Can we have globalisation part 2, please?

One of the most striking things about the current global meltdown is that the meltdown is global but the response is piecemeal. I have always been a fan of the idea of globalisation in general, but a complete sceptic about allowing it to happen at the behest of capitalist corporations and under the control of capitalist corporations and what can only be described as intellectually and politically supine national governments. To the extent that there is an effective global politics of any kind it seems to consist solely of organisations such as the WTO, whose role appears to be to further the interests of business.

In addition, the impact of this crisis are vastly more than financial. A the impact works its way through national economies, we can only expect the meltdown on Wall Street and in the City to mean suffering for many millions throughout the world. This crisis means difficulties for homeowners in Omaha and Frankfurt, but in the Third World it is going to kill people. A lot of people.

So what is the answer to the current global economic crisis? A global political response? As a temporary measure, yes – but also, now that global corporations have managed to demonstrate just how little they know how to manage the global economy, the time has surely come for a serious attempt to build a global political system. Without that it is hard to see either how economic globalisation can be made to work, even for those who run the corporations, or how the rest of us can be protected from its massive downside.

We won’t get it, of course. Our politicians have made sure of that. On the one hand they have abdicated responsibility for actively managing society to big business and on the other they have barred the doors to politics to everyone but the ‘professionals’ – i.e., people like George Bush, Gordon Brown, my MP and a thousand other talking heads with zero practical experience of running the world and zero insight into the real structure of global society.

Who's to blame? Not me, that's for sure

I love the Financial Times. Like every other player in the current global financial fiasco (do I mean fiasco? How about another word beginning with f, ending in -up?), they of course are not to blame. Some words from today's edition, from Gillian Tett, their capital markets editor:

For this package suggests that British mandarins have finally learnt to draw sensible lessons from the past...

How foolish of those silly 'mandarins' - to have listened to the FT for the last few decades, constantly telling these silly old bureaucrats how absurd they were to attempt to control the markets! I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone from Goldman Sachs or RBS telling us that it's my mother's fault next.

And no sooner do I write these word sand start reading the very next story in the FT - and I discover that yes, it was all our own fault! Apparently we should have seen through the mass hysteria drummed up by the financial services, the mass mis-selling, the outright lies, the bland reassurances that the bull market was forever, the obvious confidence our benighted governments showed in markets!

Well, all right I confess, I dunnit. And I would like 1973 crash, the 1987 crash and the Fall of the Roman Empire taken into account too.

A few days ago the journalist Stephen B. Gray emailed me with the following query:

I see from your web site that we have many viewpoints in common, and I have
enjoyed reading it. Maybe you can give me some help with the following
puzzle.

Christians sometimes use as an argument for God that advanced human
intelligence, the kind that lets us develop abstract mathematics and physics
(not to mention late Beethoven quartets, Mahler symphonies, Shakespeare plays,
etc.) would not develop on its own. One doesn’t need abstract thinking to make
better spearpoints. I assume a highly capable brain consumes even more energy
than a lesser one, so it would be evolved against unless it offered some
survival value over the long run. The question of course is why it did
evolve.

I am writing an article refuting many Christian claims but as yet I
don’t have an answer about development of high intelligence. Is there anything
you can say or point me to?

Good question. I hope my answer was equally good:

Hello Steve

It is certainly a puzzle, to which I am by no means sure I have the answer. There is a technical answer, which I suggest below, but I have also suggested a non-technical argument I have made elsewhere, which your audience might find more accessible. It's at the bottom of this email, and basically says, even if intelligence and the universe as a whole were created, it doesn't tell us anything about whether religion is true. Nothing whatsoever.

The traditional evolutionary answer to this conundrum is that there is still a massive pressure to improve our intelligence, but it does not come from competing with other organisms. Rather, it comes from other people. Social competition drives the reproductive advantage of higher intelligence, even though it is the classic 'expensive tissue'.

The only problems with this problem are that a) there is little evidence of such competition, and b) the development of intelligence does not arise from evolutionary causes. Other than that, everything's hunky-dory!

a) There is little evidence of such competition

There is an eminent cognitive anthropologist name Christopher Hallpike (one of whose books I happen to have published) who argues that the effective distance between societies, the existence of effective social controls o competition (especially for mates) and the general lack of selective pressures between groups means that evolution doesn't affect cognitive capacity very much. I am inclined to agreed with him. However, even if he's wrong, there always...

b) The development of intelligence does not arise from evolutionary causes

I have written a very long (but still unpublished paper) on this, but the gist of of it is that evolution created the potential for intelligence, but that potential is only realised in the course of individual development. So no amount of evolutionary pressure will explain why we have developed higher and higher levels of intelligence, any more than it could explain why one stone rolls down a hill faster than another.

Real answer

There real answer lies elsewhere. In essence, you can only explain why we reach such a high level of intelligence by looking at the conditions in which intelligence develops in the individual. These conditions are partly biological but mainly social. Again put very briefly (the details are set out at enormous and very trying length in my History of Human Reason), as social system become more complex, so the forms of activity in which one must engage to live in that society become more and more complex. Thus life in a hunter-gatherer society is of quite limited complexity, while industrial capitalism forces us to live through elaborate systems of roles, money, commodities, employment, law, bureaucracy ... As a result, the mere conduct of social life in a complex social system causes one to live a more demanding life, which generates both the experience and the demand to develop to higher and higher cognitive levels. And that, I believe, is the real reason why human beings have such advanced intelligences.

All this assumes that intelligence has the capacity to develop that far, even though, in many conditions, it simply doesn't. That's a bit of a puzzle too. How come all that potential was there all the time? But again the answer lies in the fact that evolution throws up only a potential for intelligence. In the case of most adaptations, you tend to be limited to incremental improvements. But in the case of intelligence, you get this sudden transition to intelligence in all its glory. The reason this is possible is that intelligence is a quite different kind of structure from other aspects of life in general, and as such has a vast potential to fulfil that has nothing to do with the usual limits of biological change. After all, if the whole development of intelligence takes place within the individual, then the whole potential must be present in each individual. So unlike the potential of living organisms, most of which is only realised as evolution replaces one species with another, the whole potential of intelligence as such can arise in anyone, given the right conditions. Spooky stuff.

But this is also the inconvenient part of the answer from the standard scientific point of view, because the standard scientific point of view does not generally allow for the possibility that intelligence has superseded biology as fully as biology supersedes chemistry. Nature does not make leaps, goes the conventional wisdom. To which I can only reply, does that mean that life is only chemistry, only more so? Still, it's a bit of an embarrassment. It's only merits are that ) it does not support religion either, b) it's entirely scientific, and c) it's true.

So you may find it convenient not to raise this issue until directly pressed for an answer!

Alternative answer

But if you are looking for comment on religions using arguments from human intelligence, I think you'll find this blog entry of mine (see below for all my blogs) more helpful. Basically, every single step in the theological argument is a non sequitur.

Mandy's back? How desperate can Gordon be?

Yes, Peter Mandelson's back in the Cabinet - a place from which he has twice been ejected in disgrace. To appoint a man who is perhaps the only person in Britain more heartily despised than Tony Blair - this is the sort of thing pundits usually call 'brave', though perhaps only because being more forthright would result in an action for libel.

Is there no end to Microsoft's selfishness?

Good old Microsoft. Just when you might have thought people were starting to get the message about how environmentally damaging flying is, they offer air miles to anyone using their search engine:

Under the latest plan, known as Search Perks, Microsoft said that US
internet users would be able to earn a “ticket” each time they conducted a
search on its Live Search site, then redeem those for things such as ... regular air
miles. (Financial Times, October 1 2008)

Well done. Another generation addicted to flying. Still, it serves a higher purpose - bribing Google users to jump ship.

If you are a Google user, please don't accept the Microsoft bribe. And God knows the world would scarcely be a better place if Microsoft gain control of yet another area of computing!

The Director of the LSE has an attack of attention deficit disorder

I suppose it had to start sometime around now - the excuses, the 'no one could have seen it coming' tosh from the bankers and their mates. Here is the learned opinion of Howard Davies. Sir Howard is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and one-time Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, the UK's financial regulator.

Some people saw it all coming, of course. The celebrated commentator Harry
Hindsight... has trenchantly argued that any fool could have seen that the credit expansion would end in tears, that regulators should have seen the trouble coming and headed it off at the pass. He would certainly have done so himself – though a diligent Google search has failed to unearth any warnings he personally gave.

I appreciate that a director of the London School of Economics is a busy man. According to his resume on the Morgan Stanley website,

Sir Howard J. Davies has been a director [of Morgan Stanley] since 2004. He has been Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science since September 2003. Sir Howard served as Chairman and Chief Executive of the U.K. Financial Services Authority (1997-2003), Deputy Governor of the Bank of England (1995-1997) and Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (1992-1995). From 1987 to 1992 he was Controller (CEO) of the U.K. Audit Commission.

So you think he'd have noticed. Nevertheless, Sir Howard really can't have been paying much attention over the last decade or so. Not only have the 'toxic assets' that are currently poisoning the world's financial systems been a routine topic of conversation for quite a few years now, but a number of related scams (this time wholly to the financial sector's benefit) have also been paraded across the public's screens. What about all those mis-selling scams? What about the Great Savings + Loan Scandal of the early 90s?

As for Sir Howard's tenure at Morgan Stanley, I can only assume he was brought in to help clear up the great stink of corruption that followed the enormous scam that surrounded the investment banks and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to the clients they misled - Morgan Stanley included.

The fact is, this is only different because this time the financial sector have been so stupid (or irresponsible - or criminal) that they have collectively shot themselves in the foot - if not worse. Otherwise it's business as usual.

Why not send them to gaol?

Not too long back I posted my finding that most people I knew wanted Paris Hilton in gaol, but they didn’t think it mattered whether she had broken any laws. It was a matter of principle.

Likewise the leaders of the financial community who have led us into our current dire straits.

Today the Financial Times published an article by Martin Wolf bemoaning the irresponsibility of Congress for not coughing up $700,000,000,000 to save the financial system. The grounds were very reasonable –

We are watching the disintegration of the financial system. Finance is the web
of intermediation binding economic agents to one another, across both space and
time. Without it, no modern economy can survive. Yet that is now threatened,
with the ongoing collapse in trust and flight to safety. We can indeed run this
experiment. But why should we?

As far as the role of the financial system is concerned, I agree absolutely, and it would be insane not to fix the problems. And that’s coming from a devout socialist. (Strangely, in my experience socialists understand capitalism far better than capitalists.)

But this is one case where we could and should throw out the babies with the bathwater, or at least the throw out the bath attendants. They got us into this, and it is shocking that, if this measure goes through, they will still have their jobs – the very jobs they have proved they cannot do at the very pinnacle of the systems they have just proved are crucial to society as a whole. To tell you the truth, I’m quite shocked that, come the end of this process, they will still have their liberty. As I keep telling everyone I know (very nearly jokingly), the message should be that, once the negotiations about saving the system are over, they will all be off to gaol. We don’t really care what for – they just belong somewhere as dark and dingy as the misery to which they have sent so many other people.

A bit draconian? How about this then? The banks (etc.) get this financing on the absolute condition that they have completely replaced their leaderships within a year. After that, if we catch any of them running so much as a sweet shop, they go to gaol.

Still a bit draconian? I don't think so. What have these people done that deserves such bitter treatment? Just pushed the financial system Wolf rightly declares to be the hub of our economies over a cliff. They were give absolutely all the leeway to run their businesses they asked for. Nothing was too good for them as far as our brainless governments (who seem not to understand capitalism at all) were concerned. And what did they give us in return? The threat of the worst economic depression we have seen since the Thirties. The destruction of thousands – and if the more grim predictions are right, maybe millions – of jobs. Vast harm to millions of people. A crushing blow to the very economic foundations of society.

I’m sorry, but if I had deprived so many people of so much – money, safety, happiness, future - by such evident greed, indifference and stupidity, but done it in some other walk of life (bank robbery, perhaps), would I still to be loose on the streets, let alone being paid to carry on?