Footnotes

¹ Toynbee, Arnold; “Greek Civilization and Character”; Mentor Book, New York; 1953; p.p. 44-46.

² Ertman, Thomas; “Birth of the Leviathan”; Cambridge University Press; 1997; p. 159. This book further asks why 18^th century democracy developed in England, Scandinavia and east-central Europe.

Ertman describes how democracy has been traditionally formed from the bottom up, by people able to resolve their differences and undertake collective action within their communities. In the modern world, the process of democracy formation may be different, because globalization tends to encourage the large-scale economic and social spanning organizations of civil society. * But democracy advocates should note: the crucial factors are not whether people in opinion polls “want” democracy, believe it is a good thing and accept the (of course) well-intentioned leadership of the United States in that matter (Smith, Tony; 2007). The crucial factor is whether local elites will allow the growth of organizations that are alternatives to the state. Such elites have to be convinced that democratization and inclusiveness are necessary for sustained economic growth and that they will survive the process, allowing an independent society and a political opposition to grow around them.

As we suggested in our example of Turkey, the growth of a secular civil society – that is growth in the space accorded to personal freedoms – is a simpler means of attaining social peace, an alternative to the obscure and complicated machinations among competing sectarian groups. However, as the examples of South Africa and now Tunisia illustrate, all groups in society have to be capable of dialogue and compromise; and that depends upon their unique histories and leaderships. In Tunisia, the moderate Islamist Ennahda party relinquished power in favor of a more secular, technocratic, and now constitutional government. Marwan Muasher, former foreign minister of Jordan, suggests that this process will eventually occur throughout the Mideast; a process that will take many years.

* At the level of political theory, the philosopher Immanuel Kant envisioned a cosmopolitan order that was the culminating political vision of the Enlightenment’s reason. This is the motivating vision of the United Nations and the European Union. “Kant used many different terms to describe (the new cosmopolitan order) – a ‘league of peoples,’ ‘an international state,’ a ‘universal union of states,’…whatever …it might be, it would be a peaceful, consensual body, and all those who joined it would do so of their own volition. The effect would be not to erase those differences which had hitherto been the cause of war, but with ‘increasing culture and the gradual approach of human beings to greater agreement in principles,’ it would finally result not, as all empires had, in the ‘weakening of all forces’ but in ‘their equilibrium in liveliest competition.’ (Pagden, see below, p. 360)” The challenge in many societies, of course, is to get from the former to the latter.

³ Fischer, David; “Albion’s Seed”; Oxford University Press, New York; 1989; p. 212.

⁴ Hobbes, Thomas; “Leviathan”; Penguin, London; 1985 (ed.); p.p. 189, 186.

⁵ Pagden, Anthony; “The Enlightenment”; Random House, New York; 2013; p.p. 65-66.

⁶ Heilbroner, Robert; “The Essential Adam Smith”; W.W. Norton & Company, New York; 1986; p. 151.

This quote states the truth of the matter. The economic market system is “flexible and dynamic.” This utterly contradicts the idea that the market economy tends towards equilibrium, and it is therefore possible to act “efficiently” until marginal cost = marginal revenue. This kind of efficiency is possible only in systems (like the power grid) where all costs and operating conditions are known. The market system is “flexible and dynamic” also inefficient, which means that overall, everyone adjusts to everyone else.

⁷ Heilbroner, Robert; “The Worldly Philosophers”; Penguin Books, London; 2000 (ed.); p. 29.

The introduction to this book also discusses how land, labor and capital were embedded in the social structures of medieval society, to be later disassociated from society and the state by markets and the study of economics. Our contention is, in reality, not totally. U.S. society needs concern itself with the larger issues of income distribution, as technology changes, and investments in the education, R&D and infrastructure that also constitute the Wealth of Nations. Both Germany and the Asian countries lack natural resources, and thus had to partially plan the means to make their way in the world.

⁸ Heilbroner, Robert; “The Essential Adam Smith”; “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” p. 65.

⁹ Since Darwin, modern science has revealed continuity among the life forms inhabiting this planet. There has not been much MRI study of the sympathy principle in humans, although it is clearly the key to social life. However, Emory University’s Gregory Berns (2013) has recently published a notable study entitled, “Functional MRI in Awake and Unrestrained Dogs.”

The idea was to bypass the constraints of behaviourism, to directly examine the activity in a dog’s brain to ascertain its mental state. The main challenge for the experimenters was to get their subjects to lie still; their training process avoided either anesthetizing the animal or committing an ethically objectionable act of immobilizing it.

After performing MRI scans on two dogs, a feist (small hunting dog) and a border collie, the experimenters found, “…hand signals denoting the presence or absence of a food reward…” activated the dogs’ caudate nucleus, an area of the brain associated with the anticipation of things that people enjoy. Berns notes (speculates?), “…Many of the same things that activate the human caudate which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate.” This indicates canine emotions.

To those who like dogs, this is not at all news. But, other data and this experiment do indicate that dogs have a “functional homology” with humans; this is why they are sympathique. The experimenters note, “…while the study of the canine mind is fascinating for its own sake, it also provides a unique mirror into the human mind. Because humans, in effect, created dogs through domestication….”

Having identified the neural building block of sociability, and likely there is also one for asocial behavior, how are we to explain moral behavior? Morality cannot be absolute because values conflict. A practical explanation would call morality (meritorious) evolving custom, caused by the sympathy principle. * Pagden (2013, p. 160) quotes the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, “…without customs we would be ‘entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and the sense (these were the original sources of Hume’s knowledge)’. In short, ‘habits,’ ‘manners,’ ‘customs’ are the stuff of which our worlds are made. Without custom…we would know nothing about the social world that human beings inhabit.”

Pagden then continues, “…man was the architect of his own social world, it would only be by studying that world that we could acquire any understanding of the human mind. It was also central to…(the) ‘Enlightenment’: the need for human beings to possess a rational grasp of their shared world, based upon investigation and systematic observation.”

* Morality without sympathy is simply raw power; the Tea Party (2014) could note.

¹⁰ Commenting on the 2013 government shutdown and a possible default on the U.S. debt, a political correspondent justified the entire House strategy to defund the Affordable Healthcare Act saying, “There is no other way.” The 2013 happenings in the U.S. Congress reminded us of the overheated and destructive conflict in the Greek city state with which we began this essay. Congress could use some mutual sympathy (in order to interest aggregate).

¹¹ Stability, of course, matters in all societies. In traditional societies, stability is static, where everyone follows the dictates of tradition and knows his place. In contrast, stability in modern market society is dynamic, the result of compromises. Isaiah Berlin described this as an “imperfect equilibrium.” This kind of stability allows both for change and stability. In “The Nature of Stock Market Equilibrium,” we demonstrated that the stock market, under normal circumstances, achieves an econometric error-correcting (bargaining) equilibrium around Fed policy.

¹² Sagan, Eli; “The Honey and the Hemlock”; Basic Books, New York; 1991; p.p. 301, 290.

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