On the Business of Literature

Here is an excellent piece on the business of literature.

How will the internet change things? You can now self-publish for free with Amazon -- and your work will be available on Kindle. In fact, I decided to try it with my play Sandy Keenan. What new kinds of filters will emerge? Blogs? Word of mouth? Dedicated online reviewers?

Population Genetics Methodology and the Evolution of Spontaneous Orders -- Iliad Edition

Spontaneous orders change over time -- but slowly, and always in relation to the tradition out of which the orders in question emerged. Language is such a spontaneous order. Our languages change over time, but not radically so. They change with use. And they change and spread in a way very similar to how DNA mutations change and spread.

Thus, it should not be surprising to learn that one can use the same tools geneticists use for population genetics to determine the age of works such as The Iliad.Using this technique, it was discovered that "in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years," a date that matches much current scholarship. I can already hear the naysayers arguing that if scholarship was right, what do we need this scientific method for? Well, not every text is as well established as is The Iliad, meaning it can be used to both more accurately date a variety of texts as well as help us to learn more about the evolution of language itself.

Given the fact that this method works for both genes and language, perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that his method might also work to help us understand change in other spontaneous orders as well.

Usury, Dante, Time

I am currently reading Dante's "The Divine Comedy," and one of the groups of people punished in Hell is, of course, the usurers. For Medieval Christians and modern Muslims (among each other), usury was a sin. But why?

Dante suggests:

"Philosophy makes plain by many reasons," 

he answered me, "to those who heed her teachings,
how all of nature,---her laws, her fruits, her seasons,---

springs from the Ultimate Intellect and Its art:
and if you read your Physics with due care,
you will note, not many pages from the start,

that Art strives after her by imitation,
as the disciple imitates the master;
Art, as it were, is the Grandchild of Creation.

By this, recalling the Old Testament
near the beginning of Genesis, you will see
that in the will of Providence, man was meant

to labor and to prosper. But usurers,
by seeking their increase in other ways,
scorn Nature in herself and her followers. (John Chiardi, tr.)

The author of the Physics is, of course, Aristotle. And Art for Plato and Aristotle was poiesis, which was a "making" or "doing." The maker learns what to make by apprenticing to a master. God, being the ultimate creator, is the ultimate master. He created the universe, and we imitate God.

But we cannot imitate God in one thing: making something out of nothing. At the time, people considered usury to be the creation of something (more money) out of nothing (mere lending). Of course, what a lender does in charging interest is charge for time. Thus, the usurer creates time for others.

But if we consider the fact that in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition God is the creator of time, where does that put the usurer? Is he not equally imitating God in making time for people? He cannot create it literally -- but he can, through lending, make time. And do we not deserve to get paid for what we make?

With a proper understanding of what it is usury does, we can see that the usurer is in fact a maker, just like the maker of physical objects. Thus, we can finally lead the usurers out of Hell.

Caplan on Tolstoy on Lying

Bryan Caplan reflects on lying and trust in light of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. It has been a while since I read the story, but I remember liking it a great deal.

Caplan raises the issues of lying and trust. Specifically, in believing a lie or an untruth. Ivan Ilych is dying, but everyone tells him he's not. Are they doing it to be kind? Ivan thinks it unkind. They could be sympathizing with him more if they weren't lying to him and themselves about his condition. Everyone could say their goodbyes. But more, this lying undermines trust, and trust is a vital element for a society's well-being.  Of course, one has to have the right institutions in place to promote trust. 

Paul Cantor on South Park

Paul Cantor on South Park.

Ever wonder why egalitarians tend to lose their sense of humor? "To laugh at people is to feel superior to them." In other words, humor is anti-egalitarian. More, it is outright judgmental.

Cantor also sums up the difference between economic exchange and poltical exchange quite concisely:

"Politics is a zero-sum, winner-take-all game in which one business triumphs only by using government power to eliminate a rival; but in the voluntary exchanges that a free market makes possible, all parties benefit from a transaction."

Cantor does a great job of demonstrating how good literary analysis should be done.

Is Scrooge Generous to a Fault?

The latest on Scrooge from our very own Sarah Skwire.

Not-So-Bleak-House; Rescuing Dickens's Reputation

Creating Order, or Working in Order?

Poets and other writers of literature fancy themselves the creators of order, imposing their own order on the chaos of language (a  belief which perhaps goes a long way toward explaining why so many writers support leaders who promise they can impose order on the chaos of society).

However, writers are wrong to think this. First, language is not chaos. The language they use evolved in a spontaneous order. That language follows the rules of grammar and syntax -- a deep grammar which is instinctual and, thus, genetically inherited; an evolving surface grammar and syntax which evolves more quickly in the linguistic order.

Further, the cultural context the writer is working in is also a spontaneous order. They were born into this evolving order, which they can affect through their actions, but cannot design. This cultural context affects the content of their works.

And of course, literary artists are all working within the literary order. They have to participate in the literary order first as readers, then as writers. They write in dialogue with the other writers of that order. Here, too, there is no utter chaos, but a complex, evolving order.

Does this mean there is no heroic literary genius? That Goethe is merely a social contruct? Or at best a marionette suspended between the strings of his genes/instincts and social order into which he was born? Hardly. Yes, our genes and instincts influence our actions. The actions of our neurons, through, create our minds, which in turn affect our neural activity. Yes, our various social orders influence our actions, and with our neurons, co-creates our minds. But this mind is, in this suspension, nevertheless free. It plays in the rules provided it, which it provides to itself from its genes and neural architecture and which it co-creates in its actions in the social environment, but the presence of rules hardly eliminates freedom or the emergence of individual differences. Good rules create more degrees of freedom. However, bad rules have the opposite effect.

What is a good rule? What is a bad rule? Consider the rules of sonnet writing. They are good rules because they can and do result in innumerable truly new poems, truly new expressions. But suppose that I created rules for poetry that stated that what specific word had to be used at the end of each line, what the topic necessarily had to be, what each noun had to be, what each verb had to be, etc. How many different kinds of poems could be written? Very few. Such would constitute bad rules.

The same applies to society. General rules generate freedom; specific rules are oppressive. The same is true in poetry as in society.

Affecting Popular Culture

Culture has a significant impact on the spontaneous orders, including attitudes toward them.

The popular T.V. show Big Bang Theory, for example, has fostered a boom in students majoring in math and physics in college. This is no small thing. That will affect the scientific order and the technological order directly, and the market economy through the technological order, creating waves through the catallaxy.

We can write white papers, or even popular nonfiction pieces to reach general audiences, but in doing so we will mostly be preaching to the choir.

But when we write screenplays and teleplays, when we write plays and novels, when we write short stories and even poetry, then we reach a wider audience. Then we really change minds.

If we want to really effect change in culture, we need the economics equivalent to Big Bang Theory. We need the popular sitcom Spontaneous Orders, with an Austrian-school economist, a neoclassical economist, and a Keynesian, with their friend who is a business owner. Admittedly, that's a little explicitly like Big Bang Theory, but I think you get my meaning.

Libertarian Literature

There is a new page listing libertarian fiction at Thinking Machine Blog. But why stop at libertarian fiction? Why not libertarian poetry, libertarian plays, libertarian movies? As far as poetry, there are the works of Frederick Turner, including his two epic poems. And then there is my own poetry on