I've been in the UK of GB and NI for a good solid week now. A "baker's week" even, assuming that bakers make the same sort of error counting to seven as they do counting to twelve. I have noticed many interesting things about London. These are probably commonplace to any of my readers who are English, or who've been here on holiday, but maybe it will be an amusement to see these things through fresh eyes.

First, everything here is double-deckered. Besides the famous double-decker buses, I was brought here in a double-decker airplane. The British attitude is, why have just one thing, when you could have another thing on top of it as well? The office I've set up in has a similar 'double-decker' mentality - the desks and chairs are both of two levels. This leads to some awkwardness at lunchtime, when the top man must ask a hand down, then a hand back up, of the one below; but on the whole I find it an admirable practice, which saves a good deal of space.

The second thing which tends to strike one about London is its sheer age. Last night I went to a wine bar over 100 years old. Shamefully, they're still trying to sell 100-year-old merchandise to their clientele! You'd think they'd have given up on trying to move those outdated casks sometime around the Second World War.

It's hard to tell you just how deeply aged is London, but a few examples may give you a taste: instead of newspapers, they have oldspapers. ("Ice Sheet Recedes from Northern Continent" was one headline). There is a lot of graffiti here as in New York, but here it is mainly still Latin. Instead of houseplants, people keep oaks. Instead of cats they have sloths. Clocks do not generally have second, minute, or hour hands, as Londoners are simply tired of watching the passage of time. The country is ruled by an extremely old woman, and has very severe penalties against, e.g., making a racket, tramping through her geraniums, etc.

I am sitting in a restaurant eating potato chips. Potato chips are the most mysterious food to me. Everywhere, you see them: they are sold at supermarkets, convenience stores, roadside carts; offered free at events, packages with meals at restaurants. The potato chip must be one of the most common food products in the USA.

When you eat one, this is what you experience. Your first bite: the chip falls into pieces under your teeth, with a somewhat satisfying crunch. This is accompanied by a bland, oily flavor. As you 'savor' this flavor, per the instructions on the back of the bag, the crunched-up pieces dissolve in saliva, flooding your mouth with the sharp taste of a pile of salt. What's left behind is a flavorless goop, which sticks into the crevices of your teeth.

Upon probing this goop with your tongue, in hopes of dislodging it (vain hopes), you notice a faint, almost imperceptible sensation. Could it be? Here, at last, has the 'chip' finally given up its secret? Yes, indeed: this last whisper of flavor is recognizably the product of a potato. That familiar tuber must really have crossed paths with the thing you've put in your mouth. No doubt far in the past, under compromising circumstances - the potato would no doubt just as soon forget the whole episode - see how shyly it hides within the blaring cavalcade of salt and oil!

I think that just now was literally the first time I've ever gotten something complicated to work by just thoughtlessly fiddling with it for a while. Strangely enough I'm not even slightly upset by the fact that I got away without figuring out why the expression needed to be

co o = ContT (\k -> 
            return $ Left $ Co (\x -> 
               ContT (\_ -> k x)) o).

the unthinkable

I have met many cynics - those who say 'the world can not be changed very much', or 'what you do does not very much matter'.

To the contrary, it is shocking how every notion thought up by humanity has been, at one time or another, enacted - no matter how horrible, or difficult, or ridiculous it is. No depraved imagination has gone further than certain torturers, nor has any vision of selflessness and devotion gone unanswered by some great humanitarian. And these exceptional cases have even driven the mass spirit, at least for a few moments, as in the Nazi episode. The 'unthinkable' occurs inevitably; only the 'unthought' is truly abstained from.

propaganda

From Falsehood In War-Time: Propaganda Lies of the First World War

"When the fall of Antwerp got known, the church bells were rung" (meaning in Germany). (Kölnischer Zeitung')

According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken. (Le Matin)

According to what Le Matin has heard from Cologne, the Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been driven away from their places. (The Times)

According to what The Times has heard from Cologne via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour. (Corriere della Sera).

According to information to the 'Corriere della Sera' from Cologne via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian Priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down. (Le Matin)

Learning democracy

Ukrainian politicians are learning how to do democracy properly. Good for them!

Neave Barker, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, said Yanukovych had learnt a lot in the last five years.

"Back then it was very much felt that he alienated voters in the west of the country - voters who looked towards the European Union for a future for the country - by mentioning the need to maintain strong ties with Russia," Barker said.

"This time round he has refused to speak at all about anything that may be vaguely controversial."

Form and Content

Today I realized that two problems I have been thinking about are actually one problem, from two points of view.

First there is the problem of form and content. This distinction is familiar but ill-defined. For example, one can say that Descartes' exposition of his argument has the same 'form' as the outline version found in a philosophical critique of it; but what are the actual criteria for deciding if the critique retains the form of the argument?

Secondly there is the problem of manager and worker. Again, a familiar division of roles, but why does it work as it does? The degree to which this role remains unanalyzed is revealed by the degree to which explanations of the managerial role transparently depend upon a previous understanding of what one is talking about: the manager 'coordinates operations', or 'tells others what to do', etc.

The first insight is that 'form and content' is the same division as 'manager and worker', except seen from the point of view of the object rather than the subject. Whatever the 'worker' does is 'content'; whatever the 'manager' is concerned with is 'form'. This also tells us whence comes the internal dynamic of form and content - it comes from the external dynamic of manager and worker. 'Form and content' is a game played between manager and worker.

If form and content is a game, then what are the stakes? Why is it played? Let us consider a particular case: the writing of a novel. Here the manager consists of the 'higher' cognitive processes, those which are more conscious. The worker is the more opaque creative process of actually writing. A typical interaction between the two is for the worker to write a scene; then the manager compares it with what is already written, and with the desired outcome (e.g., the completion of certain plot points, the introduction of certain themes, the production of a work of so many pages).

The interaction goes in both directions: a novel writer will often shuffle around what has been written to fit a plan, but will also alter their plans if the writing pulls them in another direction: one often hears an author say that they are 'surprised' by what their characters do.

The managerial role here acts as a translator between objectives at one level (the desire to write a novel) and objectives at another level (what should actually be written next). I think that this is exactly what management is, in general.

A question remains, which is what is the connection between management and discipline. Management is traditionally wed to the disciplinary function: it is the manager who fires people, and the iconic image of management is of someone ordering people around or 'chewing them out'.

This role of management, however, I can only see as conventional. There are in fact numerous counterexamples to the scheme: a literary agent or political adviser fulfills a managerial role in the sense of translation, but has no disciplinary function.

Disciplinary management I see as a 'type' or 'personality' for the manager/worker function. One imagines that the 50s-style authoritarian manager is also an authoritarian personality, in the sense that dey discipline deir own thoughts and actions explicitly - like a novel writer who sits down at 6am every day and 'forces demself' to write. But this personality is not the only one, or the most common one, or the most effective one.

Japanese

People are always asking me if I know Japanese. 'Do you know Japanese?' they ask.

I know many things, and when this question comes up I'll have been talking about them. For example, I may have been asked 'what do you do?' and I'll have answered that I am not bound up in any particular profession, but study widely among the wisdom of the ages, write down whatever moments of genius grip me, etc.

Then they will ask me what I am 'interested in'. Hegel, certainly; and the whole great question of the symbol, which is studied by everyone from Turing to Derrida; and I have a fascination with the great artistic disruptions of the twentieth century, and with that whole flirtation of the artistic, the social, and the political with the surreal, the perverse, the horrible and the nonsensical - Dada and Nazism and the bizarre, disassociative eruption of the television commercial. I tell them all this although I am already full of despair, for I know they can not follow.

And at that point they will ask me if I know Japanese. It raises my ire, because although they don't understand why they've asked me, I do understand: they see my whole philosophy, my whole project as summing to a simple quirk: they see me as an 'eclectic', and they think all that babble about this philosopher and that can't mean much, it's certainly not the whole content and spirit and being of culture. But it does suggest, to this sort of inadequate mentation, the kind of character who's 'in to weird things'. And then, connecting in the thoughtless, automatic way which is habitual for such people, they think as follows: 'Japanese is also weird, perhaps he knows Japanese.'

And as though that weren't enough, the most galling, unbearable, utterly unjust part of the whole miserable problem is that I do know Japanese.

Slogans of Thought

I've noticed that my style of thinking has shifted in certain ways, although I don't know exactly when these shifts took place. The difference is that I tend to think more in "slogans". I very often have the experience of reading something, and then immediately labelling it as a particular form of some very general idea that I have - and this is something which didn't used to happen.

I don't know if this means that I'm thinking at a higher level now, or that I've just become intellectually lazy. I do think I have a tendency in that direction - witness the long list of projects which I have, at one time or another, set out to attempt. Few of them have I followed through to completion. On the other hand, I feel as though I am less intellectually lazy now than I have been in the past, so perhaps my new styles of thought really are a positive development.

I'd be very curious to know what other people thought of my little "slogans". Do they represent genuine insights? Or are they just reifications of my humdrum intellectual habits?

One slogan is: "Everything 'external' is internal and vice versa". I tried to explain some of my thinking behind this in my last post on interrogator and interrogated. The sense of the slogan is that, on the one hand, statements which attempt to define some "external" condition are implicitly relying on a system of assumptions whose internal structure already determines what kinds of "external" things can be recognized. So everything "external" is actually internal (a structural property of the entity making the statement). On the other hand, these "internal" things, the structure behind a statement or action, also have no independent life - they do not spring from nowhere, but are defined only in terms of their relationships to the things upon which they act. So these "internal" things find their definition externally.

When someone says, "What is that person's gender," we might assume that the statement is trying to ascertain something about an external fact (i.e., someone's gender). Thinkers in the feminist tradition would instead focus on the origin of the notion of gender: the person making this statement has an idea of what "gender" is in their head, which does not correspond in any natural way with the external world; and this statement is actually trying to fit external facts into an internally determined framework. So this can be seen as an example of "everything 'external' is internal."

The other side of the slogan is where I probably tend to disagree with thinkers in the feminist tradition. Namely, many feminists go from the readily apparent fact that gender is a social construct, and seem to take this as some sort of a personal affront or moral problem. What they miss (in my opinion) is that the notion "gender" was not simply invented, nor could it have been. A concept is nothing more than that concept's place in a system of concepts, and the conceptual action it specifies within that system. The system of concepts taken as a whole corresponds to all of reality, so in that sense gender is a fact even though it is socially constructed.

To bring the contradiction in this sort of thinking out (I would call it "feminist thinking," but I don't think that all feminists think this way at all), let us use a simple thought experiment. Feminists would like to destroy the concept of gender, because gender, they say, is a kind of oppression. But surely, a "pure" or "internal" concept can not oppress you! The reason they oppose the concept is precisely because it is part of a system of actions within the world. But then, how could you get rid of the concept if the actions exist? So this is the idea behind "everything 'internal' is external."

I'm afraid the second half of this explanation was not very clear. In fact, as I descend from the abstract height of the slogan into the specifics of an example, it becomes very difficult for me to express what I think. I analyze this as a combination between an incomplete understanding of the meaning of the slogan on my part; and the difficulties imposed by conventional language, which is based on some very different 'slogans', and which exerts its constraints more sharply the more one attempts to speak in a "concrete" manner.

Another slogan I have is "There is no neutral position." This is a more straightforward notion, I think. If you are going to have a position at all on something, it means you're part of a system of possible actions. Most systems in the world arise as large-scale consequences of the expected, "neutral" action. In other words, things are not put into motion by "radicals" or what have you - if the system were constituted by radicals then they wouldn't be radicals.

This slogan always occurs to me when I read the "moral" argument for libertarianism. The argument runs as follows: to take someone's property is theft. Therefore taxation is theft, and the only moral government is one which is entirely voluntary. Libertarianism thus casts itself as the truly neutral position: a position of simply letting everyone be, to carry on their business as they see fit.

My problem with this argument is that I think "there is no neutral position" when it comes to the idea of property. Property is an enormously contentious issue, with different forms of government often being based on what constitutes property, and which segments of society are entrusted with what property. For example, under some definitions of property, people can be property. Under some, only certain classes are allowed to own property. Under some, natural resources such as water and coal can be property. To imagine a world in which "private property" were uncontroversially defined, is to imagine a world in which much of the content of politics has somehow been transcended. A "neutral" party with regards to property is actually a partisan for a distribution of power that is very much like the status quo.

A third slogan, which is the last I can think of just now, is "everything is part of the world." It's hard to explain how this is anything but a truism. The point is that, when we talk about complex systems, we need to be sure that we never reify the complexity. For example, there is no "invisible hand"; the "invisible hand" is a description of actual events as they transpire in the world.

As another example, people have been talking about "moral hazard" with regards to the present problems in the financial sector. The idea is that, by bailing out badly-performing institutions, we create some kind of perverse incentive: firms will not be as concerned about failure as they ought to be. This is incoherent, to me, for the same reason as the reification of the "invisible hand". Namely, there is no such thing as an "incentive" except as it exists in the world. It is just a word used to describe a situation in which people have reason to act in a certain way. An action, even a misguided action like the bailout, can't be an "incentive". The action fits with a system which does incentivize bad business, but taking the action will not call the system into being through voodoo magic, any more than not taking the action will stop the system from existing. In other words, there is not the direct effect of the bailout, and additionally the perverse incentive of the bailout. That would be akin to the Americans who visit Paris, and see the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower; and then one of them suggests that as long as they're in Paris, why don't they do some "tourism" next!

Another interesting thing is that I think these slogans have their counterparts in ordinary thought. That is, almost all thought within this culture follows certain high-level beliefs and assumptions, which are all but invisible. The counterpart to "Everything 'external' is internal and vice versa" would be "The world is divided into subject, which is purely internal, and object, which is purely external." The counterpart to "there is no neutral position" would be "neutrality is the natural and virtuous position." The counterpart to "everything is part of the world" would be "the physical world exists alongside another world, the world of concepts."

Standing five hours at the Tamarack

there is nothing to say. A sympathetic word fades out over the asphalt. The woman might as well have been mute.

We are standing under the sun and someone drives by and thinks, what the fuck are they up to. Under the sun surrounded by people, but then what is a person but a long series of interactions, and what is an interaction but a reflex. The foot goes down easy on the pedal and everything becomes close. All the world is on your living room set. Your whole life is there in the car with you, riding along at sixty.

The pedal is already down and the two people who were standing there are already far away.

The Dialectic of Interrogator and Interrogated

I've been trying to write a handful of very detailed analytical essays for this blog, over the past three months or so, and failing completely. So today I'm making a decision to give up on the analytical essays. Instead my posts here will be shorter, more informal, more conversational, etc. Essentially just a record of what's on my mind, which is probably what people would read this for anyway. Hopefully as a side effect, my rate of posts will increase from its current zero.

What I've been thinking about lately is interrogation. I mean interrogation in the broad sense, for example scientific investigation. I don't really mean the person in the dark room with the single bright light and uncomfortable chair. What I want to talk about is the sort of interrogation where you have something before you, and you're not really sure how it works, and you're going to "ask" it (by questioning it, or doing experiments on it, or thinking about it).

To be concrete, let's talk about a quantum physicist who is examining something using an electron-microscope. The electron-microscope, and its subject, are engaged in an interrogation: the electron-microscope is gaining certain information from its subject, which answers the electron-microscope's questions about e.g., "what's the electronic displacement over here?" The scientist is also involved in an intorragation: dey[1] is interrogating the electron-microscope / subject system as to whatever dey wants to know about. Let's say that dey is trying to determine a certain constant factor, C, in an equation: A = Bx + C. Dey has controlled for x by setting it to 0 somehow, and is interrogating the system as to the value of A, which should then be equal to C.

What interests me is the dialectical aspects of this interrogation. The scientist is interested in a constant, so if the electron microscope gives him an uncorrelated sequence of random values between 0 and 1, dey'll be flummoxed. The only option will be to revise the theory or investigate the experimental setup. In other words, the "answer" has changed the parameters of the "question". In some ways, the "question" can be seen as a system of assumptions about the interrogated system; an interrogator who makes no assumptions will be unable to ask a question, while an interrogator who makes wrong assumptions will be unable to make sense of the answer.

Okay, this is all kind of abstract. Let me talk about a couple of interesting examples. One is mathematical notation. In quantum physics, you have a notation which represents quantum "states" as vectors and "observables" as operators. It's tricky because it's not exactly mathematical notation: the underlying spaces are not completely defined, some problems with infinite quantities are not completely dealt with, and so on. In fact what happens is that some mathematical manipulations are allowed because they come up with physically plausible results; others are disallowed because they come up with physically implausible results. Rules of thumb are developed and so on. So the mathematical notation is certainly influenced by the physics.

The physics is also influenced by the mathematical notation: there is no way to represent a "partial observation" of any sort in the notation, and so this has to be considered a very special topic in quantum physics. The notation represents experiments in which large observational apparatus observe quantum events:

A | k > = | x >

(Operator A) (applied to quantum state k) (yields localized quantum state at x)

(experimental measurement device for A) (applied to particle k) (yields localized particle at x)

and so these are the experiments which are conducted. Questions which fall outside the quantum notation completely tend to be branded as "philosophical" (i.e. worthless).

Another area with a lot of mathematical notation is economics. In economics they're not even half as careful as they are in physics, so it's even easier to see how this notation interacts dialectically with what is observed. I've read statements in economics like "if p is not set exogeneously, then the model can not be guaranteed to stabilize..." with the implication that we therefore make sure to set it exogeneously! More subtly, once something has been set as a variable, it becomes hard to question that it is a well-defined quantity. The (macroeconomics) book I'm reading now defines various aggregate quantities: aggregate production, aggregate employment, so far so good. Then aggregate consumption is calculated based on an aggregated expectation of disposable income. This last aggregation is, strictly speaking, unjustified: the USA as a whole has a great deal of disposable income, but many residents make decisions based on their own very limited disposable income due to income inequality. But the assumptions involved in defining it all but disappear, since this aggregation fits in to the mathematical system (I didn't notice until reading the relevant chapter a few times through).

As you can see, keeping track of this dialectic of interrogation is quite important for scientific investigation. It seems to have seeped into scientific consciousness through terms like "rigor," but generally it seems to be underappreciated.

Another aspect of this which I've been thinking about somewhat is how it all relates back to the big picture: humans as conscious beings who are investigating a world which acts according to rules, etc. When we look at a specific interaction, we see this sort of dialectic taking place, where the question of the interrogator limits their ability to understand the interrogated, and where they ultimately have to allow the interrogated to redefine their question in order to get anywhere. And this can be seen very easily in the basic interactions of phenomenal consciousness: if you aren't looking for notes in music, then you just hear music; you have to train yourself to hear notes. If you aren't looking for color, shape, form, and movement in your visual field then you just see things and events, and are unable to draw or paint very well; again, you have to train yourself, and of course the way to train yourself is to open up to the visual field and see what it teaches you.

The natural question is where does this lead? We might say that there is a dialectic of interrogation going on between consciousness and sense-perception: consciousness takes information from sense-perception in terms of its own expectations of the world, but these expectations can also be altered by the feedback from sense-perception. But then, what do we mean by consciousness? Conventionally, consciousness is the seat of the ego: it is where our desires and beliefs and personality and so forth are expressed. It is also the location of reason and rationality: it is where the rules of logic and scientific thought are expressed, etc. These characterizations have in common a sense that things go only one way: from the ego to the outside world. The ego is not dialectically realized, but evaluates what is present to it from a stable point of view. So perhaps eventually we're going to have to come back to the "ultimate interrogator," the one who just asks the same question over and over again, something like "what's going on?"

I think this ultimate interrogator is sort of a mythical figure which a lot of people are trying to find, or think about, or what have you. My vision of the interior of the mind is as a bunch of these dialectic processes, exchanging information and at the same time reacting to that information and reshaping themselves based on that information. Or rather, being reshaped by that information: the process is truly dialectic, in the sense that neither interrogator or interrogated is "the actor" or the one in control. Sometimes the processes stand as interrogator, and sometimes as interrogated, and this extends through the rather artificial barrier of "the mind" into the outside world, in both directions. "In both directions" may be hard to understand in the context of mental events: what I mean is that for a particular interrogation - let's say the physicist's interrogation of an experiment - one's sense of what is going on with the interrogation is obviously feedback from the outside world - the movement of the dials on the experimental apparatus, perhaps. But one's situating conception of the processes involved - one's theoretical understanding, one's sense of what question they are asking - also extends out into the outside world eventually. If the experiment yields puzzling results, the physicist will eventually move to der textbooks, or to the chalkboard, or talk to others about the problem.

Finally I would like to say something about the connection between the application of this dialectic to the mind, and the application of this dialectic to science. I think that there is a certain "folk philosophy" in science which comprises subjects like the "scientific method," verificationism, rationalism, etc. One of the strongest features of this folk philosophy of science is that it tends to believe in the "rational being," defined one way or another: basically the idea of the intelligent scientist who determinedly investigates phenomena, figures things out using powerful internal processes, etc., etc. My guess is that this tendency has led to another tendency, which is the tendency to underrate the importance of feedback from experiment to assumption, that is of critical analysis of what assumptions are being made, how they are affecting the interpretation of experiments, and so on.

[1] I will be using "dey/dem/deir" as gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns.

How Cruel be Fate, how Heartless Truth

Math in the news. Offensive and derogatory math in this case.

Gov. Rendell, Mayor Nutter and two of Hillary Rodham Clinton's top aides yesterday blasted Barack Obama's campaign for allegedly diminishing and disrespecting Pennsylvania's presidential primary.

In a national conference call with reporters, the foursome pointed to a memorandum written by Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, that referred to Pennsylvania as "only one of ten remaining contests."

Rendell predicted that the description would be "off-putting" to the state's Democratic voters. Nutter called it "one of the silliest things I've seen in recent times."

A Theory of Society

The classical economists - Smith, Ricardo, and Marx - had great insight into the workings of economics. Nowadays they are mainly remembered for certain iconic ideas: Ricardo (if at all) for comparative advantage, Smith for the "invisible hand," and Marx for Communism. However, all three were fairly close theoretically.

Each took as the starting point for their analysis the basic and startling idea that economic value comes from labor. This is startling, because one is used to thinking that value is based on some objective worth - for example, tiramisu is more valuable than barley soup because it is much tastier. It is impossible to recognize the fact that value comes from labor if you simply look at what is in front of you. It is necessary to situate these items - the barley soup and tiramisu - in the determining context of economic competition.

Within the context of economic competition, the idea that value comes from labor shows its merit. Everyone is bound to work for the highest wages they can get. Therefore, if people are not willing to pay for something in proportion with the labor given to create it, then the industry which creates that product will be unable to attract workers. The market as a whole tends towards an equilibrium in which every laborer is working as efficiently as possible in terms of satisfying human desires - therefore the particulars of what they are making are mostly irrelevant from an economic point of view.

The above analysis simplifies considerably, because it is not my main point of interest in writing today. I will be writing more about economics once I've learned more about economics. For now, I'd like to outline a new social theory, which is analogous to the classical economic theory of labor and value.

I would like to propose that learning is an originary concern in social matters, analogous to how labor is originary in economic matters.

I think it is safe to say that most current social theories, insofar as they attempt to be deductive and universal, are based on the idea of choice, or preference. For example, modern microeconomics takes choice as an axiom, and derives theories from there. Political science also seems to come from a basis of choice. Liberal political philosophy is also based on the idea of choice, and uses one's ability to do as they choose given their circumstances, and to be governed by officials of their choice, as the definition of political freedom.

I don't think that these ideas are very successful. People are mostly not in control of their social circumstances. In the modern world, people are born into a huge infrastructure of social systems. Their choices lie mostly outside these systems (hobbies, etc) or are defined by these systems (Should we invade this country? Should we go through with this merger?). Someone's action in a particular situation can be explained, perhaps, by preference - wherever preference comes from - but how they got in that situation certainly can not be so explained.

A perhaps more perceptive line of social thought focuses on power. If the theorists of choice come from liberalism and the right wing, then the theorists of power come from socialism and the left wing. Marx is a thinker in this group: he located the problems of the proletariat in their alienation, their non-ownership of the means of production. Other left-wing thinkers, including Chomsky, Foucault, etc., have developed other theories based on power.

The power theories are more convincing to me than the choice theories. For example, it offers a much better perspective on the phenomenon of inequality. Choice theorists are more or less forced to conclude that global inequality is caused by personal or cultural differences, and has no global component. Power theorists are able to view inequality as a real global situation on the level of power relationships.

However, power theories are limited in their own way. The question is why are some groups in power and others not. Choice theorists answer this by saying that some people have personal or cultural characteristics which allow them to attain power. Power theorists disagree with this incorrect analysis, and point to the wide array of social and economic tools used by those in power to hold on to power and to disenfranchise other groups. However, this analysis leaves no room for an alternative answer to the question of why the powerful groups are powerful. It reduces this fact of power inequality to a transhistorical coincidence, essentially an axiom. This is unacceptable.

My own theory is that the power theorists are right about global inequality being a real global situation, but wrong about the a priori nature of it. Interestingly, these left-wing and right-wing theories tend to agree on one thing, which is the idea of 'indoctrination.' Indoctrination is the notion that a belief system can be forced on someone through coercion and propaganda, and that this belief system will subsequently determine the person's actions to a considerable extent. Indoctrination is a basic component of many modern theories, implicitly or explicitly, as an explanation for why those who are disadvantaged, and theoretically are capable of reversing their disadvantage, do not do so. For example, why does the laborer support capitalism? Why does the dictator's subject support dictatorship? Why don't the people revolt? The solution of depressingly many theorists is that the common person has been indoctrinated into the current system, and is mostly incapable of escaping this indoctrination.

My own solution would be that they don't know how to revolt. Not that it has not occurred to them, but that they do not know the tactics to pull it off. This and many other social equilibria, I believe, are controlled by learning.

I regard all other ideas, notably indoctrination, as psychological pseudo-science. Indoctrination happens to other people, never the essay-writing intellectual. For this reason alone it can be discounted. Indoctrination, as well as other theories, such as theories about moral character or work ethic, fail moreover on the grounds that they inhabit the wrong causal territory. They seem to be aware that the border of causality has been pushed as far as social factors such as effort and belief - but they duck out at this point, taking the easy answer that these social factors are in turn inherent or acausal. The plain fact is that no social phenomenon is acausal.

So viewed from this theoretical perspective, a social theory based on learning is a natural extension of earlier theories based on power or on choice. A theory of learning merely takes it as a given that certain power relations exist in society, and that certain groups therefore have social goals which are determined by these relations. This is an equilibrium position - if a group has power in society, but is not socially determined to maintain power, then they will lose power. The question then is how successfully different groups - including classes, nationalities, religious groups, etc. - will be able to pursue their respective goals.

The answer to this question is determined, generically, by how they are able to overcome the challenges placed in their path by the dynamic evolution of society. And this in turn is determined by what they do in response to these challenges. However, this is to some extent determined - as I have outlined above, it doesn't make sense to say that they choose not to pursue the maintenance of their social position, from an equilibrium point of view. Therefore, the sole remaining determinant is how well they know how to maintain their social position.

This process I would outline as follows: a group has certain objective conditions in which they must perform. They have certain resources at their disposal, including social, economic, and theoretical resources. But their exact performance remains underdetermined. They will not make the best use of their resources, because this would require a perfect theory. Therefore, they will act according to a dynamic process, in which they make various attempts using their resources, and use human intelligence to respond to the unexpected in their objective environment. This is the process of learning - and I am arguing that from it comes the dynamic evolution of social relations.

In other words, history under my program is to be retheorized as the history of techniques. The movement of knowledge, power, and wealth, then, are just particular equilibria which shift as society progresses technically on many fronts.

I was originally planning to write down some preliminary thoughts on the state of learning in modern society - but this post is already long. Some other time, then.