Theme: Civilization

(A Lament On Intellectual History)

You know, I’m openly critical of Rationalism whether Continental or Cosmopolitan. And I am not only critical but hostile to what I see as Rothbard’s cosmopolitan libertine immorality of the low trust society.

But, those fairly technical criticisms aside (that few grasp anyway), if you spend a decade or more trying to understand the political theory extant throughout history; ethics and morality throughout history; our brief history of economics; and finally Hoppe’s articulation of political, moral and ethical arguments as reducible to property rights and incentives (and my arguments that property rights are positive assertions of the negative prohibition against parasitism), then it becomes clear, once you have exhausted the thought in all those fields, that outside of this Hoppeian technique by which we conduct behavioral, criminal, ethical, moral, political inquiry, that it really is a backward and barren wasteland out there of little but psychologizing and justification with little contribution to our understanding except the odd insight here and there throughout history.

And that is both inspiring, in that Hoppe constructed it, and depressing that it takes half a lifetime to understand that nearly all else is little more than essays justifying subjective preferences necessary to assist in the accumulation of power, and little else.

Our field is not exactly populated by great thinkers. But then, we cannot claim that political theory has often been populated by great thinkers. Moralism and psychologism are persuasive, and easily understood. But until we discover the universal morality of fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality, and fully articulated property rights correspondent to the current division of knowledge and labor, all statements in Politics, crime, ethics and morality are merely opinions, and NOT CALCULATIONS.

However, once we possess such knowledge, all human action can be reduced to calculations whose truth propositions are ascertainable, and subjective preference left aside – at least to the same arbitrary precision that constrains all general rules. Groups may choose to allocate their individual property rights as they see fit, for the purposes of more effective cooperation, but this does not alter the basic premise that politics, ethics and morality are no longer open to subjective interpretation but are reduced to calculations with the same degree of precision as any other of the formal logics.

I say this only because, frankly, it’s depressing that classical liberal philosophy through Hayek is discussed psychologically rather than calculative. And it is almost impossible to debate with members outside of the very narrow Anarcho Capitalist community. And even in the AC community the desire of individuals is to argue not in the calculative sense, but moralistically and psychologically – if not via rather childish applications of marxist critique.

Ideology may sell. It may make a good meme. But the fundamental difference in this line of inquiry is our ability to calculate using constant categories, rather than rationalize across incommensurable ones. And that is one of the primary reasons why I am against rationalism: it is a vehicle, and always has been, for obscurantism, overloading, loading and framing. Whereas operational definitions (descriptions) and propertarian calculations are immune to obscurantism, overloading, loading and framing. Overloading, framing, loading and obscurantism are part and parcel of Rationalism.

Unfortunately we cannot often resist the impulse to moralize, psychologize, critique, and engage in loading, framing and overloading – it’s all just elaborate weaponized gossip – and we evolved to make constant use of it. And so reason easily falls victim to it. And only calculation, laundered of all such sentiments, is free of it.

We have it. We are the only ones who do. But we rarely use it. And it’s an intellectual wasteland out there without it.