Freespace

Some problems with spontaneous order

I have posted a draft of a paper I'm working on, "Some Problems with Spontaneous Order," on SSRN. This is a critique of the Hayekian distinction between spontaneous and constructed orders. I'd be pleased to hear comments or suggestions from readers.

Forthcoming

I have an essay in the upcoming second edition of Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism, which he discusses briefly here. It'll be a while before it's out, but I'm honored that I was asked to participate. While I disagree with a good deal of what Arnhart has to say, I think he's definitely on the right track as far as a genuinely naturalistic ethics and politics is concerned, and I highly recommend his books.

By the way, working on the Arnhart essay inspired me to write a more elaborate criticism of Hayek which I hope to put out pretty soon have posted on SSRN.

More on caffeine

In a recent blog post I said I thought it likely that the mass tort industry would target "Big Caffeine" next. Legal Newsline's Aricka Flowers was interested enough in the idea to write up this interview with me about the subject.

Speaking of the Greeks...

Here's the great Jacob Bronowski explaining how Pythagoras could discover his theorem in the absence of mathematical representation, long before the adoption of Arabic numerals.

Gates of Fire

I’ve finally got around to reading Gates of Fire, the Steven Pressfield novel recommended to me so many times by so many people for about five years now. I’m only about halfway through, but it is definitely as good as everyone said. Pressfield is astonishingly adept at evoking the whole feel of classical Greece. Although I’ve never been an admirer of Sparta, this book captures much of the fundamental glory and beauty of our ancient ancestors—so like us, and so unalike. On his website, Pressfield also expresses beautifully what it is about ancient Greece that is so compelling:

what appeals to me about the ancient world as opposed to the modern is that the ancient world was pre-Christian, pre-Freudian, pre-Marxist, pre-consumerist, pre-reductivist. It was grander, it was nobler, it was simpler. You didn’t have the notion of turn-the-other-cheek. You had Oedipus but you didn’t have the Oedipus complex. It was political but it was not politically correct. It's refreshing. The first time I read Thucydides I felt like a fresh breeze had blown into the room. At last someone was giving me human nature without the bullshit. I find almost all the works of the ancient age to be like that. From Aeschylus’ Agamemnon:

And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God.

You ain’t gonna find that in any work written in our era…. I find the ancient conception of who we are and why we do what we do much closer to reality than any modern interpretation or explanation.

Our age has been denatured. The heroic has been bled out of it. The callings of the past—the profession of arms, the priesthood, the medical and legal professions, politics, the arts, journalism, education, even motherhood and fatherhood—every one has been sullied and degraded by scandal after scandal. We’re hard up for heroes these days, and even harder up for conceiving ourselves in that light. That’s why I’m drawn to the ancient world. It’s truer, in my view, to how we really are. The ancient world has not been reductified [sic] and deconstructed as ours has; it has not been robbed of all dignity. They had heroes then. There was such a thing, truly, as the Heroic Age. Men like Achilles and Leonidas really did exist. There was such a thing, truly, as heroic leadership.

Large Hadron Collider rap

M.C. Hawking is down wit da atom smashas...

From LGF

Gas prices falling steadily

Russ Roberts points out that gas prices are falling at about a penny a day.

Darryl Wright on objectivity

Darryl Wright has an article in Social Philosophy And Policy on objectivity in ethics which I thought was particularly good. It doesn't really solve the conundrum that's recently been a hot topic among Objectivists about the obligation (or lack thereof) to choose life as one's standard of value, but Wright's explanation of objectivity itself is one of the clearest and best written I've ever seen. It's so nice to see good, solid, non-haranguing Objectivist scholarship!

The same old "change"

Obama the collectivist calls for America to emulate communist China. Literally.

A great Hitchens column

[W]e should be glad that the luridly sadistic and aggressive Saddam Hussein regime is no longer in power to be the beneficiary of the rise in oil prices and thus able to share its wealth with the terrorists, crooks, and demagogues on its secret payroll. I think we should also be glad that its private ownership of Iraq's armed forces, and its control over a party monopoly called the Baath, has been irrecoverably smashed. Iraq's resources are no longer at the disposal of an aggressive, parasitic oligarchy. Its retrained and re-equipped army is being deployed, not in wars of invasion against its neighbors and genocide against its inhabitants, but in cleanup campaigns against al-Qaida and the Mahdi Army. An improvement. A distinct improvement.

It is in no spirit of revenge that I remind you that, as little as a year ago, the whole of smart liberal opinion believed that the dissolution of Baathism and militarism had been a mistake, that Iraq itself was a bottomless pit of wasted dollars and pointless casualties, and that the only option was to withdraw as fast as possible and let the inevitable civil war burn itself out. To the left of that liberal consensus, people of the caliber and quality of Michael Moore were describing the nihilist "insurgents" as the moral equivalent of the Minutemen, and to the right of the same consensus, people like Pat Buchanan were hinting that we had been cheated into the whole enterprise by a certain minority whose collective name began with the letter J.

Had any of this sinister nonsense been heeded, it wouldn't even be Saddam's goons who were getting their hands on that fantastic wealth in such a strategic country. It would have been the gruesome militias who answer either to fanatical Wahhabism on one wing or to fanatical Shiism on another, and who are the instruments of tyrannical forces in neighboring countries. Hardly a prospect to be viewed with indifference. I still reel when I remember how many supposedly responsible people advocated surrendering Iraq without a fight....

So, yes, major combat operations appear to be over, and to that extent one can belatedly say, "Mission accomplished." If there is any Iraqi nostalgia for the old party and the old army, it is remarkably well-concealed. Iraq no longer plays deceptive games with weapons of mass destruction or plays host to international terrorist groups. It is no longer subject to sanctions that punish its people and enrich its rulers. Its religious and ethnic minorities—together a majority—are no longer treated like disposable trash. Its most bitter internal argument is about the timing of the next provincial and national elections. Surely it is those who opposed every step of this emancipation, rather than those who advocated it, who should be asked to explain and justify themselves.

Here's the rest.