This is a strange subject for a blog about commerce. It will take a few paragraphs to get to the
point. Patience please.
Regular readers already know that I have been reading Leszek Kolakowski. I’ve read three of his books … no particular one is best. He is an important philosopher because he studied Marx deeply in Poland, gained fame for his scholarship, figured out Marx was a terrible sham, was driven out of his home country and had to move to the U. of Chicago and the U.S. I enjoy his scholarship on the philosophy of the Dutch Enlightenment (1630-1685) that includes Baruch Spinoza. Holland of that period is the wellspring of modern democracy and industrial commerce.
Free will comes up for two reasons. Spinoza pointed out....
Free will comes up for two reasons. Spinoza pointed out that, regardless of the
1,000 other thinkers who were wrong, there is no room for free will in a
monotheistic god centered universe. I came to that conclusion when I was very
religious at age 13.
My son brought up the subject of free will because a current writer on book tour repeats a claim of a Seattle therapist that he can predict marital stability verses divorce with 90% certainty over a 15-year period based on a few minutes of video tape observing the couple. If that were the case, there would appear to be no such thing as free will.
Free will is only an issue in a world of monotheism. So I
won’t pursue the subject. In my world
of social thought and commerce there is a different response to the 90%
prediction issue. In a world of social
thought, where language creates the reality of the members of any particular
culture and language is carried on the tent poles of major ideas and concepts,
free will is irrelevant. Each
individual sees the world in terms of his/her language and the conceptual
structure of his/her surroundings. Predictability of behavior should be very
high in a world of social thought; there are only a few people who have the
improvisation drive, the rest do pretty much what is expected of them during
their life in their community.
The relevance of commerce is two sided. Commerce gives the appearance of “wildness, “unpredictable behavior,” and abundance of choices when in fact the choices (as in a retail store) are mostly insignificant. On the other side of the coin, commerce has given us hundreds of thousands of ways to utilize our skills and talents and make a living (it rewards merit).
Both of these attributes of commerce have accelerated
geometrically over the past two centuries. So… we believe we have a cornucopia of choices (people coming from a
socialist country are usually stunned by the number of choices and Lefties are
usually angered that the secular God of government has allowed choice to
proliferate) but the choices are prolific and morally trivial. At the same time the near infinity of occupations makes sure that
we end up in the narrowest possibility, the point of greatest predictability,
where merit rewards us the most.
Social thought provides a world where we have no sensation of the predictability of our lives (like fish failing to understand that they are in water … presumably) while being nearly deterministic. Commerce provides a world of apparent infinite choice while offering a reward system that directs us to the most deterministic livelihood.