trying to put some thoughts together

For a long time I've had the notion that the world is a thing that can -- and must -- be forcibly improved by educated humans. I was going to try to write a formal essay about why that whole notion is misguided, but I'm in an uncomfortable molting phase right now and don't really have the clarity to do that.

My major observation right now is that academic reading and writing can introduce a lot of abstractions. The good side of abstractions is that they are (1) rewarding because they're perfectly rational in a way that nothing in our non-linguistic/concrete world is and (2) helpful because they allow us to model the world so we can manipulate it. Economic and scientific models allow us to create the technology and institutions that give people more of what they want.

The bad side of abstractions is that they also create new desires that can never be fulfilled. We have words like God, heaven, spirit, consciousness, and progress that don't actually mean anything useful, but people spend their whole lives thinking and acting like they have to figure them out. And when we -- and by this, I'm thinking especially about intellectuals or educated people -- get used to abstraction, it gets really addicting. Then we start applying analyses and generalizations to things that don't merit them. This results in nonsense phrases like "making the world a better place," which presupposes the world is a single entity that fluctuates in moral status depending upon our piety. I agree that countries can become more just, that economies can provide people with more of what they want, and then health care can decrease debilitation and increase freedom (and they will continue doing so, I have no doubt), but none of these guarantees that world is heading closer to or farther from perfection. People can get better -- by obeying the Golden Rule more faithfully -- but that's it.

Steven Pinker's analysis of politics in The Blank Slate helped me a lot to understand that there is no such thing as "the world." In his brilliant dissection of modernism, he showed how recent political ideology, social theory, and art theory are anti-scientific: they are based on assumptions about how a culture or government can create and recreate human nature, when the data shows otherwise. All of the most important patterns of our behavior are already in our genes and they all have evolutionary explanations. The job of government is to administer justice, not to create utopias. And again, my best notion of justice right now is the power to give people what they want, and enforcing the Golden Rule by means of inalienable rights.

Part of my problem with Thomas Friedman -- as much as I found The Lexus and the Olive Tree to be informative and engaging -- was that he tended to conflate economic development with justice. In other words, he tended to view getting wealthy as an end itself for countries, instead of as a means to justice. Rich countries are also naturally more free and have more resources to devote to health care, so they are by rule generally more just. But there's also this big problem, which is the "hedonic treadmill" effect: rising means create rising expectations. Being richer gives people lots of choices which can increase anxiety instead of decrease it: the paradox of choice. Furthermore, when people are more anxious and less sure of themselves, being good -- obeying the Golden Rule -- gets harder. When people don't know what they want any more, then they get even more confused when it comes to other people. Thus, a country can get less just and its citizens less moral if, in the process of getting richer, the people start wanting more things that they don't have and can't buy.

The tendency to view wealth as an end in itself is the most frustrating characteristics of people who study economics and are in business. The lesson from the Cold War, as both Friedman and Pinker pointed out, is that capitalism undoubtedly beats communism. But only Pinker understood the broader lesson: science beats ideology. Ideology is absolute certainty, and science is the opposite. Capitalism is not an ideology as much as a scientific model based on generally accurate models of human interaction. But as our understanding of human interaction changes, so does capitalism. Thus, a bunch of new economic models are developed in coordination with psychological research. On the other hand, communism was based on very bad models of human interaction and human nature and that's why it couldn't last.
Anyway, the reasoning that greed is good for everyone, and furthermore, that wealth is an end in itself, is a misinterpretation of capitalism as ideology. Again, real capitalism has nothing to do with what's good and what's not. It's just a model that often -- but not always -- helps people to get what they want. So, why do people tend to view wealth as an end and take capitalism as ideology? After all, most people understand that money is just numbers and few are truly rapacious. But it's what money can buy that matters: health, security, and to a large extent, the conditions favorable for happiness. Psychology research shows, though, that this is only true to a certain extent. Once people get these basics, there's no guarantee that more money buys more happiness. My guess is that those who take capitalism as ideology and are excited about the world's economic and technological development have some kind of utopia or armageddon scenario in mind. Once all the US solves its inequality problems, and all the countries get to be like the US, something big and important will happen and our lives will get better. Human nature will evolve and everyone will live in bliss. And this is exactly the kind of thinking that Pinker so forcefully discredited in his book.

To be fair, I'm also excited about the world's economic development because there are so many people in the developing world experiencing a degree of suffering I'd never wish upon myself. But I also don't think that my own life or country will necessarily be better off for it. My own life will be better if the proportotion of things I have to things I want -- material things hopefully comprise only a small subset of this -- is higher than it is today. Today, though, it's pretty high, so I'm not expecting it to improve. The whole task of progress in life is not to get this ratio higher and higher, but to try to keep it where it is.

Summary: Economic progress is making people more free and helping governments be more just, and that's good. But there's no guarantee that this will continue forever and there's plenty of reasons to believe that it could backfire. People are only good to the extent that they live by the Golden Rule. Economic cooperation and good government promotes goodness, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it. Whether people adopt the Golden Rule probably depends on how much they're exposed to it, so if we want to make other people better we must live by it. In this sense, being good and making the world better are the same thing. We can make personal progress by learning to understand ourselves and others more, so we can more accurately interpret the Golden Rule. What is understanding ourselves? It's about clarifying what we want and figuring how to get it or to abandon the desire.

You can never make the world a better place, you can only be a good person. Progress is personal.

Second Summary. Things to live by:

1. The negative golden rule -- don't do to others what you wouldn't wish upon yourself
2. The present moment is the only thing that exists