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What Hacker News says
- Oftentimes when Luddite comes up on HN I quote a bit of John Ralston Saul - today will be no different.
From his most excellent book 'The Doubter's Companion', an alphabetically ordered series of delightful rants on various topics.
On the subject of Luddites, he writes somewhat presciently:
"Highly trained individuals whose careers were destroyed by technological progress. This progress was treated as inevitable and uncontrollable. The Luddites therefore occupied the only remaining intellectual position, which consisted of rejecting technological progress.
"This reduction of attitudes to two extreme positions was accomplished between 1811 and 1830 when the introduction of Watt’s steam-engines and water-driven wool-finishing machines made hundreds of handicraftsmen redundant. Industrialization was spreading from sector to sector and quickly eliminated most crafts along with tens of thousands of jobs.
"The Luddites (named after an imaginary leader, Ned Lud) broke up and burnt factories. Their revolt ended in a group trial in 1813. Five were hanged. The attitude of society towards unrestrained technological progress was made perfectly clear. The judge said the Luddites’ actions were “one of the greatest atrocities that was ever committed in a civilized country.” 1
"This was a classic case of provocation and order versus despair and disorder. Wilfrid Laurier described the nature of this type of conflict when he spoke in 1886 about the Riel Rebellion. “What is hateful...is not rebellion, but the despotism which induces that rebellion; not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.”
"What society misunderstood early in the nineteenth century when faced by the industrial revolution was the full nature of the change. The debate should not have been over whether there should be technological progress or not. It was more accurately a question of progress in what conditions: what progress, when, in what circumstances? Market extremists would argue that what happened was inevitable and eventually brought general prosperity. Their view ignores the social disorder, followed by suffering, followed by serious social disorder that this approach towards change brought on. Communism was the direct result. England, France, Germany and Sweden suffered recurring internal violence throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of it expanding into civil wars. Most of these countries passed within a shadow of revolution.
"The question is therefore not whether technological progress was necessary, but whether it was necessary to go about it in a barbaric manner. It can be argued that the Luddites were wrong in 1811. But society spent the next 150 years rendering progress civilized and thereby proving that the infuriated craftsmen had been right at least in spirit. Did these decades of wasted time, effort, lives and money represent an intelligent use of human talents? "
The recovery of the quote true meaning unquote, and implications of, Luddite feels similar to the change in consensus around a frog's actual response to being in gradually warming water, or a goldfish's actual short-term memory capabilities.
We're aware - and it's uplifting to find TFA dwells on this morphing of our collective understanding - that there was a generally agreed trope, since subverted / rectified, but in this case, unlike our amphibian or piscine revelations, we still find ourselves in desperate need of a way to succinctly describe a relatively calm but firm desire for society to work on an inclusive way of navigating significant social changes wrought by technology before we end up having to react violently to same.
- > This zero hedge obsession with the gold standard and simplistic view that if it were reinstated the problems listed would be largely eliminated makes it hard to take them seriously. You know who also is not on the gold standard? Every other country where a large range of conditions exist.
I'm unfamiliar with zerohedge beyond this article, but I can empathise with any fond remembrance of a fiscal system that wasn't (intentionally or otherwise) designed to provide a perpetual and ineluctable boom-bust cycle.
I wasn't alive at the time, though I was present for Australia's following of the crowd (the global peer pressure was enormous by then) as we floated our AUD. The reason, comically stated at the time, was that 'it hasn't worked anywhere else, so maybe it will work here'. We adopted the same mantra for the introduction of GST (a la UK's VAT).
Anyway, I'll often recommend John Ralston-Saul whenever the subject of Bretton Woods comes up - he had this to say, tritely, in his Doubter's Companion (1994):
"A system for international financial management and stability which was put in place by the Allies, minus the Soviets, in 1944 and destroyed in 1973 by President Richard Nixon without consideration being given to a replacement.
"Nixon hoped in this way to solve some short-term American economic problems by re-creating the sort of financial disorder in which the largest power would be best placed to benefit. It could be said that this was the single most evil act undertaken by an elected leader in the postwar period. Other leaders should not be discouraged, however. The opportunity to do worse is perpetual."
His concern (fleshed out much more seriously in his other works) is not so much that the gold standard was by any measure The Best System, but rather that replacing it with a demonstrably even worse system was a horrendously woeful decision.
- You may like this one: The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense by John Ralston Saul
- Some random things that come to mind: game theory, Nietzsche, Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Chomsky's political works, GK Chesterton (e.g. Heretics), Freakonomics, Cialdini's Influence, JR Saul (e.g. Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion), Bertrand Russell (e.g. Unpopular Essays, Sceptical Essays, Freedom and Organization 1814-1914), Santayana (e.g. Egotism in German Philosophy), Scott Noble[0] and Adam Curtis' documentaries. The Devil's Dictionary, Metaphors We Live By, The Moral Animal
If I had to pick just one for you - Voltaire's Bastards.
edit: Also La Rochefoucauld's Maxims should be very high on a list of exposés - it's a savage exposé of oneself. La Bruyere's Characters is a milder but still at-times-scathing exposé of the world. As is Fable of the Bees..
- Not merely an insightful repository of analysis and explanations around the more profound aspects of our world, John Ralston Saul's exquisite Doubter's Companion includes some answers - acerbic accusations bundled free - to the more pedestrian issues:
"DANDRUFF: The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions.
"What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo exacerbates. Wash your hair with a simple non-detergent shampoo, soap, olive oil, beer, almost anything. Rinse. Then close your eyes and pour on some vinegar. The extremely cheap but natural sort—apple cider, for example—is probably best. The smell will stimulate interesting conversations in changing-room showers and your explanation will win you friends. Wait thirty to sixty seconds. Rinse it off. The smell will go away. So will your dandruff.
"All dermatologists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies know this simple secret. They don’t tell you because they make money by converting dandruff into a complex medical and social problem. By most professional standards this would amount to legally defined incompetence or misrepresentation.
"Dandruff shampoos that promise to keep your shoulders and even your head clean are harsh detergents and may promote baldness, which ought to constitute malpractice."
- I thoroughly enjoy John Ralston Saul -- he popped up on HN a while back[1]. A Canadian philospher with a GSOH - what's not to love?
From his Doubter's Companion (highly recommended) - an occasionally acerbic description of many things - comes this definitive entry under Chicago / Harvard School of Economics:
> A great centre of contemporary SCHOLASTICISM. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.
> Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. They also share a tactical genius for exporting their conceptual definitions to less important centres around the world. The result is a pleasing symphony of international echoes imitating their calculations and cadences and so confirming their correctness, even when their policies bring economic disaster. The percussion section of Chicago’s orchestra is the Nobel committee for economics. Each golden medal is like another congratulatory parchment presented at the end of an elaborate theological debate.
> But what of content? There isn’t much. What of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? These minor Thomists preach little more than inevitability and so counsel passivity.
> What they call libertarian economics is a remarkable revenge of the scholastics on the men of the Enlightenment, who had theoretically destroyed them. Peel away the tangle of intellectual leaves from the Chicago School and what remains is a great clockmaker god who has set the world ticking. But the conclusion of the Enlightenment was that god’s indifference left humans free to organize the world as they wished. Chicago has so deformed this idea as to invert it. The great clock has been turned into an absolute, all-encompassing system. Better than an ideology, the world is its own absolute economic truth. We must remain passive before its majesty.
> This is a denial of Western experience. It is nonsense which simply comforts the power slipping increasingly into the corporatist structures.
> Strategic thinking can save a great deal of time wasted over tactics. A large number of America’s economic problems, and those of the West, could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics.
> This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching their essentially anti-social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment.
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