Excerpts and Notes

Why America Failed by Morris Berman

Amazon Link

This was not my favorite Berman book. While I don't disagree with his characterization that America has always been a nation of "hustlers," I was not convinced that the South represented another paradigm nor am I convinced that Mexico is a better place to be than the U.S.

Selected excerpts:

He [Lincoln] and the Republicans held that today's laborer was tomorrow's capitalist, and that if a man failed to rise above this status he had only himself to blame. It was never, said Lincoln, the fault of the system. (The legacy of this, as John Steinbeck pointed out many years later, was that in America the poor regard themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires.") [p.128]

My own take on this vortex of violence is that from an early point, America had no real content. Hustling, after all, hardly qualifies as content; indeed, it can only generate an anti-society, which we now see all around us. In addition, in breaking away from England and Continental Europe, America acquired what Hegel called a "negative identity," one that was defined by what it was not, what it was opposed to. Hixson, following Louis Hartz, argues that our belief that we are special came out of not having, in contrast to Europe, a long history of feudalism and religion to endow us with a solid identity. And without the sense of a long historical tradition, America became dependent on representation -- on an image of itself to organize consent and coherence. This is why the boundless expansion of the frontier and the ideology of progress (as against the "savage," who is unprogressive) are so closely tied together and why our behavior toward perceived enemies is so extreme -- pathological, in a word.

It is also why there is so little tolerance for substantive dissent, or fundamental critique, in America. Since our identity is in fact quite brittle, we have to be constantly telling ourselves how fabulous we are. Thus Tocqueville wrote of America that "the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues....Hence the majority lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration." [p.155]

In an interesting article entitled "A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism" (Critical Inquiry, 22, no. 3 [Spring 1996], pp. 466-85), Patrick Brantlinger quotes Andre Gorz as saying, "those who propose a fundamentally different society can no longer be condemned in the name of realism. On the contrary, realism now consists of acknowledging that 'industrialism' has reached a stage where it can go no further, blocked by obstacles of its own making." Brantlinger goes on to say that the idea of an alternative path, "the nonindustrial, nonviolent, decentralized, democratic, communitarian, and economically and ecologically sustainable path...may turn out to be the only rational blueprint for survival." This doesn't mean it will come to pass, but it might have some chance under conditions of major geopolitical disintegration. [Notes To Pages 181-187, p.227]

Yep, we may be rapidly approaching the point where realism is converging with idealism.

Related quote from one of the books that Berman indirectly cites:

The relationship between morality and afluence [sic.], the book's first major theme, brackets this study and reminds us of the persistent hope among intellectuals that Americans would curtail their spending habits and turn to loftier goals. From early in the nation's history, writers worried about the moral implications of consumers' self-indulgence and the consequences of changing patterns of comfort and luxury. Opposed to excessive commercialism and what they saw as the corruptions of luxury, they proposed instead varying combinations of genuine work, self-control, democracy, public welfare, high culture, meaningful recreation, and authentic selfhood. ¹

¹ Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) 2, Questia, Web, 22 Dec. 2011.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

For those who do not have the time or inclination to read The Master and His Emissary (selected excerpts here), I recommend A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

It would appear that demand is building for an organization/institution similar to the one that has been sketched here at IntegralJournal over the past few years.

note: Pink recommends that readers check out Halfbakery.com.

Selected excerpts:

The typical boomer now has more of his life behind him than ahead of him, prompting the searching of souls and the reevaluation of priorities....Meanwhile, technology continues its unrelenting march, deluging us with data and choking us with choices. All these forces have gathered into a perfect storm of circumstances that is making the search for meaning more possible and the will to find meaning the sixth essential aptitude of the Conceptual Age. [p.218]

Inglehart believes that the advanced world is in the midst of a slow change in its operating principles, "a gradual shift from 'Materialist' values (emphasizing economic and physical security above all) toward 'Postmaterialist' priorities (emphasizing self-expression and the quality of life)." Gregg Easterbrook...puts it more boldly: "A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale -- involving hundreds of millions of people -- and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age." [p.219]

[Quoting Virginia Postel in the Notes]

"We don't want more food, or even more restaurant meals -- we're already maxed out. Instead, we want tastier, more interesting food in an appealing environment. It's a move from physical quantity to intangible, emotional quality." [p.251]

University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection

University Planning and Architecture: The Search for Perfection by Jonathan Coulson


I've read the first section as an ebook at one of the local universities. However, this is not a book that should be read electronically. I'm interested in sharing the purchase price of the hardback with others. I'll read it in a few days and mail it forward to others who commit to sharing the cost. (We can eventually put it in the library of the University system that we build.) Contact me at "theinnclub [at] yahoo.com"

An excerpt:

The concept that the university should be the ideal community in microcosm was as relevant in post-war Britain as it was across the Atlantic.

Amazon Link

View all my reviews

Sunnyside Gardens | Preservation Alliance

Sunnyside Gardens | Preservation Alliance.

Paradigms and Conventions by Young Back Choi

Amazon Link

Selected excerpts:

Recently, Timur Kuran has observed: "We must guard against turning the [past] successes of neoclassical economics into a license to stop thinking. If a broader, more refined framework might prevent blunders and explain more successfully a wider set of phenomena, science mandates that we develop and explore it." Progress in science occurs by constructing new analyses that work to resolve difficulties perceived in existing theories.... [Preface, p.ix]

The binding rules of the economic game are uncertain because these rules are often implicit. Even if there were some codification upon which everyone could agree, we could still never guarantee against alteration, simple nonobservance, or even subversion. By definition, rules cannot be specific enough for every possible case. There is always room for interpretation. Genuine differences in interpretation and the willful distortion of rules to promote individual interests are, therefore, always possible and often very difficult to differentiate. Scarcity and invidious comparisons make these problems of distribution decidedly nontrivial. [p.14-15]

Sometimes we speak as if uncertainty can arise only from too little information, but its source can also be too much. We cannot see all things at all times; we must choose and create images, else we are bound to be baffled. [p.15]

While Kirzner focuses on behavior that emanates from conscious and explicit decisions, Heiner examines all sorts of actions, not just by human beings but also by animals and micro-organisms. Examining the generalized finding from "signal detection experiments," he asserts that the greater the uncertainty (or, rather, the gap between the complexity of decision problems and our ability to calculate), the stronger is our (and lower beasts') incentive to adhere to rules and thus the more behavior is "rule governed." Given what can be gained and lost by taking a certain action, the reliability of any action that deviates from the rule must approach perfection as the probability of making the correct choice decreases below a certain point. Accordingly,

... an agent's repertoire must be limited to actions which are adopted only to likely or "recurrent" situations. Thus a general characteristic of such a repertoire is that it excludes actions which will in fact enhance performance under certain conditions. [p.25]

Every decision, a necessary antecedent to human action, must involve two structural elements: an idea or understanding of a given situation, and, given that understanding, a selection of the most desirable course of action. [p.30]

Unfortunately, most don't have an understanding of the predicament of man.

And here we shall further assume that individuals never pose problems too difficult to solve; it is the task of the process of understanding itself to simplify in order to manage, and to do otherwise is counterproductive. [emphasis mine, mh, p.31]

In our faculty of reason and imagination, we are fortunately endowed with the means of coping with uncertainty. We can make inquiries, deliberate about the variety of actions possible in any set of circumstances, and find those that are best suited to the particulars. Once discovered, ideas transform states of doubt into those that support action. Indeed, our second fact is that, under uncertainty, individuals seek ideas that enable them to deal with given situations, terminating this search only when such understandings have been obtained. [p.31]

This sounds a little too rational. I can't envision many people making "inquiries and deliberating about the variety of actions possible."

For scientist and layperson alike, however, the essence of reasoning consists of the ability to make comparisons. It is this that makes possible the drawing of inference, deduction, and analogies, and the creation of allegory and metaphor. But comparison making itself requires a basis, and that basis is paradigm.... Examples constitute our very mental process, and examples are, literally, paradigms. [emphasis mine, mh, p.33-34]

Paradigms elicit our faith that their implied vision is true because our livelihood depends upon action, and our action depends upon our paradigms. We cannot even entertain the possibility that the basis of our action is false ex ante. In other words, we posit faith in the veracity of our viewpoint. We may doubt the veracity of the selected paradigms, but only ex post. [p.39]

Paradigms tend to have normative as well as predictive implications for the individuals who adopt them. For people who must act, the line between "is' and "ought" is not clearly demarcated. Nor are scientists wholly exempt from this tendency. In their field, a paradigm or theory must be treated as provisionally and potentially true, unless or until proven false. Although scientists are required to abandon a theory if it compares unfavorably to another, they are not obliged to abandon it at the first sign of trouble. As Popper himself would argue, even scientific discourse requires the existence of committed proponents of competing theories. One of the chief reasons for adhering to a hypothesis is the lack of a better hypothesis. [p.40]

Individuals tend to be quite loyal to their paradigms and to revise them only over time and at the margin -- that is, within the context of other paradigms to which they hold fast. This is not to say, however, that individuals will never forsake their paradigms. They are not genetic codes built into our natural makeup, but rather mental equipment we have chosen to help manage our lives. They can be and will be replaced -- just not continously or even continually. When these changes finally come, in brief, they come much like a shift in gestalt. The behavioral patterns we actually observe as a consequence of this sort of revision of paradigms should, therefore, exhibit great continuity for a time, followed by great discontinuities, leaps to new patterns of action that will themselves prove stable for a considerable stretch before yielding to new ideas of being. [p.44]

Only when a situation is truly problematic are we open to all sorts of suggestions. Desperately seeking a paradigm and paralyzed until we find one, in the face of genuine novelty, we are free of preconceptions, commitments, and inflexibilities.

Proposition 2 (Paradigm Seeking). When faced with uncertainty, an individual will search for a suitable paradigm; the search will continue until one is identified and uncertainty is resolved.

This merely restates the necessity of action and its impossibility without paradigms. The process of paradigm seeking is also the process of decision making.

Corollary 2a (Learning). The decision-making process i sa learning process.

Learning is the process by which we acquire understanding of, or the ability to deal with, a situation that we could not make sense of, or deal with, before. When we are faced with an unfamiliar situation, for example, we are driven to search for a paradigm to cope with the novelty. Once the process is completed and an appropriate paradigm is identified, the decision is made. The situation is no longer regarded as uncertain, since we know how to act. Note that we can now deal with a situation we could not handle before. A decision-making process is, therefore, a learning process.

The novelty of a situation consists in our failure to identify a suitable paradigm -- perhaps because we have none at our disposal or perhaps because our "assignment paradigm" has yet to come up with one we have already filed. [?] Faced with uncertainty, we begin to search either by "stretching" existing paradigms or by acting randomly. The former is the more likely approach, consistent with how we deal with a variety of problems by means of reason and imagination; it may also resemble the process by which we understand metaphors (see below). In the end, we add a new paradigm to the file or restructure the assignment paradigm. And because we now know what to do in what used to appear to be a baffling situation, we have gained understanding or "learned" from our experience.

In the sense here of involving the process of identifying a paradigm, learning does not take place in a vacuum. It is both enabled and restricted by prior learnings -- by the paradigms already in our possession. We come to understand and deal with novel situations by using paradigms we have already acquired, and our understanding and coping styles are limited to what is possible within the context of our existing paradigms, however imaginatively and creatively we may impose them. [bold emphasis mine, mh, p.47-48]

In a group setting, we therefore have ample and greatly beneficial opportunity to learn from others. Timur Kuran has made the following observation:

[T]he individual cannot formulate an opinion and take a position on every human issue. To protect his nervous system from overload, he must be very selective in choosing what information to seek and process...[deferring] on most matters to the judgments and choices of others. [p.56]

The evolutionary process through which individuals collectively generate conventions is bounded at both ends: by means employed by lower forms of life at one extreme, and by the mediated approach of the ideal scientist at the other. As creatures with with well-developed craniums, we have an ability to reason like scientists. But, as practical beings, we share with lower animals the urgency of action, which imparts a certain inflexibility to our behavior and tends to make the criterion of paradigm choice that of value rather than truth. [bold emphasis mine, mh, p.70]

...once a certain behavior happens to get established however fortuitously as convention, it will tend to be upheld even if the social outcome to which it gives rise is inferior to those supported by other practices. [the author uses "QWERTY" as an example, p.86]

Without a crisis, however, there can be no social change of radical proportion. Growing opportunity is necessary but not sufficient to overthrow one set of conventions in favor of another. Conventional wisdom must also be questioned. People must abandon the means by which they have traditionally made possible social cooperation and coordination and search for new methods. In order to do so, most must be very troubled indeed, that is, they must be "in crisis." Crisis may be precipitated by a major shock to the system, or it may develop gradually by a fortuitous sequence of unrelated events that seem innocuous, one by one. In any case, a gap between the actual and the potential must be too glaring to ignore, and would-be reformers or innovators must propose to close it. They will succeed if and only if other are sufficiently disgruntled to follow suit. [p.109]

I find it interesting that individuals are simply resigning themselves to working until the age of 80 or so (see this article). This should/could be the shock that launches a new paradigm, but individuals are unable to see it as such. Opportunity? I can hear the voice-over now: "Maybe you can retire at 65...."