would anyone else, perhaps, except a specialist in renal medicine. It’s not hard to think of a hundred alternative curricula, sharing only the fact that they lead to education rather than exam certificates.

Human intelligence and the Birth of Reason

One of my many unpublished manuscripts is a book-length treatment of the origins, evolution and individual development of intelligence, entitled The Birth of Reason. It treats the concept of 'intelligence' in the same way a biologist might treat 'life' – i.e., as a general term for everything human beings and other natural intelligences are and do, rather than (by analogy with for example, ‘the organism’) a narrowly cognitive process. That is, it is designed to explain the full span of intelligent activity, including not only the usual cognitive powers associated with that term but also the possibility of history, consciousness, global social and economic systems and so on. It includes a comprehensive account of the relationship between human and other natural forms of intelligence, such as primates. I have never tried to have this book published. I don’t really know why not – it is complete, the few people who have read it have spoken very well of it, and there are no other treatments of intelligence in this extremely broad sense of which I am aware. If you would like to know more about it, I have created a new website from which the full text can be accessed.

Economic myth no.1: Who are the wealth creators?

One of the necessary consequences of governments failing to measure up to the current economic crisis – and as yet there is no evidence whatsoever that they plan to do anything the change or manage the system that put us where we are today – is that the old self-congratulatory myths start to resurface. Perhaps the most important of these myths is the fantasy that it is bankers and investors who are the true wealth creators.

Why does this myth matter? Because it is this myth ensures that the rich are also the powerful, through their unchallenged control the commanding heights of the economy. Because it is the myth that they are doing something unique and almost magical that we must not importune them for taxes or justifications of their prestidigitations, lest these magicians, these golden geese, fly away, casting us into helpless penury. It is also this myth that allows them to escape the sort of scrutiny to which every other strategic area of society is rightly subject, such as the social services, manufacturing, the education and health systems, the military and so on. It is this myth that allowed them to reward themselves with a disproportionate share of society’s wealth. It is even more important than the myth of the market because, above all else, the myth of the wealth creators allows those it mythologises to disempower everyone else.

But in reality is quite preposterous to identify wealth creation with a single sector of society. It is a simple tautology that wealth is created every time anyone takes a resource and turns it into something it solves a human problem (from hunger to vanity), that makes the real world materially more efficient or effective, or otherwise makes the world a better place.

A small part of this wealth is economic. But even if one focuses exclusively on goods and services that can be bought and sold, even there it would be preposterous to claim that wealth is created at the top. Every bolt screwed onto a machine, every machine operated to make a useful product, every product used to perform a valuable service, every service performed – they all add value. Nor is simply a question of the direct production of wealth. Every manager with a discretionary budget has the opportunity to create more wealth or less, depending on how they chose to use it.

One feature of modern economies that especially militates against the idea that wealth is created at the top is the progressive professionalization of roles in the economy. An employee is someone you pay so that you can tell them what to do; but a professional is someone you pay so that they will tell you what to do. This is clear enough with doctors, lawyers and so on, but it is equally true of professional staff. And their role in the organisation is specifically to know how to create wealth in their area better than their superiors. So the more the modern economic organisation is staffed by professionals, the less claim those a the top have to be exclusively the wealth creators. On the contrary, they are increasingly only coordinators of those who create the wealth.

Hence the difficulty of maintaining a hierarchical structure in strongly professional organisations – because it is increasingly difficult to maintain the myth that those a the top know best. This leaves senior executives in the contradictory position of wielding the power to hire and fire, to invest and disinvest and generally control the organisation, yet lacking any realistic claim to unique insight, awareness or pre-eminent skill. Rather like the absolute monarchs who created to modern state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the business hierarchs of modern world have created a massively powerful system – the modern capitalist business – that has less and less time or place for those who were its progenitors.

So what is it that distinguishes the bankers and the financial sector in general? In these terms, not very much. To the extent that they are merely managing budgets, nothing at all. The leverage and reach they exercise may seem vast, but to claim that this means that they create more wealth than others makes no more sense than saying that only the top person in a human pyramid gives it height. It’s rather like a previous era when it was salespeople who were idolised rather than the analysts, the superstar executives, the ‘quants’ and other financial monsters: they too were disproportionately rewarded for selling things other people actually made. Of course, an exceptional individual can make an exceptional difference, but that is true of wealth creation at every level. And it is not as though the evidence actually support the claim that bankers, let alone the financial sector as a whole, actually do create disproportionate wealth.

So what have they been doing for the last couple of decades that explains their fabulous rewards? Haven’t our economies grown exceptionally quickly? Isn’t that to the credit of the financial sector? In the illusory terms of global figures and monetary values, yes to both. But did anyone but themselves enjoy the wealth? No. When in 2008 the banks finally realised how unsure their financial footing was and started to pull the rug from under one another, it turned out that most of the monetary increase in wealth was an illusion. The bubbles had inflated the money but not increased the material wealth society enjoyed. In fact most people are no better off now than before the financial sector was let off the leash. The geese, it turned out, produced eggs of gilded lead, not true gold.

But even that is not the bottom of the barrel. Even if they had been creating exceptional wealth, those at the top of the tree are also the ones who decided on whose behalf wealth is created. This is not after all a completely neutral activity. You can decide how to divide up the surplus. The choice is quite simple: they can allocate the wealth to the shareholders, to the workers, to society (through taxation and true corporate social responsibility) – or to themselves. As ever, those at the top favoured their shareholders. But not as much, it turned out, as they favoured themselves. Despite the longer hours, the heightened insecurity and lower happiness, the average American is no better off than in the 1970s, and much the same is probably true in Britain too. There were no more goods and services, especially not for ordinary people – which is to say, for the vast majority of the real economic wealth creators. So even if they had created great wealth, don’t hold your breath waiting for your share. What you get is a insecurity and relentless pressure.

Finally, the bankers turned out to have produced something that is now busily reducing the total wealth in society. By dislocating the structure of ownership and credit in the economy as a whole, a great deal of its material wealth, its homes and security and comforts, has been debased from wealth to debt, as people of honest working people who thought they had the money to pay for it suddenly don’t. Through no fault of their own, millions are losing their livelihood. Among the very poorest in developing countries, tens of millions have been shoved into absolute poverty. Many will simply die.

But the mythology of wealth creation has already started to revive itself. And why not? For nothing has really changed, except that we now despise the bankers we once admired, and politicians (who have been offered a truly golden opportunity to become popular heroes without a hint of crass populism) are confirming the electorate’s worst suspicions about them.

Economic myth no.2: Trickle-down economics

One of the mainstays of market economics is the idea of trickle-down – that it does not matter that the rich corner the money, because eventually they will spend it only lesser mortals, who will then benefit from it.

This is not a very convincing idea, yet it stays on the lips of conservative politicians and economists everywhere. And it’s not true, of course – not even about the money, let alone the real economic consequences. Starting with the real economy, what happens when a rich person acquires money and spends it as a private individual? They spend it on, say, a house. Eventually everyone who works on the house is paid of course – hence the trickle-down. But what happens to the real human effort and the resources that go into that house? They are the real value in the economy, and what happens to them? They remain in the hands of the owner. They enter the economy through the paid work, but promptly leave society in the form of a private dwelling that absorbs a disproportionate amount of social activity and resources. That time, effort and resource can never be used by society again.

Contrast this to what would have happened if the same amount of money had been spent on, say, new classrooms and facilities for the local school. The same effort and resources would have been expended, but this time all those who built it would still benefit from the product of their work – the school itself. This remains in circulation in society, as it were, in complete contrast to the private home. So trickle-down economics is aptly named – only a trickle of the great flood of real social value benefits society as a whole, while much the greater part remains in the hands of the wealthy in the form of the real goods and services they enjoy.

What about the money, then? Surely that has to circulate? Some of it, such as the payment for work and materials, yes, but not all. A good deal will be set aside for investment. And what is investment for, if not to buy further property that both generates further income to be used for socially exploitative purposes and places more of the real economy into private hands? Of course, the money is eventually released, but only under conditions that not only repeat the same cycle but also reinforce the control of the propertied over the rest.

Alternative histories

One of my minor enthusiasms is alternative histories. You know the sort of thing – what-ifs about the wrong side winning wars, Jesus not being crucified, and so on.

My personal favourite is what would have happened if Napoleon had not sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803. In those days, Louisiana was rather more than the present-day state – it included all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, plus much of Minnesota west of the Mississippi, most of both Dakotas, north-east New Mexico, all of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, plus all of the modern state of Louisiana that lies to the west of the Mississippi River, including New Orleans. It’s more than 800,000 square miles or 2 million square kilometres. That’s about a quarter of the modern USA, and completely divides the east and west coasts. As Napoleon rightly said of the Purchase that ‘This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.’

So what would have happened had the Louisiana Purchase not happened as it did in 1803 (at 3 cents an acre!)? Assuming that the USA had no later opportunity to buy this land, plainly the USA would have been a much lesser country – locked to the east coast, cut off from the Great Plains, Texas and California, with no interest in the Pacific, Hawaii or Alaska, and extremely unlikely to emerge as the Great Power sans pareil at the end of the 20th century.

And what about Napoleon? Assuming that he was still defeated in 1814, what if he had fled to a still-French New Orleans and been welcomed (or at least forced his acceptance) as ruler? It is not hard to envisage his subsequent career, with two basic themes: keeping Americans to the east of the Mississippi, and establishing a new French empire to the west. Imagine the results: all the familiar additions to the USA – Oregon, Texas, California, maybe even Hawaii and Alaska now go to a new French-speaking power. Mexico defeated and perhaps absorbed. New French conquests in central America and the Caribbean, perhaps. A great French naval power in the Pacific. Conflict with Britain over western Canada. All of the oil wealth in the hands of a new power.

But whenever I think about alternative histories, I never get very far before a quite different train of thought sets out. For how long would even such a great change have made a difference? A century later - certainly. A millennium? Well, less so, at least as far as the general shape of the world is concerned. And the longer you wait, the smaller the likely impact. Or at least so I would have thought. I really don’t know. There are countervailing arguments. Chaos theory, for example, seems to suggest that, for some phenomena at least a small perturbation in 1803 would change the future irreversibly.

But I am not convinced. I do not doubt that, at the level of, say, who is born and who dies, a great funnel of causality spreads out indefinitely, within which nothing is the same again. But in terms of the larger structures of society and history, two things occur to me. Firstly, are social systems sensitive like the weather? A butterfly may change the weather halfway around the world (though I have never seen a convincing proof of that idea!) but great systems such as capitalism or feudalism do not look quite so touchy. And secondly, what of all the things – the infinitely many more things - that do not change? Is their effect erased? Presumably not. For human (and intelligent) systems have two features that make this unlikely.

Firstly, like living systems, intelligent life does not react to things like a billiard ball- just bashed about willy-nilly. A living system assimilates the things it encounters (i.e., adjusts them to it own patterns of activity), or if it cannot, it accommodates to them in ways that are as specific to its own nature as they are to the thing to which it accommodates.

As for any intelligent system (e.g., a human being or society), not only do they (like all living things) respond only in ways that reflect their own structure, but they also - and in this they transcend non-intelligent organisms completely - include within themselves knowledge of the principles through which they do this. That is, they include within themselves their own values, goals, methods - any number of other more or less explicit, more or less deliberate structures that ensure that the randomness of the chaotic system is replaced by its very opposite.

So is the result an ever-widening funnel? Or a lens-shaped hole in history that widens and widens and widens – and then narrows and narrows and narrows again, until the point is reached where you can no longer tell whether or not the original trigger actually occurred? At that point, the effects of the initial cause have been so dissipated and diluted by the effects of all the events that were not changed that everything – or at least things of a more structural and functional level – are as they would have been anyway?

I suspect that the answer depends on the relative breadth of this causal ‘funnel’ at its widest and the historical ‘space’ into which it irrupts. Where the former exceeds the latter, it would seem that irreversible change is unavoidable. Even if it is smaller, there is presumably a kind of ‘critical mass’ of effects that set history on a radically new course. Hitler dies in the First World War? Climate change devastates civilisation? Nuclear winter kills every large animal and literally every bird and mammal (i.e., every potentially intelligent organism) on the planet? And planet Earth would otherwise have founded of a galaxy-wide society?

Or are there rules to the structure of human history that either are not affected by empirical events, or at least can force themselves back into control? As I have argued (implicitly) in my History of Human Reason, there are. If there is life, there will be intelligence. And if there is intelligence, there will be history and consciousness. And if there is history and consciousness, there will be something very like feudalism and capitalism and their successors - the still more advanced social systems we did not quite get up to.

Intellectual capital

My son tells me about a recent TED Talk, which includes, among much else, the idea that it would be wise to go beyond ‘procedure’ in our social dealings, Quite right, and who would disagree that justice and propriety don’t always follow from following the rules? That is after all why we have a concept of equity.

There is a much unappreciated aspect of this problem, I feel, that is almost the reverse of needing to go beyond ‘the system’. This is the ways in which the way we create and manage the system in fact disempower us from even understanding it, lest alone going ‘beyond’ it. This is even a subject of much enthusiasm, and in certain respects should be too. But at the same time it is rapidly creating a situation in which people who have neither legal nor moral right nevertheless find themselves with more and more of the hi-hand over the rest of us.

The issue I am referring to here goes under the name of ‘intellectual capital’. The significance of intellectual capital is not merely that it creates legal titles on knowledge, experience, and so on – that is intellectual property. ‘Intellectual capital’ goes beyond mere ownership (although there is nothing ‘mere’ about ownership, even in its barest forms), to actually place that knowledge within the system itself. This may take the form of documented procedures, databases of information, the structure of a patented process, the workflow engine that controls a great factory, the books of ‘due process’ through which society’s highest courts and most powerful administrations proceed.

So what is the problem with these systems? In principle, absolutely nothing. Indeed, they become the basis for future developments that take these building blocks and synthesise them into yet higher structures, through which human beings come to still more profound insights and exercise yet greater powers. But it was not only systems I started from – it was ‘intellectual capital’. And capital, of course, is owned, and ownership means not only that somebody owns it but also that everyone else is excluded. Now, under recent patent laws, it can even mean that if discover something for myself, that knowledge can still belong to someone else. I am not even legally entitled to use some of the knowledge I acquire while working for company A when I go to work for company B.

But even beyond that, there is a still more profound issue. For by embedding the knowledge (skill, etc.) in a system, the users of that system no longer need to understand that system or have any insight into its purpose, goals or even mechanisms to operate it. I just have to follow the instructions. Indeed, once this is possible, people who are smart enough to understand the system as well as simply use will probably be too expensive ‘resources’ to be employed using it. So for more and more aspects of human life, ‘the system’ will come to dominate over mere human beings.

And who will now control human life? Who but those whose capital intellectual capital is – the owners. And I should not be afraid of this?