| Subject: | [socialcredit] Re: Replying to John Rawson re Bethune vs. others | | Date: | Tuesday, May 17, 2005 08:59:28 (-0700) | | From: | William B. Ryan <w_b_ryan @.....com>
|
Keith, it so happens that the bridge over the St.
Lawrence at Quebec was mentioned in Douglas' address
at Dunedin. Our New Zealand interlocutors might take
note.
It is another one of the Douglas materials so
graciously forwarded to me by Wally Klinck, in our
effort to preserve the Social Credit literature before
it becomes lost forever. I have not yet had time to
convert the document into plain text. What follows
are brief excerpts I have transcribed for the current
reply.
I will forward this very important address, by email
attachment (the original in PDF that Wally sent), to
anyone who so requests.
--
C. H. Douglas
Dunedin, New Zealand
1934
***
"...Now I should like, first of all, to direct your
attention to the fact that the advance of the
world--the progress of the world--depends ultimately
upon what I might call a point of view. And the world
has been for a considerable time operating, as you
might say, within two divergent points of view, one of
which is old--as we count age--and one of which has a
later origin to which I will refer.
The first of these points of view, or habits of mind,
as you might say, is called by those people who deal
in the science of logic, the DEDUCTIVE habit of mind,
which may be translated as the habit of arguing from
the general to particular. Let me explain what I mean
and what is meant by that...
Now the great defect of the deductive habit of mind is
that it is static, that it forms a theory--just as I
was suggesting you could form a theory about cows--and
in its pure form that theory is eternal. No facts
will shift it at all. Anything that does not conform
with that theory is not a fact.
"This deductive habit of mind persisted from long
before the Christian era until down to about the
middle of the 16th century, when a man arose who
became Lord Chancellor of England--Francis Bacon--and
he wrote two books...Bacon said: 'Further speculation
along the lines of these great ancients is fruitless.
What is required is to cultivate the the just
relationship between the mind and things.'
"From that time onwards in certain lines of activity,
instead of its being possible to set up a theory, and
say that theory is a good theory, and is eternal, we
have got into the habit of mind in in certain spheres
of activity of saying any fact is a good fact, and a
great fact is a good fact, but any theory against
which anybody can bring a fact which will not fit into
it, is a bad theory and should be discarded. I want
you to grasp that idea because it is vital in
connection with what we are talking about to-night.
"Now, up to the time of, and, of course, for some time
after the formulation of this theory, which is called
the INDUCTIVE method of thinking--the method of
arguing from facts to a tentative theory which you
discard as soon as it ceases to coincide with the
facts, and this is the reverse of the idea of forming
a rigid theory and blinding yourself to the fact--up
to the time that this new inductive method of thought
came into operation, I should like you to observe that
from the material point of view the world made no
progress whatever.
"_The method by which people got food, board and
clothes, and kept themselves against the storms, and
the way they built ships, and the way they
progressed--their transportation--and so forth, made
for all practical purposes no advance whatever in the
centuries, thousands of years, between the birth of
Christ and the sixteenth century--none whatsoever_.
"The formulation of a fixed set of ideas is a
disregarding of facts. The world was warned against
it nineteen hundred years ago, or so, when it was said
that the letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive.
There is no doubt running through the warp and woof of
things a certain amount of something that we can call
absolute truth, but the form of that truth is always
changing, and we are beginning to understand that even
in a mathematical form is the theory of relativity.
There is no such thing as absoluteness about any of
these things at all.
"_Now this modern civilisation in which we live--the
civilisation of railway trains and electric power and
motor cars and mass production and things of that
kind--is the outcome of the inductive method of
thought. The methods by which we judge in regard to
matters of economics and finance and so forth are the
outcome of deductive methods of thought, the kind of
thought which says that all cows are black, have two
legs, and never move.
"_So far as our economic thinking is concerned, it has
taken no cognisance, no notice whatever of the
miraculous changes that have been brought about in the
physical economic system by the inductive method of
thought.
"_There is nothing seriously changed about economic
thinking of the real kind, from about, at any rate,
the sixteenth century..._
***
"...The thing began, of course, some time ago, with
the theories of a gentleman by the name of Malthus,
who had a theory that the increase of population
pressed, as he put it, against the standard of living,
that as you raised the standard of living so the
population grew. There are people in responsible
positions at the present time who are still putting
forward that theory; whereas every fact, every
statistic which it is possible to produce, shows
exactly the opposite, that as the standard of living
rises so the size of families decreases, and you will
find always the largest families are those who live on
the lowest standard of living; but facts of that kind
bounce off a certain type of mind like peas off a
steel plate, and they will go on putting forward the
same theory.
"Now, another way in which I want to give you two
instances of the way in which this idea runs through
our actual conditions at the present time. You will
see quite frequently cases of men being
condemned--fortunately to light sentences--because
they were starving and stole perhaps a little bread,
or something of that kind--nothing that I am saying I
hope will be regarded as a condonation of
stealing--but the idea that you condemn a man to
punishment for stealing a loaf of bread, and that you
are destroying huge surpluses of wheat and preventing
further wheat from being grown at one and the same
time, seems to me to most tragic and absurd.
"Now, take another way in which this habit of mind
affects people. You have most of you probably heard
of the Quebec Bridge, across the St. Lawrence, at
Quebec. Now, when the Quebec Bridge was first
half-built, the engineer of that bridge, whose name,
fortunately I have forgotten--and perhaps it would be
better to forget it--two days before the time I am
speaking of, delivered a lecture at Connecticut
University in the United States, in which he said, in
so many words, that the engineers of the Forth Bridge,
near Edinburgh, ought to have been indicted for a
mis-use of public money because they put far too much
steel in the bridge. Two or three days, certainly not
more than a week after his making that speech, the
unfinished Quebec Bridge, which he designed, blew down
because there was not enough steel in it.
"The idea which had been in that man's mind when he
did that was that he had become oblivious to the fact
that there was plenty of steel in the world, that
every one of the steel manufacturers in the world
would have been delighted to have provided him with a
little more steel, but the important thing was not to
build the best and the strongest and the safest
bridge, but that the important thing was to do it with
the least expenditure of something that we call money,
which has nothing whatever to do with the strength of
bridges.
"THAT IS THE DEDUCTIVE HABIT OF MIND COMING INTO YOUR
DAILY LIFE..."
-
--- Keith Wilde <keithwilde@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Well, John, as a testable hypothesis how is yours
> different from that of the engineers who were sure
> they could build a bridge across the St. Lawrence
> River at Quebec? Two of the gigantic structures
> buckled and went down to the bottom, taking the
> workmen with them. They had some pretty sound
> physics to work with, but their faith in the
> prediction that they could complete the span turned
> out to be a vain hope.
>
> For a better comparison with A+B, consider the
> neoclassical analysis of product and factor prices
> with its implications for general equilibrium and
> optimum social welfare. I dare say that it has had
> a lot more ink spilled over it with the same end
> product as you claim for A+B, i.e. that "since
> nobody has ever pointed to any fault in his methods,
> at that level it may be taken as something
> generally agreed... ." Before Copernicus, Kepler
> and Galileo there were not many objections to the
> method of those who believe in a geocentric vision
> of the universe. General agreement does not amount
> to a tested hypothesis. I haven't noticed any
> disputes over Douglas' methods, as you say, but
> there has been plenty of controversy over his
> analysis, on this list alone. It might be useful (I
> think it would) to have some explicit discussion
> about just what his methods were, and to contrast
> them with those of Jevons and the Austrian and other
> marginalists who followed.
>
> How is your explanation below of a "testable
> hypothesis" different in form from the dirge of the
> neoclassical market fundamentalists that "the market
> system has never been tried"? (Note the precise
> parallel with the socred theme that "practical
> Christianity has never been tried".) The market
> fundamentalists have been getting their way in
> recent decades, with the progressive success of
> their campaign for "de-regulation". They seem to
> think that it is also a "scientific" success in the
> sense that it has improved the general welfare.
> There are many these days who disagree with the
> evidence of success. What evidence or argument can
> you provide that a trial of A+B would be any more
> conclusive in the direction you prefer? I asked you
> for a testable hypothesis and you have given back an
> armchair rationale of the kind that is supposedly
> despised by "inductivist" disciples of Douglas.
>
> Consider the possibility that you are confusing
> science with engineering. Market fundamentalism,
> based on neoclassical rationale, and Social Credit,
> based on A+B rationale, are social engineering
> projects. Each contains some presuppositions that
> might be capable of scientific testing. (That is
> why I am interested in the 'philosophy'.) I haven't
> tried hard to conceive of a refutable test involving
> A+B (or some other element of the Douglas analysis),
> short of the big engineering project; that is why I
> reacted to your claim that one is available.
>
> If you investigate the subject, I think will find
> that social scientists spend quite a lot more time
> reading and thinking about the essential nature of
> scientific method than do persons whose training is
> in the natural sciences. That is because the latter
> learn techniques that have been time tested and show
> good results. In the social sphere we have to try
> much harder to devise techniques that get comparable
> results and we are therefore quite a lot more
> self-conscious about method. One could characterize
> it as the difference between technicians and
> philosophers.
>
> Keith Wilde
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: John G Rawson
> To: socialcredit@elistas.com
> Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 4:23 PM
> Subject: RE: [socialcredit] Replying to John
> Rawson re Bethune vs. others
>
>
> Thanks Keith. I did cover this before when
> dealing with a scientific approach, but everything
> seems to get covered many times in this group..
> From that viewpoint, the A+B statement has two
> standings depending on where it is applied. As
> discovered by Douglas in relation to industry, since
> nobody has ever pointed to any fault in his methods,
> at that level it may be taken as something
> generally agreed as Vic Bridger states, i.e. a
> "fact".
>
> As applied to the whole economy, where other
> factors come into consideration, it ranks as a
> "hypothesis". Were it accepted by a large
> proportion of those dealing with it, it would rank
> as a "theory". As a hypothesis expressed in
> tangible form, in this case a mathematical
> inequation, it IS, in this context, a "model".
>
> Taking it from this viewpoint and assuming that
> the discipline of Economics adopts scientific
> method, I predict that it will become the great
> unfying theory of that field, equivalent (as
> someone said recently) to Einstein's work in
> Physics, or to Evolution in Biology, or Continental
> Drift in geology.
>
> Two of my reasons are that it explains groups of
> facts that orthodox economics can not (as I noted
> before) and unifies in that application of policy
> based on it would, for example, reconcile Say's
> "law" with other conflicting views.
>
> While doing this, I will risk a couple of comments
> on other recent statements, first Don's "child of
> ten" one. When I was young enough to go five miles
> over our then muddy clay roads on the front of my
> Mother's saddle on a small pony, I forget when, but
> obviously much younger than ten, I heard our Col.
> Closey speak. In reference to A+B he used the
> example of a bootmaker investing some earnings to
> buy a new machine and thus costing the one amount of
> money into two cycles of production. Not only did I
> understand it, but years later as a candidate I used
> the same example. I was no infant prodigy, my level
> of intelligence is sufficient to get with hard work
> what many would regard as an "easy" degree in
> natural sciences. (But perhaps better than one in
> Economics?!) Closey by repute had been the youngest
> Colonel in the British (incl. NZ) armies, was
> brilliant, and obviously able to explain it clearly.
> One of those people (like many top American
> scientists) completely and humbly confident on his
> topic who didn't need to obscure with long words and
> bad definitions.
>
> The other was that my comment on "original sin"
> was by no means intended to create a sideline, but
> to head one off. I believe SC has a great deal in
> common with Christianity, particularly its
> absolutely basic accent on the worth of the
> individual. But it has nothing to do with a doctrine
> that tends to regard the individual as worthless
> until he "sees the light", usually according to the
> precise rules of the particular sect promoting it.
> To me, that is equivalent to broadening the field to
> include binary economics on the SC side.
>
> Regards. John R.
>
>
>
>
> >From: keith wilde <kwilde@tc-biodiversity.org>
> >Reply-To: socialcredit@elistas.com
> >To: socialcredit@elistas.com
> >Subject: [socialcredit] Replying to John Rawson
> re Bethune vs. others
> >Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 05:37:30 -0700 (PDT)
> >
> >John, I thought I had sent this question
> yesterday, but it doesn't seem to have registered,
> even in my own e-mail window. To repeat, therefore:
> >
> >What is the specific hypothesis you have in mind,
> and how do you propose that it could be tested?
> >
> >Keith Wilde
> >
> >John G Rawson <johngrawson@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >Thanks, Don.
> >
> >To put it another way, if Sherlock Holmes had
> spent months discussing what note he was playing
> when the idea popped into his head, what his
> temperature was, whether he was facing east, west or
> upwards, even perhaps the relative discomfort of his
> bladder at the time, how many crooks would he have
> caught?
> >
> >These discussions have partially or completely
> reinvented the hypothesis something like fifty times
> from about as many diections, while seldom or never
> testing its veracity.
> >John R.
> >
> >
> >
> > >From: <donzbeth@ihug.co.nz>
> > >Reply-To: socialcredit@elistas.com
> > >To: <socialcredit@elistas.com>,<sutton
>
@kingsley.co.za>,<Walt.p@free.fr>,<murshed@choudhury77.fsnet.uk>,"Wallace
> M.
=== message truncated ===
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