individualism for the masses
July 22, 2011 1 Comment
This article is a treasure trove of useful links:
Old books plus new technology can make modern-day liberalism the most refreshing and interesting movement around, giving the thoughtful young person a welcome alternative to the smug, hidebound intellectualism of the Left and the proud anti-intellectualism of the Right.
– Danny Sanchez, “In Praise of Old Books”
July 21, 2011 Leave a Comment
I wish I had known of this video when we published "Luxuries into Necessities" last month.
It sometimes took many centuries until an innovation was generally accepted at least within the orbit of Western civilization. Think of the slow popularization of the use of forks, of soap, of handkerchiefs, and of a great variety of other things.
From its beginnings capitalism displayed the tendency to shorten this time lag and finally to eliminate it almost entirely. This is not a merely accidental feature of capitalistic production; it is inherent in its very nature. Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
– Ludwig von Mises, "Luxuries into Necessities"
That’s worth repeating:
Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
SMU professor Michael Cox has a couple of great lines in this video:
Things get better because, in order for me to succeed, I have to pay attention to your needs and wants. … I cannot make myself better off apart from making you better off as well.
Capitalism, paradoxically, starts with self-interest; but if it’s guided by freedom it maximizes social welfare.
June 20, 2011 Leave a Comment
Hayek declared in 1961,
For over a hundred years we have been exhorted to embrace socialism because it would give us more goods. Since it has so lamentably failed to achieve this where it has been tried, we are now urged to adopt it because more goods after all are not important. The aim is still progressively to increase the share of the resources whose use is determined by political authority and the coercion of any dissenting minority.
"The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect’"
June 6, 2011 1 Comment
Do we see signs of Austrianism in Egyptology and marketing?
I don’t think Barbara Mertz is a praxeologist, by which I mean that I don’t assume she would accept the claims of a priori laws concerning social phenomena, but she certainly shares Mises’s methodological dualism.
After a discussion of some standard causal theories about the rise and decline of civilization, Mertz concludes,
This has been a very superficial, limited probing of some of the types of problems we encounter when we talk about causes in history. We have not even settled the important question of whether there are causes. Yet we will probably go right on looking for them, and talking about them. The intellectual climate of our own era asks for explanations. We would like, if we could, to reduce all phenomena to systems of logical sequence. In part this is the effect of the prestige of the physical sciences, and this effect is not always for the good. History may be “scientific” in its approach, and the social studies may be “social sciences” in the sense that they apply dispassionate, critical, and rigorously logical analyses to the subjects of their discourse. But the disciplines that deal with man and his peculiar affairs cannot expect to use the methods, or anticipate the results, of the physical sciences. The human experiment will not reproduce itself under laboratory conditions; we can never control our specimens to such a degree that we can isolate a pertinent stimulus or determine a specific conclusion. My personal antipathy toward the use of the term “scientific” in the humanistic disciplines is that the very application of the word sometimes suggests to the user that such isolation and such determination are possible. Sometimes I wish they were.
We have a more personal need, in our time, to dissect the past in search of its pathology, for according to some historians our own culture is showing disturbing signs of disease. However you define the developmental stages of civilization, and upon what ever step you put us here, in this twenty-first century of the Christian Era, it seems unlikely that we are at the beginning of a process. This leaves us with the dismal possibility that we may be nearing the end. If so, it behooves us to discover, insofar as we are able, where we are, and why. If there are universal causes, and if we are able to see them plainly, we may learn how to avoid their more disastrous consequences.
That is one of the reasons why we look for reasons. Whether we have any grounds for supposing that we will find them is another question. At the moment, it appears that our only recourse, if we are about to fall, is to go down gracefully.
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt
While Barbara Mertz’s may or may not agree with Ludwig von Mises’s approach to theory and history, ad man Rory Sutherland is openly Austrian, at least enough to give a marketing presentation called “Praxeology: Time to Rediscover a Lost Science”:
Jeffrey Tucker says, “This is, very truly, one of the most interesting lectures I’ve ever heard.” I have to agree.
June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment
Barbara Mertz continues to delight me. Here’s this morning’s contribution:
Thutmose III, everybody agrees, was the greatest warrior Egypt ever produced. He has been compared with Alexander and Napoleon, particularly the latter; for when Thutmose’s mummy was found and examined, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith reported that he was a little fellow, slightly over five feet tall — pretty short, even for an ancient Egyptian. This led to the usual psychological cliches about little men and their need to prove their manhood. It wasn’t until fairly recently that someone actually took another look at the mummy and pointed out that the feet were missing. Remeasurements and recalculations resulted in quite a different figure. Thutmose was of average height for an Egyptian — approximately five feet seven inches.
This is a relatively minor point, I suppose, but I mention it because it is further proof of the advantages of revisionism. To claim that Thutmose’s accomplishments were “compensation” for a subconscious sense of inadequacy or frustration is a cheap explanation.
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt
May 25, 2011 Leave a Comment
I’ve been meaning to praise Geraldine McCaughrean’s Casting the Gods Adrift, which is what we’re currently reading for family book time. I have yet to read a book by McCaughrean I don’t want to praise. She’s so good at finding the dramatic angle. And my wife describes her writing as "liquid prose."
After the missus read us a chapter at the end of dinner, I was acknowledging the author’s ability to make me care about Pharaoh Akhenaten‘s “heresy” — emphasizing that it’s difficult for me to imagine caring about these gods I don’t believe in.
Not-quite-5-year-old Benjamin said, "You don’t believe in the Egyptian gods? I do!"
"And do you believe in the Greek gods?" I asked.
"Yes."
"And do you believe in the God of the Hebrews who said that all these other gods don’t exist?"
"Yes," said Benjamin, "but He didn’t say the other gods don’t exist; He just said that you can’t have any gods before Him!"
Serves me right for teaching him the Bible. So — will he be a biblical scholar or a lawyer?
May 25, 2011 Leave a Comment
Barbara Mertz first published Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt in 1964. She published a significantly revised and updated edition in 2007. As she writes in her foreword to the second edition,
Not only have (good heavens) forty years passed, but they have been years full of new discoveries and new interpretations, and even new characters in the story of ancient Egypt, some of whom were not known when I wrote this book.
It’s fun to try to figure out which passages are from 1964 and which are from 2007. For example, I’d have guessed that her comments about goofy scholars were from the 1960s, but the prime candidate for goofy scholarship would probably be Erich von Däniken
but Chariots of the Gods? wasn’t published until 1968.
How about this great passage on revisionism?
A prominent political figure once referred to “revisionist historians” in a manner that implied: (1) he had coined the phrase; (2) these people were doing something underhanded. Neither is true. Revisionism is an essential process in history (and of course other disciplines). Like most things it can be used improperly — shaking things up just for the hell of it, or to get newspaper headlines. We see a certain amount of that in Egyptology. But new discoveries and new interpretations require a reassessment of the evidence — revisionism, as I like to call it. That’s what history is about, and you’ll find plenty of it in this book. Without apologies.
I’m going to guess that Mertz added that section in 2007. After all, Bush Jr. blasted "revisionist historians" in 2003.
May 23, 2011 Leave a Comment
By the time I heard these lines, I was in love with the author:
So when and where did all this [civilization] begin? Did the idea spread outward from the original center to other societies, or did it occur independently in various parts of the world? If it did occur only once, where was the cradle of civilization?
The problem of Diffusion versus Independent Invention is still being debated by scholars, and also by people whose scholarship is, to put it nicely, goofy. The latter believe in a single source, but they don’t agree on what it was. Some give the credit to the hypothetical geniuses of the lost continent of Atlantis. However, the most popular current theory favors visitors from outer space. I don’t want to get started on this, because it makes me lose my temper.
Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt
May 23, 2011 Leave a Comment
Here’s Barbara Mertz’s on a politically incorrect term in archaeology:
I would like to avoid the term “primitive,” because it implies a certain value judgment. I can’t do it, though. Alternatives like “preliterate” and “prehistoric” are at once too explicit and too vague. You know what I mean, and I know what I mean, so let’s stick to “primitive.”
Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt
Father of Benjamin, husband of Nathalie, BK Marcus works from Charlottesville, Virginia, as managing editor of Mises.org.
