Geoff Arnold's Blog

Jeremy Seabrook has an excellent piece in CiF on the way in which “the economy” has become the new religion. A comment by Ieuan is worth reproducing at length:

“The economy now has to be treated with a veneration long lost to mere religion.”

Thank you Jeremy. I thought I was the only one who was seeing the connection between the superstition of religion and the superstition of believing in the economy – a superstition which is admitted by ‘the market’ when they say the whole system only works due to ‘belief and confidence’.
Like ancient babylonian priests, who held a population in thrall by being able to foretell the times of eclipses and the equinoxes (not always accurately), the modern money masters hold us all in thrall by warning of the dire consequences which will befall us all if their words are not heeded. The ‘Dow’ and the ‘Footsie’ are quoted like prayers on the news bulletins, their movements interpreted as intently as any chickens entrails were in ancient Rome.
I hear no difference in tone, nor depth of belief, between Islamic fundamentalists and city boys, they both say that we must cleave to their ‘system’ or we are lost. Both look primitive and unthinking. And both seem, to me, to be far beyond the rational…a surrender of our (individual, human) power to the irrationality of a system – whether that be ‘economics’ or ‘religion’.

Yes indeed. I remember a dinner party back in 1981, soon after I arrived in the US, at which one of the guests was waxing lyrical about capitalism, property rights, and so forth. I suggested (quite mildly) that over the last few thousand years human beings had ordered their societies according to a number of quite different patterns, that none of them had lasted all that long, and that it was ahistorical to ascribe any uniquely special virtue to any particular pattern, just because it was the system under which we happened to be living. Five hundred years from now it will look as quaint as medieval guilds do today; ten thousand years from now it will be utterly forgotten. People reacted as though I had blasphemed, which in a sense I had.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean offers a nice piece on one of those annoying questions that keeps on popping up: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? Many religious thinkers have tried to weave this into an argument for the existence of God (or at least some kind of First Cause), but none of them stand up to serious scrutiny. There is, for example, the idea that non-existence would be “simpler” than existence, and so some kind of prime mover is necessary.

It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow preferable. After all, Occam’s Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But that’s a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the same sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for the universe is a different kettle of fish entirely.

And he points out that it’s critical to distinguish between “simpler” in the Occam sense and “simplicity” as an aesthetic preference:

And, to be honest, it’s true that most working physicists have a hope (or a prejudice) that the principles underlying our universe are in fact pretty simple. But that’s simply an expression of our selfish desire, not a philosophical precondition on the space of possible universes. When it comes to the actual universe, ultimately we’ll just have to take what we get.

As Sean concludes, the problem is that we’re making a kind of category mistake in even asking the question:

Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole.