Re-Imagining objective value

"The welfare of a people, like the happiness of a man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place. ... [And this] presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allotted their due place. ... The essential point for us is that no such complete ethical code exists. ... This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish, or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist, scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other." — Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Planning and Democracy

The destruction of imagination

“What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ― Pablo Picasso

Beginning with Ockham [c. 1300] whose nominalism reasoned that only individuals "exist in reality" and that universals "exist only in the mind" ... and continuing thru the Reformation with its emphasis on every individual relating directly to God with nothing between ... the Enlightenment's increasingly anthropocentric, dualistic universe eventually spawned an ex-Catholic priest turned psychologist-philosopher named Brentano [c. 1875] who taught that the relationship between mental acts of perception and the external world being perceived was based solely on the individual's intentions for the object rather than on any properties or methods intrinsic to the object in the external world ... an understanding he called "intentional inexistence". Brentano's disciples included classmates who became famous in their own rights ... psychologist Sigmund Freud and economist Carl Menger ... who were faithful to their master's belief in the preeminence of the subjective over the objective when attempting to make sense of reality:

• intention replaced imagination.

As late as Adam Smith in 1776, the ancient ethical idea of objective and subjective values co-existing and diverging were entertained by philosopher-scientists from Aristotle to Aquinas with conviction:

"The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use;’ the other, ‘value in exchange.’ The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water; but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it." — Wealth of Nations

But by 1900 objective value had disappeared from the imagination of economists:

“Despite his intellectual roots in Aristotlean thought, Carl Menger  was wise enough to see that Aristotle had erred in regards to exchange. One can make no sense of the relationship of value to market prices if one regards value as a property of goods themselves. Since the properties posited as ‘inhering’ in goods, such as land and labor, are themselves traded on the market, such explanations must always beg the question as to how those ‘determinants’ of value are priced. Menger's breakthrough insight was to realize that ‘[v]alue is… nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs... and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the… causes of the satisfaction of our needs.’ (Principles of Economics). In other words, value is the name of an attitude or disposition that a particular person adopts toward a good: he chooses to value it.” Carl Menger: The Nature of Value, Mises Daily Articles, Gene Callahan, 10/17/2003

Ockham's nominalism [ie. "value is only a name we assign"] had redefined natural as positive law, justice as profit, detached economy from ecology and delinked nominal/fiat money from real resources.

Bad grammar

“My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.” ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

A great part of the blame for the subversion of sound thinking about value is attributable to the simple failure of communicants to use good grammar. They persistently conflated terms like "needs, wants, desires, happiness, welfare, ethics and value" as if they were merely nuanced synonyms which they are not ... as anyone who reads the ancients including Cicero's On Duty will quickly and easily discern. The metabolism of nature sovereignly determines needs based on life and disposes of everything beyond needs as waste to be recycled ... the best intentions of humans [paving the road to hell] notwithstanding.

 

But, once established, such "half-truths" become accepted and serve as foundations of sand for towering, intentional human edifices that must sooner or later fall in the storm:

"In the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject-matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics. ... One aim of philosophy is to challenge the half-truths constituting the scientific first principles." — Whitehead, Process and Reality

And, if the truth be told, these notions were only "half-true" from the start, because they were only "half-brained" as neuropsychologist Iain McGlichrist is now explaining in his ground-breaking work on the hemispherical functioning and significance of the brain ... another indication that value [and thus ethics] is firmly grounded in nature after all.

Good food

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

Even absent speculating skeptics like Hume and Proudhon, had Locke [Of Property], Jefferson and the new economic liberals stopped to think comprehensively and coherently about the cosmology they were implicitly assuming, they might have seen their mistake soon enough to avoid the ethical and environmental disasters we now see playing out due to their dogmatic rejection of natural, objective value and our cultural acceptance [nomos] of positive, subjective value.

But it was not until 1926, that philosopher-scientist AN Whitehead, in pursuit of a comprehensive and coherent cosmology, examined the simple but real and natural concept of food, curiously missing from the grandiose Declaration of Independence [from nature?] of the new liberals, and explained why the morally-laden words "property" and "robbery" come [as Proudhon, Marx and others tried to explain] from the same root word [privo] and from the same source [life ... not human intentions or even human labor]:

"Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food . This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification." — ibid

Real science ... follow it

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

With the advent of quantum mechanics and the arrival of Schroedinger's cat [c.1900], it was apparent to the rational scientific historian that Enlightenment heuristics [including the subjective value theory], masquerading as science and even accepted as truth, were outdated and in desperate need of re-imagining. To this day, physics has largely returned from Newtonian dogma [at which Newton himself would have blushed] to a cosmological pursuit with philosophy alongside laboratory experiments and space launches. But economics remains 500 year behind the times ... and stuck in a failed paradigm ... until now.

Real science springing from philosophical speculation and imagination is beginning to posit that ... as the ancients assumed ... nature does, afterall, provide a universal metabolic scale in which the common life needs and the individual idiopathic desires of all living creatures can be quantitatively measured, compared and ethically judged ... in life units:

"What he [Geoffrey West] found was that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other ... and that the same laws of scalability held true with an eerie precision ... to cities and businesses." Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies.

More knowledge about life units is certainly coming. A new era is dawning as the neo-liberal collapse unfolds. But established half-truths die hard. Much we now think we know about economics is going to be overturned ... and we are going to return to nature ... or to dust ... it's our choice.

The road behind

"I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but rescue consists in going back til you find the error and working from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not." ― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

And, of course, the choice for the capitalist culture built on subjective value theory and its logical techne [ie. its technology] of fiat money and credit is clear:

• press ahead culturally ... into increasingly procrustean and totalitarian versions of commercial nominalism detached from nature and real life on the grounds that the practice has become Too-Big-To-Fail or
• go back culturally ... unwinding bit by bit ... even repenting ... initially to something resembling our pre-1970's Bretton-Woods style gold-based system of global currency and commerce [as BRICS seems to be wisely doing] even if it is alongside CBDC's and/or blockchains which transparently enforce common [if not yet completely just], physical [not merely financial] rules for and disclosure of resource valuation and allocation across continents and classes.
  

Going back would set great changes into motion immediately ... but they appear to be coming in any case. Furthermore, the "road behind" may lead from global gold to local resource [including labor] based currencies, credit and commerce which have already become essential as we pass through nature's great simplification which scientists around the planet are seeing more and more clearly with each passing day as the inevitable ending to our intentionally unimaginative [ie. ignorant], financially perverted and unsustainably wasteful practices in energy, agriculture and transportation ... the once elegant edifices we intentionally built on foundations of sand.

The importance of money: is it natural or positive?

 It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends. — Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV. Part II - Sceptical Doubts

At this point, somebody with intellect should observe that even the wisest and most ardent organicist [like AN Whitehead] would admit [indeed insist] that taking the road behind can never bring us to a completely natural state of commercial realism in which we discover, define and utilize nature's common life unit [which, thanks to West and others, we can no longer deny exists] to accurately measure, morally evaluate and justly [whether considered as subjectively profitable or objectively zero-sum] transact all the opportunity costs for every proposed action any individual might take given that, assuming the organic nature of our universe, every such transaction would set in motion a new, continuous and infinite series of dynamic consequences resulting in a perpetually, non-neutral disequilibrium. So aren't we really going back to Hayek's pragmatic individualism with which we opened this blog post? Haven't we come full circle? Back to Ockham's nominal value and Menger's intentional [aka positive] money?

 

Or have we simply refused to accept the cosmological idea that reality is process not stasis ... and that equilibrium is a "ceteris paribus delusion" which supports the inorganic notion that intentional action [aka individualism, liberty, liberalism, neo-classical economics and libertarianism] is attainable and meaningful?

We must go back even further from Hayek's individualism ... to Adam Smith's moral sentiments ... to Aquinas ... and to Aristotle ... to a hierarchical scale combining subjective and objective value ... to particulars and universals ... to physics and metaphysics ... to intention and purpose ... to a brain with a left and a right hemisphere ... to practice and potential ... to culture and truth ... to Economy and Ecology ... to Creation and Creator. And we must put and keep them together in a cycle ... a 3e-system ... a process ... which, like the wheel on a bike, turns many times as the journey progresses ... but with feedback [Education] to correct and guide the oft-straying pilgrim.

And the scale's hierarchy must acknowledge and correctly identify and distinguish the Master from the Emissary.

And what is to be the medium which connects subjective to objective value ... the corpus callosum between Economy [left-hemispherical, positive-law nomos] and Ecology [right-hemispherical, natural-law logos]? Isn't it obvious from the very words themselves?

 

The only possible medium must be the "eco" ... the "oikos" ... the household of Creation itself.

We must tie nominal money to real resources ... locally and globally ... if we wish to bridge the divide between subjective and objective value ... then TRUST that Ecology will both enable and constrain Economy as needed over time.

Does this require us to adopt a beneficient view of nature if we wish to have hope for the future? And does the evidence justify taking a beneficient view?

 

Aristotle believed a beneficient view of the universe was not only justified but required:

“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. ... We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” Metaphysics Book XII, Aristotle, 350 BC

For those who cannot accept this organic view of the universe, there is a more humane [and stoic] point of view also expressed by the ancients and described by Whitehead as reverent duty:

"We can be content with no less than the old summary of [culture] which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity."

And, for those who will not accept duty and reverence, there is no way back. What remains for them is the road ahead into irreverent intentionality ... which does not lead to life:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing." — Shakespeare, MacBeth

Chronic Disease

 

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”  ― Joseph Conrad

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ― C.S. Lewis

"All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while [d]evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed." — T. Jefferson

Time never heals

"Procrastination" comes from the suffixed Latin "pro+cras" = "for+tomorrow" ... and it remains the leading cause of death [both individual and societal] in the history of human civilizations. Why? Think of it as custom or moral inertia in which evil grows ... at first enjoyed ... then unadmitted ... then undiagnosed ... then too advanced to treat ... then fatal.

Appetite appeals as it repeals

Chronic disease begin with pleasure-seeking [or appetite] which appeals to us as an end in itself and, in so doing, appears to repeal the limits and consequences we, unconsciously at least, suspect nature [as our ever-presnt companion] might impose on our unilateral actions. This is the "liberty or labor" phase of life ... and can be quite intoxicating as it powerfully stamps our mind with an open invitation to return to its boundary-less domain where everything seems to be within and waiting for our grasp.

Custom conceals

As time progresses, we begin to "use and consume the fruit of our labor" ... known as usufruct. This is the "pursuit-of-happiness or property" phase of life in which we first encounter satisfaction of appetite and are faced with the choice of "craving more" or "sharing with the one in need" ... and we must decide which is "proper" [which word has the same etymological root as "property" and "robbery"].

This is the critical moment in any civilization, as Jefferson explained to Madison, in which "custom" is established as the basis for political authority ... and in which, as the Apostle Paul warned, "the [d]evil seeks a foothold". And it is the moment in which conscience usually fails to be heard ... not because it fails to speak ... but because it is sequestered in the right hemisphere of the brain as the left hemisphere wrests control. The critical question that must be answered at this point is

• whether "what is true of every member of the society individually is true of them all collectively" or, in other words,
  
• whether "the right of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals."

Everything that follows hinges on the answer to this question.

Pain reveals

One therapeutic purpose of pain is to raise the alarm that something is not "right" [to use Jefferson's word]. Unfortunately, treating the pain per se usually becomes the obsession that obscures and delays any diagnosis and allows the disease to progress until it is too advanced and multi-symptomed to cure without killing the hosting organism ... TOO BIG [NOT] TO FAIL.

Delay seals

It is in retrospect [ie. "backwards+looking"] that irreversible chronic disease becomes clear with lyrics which inevitably recount some story of an intelligent man being needlessly reduced to a dehumanized animal for slaughter ...

• a tragedy [tragos+ōidē = "goat, buck + song" ] as opposed to
• a comedy [kōmos+ōidē = "revel, carousal, merry-making, festival + song"].

The net-WORK of demons

In a letter to his son, storied economist Irving Fisher retrospectively identified his demons as "war, disease, degeneracy, and instability of money". We each have our own list of demons. And, if we are persistent and honest, we always find them linked in a net-work [ie. snare] of chronic diseases that can be traced back to the formulations of LIFE we chose to embrace by giving them our attention in custom which becomes more entrenched and entangled the longer we wait to examine and untangle it.

Absolutes are back

absolute - "not relative to something else"; ab + solvere = "off, away from" + "to loosen, untie, release, detach"

“Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. ... The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility.” ― Frithjof Schuon, Logic & Transcendence

"There is no better means of reducing a fallacious variety of thought to absurdity than to let it live itself out completely." ― Carl Menger

The absurdity of Economy ...

Little did Carl Menger imagine that his notion of marginal utility would be allowed to "live itself out" to absurdity, and yet that is what has happened. But, perhaps, Menger [like many great scientists before him] is merely the scapegoat for subsequent, smaller minds that took his transitional notion of relative values and, in a slothful act of pagan idolatry, deified it as a destination ... as absolute truth.

"The study of philosophy is a voyage towards the larger generalities. For this reason in the infancy of science, when the main stress lay in the discovery of the most general ideas usefully applicable to the subject matter in question, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from science. To this day, a new science with any substantial novelty in its notions is considered to be in some way peculiarly philosophical. In their later stages, apart from occasional disturbances, most sciences accept without question the general notions in terms of which they develop. The main stress is laid on the adjustment and the direct verification of more special statements. In such periods scientists repudiate philosophy; Newton, justly satisfied with his physical principles, disclaimed metaphysics." ―Whitehead

While most "economists" are stuck regurgitating what they "learned" by watching and listening to others regurgitate, a few have been able to lift their eyes and minds above their "micro" and even "macro" scopes to REALITY in its dazzling, comprehensive and coherent beauty. And what do they encounter?

... without going to the next level of Ecology

If the fatal flaw of Economy is its obsession with abstract desires, the strength of Ecology is its recognition of relative needs. 

WHAT ???!!! Didn't we just say that relative values is a failed paradigm?  Not exactly. What we said was that relative values are not appropriate as a destination. Economy by definition limits its field of vision to individuals [micro] or groups of individuals [macro], but in both cases it relies on some form of subjective value determination as the basis for rational exchange to "maximize" value.

Ecology is willing to consider the proposition that Nature [the Cosmos] imposes absolute limits and consequences on Economy in the form of an objective and comprehensive hierarchy of values .. something Hayek claimed mankind could never know and which he therefore fatally dismissed as non-existent. These absolute, objective values are defined relative to one another ... but the idea that this relativity can be meaningful within a local "subset" of all the things in the cosmos is futile nonsense.

... which redefines LIBERTY

Of course, most self-styled classical "economists" claim that the theory of relative values and marginal utility is the basis for liberty. And yet when it comes to explaining this "liberty", they go to absurd lengths which nobody practices in real life or is able to articulate even in theory.

Ecology provides a new and simple definition of LIBERTY:

Local Includes Believing Everything's Related To You

which puts Economy [local] into comprehensive perspective [includes] with Religion [believing], Science [everything's related] and the individual [to you].

... and returns us to Philosophy

And yet Ecology, properly understood, merely returns Economy to what Whitehead identified as its starting point for our Enlightenment ancestors: "the study of philosophy as a voyage towards the larger generalities" ... even God ... the ultimate absolute.

"Assessing the roles  of  economics  and  ecology  for  biodiversity  conservation  ultimately  requires embedding  the  view of  Mainstream  Economics,  Ecological Economics  and ecology  on humankind  and  nature  into  an  encompassing  philosophical  understanding  of  the relationship between humans and nature."
TY  - JOUR
AU  - Faber, Malte
AU  - Frick, Marc
AU  - Zahrnt, Dominik
PY  - 2019/01/20
SP  -
T1  - Absolute and Relative Scarcity
VL  -
ER  -
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340336532_Absolute_and_Relative_Scarcity

 Sounds like Genesis 1. Are our religious, political and educational institutions up to that challenge?

Added Resources

Mario Giampietro: "Models with Meaning - Changing Social Practices” | The Great Simplification #107 ... Giampietro proposes the task of combining Economy and Ecology by viewing them as stages in a universal "metabolism"  ... an idea we also develop in our discussion of the 3e cycle:

"Society doesn't like complex things because we just like to parse things into dollars or euros and we make decisions on that and this is not easy to do with what you just said. It is something that should start in school, it should start in school. How would we do that? I think that they should change the way we teach things at school because all the energetics, metabolism, these are all... Let alone the discussion on multiple scales, this idea that we have only one scale is absurd. ... We have to even teach young people what energy is and why it's important to our lives. We're still not even doing that. No, but we are victim of the success of economics. This is the point, we are intoxicated [Rev 18:3]. Because if you imagine we have a discipline, I work with Kozo Mayumi which is a professor of economics. So I respect the category of what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that economics assumes that absolute scarcity is impossible because it works with price. If you have price there is a modest scarcity, so you can use technology to trade the things. But if you have absolute scarcity, you no longer have price, you don't have a market, you have either war or solidarity but you don't have market. So we are using a science, they assume the absolute scarcity is impossible to study absolute scarcity, how to avoid it. Guys, no, economics is not capable of comparing the size of economic process to the size of ecological process. Would that ever change?"

Get with the plan?

I-80

After Christmas 2023, my wife and I took a road trip from Kansas to the Pacific NW. We crossed mountain ranges in snow storms [-22 in Laramie WY] ... and saw amazing sights [snow covering the Steamboat Rocks in the Utah mountains]. But nothing prepared me for the spectacular experiences surrounding the birth of another grandson. LIFE IS INVALUABLE ... except in terms of other lives.

As that new human being presented himself to his family, I marveled at how helpless and near-sighted he was. But also at how, from the first, he seemed to know what "the plan" was ... FOOD ... which his mother graciously [and quite happily it appeared] supplied on demand. If this boy makes it to my age of 70+, I wonder what he will think about "the plan" looking back. Was there really a plan? And was it all about just being together with the food?

JWST

The James Webb Space Telescope is, as its name says, bringing what is FAR DISTANT [telos] into VIEW [skopos]... and the vastness of the new perspective is SHATTERING long-standing [but now seemingly parochial] explanations of the universe. Did all this just happen ... without a plan?

What if we could observe [skopos] the history of human civilization with such a comprehensive perspective? What would it reveal to us about where humans have been and where they may be going ... about our notions of "economy" in the face of "ecology"?

This is precisely what noted astro-physicist Tom Murphy [who sees the universe thru the lens of JWST] has done in a recent piece titled The Simple Story of Civilization - Do the Math where he puts human "progress" into perspective by looking at human civilization as if it were a single life ... leading him to conclusions that will burst a few bubbles ... especially those of the enlightened elites & entrenched economists who are supposedly "leading" us into the future. ["Parochial" is too dignified a word to describe our current notions of policy and economy ... Tom uses "idiotic" ... and you will see why ... and agree!]

I have prepared a very short comment introducing Tom's piece [with generous quotes from several reliable sources in addition to Tom's work] which I have entitled Fill the earth ... OK ... NOW WHAT? I hope these thoughts, may ... along with Tom's piece ... give you pause to think even more deeply than you ever have before about ALL life on earth ... and whether you are doing your duty in reverence during your life here.

Bob

PS. For more on Tom's work, see his text book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

Truth & Power

 

"Whoever is partner with a thief hates his own life; He hears the curse [when swearing an oath to testify], but discloses nothing [and commits perjury by omission]. " Prov 29:24

"'My house will be called the House of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers." Matt 21:13

"Is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth?" Arendt, Truth & Politics

 

 

To be or not to be

In the most basic sense, truth simply "is" ... being ... existence ... "what is". Thus Pontius Pilate unknowingly answered his own question when he asked, "What is truth?" which is, perhaps, why Jesus [the great "I am"] did not respond. This truth is both unmoved and unmovable as described in Aristotle's metaphysics:

“[T]here is something which moves while itself unmoved. ... Th[is] first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. ... On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. ... We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God."

To do or not to do

But the ancient sentiment goes on to further describe existence as movement making it personal ... "handsome is that handsome does" ... extending being to becoming ... one to many ... static to dynamic ... potential to actual ... eternal to changeable ... timeless to temporal ... stasis to agency.

• stasis - Latin stare = "to stand, make or be firm, condition, position, state, manner, attitude"
• agency - Latin agere = "to set in motion, drive forward, to do, exert power, produce effect"
  

"We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader, and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him. And all things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them …” 

And so the age old question arises, "What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object?" ... when power diverges from the truth which quickens it?

Money is power ... but "What is money?"

Paraphrasing Pilot, does the question "What is money?" contain its own answer? Yes and No. "Yes" to the extent that money reflects "what is" ... existence. "No" when money is detached from "what is" ... in which case the power of money diverges from the truth of money ... setting the stage for a cosmic collision.

 

It is increasingly clear that the global, financial detachment of money from "what is" by a small group of unchallenged elites who have hijacked the people's power [demos-kratos] by using that delusion of fiat money and credit is now cascading the destruction of not only the atmosphere and environment but of humanity itself in what can reasonably be described as unjustifiable robbery of cosmic proportions:

“Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires food. In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the animals are fed. Having regard to the universality of reactions with environment, the distinction is not quite absolute. It cannot, however, be ignored. The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food. This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, LIFE IS ROBBERY. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.” - AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, Chap III - The Order of Nature, Section X - Life and Food, 1929

If YOU have doubts about the prospects for a cosmic reckoning ... or should we say wrecking ... I encourage you to listen to this exchange [pretty much one way] between a Swedish godling of finance [let's call him Molech] and an American shepherd and grower of figs [let's call him Amos]. Like Molech, you will be speechless ... which is what ALWAYS happens when power meets truth.

 Perjured by omission ?

"They hate the poor at the gate, and he who speaks correct things they despise. ... Because of this, he who understands in that time will be quiet for it, because that time is of evil." Amos

[Please read the whole book of Amos and remember ... either GOD is not a respecter of persons or nations ... or else HE is a liar ... and, either way, YOU should be frightened.]

We have only one account in the New Testament of Jesus using physical violence [arguably twice]: driving the money changers out of the temple with a whip. After all, he pardoned a dishonest tax collector over lunch and was crucified between thieves to whom he showed only mercy. Why was this offense so abhorent to him? Why such zeal for God among a group of socially accepted [even necessary] business persons?

 

Perhaps, it was because these offenders had unknowingly crossed the invisible line from their corrupt nomos into the timeless logos ... using money to rip power from truth ... defacing the image of God in His creation ... and then, TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY, claiming "IN GOD WE TRUST" as the justification for their robbery and thereby blaspheming his name with oaths and making it appear that God condoned and ordered their robbery of the people who came to the temple for His help.

It is dangerous to remain silent in the face of robbery ... because robbery must be justified. But it is damnable, when the robber falsely swears trust in God.

 

WE MUST SPEAK OUT ... WE MUST DO SOMETHING. WWJD?

Prayer & Education

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. ... One of their poets has recorded that he did not pray "with moving lips and bended knees" but merely "composed his spirit to love" and indulged "a sense of supplication". That is exactly the sort of prayer we want. ... At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? - Matt 16

Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your entire spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. - 1 Thes 5

a $ensible supplication

In Thinking Smartly About Climate Change, Bjorn Lomborg begins with a concession to nature:

"There is scientific dispute over the extent to which global warming is manmade. [But since I speak as an economist and not a scientist] I will not weigh in on that controversy, except to concede that global warming is real, to some large extent manmade, and a serious problem."

 ... and concludes with an appeal for cultural affirmation that requires neither breaking nor sacrificing [which is truly amazing given the admission above that we have a "serious problem"]:

"[W]hen it comes to climate change, our focus should not be on [mitigation, accommodation or adaptation] policies that cost a lot, deliver little, and in the end likely don’t even work. Rather, we should focus our efforts on developing new technology and encouraging innovation that will lead to the production of affordable and dependable green energy. It is possible for us to have a sensible climate policy without breaking the bank and without sacrificing the amazing opportunities delivered by cheap and abundant energy."

The cursory reader is easily persuaded that Lomborg has issued a prayer ... a $ensible supplication ... and without requiring us to make any bodily change in our current posture ... without the trouble of "moving lips and bended knees". Surely this is the best way to pray ... to maximize profit$ or, at worst, to minimize losse$ ... what more can a poor soul be expected to do?

sanctify body, soul and spirit

In Breaking Together [available free in ePUB], Jem Bendell also begins with a concession to nature:

"[After] a year’s unpaid leave from my university job to look more closely at the primary science [in many different disciplines] ... I [with extensive help from an inter-disciplinary team] conclude[d] that it was too late to prevent both catastrophic change to human societies and the inevitable collapse of the industrial consumer way of life."

... but follows immediately with a multi-disciplinary, organic, diagnostic appeal to education [the "moving lips"] which Lomborg in large part skipped [because he was "not a scientist"]:

"The first step towards ... steadiness is to realise just how bad things are and will become, no matter what we do. Then we can get real about what aspects of the world we might wish to save. We can also aspire to not repeat the same patterns that caused the problems in the first place, as we try to respond to them. That requires us tackling the true cause, rather than piecemeal activities addressing the symptoms, which will be swept away by the tides of history. It also means we should not ditch what we believe to be right, just because we have become anxious and more vulnerable to manipulation."

... and then concludes with a loving call to free ourselves for cultural revaluation [the "bended knees" which Lomborg did not require]:

"The aim is not just to ‘save’ more of the world, but to sense the world more fully, respect its beauty, and help keep it worth living in. Therefore, it is critical that we keep in mind some universal values as we consider the size and significance of the troubles faced today."

Even the cursory reader can feel the discomforting energy and unsettling movement that Bendell demands ... the vigorous exercise he requires if one is to "sense, respect and keep" the world he claims to envision and value ... if one is to have any hope of ultimately attaining a "composed spirit of love" as opposed to being distracted by Lombard's siren call to "amazing opportunities delivered ... without breaking or sacrificing".

education ... tethers culture to nature

"I commence a sacred discourse, a most true hymn to God the Founder, and I judge it to be piety, not to sacrifice many hecatombs of bulls to Him and to burn incense of  innumerable perfumes and cassia, but first to learn myself, and afterwards to teach others too, how great He is in wisdom, how great in power, and of what sort in goodness. For to wish to adorn in every way possible the things that should receive adornment and to envy no thing its goods—this I put down as the sign of the greatest goodness, and in this respect I praise Him as good that in the heights of His wisdom He finds everything whereby each thing may be adorned to the utmost and that He can do by his unconquerable power all that he has decreed." - GALEN, on the Use of Parts. Book III

In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver's stereopticon reveals the external power of culture using Plato's allegory of the cave:

"The chains which keep the prisoners from turning their heads [to glimpse the real things that stand between the light outside the cave and the shadows they perceive within] are the physical monopoly which the engines of publicity naturally possess."

Socrates goes even further to assert that, for those who become accustomed to cave life, these external chains become internalized and preferable to unchained living [aka liberty] in the sunlight outside which

"would hurt [their] eyes, and [so they] escape by [re]turning [back inside the cave] to the [shadows] which [they are] able to look at, and these [they] believe to be clearer than what is being shown to [them in the sunlight]."

Bendell echos Galen ... first learn then teach. And, by his own admission, in the learning he has experienced the pain that comes from walking in the light ... something Lombard declines to attempt by claiming a "clearer" and painless view can be had from inside the cave. And yet, when reading Bendell, which of us does not feel a tugging in our heart ... something attempting to drag us from Lombard's cave of chained comforts into the harsh light outside which we want to trust?

That tug is prayer and education [which are identical] ... the unbreakable tether that pulls against the chains of culture which bind us to our dark comforts ... drawing us out of the cave ... towards freedom through submission to nature as the organic [ie. "working"] reality of which we are always a part and from which we can never be apart.

As Bendell predicts ... in the end, either we pray and work together in the universe ... or we break together ... and the choice is ours to make everyday ... by embracing or rejecting the role of prayer & education in the 3e's. Both Moses' 4th commandment  and St. Benedict's dictum affirm this description of the task before us ... we must learn and work together in the creation. Ora et labora in natura ... which is the 3e's in Latin.

Ora et Labora

 

"When My servants ask about Me, I am indeed close to them. I listen to the prayer of every supplicant, when he calls on Me. Let them also, with a will, listen to My call, and believe in Me, so that they may walk in the right way" (Qur'an 2:186).

"Did you know that 6 month prior to Ramadan the Sahaba’s used to make du’a to Allah that He would let them reach Ramadan. After Ramadan they used to make du’a for 6 month that Allah would accept their fasting and good deeds." Cristina Tarantino, "Be Successful This Ramadan"

Education and Economy

St. Benedict claimed conscious human life should be [is only?] conducted in one of two stages: prayer or labor ... ora et labora. Some even went so far as to claim an identity ... that prayer IS labor and labor IS prayer ... to indicate that the two ideas presuppose one another in such a way that neither is meaningful if separated from the other.

 

Just looking at the Latin words evokes the idea that they are related ... with labor [labora] being some sort of extension of prayer [ora]  by combining it with the Latin word labium or the Greek lobos meaning "lip or lobe" ... implying we must "speak" our prayers into existence thru our work ... although the precise root for the Latin word labora remains obscure.

 

For those who have considered the 3e's, prayer and labor resemble the notions of Education and Economy. [For more on prayer as Education see the Lamedh page in this blog].

 

Distinction and Connection

But distinguishing prayer from labor ... Education from Economy ... without disconnecting them is vital. Indeed, the 4th commandment reveals the relationship as 6 parts labor to 1 part prayer [ie. "not-labor" or "leisure" ... which is "schole" in the Greek from which we get our word "school"] insisting on the distinction:

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God, on which you must not do any work—neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant or livestock, nor the foreigner within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them, but on the seventh day He rested. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as holy.  Exodus 20

Of course, some Jews observed the distinction without understanding the connection. They identified prayer and the sabbath with the temple ... where "with the temple" is the literal translation of the word "contemplation".  [And anyone looking at the 4th commandment can see that "family" and "household" are at the heart of it all ... which is the topic in our prior posting].

The Jews also knew from Psalm 46 that once in the temple on the Sabbath they were to "be still and know that I am God" ... which Jesus attempted to explain on many situations ... including driving buyers, sellers and money changers from the temple [on two occassions?] ... clearly distinguishing Economy from Education without disconnecting them.

So how about us? What do we understand about the distinction and the connection between prayer and labor?

Process or progress

Most people believe the work ethic drives economic progress. But labor is only the power that drives us forward ... prayer is the steering mechanism that provides our direction and navigation. How does prayer do this?

The 3e's claim life is a process in which Ecology stands between Education and Economy ... God stands between prayer and labor ... as the missing link which connects Education to Economy ... so that each plays its assigned role and fulfills its intended purpose.

If we return to Psalm 46 above, we see this confirmed ... the purpose of being still is to know God in order to do the right thing ... Education arising from Ecology reforms Economy. And ONLY by understanding and observing all 3 stages of the process can we make sense of any of its 3 stages.

There can be no progress or understanding without following the whole process.