Chapter 13 of this extraordinary book is titled, "The Making of Culture." In it, C. presents prescriptions for how to foster a more creative culture. Within the systems theory of creativity that he promotes in this and others of his books, part of the cycle of creativity involves evaluating new work for its worthiness as an addition to an existing domain of symbolic knowledge.
One of the useful observations C. makes in this context is that the impact of a new discovery may extend beyond the domain in which it is made. An obvious example is the discovery of a self-sustained nuclear chain reaction by Enrico Fermi. A less obvious example, perhaps, is the emergence of cosmetic dentistry after the fluoridation of the water supply. As C. puts it: "Left with carte blanche, every field naturally wants to control as many of the resources of society as possible, and more."
At bottom, C. refuses a laissez faire attitude to competition among fields because, however sensible a new discovery might appear to the experts in a given domain, there is no guarantee that the same discovery will be well-received in the culture that comprises all domains. For C., new discoveries should be evaluated both by the experts of a domain and by experts on culture as a whole. His specific suggestion is the most benign of the many similar suggestions that have been made along these lines in the past. Specifically, he envisions:
[A] civil service above party politics and disciplinary fashions, composed of those who aspire to be 'good ancestors,' as Jonas Salk called them, and who would be willing to represent the claims of evolution when assessing whether scientific advances should receive social support. Inevitably such a group would be composed mainly of older individuals, and therefore it would be open to criticism from younger colleagues who are more concerned with advancing their own scientific careers. On the other hand, the probability for dispassionate wisdom is greater among those who have had more, and more varied, experience and who can see their expertise in a broader context -- and those in turn are likely to be older persons. Yet our society expects very little from its elders. This might be one important contribution of seniors that will benefit everyone.
A gerontocracy. Well this is certainly less menacing than the cultural revolution envisioned by Mao, at least at first. Mormons should be pleased.
Alas, C. has faltered here. For after having spent hundreds of pages analyzing and explaining his evolutionary theory of culture and psychology, he fails to follow it through to its logical conclusion: If individuals are happiest when in a psychological state most conducive to evolution of self, then why should not society be happiest under a government most conducive to evolution of culture?
The thinker most often associated with this notion of evolutionary culture is F.A. Hayek. Hayek is also well-known for promoting markets as an efficient mechanism for allocating resources within society.
But C. dismisses the suggestion that the invisible hand can serve effectively to arbitrate the demands of competing fields on cultural resources. First, he points out that no markets are in fact, free. In effect, this is a nod to public choice theory, which acknowledges how well-organized or rich minorities can manipulate government into distorting markets. That's true, of course. Yet it's more an indictment of government than of markets. C. does not thereby prove (and I would say he cannot prove) that because markets can be manipulated they should be supplanted with a gerontocracy.
Second, he points out that market decisions tend to be short-sighted in various ways, such as being oriented too much toward the present. In effect, this is a nod to bounded rationality and behavioral economics. As our present predicament demonstrates quite clearly, markets can and do blow up when too few participants are capable of valuing what is exchanged -- a valuation that gets more difficult the larger and longer the scales of exchange. But again this proves merely that markets have problems, not that a gerontocracy should be preferred to markets.
C. nonetheless for these reasons dismisses the market as a sufficient mechanism for arbitrating the competing claims of new discoveries from different domains. Oddly, however, he writes the following immediately thereafter:
The greatest art, East or West, was not produced when the artists set the agenda, but when patrons insisted on certain standards that benefited them. Patrons wanted primarily to be admired by the public, so the art they demanded had to appeal to and impress the entire community. In this sense, medieval and Renaissance art, commissioned by popes and princes, was in reality more democratic than it has become since the art world gained the power to separate itself from the rest of society -- as a field with its own peculiar tastes and criteria of selection.
This is fishy. Having dismissed the market as a mechanism for arbitrating taste, C. now appeals to the wisdom of patrons who sought approval from... the market of public opinion. If C. is correct in his assertion, then it might follow that the greatest art resulted when patrons were best able to constrain artists to produce what the market demanded. Yet this is exactly the benefit of markets that people like Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek have cited in their support! Almost no advocate of free markets (and certainly neither Friedman nor Hayek) has promoted an unmediated free-for-all of exchange. There is always a legitimate role for government to serve -- like good patrons or popes -- in constituting and mediating transactions. The point is that spontaneous ordering is the best way to match the standards placed upon artists to the constantly evolving tastes of society. As Hayek explained, this is because of the "knowledge problem" faced by any individuals who might otherwise seek to match the supply of new discoveries to the demand of cultural desires. A gerontocracy is no match for spontaneous ordering -- an ordering that might even be conceived as cultural flow.
This is not to say, of course, that there is no room for improvement in how markets are regulated. Public choice theory and behavioral economics should be incorporated into regulatory systems design -- along with any and all new discoveries that can improve the stability and growth of our system. But we should not discard our system, the best the world has ever seen, in favor of rule by faculty committee. That experiment was tried one too many times in the 20th Century, and with nasty results.
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