Philosophy

I wrote these two laws down on a scrap of paper years ago. I still have the scrap of paper but not the original reference.

Harris’s First Law:
Belief in the truth of a theory is inversely proportional to the precision of the science.

Harris’s Second Law:
The creativity of a scientist is directly proportional to how much he knows, and inversely proportional to how much he believes.

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first posted August 04, 2005
Belief in the Truth of a Theory
Posted by jennifer, at 11:11 AM

In 1960 famous Austrian economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote an essay entitled ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative’ explaining that a fundamental trait of the conservative attitude is a fear of change while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course.

In the same essay he wrote that conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate. Of course the Left also known as the Social Liberal, or simply Liberal in the US, is also inclined to use the powers of government, but to instigate change. An obvious manifestation of this today is the various rules, regulations and regulated trading systems being imposed by governments across the world with the aim of stopping climate change – something any empiricists (but particularly evolutionary biologists) recognise as impossible.

In the essay Hayek went on to explain that the correct name for his ideas was Whiggism, because it was the ideas of the seventeenth century English Whigs that inspired what later came to be known as the liberal movement in Europe that provided the conceptions that the American colonists took with them but which was later altered by the French Revolution, with its “totalitarian democracy and socialist leanings”. Hayek ends his essay by coming to an unsatisfactory conclusion as to what any new movement based on his political philosophy might be best called, but this has not stopped many labelling him, incorrectly a Libertarian.

Libertarians believe in freedom as long as the person and property of others is not harmed and that a combination of personal and economic freedom will inevitably produce creativity, abundance and peace.

But in a world of increasingly rapid technological change and increasing concern about the impact of development on the state of the world’s environment and increasing competition for limited resources (including water) there will always be impacts on person and property (particularly if you live downstream). Change brings winners and losers and Libertarianism is not a realistic or sophisticated enough political philosophy to deal with this.

In 1998 Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason magazine, introduced a new label for a new political philosophy, a philosophy that she explained has given us greater wealth, opportunity and choice than at any time in history. In ‘The Future and Its Enemies – The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress’ Postrel suggests, like Hayek, that conservatives and social liberals have much in common and as a consequence the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are of little relevance. Instead she suggests we use the terms ‘stasis’ versus ‘dynamism’ to describe the chasm between those who want to control the future (conservatives and social liberals) and those who believe in the capacity of human beings to improve their lives through trial and error, spontaneous adjustment, adaptation and evolution (dynamists).

Postrel explains that dynamists keep the underlying rules neutral and transparent – a flat tax, for instance – and they stigmatize changes designed to favour particular groups. They believe in free markets but they are not just libertarians with a new name, as they include people with a more expansive view of public goods. So some dynamists support forms of paternalism including seat belt laws, antismoking regulations and a safety net for the poor. But instead of grand plans or ad hoc solutions they have the patience to let trial and error work within well-established and understood rules.

In short, the dynamist recognises that change is real and that our values are not things that have always existed, and will always exist. The future will be a consequence of the legacy of past generations and our own activities and should not be left to chance but neither should we seek to specify in advance exactly what the future will look like.

The ability to “read the play” is a quality often ascribed to successful politicians, businessmen and sportsmen. The term refers to the ability to predict events and then to take an advantageous position in expectation of the prediction coming to fruition. In the sporting arena it is best seen in champion tennis players like Lew Hoad whose anticipation allowed him simply to “materialise behind an opponent’s ball” (Underwood, 2007), and modern Aboriginal footballers with their uncanny foreknowledge of the way an oblong ball is about to bounce.

I was thinking about prescience recently when reading a wonderful Russian memoir Last Boat to Astrakhan (Haupt, 1998). Robert Haupt was an Australian writer and traveller (he died just before this book was published) who spent five years in Russia between 1990 and 1996. Towards the end of this time he took a boat trip down the Volga River from Moscow to the ancient trading city of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. The boat trip provides the backdrop to the book’s observations on Russia and Russians.

I found it especially interesting because I have always been fascinated by Russian history, especially the history of the 20th century. The years covered by Haupt’s book coincided with the demise of the Soviet empire and the start of Russia’s troubled journey towards democracy. ‘The barriers to progress,’ Haupt observed, ‘were as they were when Gogol named them: roads and idiots’. Nikolai Gogol, the 19th century Russian novelist had asked “why does a people so blessed with intelligence remain in thrall to fools? Why has a country that spans one-sixth of the world’s land surface remained so short of roads? Do the idiots rule because the roads aren’t there, or is it the want of roads that put idiots in charge?”

Russian history (not unlike history elsewhere) is replete with examples of fools in charge, but in Russia the fools very often seemed to be notably dangerous and ruthless. Haupt touches on the failures of the Romanovs (who for almost 300 years presided over a country in which the bulk of the population were either serfs or Counts), but provides his best insights into the Bolshevik and Communist eras, as well as the tragic consequences for ordinary Russians of the collapse of the USSR.

Haupt is also wryly humorous. For example he notes that the ugliness of Stalinist architecture is fortuitously counterbalanced by the inferiority of Stalinist concrete.

There is also a superb example of “reading the play”. Haupt recounts a conversation between the writer Andrei Sinyavski and a colleague at the Institute for World Literature in Moscow, some time in the early 1960s. Sinyavski believed his colleague was something of a liberal, and this encouraged him to speak freely. In Sinyavski’s words:

…one day I told him how hard I found it to live without freedom, and what a bad effect the lack of freedom had on Russia and Soviet culture. I argued that the Soviet State would not necessarily collapse if it lifted certain restrictions in the cultural sphere. If it allowed abstract art, if it published Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, and so on. If anything a slight thaw would benefit Russian culture and the Soviet State!

‘Of course the State won’t founder because of such trifles’ said my colleague. ‘But you are forgetting the effect all this would have on Poland’.

‘What does Poland have to do with it,’ I asked, perplexed, ‘when the point is they should publish Pasternak in Moscow’.

‘If we ourselves, at the centre, allow a relaxation in the cultural sphere, then in Poland, where it’s freer than here, there will be an even greater drift towards freedom. If a thaw starts in Moscow, Poland will secede from the Eastern Bloc, from the Soviet Union.’

“So let Poland secede!” I said flippantly, “Let it live the way it wants!”

‘But after Poland, Czechoslovakia would secede, and after Czechoslovakia, the entire east bloc would break up.’

“So let it break up,” I said “Russia would be only better off”.

But my interlocutor saw further. “After the East Bloc, the Baltics would go – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia!”

‘So let them, what do we need these forcible annexations for anyway?’

“But after the Baltics, the Caucasus and the Ukraine would go! What do you want? An end to Russian power? For your Pasternak you would let all of Russia crumble, Russia which is now the greatest empire on earth?”

Thirty years before it occurred, Sinyavski’s colleague had read the fall of the dominos (the play) with uncanny accuracy, and he foretold the way in which the ultimate play (the collapse of the USSR) would unfold.

Haupt refers to the Soviet philosophy of cultural and intellectual repression as “the iron logic of empire”, and recounts how Sinyavski himself suffered from it, being sentenced in 1966 to seven years hard labour for publishing anti-Soviet writings abroad. Times had changed however. In the 1930s, the Communists would have got away with this, and no-one would have heard of Sinyavski ever again. In the 1970s Sinyavski became an international emblem of Breshnevian repression following the Krushchevian relaxation. To acute observers this reinforced the famous line of de Tocqueville that ‘there is no more dangerous moment for a repressive regime than the one at which it begins to reform itself’.

In Haupt’s view, and looking at it from the Soviet perspective, the most significant “error” made by the USSR was in not sending armoured divisions storming into Poland and crushing Solidarity as once they had stormed into Hungary and Czechoslovakia and crushed the embryo nationalist and socialist movements in those countries. Once Poland had been “allowed to get away with it” the house of cards started its inevitable collapse.

To me, one of the saddest stories in the book is about the Volga River itself. Once one of the world’s greatest and busiest commercial and domestic waterways, its management was progressively abandoned during the last years of the USSR. It has now become so silted up that ferries like the one on which Haupt travelled can no longer navigate its shallows, and the system of lights and markers has been allowed to decay beyond the point at which they are fixable.

Returning from Astrakhan on the voyage described in this book, the ferry finds itself on a stretch of river at night and with the navigation lights turned off. It takes the wrong channel and runs aground. The next day a tug is called to tow it off, but fails and the passengers are offloaded. Haupt sees this as a parable for the new Russian State: freed from communism, Russia has taken a dark stream, and has run aground. Tugs struggle to redress the calamity, while the Volga flows on……

Haupt is more of a historian and an observer than a “reader of the play” and he does not go on to predict the advent of the new Russia, with the ex-KGB Chief Vladimir Putin firmly in control of the government, the Mafia in control of commerce and the Chechins in revolt. But he does foreshadow the problems with environmental degradation, and the failure of the environmental managers, which may well turn out to be one of the greatest legacies of the Soviet era.

References:

Haupt, R (1998). Last Boat to Astakhan. Random House

Underwood P (2007) The Pros. (Manuscript)

Natural and cultural heritage has differential value; what is priceless and irreplaceable to some is disposable to others. This differentiation is cause for many conflicts and manifests anywhere from highly localised disputes to the very core of sovereign sensitivity.

In an ABC News article Vandal attack on treasured cave, heavy cutting equipment was allegedly used to break into the Kubla Khan cave, regarded as one of Australia’s most pristine underground formations. Within the cave is a huge chamber called Xanadu, containing an 18m high stalagmite known as the Khan. The cave is not open to the general public and permits are restricted to only 12 tour groups each year.

Exclusivity of access to public reserves is contentious. The relationship between the permit-issuing authority and the permit holder is exclusionary to fair trade. Inhabitants local to the area may well perceive their exclusion from their cultural heritage as usurpatory, especially if permit-holders derive income privilege from restricted entry.

When I read the article I was reminded of the seemingly senseless destruction of the Dig Tree, made famous through the ill-fated 1860 Burke & Wills expedition. I must confess that when I heard of this incident of alleged vandalism, Innaminka sprang to mind and the beauty of the approach through the Strezlecki Desert. Nevertheless, there are those amongst us, thankfully small in number, who deliberately damage or destroy heritage as an expression of will.

I have previously written about the Disposal of Our Heritage, but much of my concern reflects the likelihood of collateral damage inflicted against the state and its Parks and Wildlife Service in particular.

It is very frustrating that the environmental mandates and functions of government land management agencies are not considered business activites, as they are relieved of the need to conform with competitive neutrality and fair trade. A national overhaul of environmental compliance is urgently required to protect our heritage from these aggravating practices. Our greatest defense, in the meantime, is the residential vigilance of local people and the importance of protecting that which sustains them, now and hopefully into the future.