{"id":33,"date":"2002-02-21T23:21:12","date_gmt":"2002-02-22T07:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=33"},"modified":"2006-05-31T08:50:53","modified_gmt":"2006-05-31T16:50:53","slug":"its-a-dog-trade-with-dog-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=33","title":{"rendered":"it’s a dog-trade-with-dog world"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Hollo cites <\/a> an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes:<\/p>\n

\n

. . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest (which would equate to the extreme laissez-faire capitalist position). <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Apples and oranges. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (or, as Ayn Rand would have it, ‘of the fit’) applies in any system; what varies is the meaning of fit<\/i>. In a world dominated by the ethic of trade, fit<\/i> means uniquely or efficiently satisfying the desires of others.<\/i> In a world dominated by so-called Social Darwinism or<\/b> bureaucratic egalitarianism, fit<\/i> means playing the rulers’ game.<\/i><\/p>\n

(‘Social Darwinism’ is a misnomer because its eugenist adherents fancy themselves wiser than slow clumsy Nature in identifying the unfit. Dawkins and Gould are both humbler than that – as is a good libertarian.)<\/p>\n

About 1985 I read an essay entitled ‘The Danger of Equality’ by somebody named Gorer. To summarize his dimly-remembered thesis: In a complex society with many kinds of institutions, there are many modes of status-seeking – owning the biggest boat, having one’s daughter presented at the royal court – which are generally harmless; whereas under regimes which seek to abolish all that in the name of equality, like France<\/s> the USSR, the only road for social-climbers is the quest for power over others, which is corrosive all around.<\/p>\n

Compared with how I as a student imagined it, my life has been an abject failure (but don’t get me started on depression); and yet, most of the time, I have been quite comfortable doing low-level work for small firms. (Family kept the wolf of Reality from my door during a couple of years.) In a less chaotic, less dog-eat-dog world, my allergy to conformist authority might well have killed me by now.<\/p>\n

The soft leftist I once was might retort: “In a truly egalitarian world you wouldn’t be forced to conform.” See Bellamy’s Looking Backward<\/i>, or the ‘hate speech’ codes. Would-be social engineers too often mistake the normative for the predictive, or, as linguists would say, the prescriptive for the descriptive. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Hollo cites an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes: . . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}