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The quest for certainty — a new substitute for religion
from Lars Syll
In this post-rationalist age of ours, more and more books are written in symbolic languages, and it becomes more and more difficult to see why: what it is all about, and why it should be necessary, or advantageous, to allow oneself to be bored by volumes of symbolic trivialities. It almost seems as if the symbolism were becoming a value in itself, to be revered for its sublime ‘exactness’: a new expression of the old quest for certainty, a new symbolic ritual, a new substitute for religion.
As a critic of mainstream economics mathematical-formalist Glasperlenspiel it is easy to share the feeling of despair …
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————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
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Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Amen my brother.
At last we are truely heading for the Post Economics Age.I wonder how long the ‘ALCHEMIST’ magazine survived the advent of chemistry. Adam Smith would be the first to cheer.
There is nothing so boring as static dualisms fighting it out to the death forever…when a thirdness greater oneness is available after either a moment of near death or the courage to embrace an illogic as a way to exit the mindset of an old paradigm.
I have learned much from this blog and the WEA library, and no doubt I have much more to learn. It sseems to me for some economics is a cult of mathematical certainty. Observing the regular comments I view some who confidently (dare I say arrogantly) dismiss culture, history, ideas, philosophy, and basic human values asserting they have solved the problem of economics in THEIR theory. And they do this in the name of science. Such individuals remind me of a book in my library I read long ago:
Economics, as the dominate religious cult of secularism is the offspring of this antitheism and antiphilosophical metaphysics in my view. It is the religion of economics, a secular theology that attempts to reduce the totality of reality to physics — cult of quantity at the expense of quality, an attempt to calculate the value of everything on the worm eaten beam of self-interest. This is scientist plain and simple.
Yet, as I expand my readings in economics I am confronted with authors like Sedlacek, Nelson, Lars, Marques, Fullbrook, and many others who are raising similar observations.
It seems the following from a book I found when I was sixteen is saying something similar to the opening quote:
Isn’t it time to rethink the purpose of economics before it is too late?
It is indeed a state of despair all around us. I wonder if Economists have ever experienced a “near death” experience in their classrooms?
Still, there is time for repentance! So, Amin, Amin, Amin… in the Orthodox (universally true) manner of worshiping the God of Humanity. One can, of course, say the same prayer in a multiplicity of languages, and religions, but would have difficultly in expressing this Econometrically. Cleverer abstract mathematicians may help here.
There is only a single analysis which meets your requirement of “abstract” mathematics it is Transient Development in RWER-81. It is NOT invalidated by the empirical evidence. This is what Popper required of theory which is NOT invalidated. The title of the blog is inappropriate. Popper did NOT search for certainty He appreciated that NO scientific theory or LAW is understood to be certain. All accepted scientific theory is NOT-invalidated. It is never seen as being certain,
When, in the 1990s I attended regular gathers conducted by one of the gurus of the Philosoophy of Science, I noticed that there were never any scientists in attendance. I asked the guru why, his answer was that scientists are not interested in epistomological questions about science, they just do it.
Robert, exactly! It is a pity that economists do NOT just do it!
Philosophers, like Popper and Lakatos explained what scientists just do. They understood the importance of empirical evidence. When I ask you to apply their understanding to transient analysis to refuse to do so. WHY?
“Distinguishing between science and non-science is referred to as the demarcation problem. For example, should psychoanalysis be considered science? How about so-called creation science, the inflationary multiverse hypothesis, or macroeconomics? Karl Popper called this the central question in the philosophy of science.[ However, no unified account of the problem has won acceptance among philosophers, and some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting. The guru who organized the sessions I attended was Larry Laudan, head of the Department of Philosophy, who contended that the demarcation problem was uninteresting and unsolvable. So much for Popper, why do you keep quoting him?
Lars’ quote is from the Popper book shown, p.394 in my edition. It is interesting to see how Popper himself reacted to this:
“Yet the only possible value of this kind of thing – the only possible excuse for its dubious claims to exactness – seems to be this. Once a mistake, or a contradiction, is pin-pointed, there can be no verbal evasion: it can be proved, and that is that. (Frege did not try evasive manoeuvres when he received Russell’s criticism). So if one has to put up with a lot of tiresome technicalities, and with a formalism of unnecessary complexity, one might at least hope to be compenstated by the ready acceptance of a straight-forward proof of contradictoriness – a proof consisting of the simplest of counter-examples. It was disappointing to be met, instead, by merely verbal evasions, combined with the assertion that the criticism offered was merely verbal’ “.
I must say I found Popper pompous and evasive himself, right here offering criticisms of Hegel’s thinking in symbolic form unintelligible to most normal readers though its very form is itself a contradition: he is equating two quantities whereas Hegel was discussing an evolving situation. As I wrote recently, it seems his later thought has grasped the fact that the point of finding mistakes is to correct them, and what seemed pompous to me may be merely the German way of thinking. So peace: let’s be tolerant of our different points of view.
Frank’s frustration by the deafening silence in response to his paper on Transient Development is palpable. I have tried to point out that, simply by translating the differing values of objects into monetary terms, he has convinced himself that he has evaded the “fallacy of composition” and can apply the Quantity Calculus. Sorry, Frank. I found your paper thought-provoking and well worth the reading, but with differences of value and purpose reduced to just numbers and development of mass production, it looked to me to be like an elegant house built on sand. I still don’t understand how to use your conclusions, but perhaps that is because my perspective is macro rather than micro: the building rather than the brickwork.
Dave, at NO point did I ever translate anything into monetary terms. Papers I quote may have done but NOT me. If I had I would agree with the fallacy of composition. All my analysis was in terms of the effort expended by tool makers and tool users — pure classical analysis. My analysis is from the first principles of the definitions of productivity and of technical progress. Those are NOT sand but the accepted definitions! Remember there are 1.8 million scientific papers based on such first principles analysis. The mathematical relationships I derive conform to the quantity calculus. NO production function does! I would commend you to read my paper carefully and NOT to invent what is NOT there. My analysis shows that the relationships derived extend at all scales from micro to macro. To see the two as different is an artefact of invalid analysis!
Economists are a religious cult. They protect the sacred texts of classical economics just like the church defended the ptolemaic mode for the universe. Economic saints are canonized by the Bank of Sweden with a Nobel prize. Popes and bishops reside in Universities around the world spreading the faith. Their primary mission is to provide a veil of secrecy while the 1% rob the treasuries of their nations. Trickle down economics is directly responsible for expanding inequality and resulted in 1.5 Trillion in college debt for a new generation.
Mnuchin, of the 1%, stole $1 trillion from the US treasury in one year by cutting taxes – just so he and his friends could profit on the stock market rise.
For a complete story – and only the large sum of 99 cents – see;
.
Thank you Mike. Purchased and will read. Reading “The Nobel Factor” right now:
“Like the Soviet command economy, neoclassical models also embody the dreams and values of their designers. That self-interest is a virtue, as the models posit, is self-evident to the selfish. Within neoclassical models, property owners can gratify themselves with no consideration for those with lesser endowments. If this could be shown (or made) to align with reality by economists, so much the better. And if the model is true, then society is redundant.” (The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn by Avner Offer, Gabriel Söderberg, http://a.co/0SztYgl)
“Isn’t it time to rethink the purpose of economics before it is too late?”
Rob Reno’s contribution above, seeing “scientific” economics as the “new” substitute for religion, deserves more than being passed over in silence. I offer the line of thought that “rethinking” needs to take the place of corruption of meaning by “Chinese whispers” and crooked opportunists seizing on the resultant misunderstandings to promote opposition to the very things the words were originally intended to convey.
So “religion” – a Latin codeword conveying grateful commitment to Christ for having redeemed us – became a term of abuse because medievals raising money for glorious church architecture weren’t satisfied with crowd-funding and started selling thieves freedom from hell. After the reformation the thieves used the funds to build heavenly homes for themselves.
So “science”, meaning knowledge, and the activities of acquiring and teaching it, begun by exploring practical mathematics, navigation by the stars and the discoveries of travellers, had to look elsewhere as the visible objects (including maths and theological literature) became known of and interpreted in terms of family tree logic (where names did not guarantee parentage). Leaving theology to theologians, Francis Bacon proposed taking things to bits to see how they worked: “for the glory of God and the relief of Man’s estate”, at a time when post-reformation England was flooded by dispossessed peasants (i.e. with the intention of creating new industries and hence employment for the desperate vagrants). Hence the industrial revolution and theives financing it and regime change with Dutch book “promises to pay” (if necessary), paying minimal wages from the bounty of work done and wars won. In case Bacon’s science took their scam to bits to see how it worked, Hume questioned the possibility of knowing anything, rewriting truth and morality as barons in Parliament agreeing. His student Adam Smith justified the economics of specialism (“divide and rule”) and capitalist trade (insuring bulk transport with “promises to pay”), perhaps not realising thieves have little of his sympathy for their victims. Since Smith, Bacon’s “science” has itself become a mere specialism, playing second fiddle on the deck of the Titanic to fraudulent “promises to pay”.
So “economics”, meaning household management, which in 350 bc Aristotle was already contrasting with “chrematism”, has been turned into its very opposite. A typical household then was self-sufficient from an allotment of land: one thinks of Cobbett’s “Cottage economy” or Chesterton’s “three acres and a cow”. Management of it was largely doing the right things at the right time: planting, harvesting, maintenance and festivities in fields and family alike. Book 1 of More’s “Utopia” complains of the appalling effects of the early mass production and wholesale trade in wool; Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” uses the example of a curate who does what needs doing despite being paid a pittance to deny the slave-driver assumption that people only work if they are forced to, and claim the rich can well afford to give everyone a decent pittance; Keynes sees the “Dystopia” of the unemployed starving while maintenance remains undone and persuading governments (if not chrematists) to go back to doing the right thing at the right time. But the chrematists from debt-trader Ricardo to Chicago “professor” Friedman have bewitched most of us with fraudulent “promises to pay” and talk of “markets”: not honest exchange of seasonal vegetables for winter’s meat, but being able to buy with empty promises our houses, household sustenance, businesses and (surreptitously) even governments and the very land on which we stand. Rogue financiers, lawyers and corporate representatives in Humean governments have established “laws” of ownership prioritising chrematists who make money from ownership of shares “promising to pay” – usually bought with other “promises” from banks which – under the Dutch book system – never have to pay.
So I’ve rethought, realised that “honest money” is neither ‘debt crediting’ nor ‘credit indebting’ but a credit limit – if I have £10 note I can buy only £10 worth of goods with it.
Using an interest-free government authorised credit card as personal as a driving licence. I could indebt myself to the people I buy from up to my credit limit, writing off in their accounts that much of their debt for stock purchases. Retaining the term ‘money’ for cash as tokens of credit pre-accounted for on withdrawal from a cash machine, banks and governments can be paid for their accounting services and advice as public servants rather than our masters. Both commercial and public services (including provision of child allowances, pensions etc) can be provided for immediately with generous personal allowances and paid off insofar as the work we are responsible for is done; and that work can be renewing ourselves, our localities and more widely nature. (Rather than trying to make money commuting to produce unnecessary and polluting rubbish). That, in an urban rather than a “three acres and a cow” society, may be the easiest way to destroy the appeal of chrematism, promote self-respect through doing good work and get economics back to “household management”, with the priority now being to re-green Mankind’s earthly home. Even certainty about being grateful for having lived is, however, is no guarantee of our “doing the right thing at the right time”. Let’s think rather of Robert the Bruce’s spider: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again”.
Thank you for your comment Dave. A dear friend of mine who retired from his role as a philosophy professor from Kent State University (author of The Golden Rule) published a work for the layman on the harmony of science, philosophy, and religion. One passage this thread brings to mind is:
It is virtual certainty that pre-scientific parochial religions are not literally true. It is also evident to any genuine philosopher and person interested in self awareness/consciousness itself that science has become a religion with many if not most who claim the title of scientists. This is partly a cultural problem and probably partly a personal one as the mindset of science tends to habituate mental fragmentation while wisdom/consciousness raising is a holistic process, and it is difficult to deal with one’s cultural roots.
The fact is that wisdom/consciousness raising at its best is an integratively dual process utilizing both the scientific and wisdom perspectives. In fact this integrative nature of both the wisdom process and paradigm perception are exactly the same process. The one personal and general, the other temporal and specific.
Science and religion will conflict or fail to be thoroughly integrated.There is no necessary conflict between science and spirituality.
Since my previous post, nomadron [nomad Ron?] has linked us to Steve Keen’s “Manifesto” via https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-better-economics.html.
At http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/manifesto/ Steve highlights the problems and proposes as a solution a “Modern Jubilee”. This is sufficiently compact to invite comparison with what I’m saying: not as to whether it agrees or disagrees with it but what would be the practical effects of the two ways of dealing with the problems. My view is that a Jubilee is a sticking-plaster solution: the biblical practice seems to have required another after fifty years. To be fair, even if we sort out the money problem with an automated credit card system, the electronics may fail or some prankster think it funny to make debt look attractive again. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Steve’s worth reading anyway.
“Michael Hudson’s simple phrase that “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid” sums up the economic dilemma of our times. This does not involve sanctioning “moral hazard”, since the real moral hazard was in the behaviour of the finance sector in creating this debt in the first place. …
“But a Jubilee in our modern capitalist system faces two dilemmas. Firstly, in any capitalist system, a debt Jubilee would paralyse the financial sector by destroying bank assets. Secondly, in our era of securitized finance, the ownership of debt permeates society in the form of asset based securities (ABS) that generate income streams on which a multitude of non-bank recipients depend, from individuals to councils to pension funds.
“Debt abolition would inevitably also destroy both the assets and the income streams of owners of ABSs, most of whom are innocent bystanders to the delusion and fraud that gave us the Subprime Crisis, and the myriad fiascos that Wall Street has perpetrated in the two decades since the 1987 Stock Market Crash.
“We therefore need a way to short-circuit the process of debt-deleveraging …”.
“The broad effects of a Modern Jubilee would be:
1. Debtors would have their debt level reduced;
2. Non-debtors would receive a cash injection;
3. The value of bank assets would remain constant, but the distribution would alter with debt-instruments declining in value and cash assets rising;
4. Bank income would fall, since debt is an income-earning asset for a bank while cash reserves are not;
5. The income flows to asset-backed securities would fall, since a substantial proportion of the debt backing such securities would be paid off; and
6. Members of the public (both individuals and corporations) who owned asset-backed-securities would have increased cash holdings out of which they could spend in lieu of the income stream from ABS’s on which they were previously dependent.”
Ron Reno, thanks for your kind response. The scientific discovery I have transplanted into my own religious garden is that the (claimed and died for) life, teaching and resurrection of Christ is the the evidence of a “critical experiment”: the only possible way of demonstrating that there actually is a God who – father-like and therefore despite disappointment – loves us.
Craig, Nomadron’s blog also mentioned E F Schumacher’s “Guide for the Perplexed” and “This I believe”. Along with “Small is Beautiful”, I would like to commend these to you
Apologies for typos, Rob.
Universal Audience of Ultimate Truth for Salvation
Ultimately all ethics depends on individual consideration, mandated in Leviticus 19:18 “Love your neighbor as yourself,” also found in Confucius Analects 12:2, Buddhist Udana Vagna 5:1 and Matthew 7:1. Consistency is the hobgoblin of limited minds as God and Truth are incomprehensible (Isaiah 40:25) and dogma and ideology are idolatry which detracts from evidence based realism. This is why the only answer can be a question. All creativity and science is divine (1 Cor 3:5-9). Jesus opposed traditionalist Sadducees and fundamentalist Pharisees but embraced syncretic Samaritans. Jesus was nothing if not anticlerical “Do as they say, not as they do” (Mt 23:1). Isn’t it odd the fundamentalists quote scripture by number as if lawyers? Meek means tranquil, not humble. Meekness is devoid of the passion of just war which divides and obfuscates. (Jer 17:9, Eph 2:3)
Hades (Sheol) was a holding place from which Jesus freed us, not a banishment. “gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn”. (Matthew 3:12 ) There is no purgatory, burning is into oblivion. “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43 ) Today! Saints intecede! If Jesus told us to be like the children (Matt 18:3) how could he believe them to have Original Sin? Mary CHOSE, by Free Will, to be sinless and surrendered herself to the service of God, as God long awaited (Luke 1:30). Luther said “Mary is rightly called not only the mother of the man, but also the Mother of God” (24:107) and “There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know.” (10:268). God lived in the Temple (Exodus 36:8) so as Mary bore God she replaced the Temple which was destroyed when she rose exactly on Tisha B’Av, the original lent of eating only fish because fish survived Noah’s flood.
God is beyond time and reason, not being limited by the dimensions that govern our world (Isaiah 57:15). God’s perspective on time is far different from man (Psalm 102:12, 24-27). God sees all of eternity’s past and eternity’s future, hence free will and predestination do not contradict. Since He is the Alpha AND the Omega, there can be no historical progression which is satanic anthropolatry. Parable of Talents (Matt 25:14-30) confirms the glory of capitalism over slothful envy of socialism. Parable of Warehouse is about being obsessed with what we have so we stop living. Superachievers aren’t concerned with accumulation but with constant achievement, seeking to ever use their gifts to the fullest (Calvin Institutes 3.7.5). James 2:14-18,26 shows that while faith is the essential prerquisite, you cannot escape the need for works as well. Half the planet worships to the Psalms of David so stop renaming them as your own hymnals. A Republic of Judges was preferred by God over the Reign of Kings. (1 Sam 8:6-18) The clothing and responsibilities of the Cohens (chief priests) resembles the early bishops (overseers) and of rabbis with the pastors (presbyters, elders). Paul’s word for fornication meant prostitution instead. Paul’s word for masturbation meant malady. Paul’s word for sycophant meant slander. Magog meant Mongol. Jesus came to fulfill not repeal the Law (Matt 5:17) as Pharisees were condemned because they syncretized vindictive Roman natural law over Jubilee redemptory Deuteronomy law. Moneychangers were racist about Roman coins. Redemptory confession is from 2 Chron 7:14 and Resurrection from Dan 12:2, Ezek 37:12-17, and Isaiah 26:19. Forgiveness is found in Isaiah 33:24, Isaiah 55:7, Jeremiah 3:22, Numbers 14,15, Leviticus 6,19,2 Samuel 14:14. Jesus used the lunar calendar, so why do you use the calendar of those that slew him and stole his religion.
This is what Sam Harris, author of “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation: The End of Faith” says about certainty in science. “Certainty is, I think, a false goal. I mean we’re not achieving . . . We’re achieving functional certainties in science and in just . . . in our day-to-day lives. I mean it’s a functional certainty that I’m sitting here talking to you, though it’s possible I could be dreaming or, you know, deceived by an evil demon. Those kinds of philosophical, ______ worries don’t really relate too much to the ordinary practice of science, the very useful practice of science, and our ordinary task of just negotiating our lives and finding happiness in this world. We recognize that there’s a range . . . that there’s a continuum of, “I’m not sure, there’s a coin toss, fifty-fifty” understanding of a circumstance to being functionally certain about what is so. And many people are pretending to be functionally certain, or believe themselves to be functionally certain about things like Jesus is gonna come back and judge the world in their lifetime. Twenty percent of the American population claims to be functionally certain that that is gonna come to pass, and 78% think that Jesus is gonna come back sometime – not necessarily in their lifetime. And these certainties do real work for us. I mean the person who is certain that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception is the person who wants to veto stem cell research, despite the fact that tens of millions of people are suffering from conditions for which stem cell research is the best line of research to generate therapies. So these are ideas that are not just of academic interest, or person, private, or spiritual relevance. I mean these are shaping policy. They’re shaping a national conversation. And then when you look to the Muslim world, they are causing people to blow themselves up on street corners.”
Interview July 4 2007
I agree with Sam Harris’ assessment, although Muslims are not the only people committing acts of violence based on religious convictions. That is today a primary form of political (religious) expression.
Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
I really don’t understand why people think religion is about certainty. If God was a Father, for sure his Son recreated hope, not certainty, that his grandchildren would love him, turn out well and live together amicably in peace. Whenever it happens, Jesus will come to judge the world (i.e. us) AT THE END of our lifetimes, not in it, for the one thing we can be certain of is that our lives in this world will end.
We don’t need an invisible and impotent hand “guiding” the economy while the current financial paradigm of Debt Only actually dominates it and everyone within it. Nor do we need increasingly re-distributive taxation on individuals and commercial agents as a palliative and increasingly unworkable way of preventing inflation.
We need a powerful new paradigm of Monetary Gifting strategically implemented at the point of retail sale as a discount/rebate policy so as to increase individual incomes and integrating painless and beneficial price deflation into profit making systems, thus freeing everyone and sovereignly and yet benevolently guiding the economy with the beatific chains of an ethic of grace.