The Lord Is My Shepherd (Norman Costa)

Who is your shepherd? (select only one)

1. Adam Smith
2. The Lord
3. I am. 

Where is fairness manifested? (select as many as apply)

1. The free market
2. In higher primates
3. The clan 

The Lord Is My Shepherd (Norman Costa)

by STUART KAUFFMAN

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures; 
He leads me beside quiet waters.

He restores my soul; 
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; 
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; 
You have anointed my head with oil; 
My cup overflows.

Surely goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life, 
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. --Psalm 23

"The exquisite 23rd Psalm is one expression of what philosopher Karl Jasper called "The Axial Age." This period from about 800 BCE to 200 BCE is when, in China, India, Persia, Greece and among the Jews in Exile in Babylonia, civilizations seem to have gathered themselves up and found new expression through Lao Tzu, Buddha, Zarathustra, Plato, Socrates and the writing down of the Old Testament. It was a period of revision some 5,000 years after agriculture led to the beginnings of property rights and the creation of greater accumulated wealth. Civilizations arose in China, the Indus valley, the confluence of the Tigres and Euphrates, the Nile Valley and Abraham gave birth to three great monothestic religions.

"The Axial Age is said to have focused attention on the individual, witnessed in David's Psalm above, a paeon to the relation between the Lord and an individual. Emphasis on the individual is a cornerstone of our United States Constitution and Adam Smith in the Scottish Enlightenment, setting the foundations of modern economics with his famous "invisible hand," where each acting for his or her own purely selfish interests unwittingly, through the invisible hand of the market, achieves the benefit of all.

"Now, 2,500 years after the Axial Age, we have learned much that may be of use as we face what historian Thomas Cahill called a "hinge of history." Our many civilizations around the globe are being woven together as never before in history. We will partially shape what we become.

"I write to raise a large question: Do we need to examine our Axial Age anew? I think we do."

Read more HERE:

Stuart Kauffman is an experimental and theoretical biologist.

Kauffman has written about three hundred articles and four books: The Origins of Order (1993), At Home in the Universe (1995) and Investigations (2000), published by Oxford University Press. Most recently he published Reinventing the Sacred (2008), Basic Books.

Kauffman is well known for arguing, in Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe, that self organization, as well as Darwin's natural selection, are twin sources of order in biology. Thus we must rethink the becoming of the biosphere.

Read more about Stuart Kauffman:

Comments

[prasad]

Norman - I thought Kauffman's piece was rather strange, and am surprised NPR found it worth publishing. I suspect if he didn't have his theoretical-physics biologist credentials they wouldn't have. It's like he basically woke up one morning and noticed first that peoples' interests differ and collide, then quickly skimmed the game theory article at Wikipedia, and wrote it all up with some vague mutterings about cooperation and axial something-or-the-other as binding. Maybe next week he will notice that psychologists have been investigating the rational actor model from another angle and produce another article!

[Norman Costa]

@ prasad:

Thanks for taking note and commenting. I think it's worth noting that the daily column on NPR is titled, "13.7: Cosmos and Culture." It's a vehicle for some top people in a variety of fields to be more speculative and even step into arenas outside their safe zones. Also, Kauffman is responding to the world-wide phenomenon sparked by "Occupy Wall Street."

Kauffman struck me, earlier this year, with his ideas on memory. Memory and learning, as you know, are probably the most central concepts in all of psychology. I am considering writing about his views. He is the first to acknowledge that they are speculative, but they are highly informed and well reasoned.

I'm sure you heard that old expression, "Remember, you heard it first, right here."

Thanks again.

[prasad]

Hi Norman, regrettably I don't know much about Kauffman's work in biology (and know nothing at all about these thoughts on memory and learning). He's a very well known researcher on these things, and I'd be very glad to read your article when you post it.

That said, I don't think he did "due diligence" in writing this article, which is on subjects where there is considerable expertise he *doesn't* share in. In the comments, for example, he pontificates extensively on Rawls starting with an admission that he's never read the man. The same goes for his superficial treatment of Adam Smith or Mill, and I'm having some fun imagining some game theorist reading his exhortations to cooperate and saying "I wish I'd thought of that!"

It's a very shallow article, and I think he gets away with it because his vague statements are of the sort NPR listeners want to hear right now.

[Norman Costa]

@ prasad:

Let's assume that Kauffman was making commentary on 'Occupy Wall Street,' and taking the opportunity to question free market economics. He is asking whether or not the 'God of the Invisible Hand' can do as good a job as David's God in Psalm 23, when it comes to providing a bountiful table. This is allegory, of course.

The Invisible Hand God finds the most fundamental value, a good if you were, in free market prices. Adam Smith anticipated economic Darwinism when he deduced that this system would still have the poor, but that they would not reproduce, sufficiently, to sustain their survival.

He sees another value, and it comes from a different source. A combination of genes and culture are manifest in the idea of 'fairness' for us AND our primate cousins. This sounds good, and I would like to think it complements or even determines, in part, market price. Is this really the case? I don't know.

Another question, which I raise, is whether unfettered free market capitalism can be diverted from its natural course of producing abnormal concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few. I don't know whether he thinks the operation of 'fairness' is some invisible check on runaway capitalism or not.

It is my view that free market capitalism can never operate in its pure theoretical form. Free market capitalism will always attract those who will control it and manipulate it. 'Free' will only be a euphemism. I always liked Milton Friedman's description of the business person. The business person, he said, wants consistent and fair rules of trade for everyone else. For oneself, however, its special treatment.