Beautifully put. I feel similarly about our culture although I don’t remember ever really particularly trusting our culture. For as long as I remember I’ve had this vague sense that things weren’t as they should be. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to put my finger on more and more of the issues thanks in no small part to writers such as yourself.
You refer to biological adaption as the available objective criterion by which we can rate cultures. I want to ask what you mean by that. If a criterion's being "objective" has to do with how reliably different people will agree on who's doing well and who's doing poorly by the criterion, then there are lots of objective criteria, but we mostly don't care about them. E.g., it's an objective matter how tall buildings are. You could judge cultures by how tall their tallest buildings are, or how tall their buildings are on average. So I assume by "objective" you don't just mean easy to judge, but something else. But then I wonder in what sense biological adaptation could be an objective criterion for judging cultures.
Stick with the individual case, rather than the social one. Imagine someone who has no desire to have children, and who doesn't help his biological relatives reproduce. You could tell this guy: "your life is going poorly by the one available objective criterion for a life well-lived: inclusive fitness!" It's hard for me to see why he should be moved--if he doesn't care about getting copies of his genes into the next generation, realizing that his lifestyle isn't well-calibrated to do that seems like it needn't bother him at all. Richard Dawkins made this point nicely way back in "The Selfish Gene."
I don't see how things are all that different when we scale up from the individual to the social/cultural level. If our culture doesn't value biological adaptiveness, then someone whose most basic values come from our culture may be unmoved upon learning that our culture is not fit, in cultural-evolutionary terms. It might matter derivatively--if you like your culture's values, then learning that it's not fit from an evolutionary perspective is reason to think it won't stick around, so people won't be around to promote those values in the future. So you might think that everybody has reason to want their culture to be fit, whatever *other* values they have. Is that the idea?
And inclusive fitness is the criterion that determined which individuals have ever existed, and which ones will have genetically similar individuals in later generations. I don't think that explains why I should care about my inclusive fitness.
(Fwiw, I say this as someone with four kids, so it's not sour grapes.)
I agree that if you want to evaluate your culture without presupposing any values you get from your culture, you've got to find some other values/criteria to use, and that adaptiveness is one potential such value. (At least if your culture doesn't already value adaptiveness; if it does, then maybe that's just another value you got from your culture.)
Where I disagree is in thinking that adaptiveness is a particularly natural alternative criterion to use for somebody who wants to evaluate his culture in an unbiased way.
I guess I don't really think there's *any* great way to evaluate your values without presupposing any of them. This strikes me as closely related to a problem you've written about in what might look like a very different context, where we're worried about evaluating probabilities, rather than utilities.
Can you evaluate your prior probability assignments? I know you think you can, using a "pre-prior". I'm more inclined to think that this just pushes the question back to how we pick a pre-prior. (My view is that for paradox-of-indifference style reasons, there won't be a single natural choice of pre-prior to use to evaluate everyone's different priors). But I admit that for somebody who finds themselves questioning what seemed like their most basic values (beliefs/priors), and who wants to evaluate those values (beliefs/priors) in an unbiased way--ie, without presupposing any of their values (beliefs/priors)--I don't have any better advice to give them on how to go about doing that. (I suppose I think the task doesn't really make sense.)
I'm not sure I buy that in the context you seemed to initially using culture, i.e. "the prevalent culture of your geographic area", plenty of subcultures exist and likewise you get belief from family, self enlightenment, etc and it makes no sense to define culture as "anything somebody else believes in that you find interesting" because at that point everything is culture, even anti-culture, and it becomes a meaningless word in the same way overdefining selfishness becomes meaningless.
What I read in your initial post was basically a secular crisis of faith, i.e. "I no longer believe in the American dream I was sold in my formative years and not only do I not believe it, but believe it's actively hostile to me, my children, and the future good of the mankind I care about", not "I am having an existential crisis because I no longer like Pepsi as I recently discovered Mexican Coke exists"
According to the neutral revolution, chance also has a substantial role to play. Developmental constraints are also significant. What you are describing is often known as "adaptationism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptationism
I was just observing that the claim that: "Adaption is the criteria that determined which cultures have ever existed" is missing some footnotes and caveats.
It would make more sense to choose a set of foundational values or criteria - the principles that make/made our culture great, and then advocate for and judge by those. I would suggest that if we are unable to judge according to values and our reason is that they lack objectivity, then we are unconsciously buying into the very Postmodernism that sabotaged the culture that we now mourn in the first place. To recover our culture, we need the courage to stand up for the principles behind it, even if the saboteurs accuse us on non-objectivity.
Ok, I see. You are taking the position that you aren’t necessarily standing up for any specific culture or type of culture, just for the process by which you believe culture is kept in connection with reality, aka cultural evolution, which process you believe is broken. I take your point to be that if the process were working, the absurdities of postmodernism (or however we are to define the symptoms of the problem) would not have been able to become the dominant culture of our day. Thus the problem is deeper than any specific set of values, which values themselves are kind of beside the point. (How did I do?) Not my position but I can see where you are coming from.
Modern communication technology makes it easier for parasitic memes to propagate. In the past, culture mostly propagated down lines of genetic descent (parents to children). So, it was mostly adaptive. Modern culture is increasingly maladaptive, because it propagates through mass media, education, the internet, etc. Memes are now selected to cause signaling behavior, not to enable reproduction.
There are other issues with the modern world, but that is a big one.
This is a standard story - though studies of hunter gatherer tribes have undermined it a bit. These show that many tribes had enough people to make kin selection into a relatively minor force. Also, memes always have a substantial "horizontal" component, regardless of what society you look at. There are other factors to consider. Memes are vastly more numerous now that we have access to technology-assisted memory. They are more mobile, due to networks. Also, culture has had more time to adapt to its host population (in the same way that parasites adapt to their hosts). Nobody got addicited to twinkies in the ancestral environment - because twinkies didn't exist back then. Between them, the combination of vastly more memes, increased meme mobility and better adaptedness to their human hosts explains quite a bit.
I didn't mention "kin selection". (It's a bogus concept.) There is cultural evolution and biological evolution. Reproduction is the basis of biological evolution -- in every context, whether hunter-gatherer society or modern civilization. Meme propagation is the basis of cultural evolution.
The selective pressures on genes and memes have diverged, due to modern forms of media, which allow memes to propagate laterally, not down lines of genetic descent. As you say, memes have become more "mobile", due to modern technology.
Memes could always propagate laterally to some extent, but not as efficiently. New forms of communication create new modes of propagation, and have hugely increased the speed and reach of lateral propagation.
That's not the main reason for the fertility decline, however. The main reason is biological mismatch: new technologies that we're not adapted to. Birth control is the most obvious example. Opiates are another. I wouldn't call those parasitic memes, but you could view it that way. They are functional technologies that give us new types of agency, which we are not adapted to. They could be used adaptively, but we don't have the instincts to use them adaptively.
Modern culture has had less time (not more time) to adapt to the host. But it doesn't need that much time. It's rapidly evolving, due to new technology. Cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, especially now. In the past, it was not much faster, and maybe even slower. (The Acheulean toolkit was used for over 1 million years.)
There have been a number of claims to compare the speed of evolution in the cultural and organic realms. They usually compare meme evolution with human nuclear DNA evolution - and then claim that cultural evolution is faster. That's a bit of an obvious thing to say - since there is typically no attempt to control for generation time.
There are some natural experiments that pit the evolution of rapidly-reproducing microbes against meme evolution. Antibiotic resistance is an example. Those seem to show that there's not all that much of a speed difference. We evolve new antibiotics at a similar speed to which antibiotic resistant strains evolve.
There have been some other attempts to compare speed based on things like comparing animal morphology with robot morphology. However, it appears to be difficult to get a good methodology here. Gene-meme coevolution is one complication. Bioinspiration is another complication. Comparing the speeds of gene and meme evolution seems like a reasonable thing to do. However, my understanding is that - so far - we haven't looked very seriously at the issue.
Yes, and you wouldn't be commenting on it. In fact, given the expense, he probably wouldn't be publishing anything outside academic circles.
Print was revolutionary in its time. The printing press was a major contributing factor to the Reformation and Enlightenment. In the 20th century, mass media (especially TV) created a new type of culture, which propagated in a very different way. Today, we have the internet, which has also changed culture.
For one thing, it doesn't occur to us immediately that people might pay to subscribe to a newsletter (without Substack's regular reminders XD). And for the free version to attract attention, is the older issues passed around. And I am such a parasocial reader I might be sending letters to the magazines I read, I have sent emails and it is only marginally more friction.
When text was first king of mass media, people did think through things more slowly though.
It arose through multiple intermingling feedback loops. Each part of modern civilization is rational in itself, within its bounds. But as a whole, the civilization is not rational. Since our culture wasn't designed as a whole, each of its parts don't work together as well as they could or should.
Rationality has limits. It is useful in many areas, but is not a general way to approach everything. It is not a suitable basis for culture, religion, and much else.
"suitable" is a normative adjective. You need a theory of value to determine what's suitable. I value rationality, so of course, rationality factors into whatever I consider suitable. If you don't value rationality, then it's no surprise if you don't consider it to be a suitable basis for anything. So, your comment doesn't say very much.
Religion has no rational basis. Religions have been adopted in the past because they increase the fertility rates of the cultures that practiced them, but they are not conducive to sustaining any modern industrial civilization. The modern world has no need for religion if it has substantially increased rationality. If you value religion as a mean to an end, then you are subordinating your judgment to religion, and thus undermining your ability to judge anything.
Yes, rationality has limits. But that's not an argument for not using rationality. Culture can and should be based on rationality.
Lastly, your comment is a performative contradiction. Reason is the process through which you make judgments. You reasoned that rationality (reason) is not suitable for many things, so you're contradicting yourself.
I said rationality is useful in many areas. I didn't say it should not be used at all. Nearly everyone values rationality highly, just often not higher than everything else. Robin was one of those, but now it seems he has bumped rationality down to 2nd place.
Rationality has found itself to be unsuitable as a basis for culture, religion and much else in many ways - eg. people aren't reliable reasoners, or they take too long at it, or the issues are ones that rationality has proven itself incapable of resolving, and so on.
Religions can be rationally justified if their adherents live better than without it, or better than with other religions. To decide that you need a long look at history, and we end up coming back to whichever religions that have survived long and have many voluntary adherents - i.e. the ones that are adaptive from an evolution point of view.
You can reason about rationality in a rational way. Some limits to rationality have been proven using recursion. It's not a contradiction to do that, but the contradictions it reveals are sometimes important.
> I said rationality is useful in many areas. I didn't say it should not be used at all.
I know what you said the first time, and I didn't accused you of not valuing rationality.
> Nearly everyone values rationality highly, just often not higher than everything else.
I already covered that that's a performative contradiction. Rationality is used to make judgements, so valuing anything more than your own judgment still undermines your own judgment.
> Rationality has found itself to be unsuitable as a basis for culture, religion and much else in many ways - eg. people aren't reliable reasoners
Rationality and intelligence aren't equally distributed among humans. It's not surprising that less intelligent humans don't value it as highly.
> Religions can be rationally justified if their adherents live better than without it, or better than with other religions.
I already addressed this. You just ignored what I said. I wrote:
> If you value religion as a mean to an end, then you are subordinating your judgment to religion, and thus undermining your ability to judge anything.
Some people may think that they're "better" off believing in religion, but I'm not. I have no need for it, nor does it provide me any conceivable benefits.
Anyway, this is devolving in to an unproductive semantics debate and I have other things to do, so I will not respond any further. Have a good day.
"Religion has no rational basis", I highly disagree on that, that is like saying gravity has no rational basis nor pitch (as in sound) or the color blue. To a believer it's real hence the rational basis is believing in reality. A particular, or even all, religion may or may not be wrong in fact but that doesn't mean it's irrational to believe in one.
> "Religion has no rational basis", I highly disagree on that, that is like saying gravity has no rational basis nor pitch (as in sound) or the color blue.
The comparison that you're making is invalid and frankly ridiculous. Rationality and levels of rationality apply to beliefs, actions, and man-made inventions. Religion is a belief system that was created by humans, so it's absolutely valid to judge how rational or irrational religion. Whereas, gravity, pitch, and colors were not created by humans, so it's nonsensical to judge how "rational" they are.
> To a believer it's real hence the rational basis is believing in reality.
At that rate, you could claim that every ridiculous, nonsensical, and poorly thought out belief has a "rational basis" since all beliefs are real to their believers. This is not a valid or rational argument at all.
> A particular, or even all, religion may or may not be wrong in fact but that doesn't mean it's irrational to believe in one.
>religion is a belief system that is created by humans.
That’s a very particular definition that happens to suit your argument, but it misses out a lot of historical reality. “Religio” — binding — originally referred not to a set of beliefs but to a set of culturally evolved processes and practices by which humans bound themselves to one another and to the experiential realm that we might refer to as “the divine.” The texts, the theological exegeses, the doctrine all came later. Religion was originally, and still is to many, not something you believe, still less create, but something you do or even something that happens to you. A natural phenomenon, like sex or harmony or gossip.
Yes, many rituals and practices are also part of religions, but they're tied to the beliefs of said religions. If the beliefs are irrational, then so are all practices and rituals tied to them. "The Divine" that you speak of is also non-existent, since it's an Inverse Homunculus Fallacy: https://expandingrationality.substack.com/p/the-homunculus-fallacy-and-its-inverse, as I said before
Regardless, the point still stands that the beliefs of traditional religions have no rational basis, nor do they offer anything to the modern world that can't be achieved by expanded rationality. That's the point.
I'm busy, so I won't respond further. Have a good day.
You too! I have no axe to grind here really: merely wanted to point out some historical/empirical facts that you appeared to be missing. I do find it telling that you, in your commitment to your own (perfectly respectable) belief system, either misread or ignored what I said I meant by “the divine” — not Huxley’s “gaseous vertebrate” but a *realm of experience*, and hence more undeniably existent and epistemically robust even than your own doctrines.
Wikipedia and Wiktionary both say that the "divine" is about theism or deities, not a "realm of experience", so I don't see how I misread or ignored what you said.
I don't think religion is more epistemically robust than my own theory of epistemology. I've written a lot about epistemology (https://zerocontradictions.net/#epistemology), and I am quite aware of how important experience is for knowledge.
You make it sound like it's you against the world. There are a lot of us out there.
Welcome to the club of prestigifree rankavoiders! Some of us are here for religious reasons, some for philosophical differences, and others simply because we suffer from prestigophobia, a disease I’ve just invented. Whatever brought you here, rest assured, you’re in good, bad, or indifferent company. It doesn’t really matter.
We’re a diverse group, united only by our status as cultural refugees. We're thrilled to have you. Consider yourself inducted. Think of it like joining a secret society, except we can’t have cool handshakes, or anything else particularly cool.
Defeat wokeness. That's the short answer. The long answer is more complicated, but 'defeat wokeness' gets at much of it, and probably the most essential part of it. Of course, it's a lot easier said than done. But nothing short of defeating wokeness is likely to turn our culture around in the ways that matter to you.
The liberalism of the west in the 80s through 00s was sustainable, probably a good social and cultural balance. But our culture really shifted a lot during the 2010s, it's very visible in how popular media shifted during this decade. There were probably some signs of this shift coming back in the 00s, but it was in the 10s that the shift really went into high-gear. You simply can't improve fertility rates when men and women are as politically and culturally divided as we are now, and wokeness is the main source of that divide.
Now, I know some don't like the term "wokeness". But I think most honest people know what *it* is, even if they don't admit it. I could call it "authoritarian leftism" but I think that's unfair to old-school leftists that care primarily about bread-and-butter economic issues. I could call it "identity politics" but I don't think that fully captures it.
Wokeness is not liberalism. In fact, it's very illiberal in many ways. It is entirely possible to be liberal and anti-woke. I consider myself center-left, and I'm anti-woke.
Imagine a 80s and 90s where the lifestyle of the hippies never faded away like they did in reality. It would have caused major problems for the west for sustainability reasons. Something like this is what we're now facing with wokeness. Either it soon dies/fades away like the hippies did, or there's a good chance it gradually destroys the west and possibly large parts of Asia as well.
Well, why do you think people aren't procreating as much as they used to?
Your writings are in fact part of what prompted me to research this more. And so I paid more attention to explicitly anti-natalist people.
Three things stood out to me:
1. 90% or more of them are woke.
2. The reasons they give for being anti-natalist are woke. "The world's not fair", "resources aren't shared evenly among all people", "why would I want to bring a child into this incredibly racist and bigoted world?"
3. This entire way of thinking would be completely alien to my parent's generation (the boomers), and to the vast majority of Gen Xers. So it strikes me that insofar as the cause for this is cultural, it's likely a *recent* culture change. I think it would be questionable to argue that liberalism in general is what brought us here.
Now, I get there's economic factors as well. Some people aren't having children simply because they can't afford to have them in a basic economic sense. And yes, an economic solution could be key for these specific individuals.
But all the economic help in the world isn't going to help someone who sincerely believes it's morally wrong to bring a child into this world. That person's entire worldview would need to change, and that worldview is essentially *woke*. Now, like Peter said, maybe the core behind all of this is fear, perhaps a basic fear of failing as parents.
Still, if you take anti-natalists at their own word, it certainly sounds like bad ideology is what's leading to them being anti-natalist. They have allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good, which I would argue is inherent to wokeness.
I am sympathetic to your views, but it is of course the case that ordinary “liberals” were in aggregate anti-natalists well before woke became a thing.
No I don’t deny that liberals’ Malthusian ideology, combined with a lack of understanding of economics (the goose that lays the golden eggs), contributes hugely to them being anti-natalist.
But again that is not the same as woke (and make no mistake I am not in favor of either of these ideologies, and I agree with you that woke is by far the worse one of the two).
“People who identify as woke consider it empathy, which logic flows out of.”
Putting aside that the people in question don’t wanna be identified as anything except perhaps “liberal/progressive”, I think you are confusing what older woke-sympathizers believe (I.e. that they are merely being allies of and sympathetic towards LGBTQ+ and PoCs) with what the actual, disproportionately woke believe.
Woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
The young woke actually BELIEVE this stuff, which is why 48% of 18-24 year olds chose “Back Hamas” (not merely back the Palestinians) in the aftermath of Oct 7th.
Even if you want to consider it “empathy”, it is hardly “logic” that flows out of it to back vicious rapist hostage-taking terrorists, unless you lack all moral values.
The miseducated woke have decidely illiberal views.
Err, if the young don't identify as woke, why is that the name that stuck? Seems kinda unnecessarily inflammatory towards someone like me, a queer who tries to be an ally to PoC, and who identifies as woke. Like how certain Christians call atheists pagans. Just rubs me the wrong way. I am 40 though, have no claim to being the youth anymore. And I don't think we should be funding either side of the Palestinian conflict given both sides are doing the warcrimes. (and I have to phrase it like a bad joke to get through this without a rant. It's easier to debate when things don't default to discussing wars of genocide!) Also, I got pissed when some youtuber punched another youtuber for being a supposed Nazi? Because being a little racist = being a Nazi to them? (Geeze the genocide blaming goes both ways) Bunch of edgelord posturing; dude deserved to get assault charges lol.
Critical race theory is examining the role of race in history, I thought. Like, when did Polish and Irish become white, and what purpose did their exclusion/inclusion in the race serve? Like the Three Stooges, they weren't white, they were Polish. And their celebrity helped shift Polish to white. Sorry you feel so attacked by that. As other groups take up more space, it's true you have less space, so I understand it. But you aren't to blame for the actions of billionaires, or your grandpa, and if you have power because of them you can spend it to do good, don't let people convince you otherwise!
Now to play devils' advocate: If the purity culture style wokes are bringing back witch hunts, isn't that an injection of old fashioned morality that will protect us from changing moors causing humanity to become infertile destroy society? I mean, it's not pretty, but there is some logic there. America had lynch mobs 50-200 years ago, so the cancelling mobs are clearly something we can survive as a nation.
“Critical race theory is examining the role of race in history, I thought.”
No, respectfully CRT is radical academia ideology that says whites are racists, blacks no matter what they do cannot be racists as whites are their oppressors and all have “implicit bias”.
My short paragraph is barely a simplification of the ideology. Go read more about it, if you are skeptical of my claim.
Sorry, I cannot tell to what your question (”I have”) is referring.
I didn’t react to the rest of your paragraph because I had no issue with it. If your quoted sentence was just sarcasm and it turns out we mostly agree, great. I use sarcasm all the time, but I try to make it as obvious as possible when I do; this sentence did not obviously seem to be sarcasm.
I was a bit snippy. I wonder if that was your plan, after I said I have a hard time with the genocide and war crimes in Gaza you said I was 90% overlap with people half my age who supported the worst of it. Well, I appreciate a well crafted troll in theory, but cooler heads are better for finding truth. So after lunch I can argue in good faith. : P Sorry if I scared you. I don't think either of us want to join a PMC and start killing people.
Critical race theory is about examining the role of race. Questions like, when did Irish become white, what purpose was served by having them be nonwhite, what was the purpose of changing that, are critical race theory questions. If you don't have a problem with that question, you don't have a problem with critical race theory, as it is in academia. But then, there is also the continuing effects of race as a construct that affect us.
And damn but Bill Cosby is racist have you heard his sketch where he blasts people for having the wrong grammar? Have you heard Richard Prior's stories about him? If you've got someone who is down on you, personally, because PoC can't be racist, then there are some good Prior clips on youtube to answer.
And would you believe, that internalized racism like Cosby's is something CRT in school would help to reduce? It wouldn't be that PoC are worse, therefore have it tougher. It would be they have it tougher because of history.
Perhaps we're better off than someone whose grandparent was lynched. Maybe not, my grandpa died in a mugging. Maybe our grandparents were braver and got a bigger stake for us to inherit, because they weren't afraid of being lynched. That's a statistical advantage, not a sin. What do you do with your advantages?
“Err, if the young don't identify as woke, why is that the name that stuck?”
Well, they specifically DID identify as woke for a while, until right-of-center folks started pointing out how immoral/evil some of the ideology was and started using it as a negative label.
Some folks identify themselves as SJWs.
But a rose by any other name…
SJWs / Woke / DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory are all at least 90% overlapped. They all hinge on the ridiculous, immoral, oversimplified oppressor-oppressed ideology - and in particular the evil claim that once “oppressors” and “oppressed” are identified, the oppressed are justified in using ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to overcome their oppressors.
Hence the woke who cheered for Hamas murder, rape, torture and hostage-taking rampage on Oct 7th did so “virtuously”.
As i said below, nothing new. They cheered the Munich Massacre as well along with every tortured British unionist in Northern Ireland. Also you are over emphasizing "oppressed are justified in using ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to overcome their oppressors.", that has always been acceptable in the West, it's part of our liberation ideology. US colonials did it's fair share of loyalist murdering, raping, torturing, and hostage taking for example yet we celebrate George Washington. Slavery is (in our cultural narratives ) the worst form of human condition ergo better liberty or death as the narrative goes.
BTW just to poke you and Arnold K. in a good natured way here on Colonial Oppressor Day, it seems today we found out Columbus was a crypto-Jew which is amazing. We can no longer blame all of America's historical injustices on whitey as a result, they were all the fault of the Jews now :) .
On your last point first, you are clearly missing something, as Jews have ALREADY been classified by the woke as white oppressors! 😀😢
On the rest, we simply profoundly disagree. My older liberal friends indeed did/do think of woke as merely political correctness on steroids (so we all need to be “allies” of the transgendered…) and did/do not understand the underlying oppressor/oppressed ideology. So they are having a hard time wrapping their heads around the celebration of Hamas’ actions by the folks on “their side.”
And try to make various excuses/otherwise for it.
Most older liberals/progressives are not woke, and do not believe the ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY ideology, but they have been unwilling to denounce the hard leftists on their side who do, and who cheer and advocate immoral things.
Sure there have always been hard core radical leftists who cheered violence. No argument there. But they were denounced by the mainstream left, and *surely* had no power in the Democrat Party.
The difference today is that there are MANY MANY more of them than there were even 10 years ago, and they have substantial power in the adem party and are almost *never* denounced by the supposed adults in the room.
I think you are over emphasizing wokeness as the root cause here. While I wholeheartedly agree it's an issue and one that needs to be eradicated, wokeness is just modern political correctness which was already causing the same issues, albeit it hadn't snowballed as much yet, as far back as the 1990s. Basically the Cold War ended and so Americans had to find a new grand crusade to embark on as to continue to avoid addressing fundamental issues with America as an experiment.
The problem is we, at an individual level, have lost private tolerance. Publicly we have always been FOOLs (Fear of Other's Liberty), that's just a nice acronym someone else coined for social desirability bias, but historical privately, as a whole, we were extremely tolerant and had culture which celebrated that. America, and Americans, have become extremely fearful to a pathological level and you see it with the rise of the modern neo puritanism movement which has become the dominant cultural characteristic of America and the West.
I think I get what you're saying. That the root cause here might be a recent pathological level of fear that wasn't present before. Perhaps 9/11 and various mass shooting events have given rise to this pathological level of fear.
And I agree that one of America's great strengths was its extreme amount of tolerance, particularly for what people do in their private lives. That is a big part of why I was admittedly stunned by the rise of wokeness, especially after the Obergefell vs. Hodges SCOTUS ruling in 2015.
If you are correct about fear (FOOLs) being the root cause here, I really have to wonder how the cultural ship of the west can be turned around. Good food for thought.
Sorry, while that is the view of some older liberals, and perhaps could be justified as an explanation/view of wokeness pre-Oct 7th, the support for Hamas by the woke crowd simply CANNOT be explained as modern political correctness, even on steroids.
You need to do your homework before making such naive claims.
You are misremembering the historic woke crowd's (i.e. the same people before the new label existed) anti-Israel stance. I remember even in the 1980s that same crowd being pro PLO, pro IRA, pro Zapista, etc. Before Floyd/BLM, they were all about Wesley Cook / Black Liberation / Power, etc. They've always been anti-Israel, anti-white, anti-heterosexual, pro tree hugging, etc.
That isn't to say they are identical as sure some of the in/out groups shifted but not the core beliefs. Globalization is now in the in group as is offensive war mongering and small businesses. Gays have been kicked out along with sex positives (I don't have a good label for that, people that wanted to decriminalize sex and sexuality) and bonafide communists (i.e. believers in Sovietism, not socialists).
I honestly don't know how far back you have to go to find the "woke" supporting Israel, I'd wager never or maybe a short window in the mid 1950s to mid 1960s, i.e. basically when nobody heard or cared about them because the focus was on decolonization politics.
We agree that there has always existed a faction on the hard left that was anti-Israel (and antisemitic) and believed essentially the same things as the woke oppressor-oppressed crowd today.
What your exposition above misses completely is that prior to the last 10 years, the numbers of those hard leftists were MUCH LOWER, *and* they had no power over or material impact on the mainstream left or the Democrat party.
Today they have substantial power and are accepted as a key constituency.
As a non-trivial example, the “Genocide Josh” smear campaign by hard leftists would have been denounced by almost every mainstream Democrat imaginable 15+ years ago. Instead, this time it was denounced only by a couple of Jewish Dem politicians, and the smear campaign was successful: Kamala did NOT choose the very popular governor of by far THE most important swing state likely to determine the election, in order to not anger her hard left constituency.
As the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
And the facts of the sheer numbers and the influence within the Democrat party compared to previously are indisputable.
There are a few rich dudes with sympathy for your reasoning - maybe they would put some resources into something helpful. I'm not sure what, but it's got to open up some possibilities that an individual blogger doesn't have.
The key problem seems to be that civilization exists in ever-changing material circumstances, and the pace of changes has been accelerating in the past few centuries. Previously cultures were able to keep up by modifying their traditions slowly enough that it didn't impinge upon their sacredness, whereas now this is no longer tenable, resulting in the twin reactions of fundamentalism and apathy, both deadly to the usefulness of tradition.
But since the pace of material changes has mainly been caused by technological progress driven by reason and rationality, could those not apply to culture as well? Alas, the results there have been more mixed, to put it lightly. Social sciences are notoriously difficult, and have been obviously lagging far behind harder sciences in terms of our confidence in their conclusions. And some attempts to implement flawed conclusions were nothing short of unmitigated disasters. The pre-eminent rationalists of the 20th century were the communists, and the death toll of their attempted "fixes" was staggering.
So, there came the great disillusionment in reason as a whole, most importantly by way of the postmodernist movement. What you call "cultural drift" is in large part the result of their unacknowledged nihilism, so if you want to fight it you'll have to deal with them. Thus, fixing the civilization to-do list:
1. Fix unreliable social sciences.
2. Convince the elites that you've actually done it (or forcibly replace them).
This is your most heartfelt essay that I've read, and I think one of your best. Like you I had a relatively happy childhood and I look back fondly at certain things.
My wife has a somewhat different perspective. She reminds me that not so long ago she would have suffered from a lot of discrimination, both as a woman and as a racial minority in the US. So I try to remember that. I also try to remember that a lot of what we did in the past wasn't sustainable. Pollution, natural resource management, recycling – how much nicer it was to ignore such things!
Two other things. One is that the future belongs to the young, and it isn't proper for the past to exert too much control over the future. I try to have faith in kids today to do the right thing even as I reserve the right to be a grumpy old guy. Because what do I know, really?
Lastly, I try to stay aware of a failure mode that relatively educated people have, which is to seek unifying, simplifying explanations for great trends. Czeslaw Milosz talked about this in The Captive Mind in terms of the sway that communist thought had over Eastern European intellectuals, who fell for that particular mind virus much more than average people did. I see this failure mode all the time in silicon valley where I live, where passionate people become convinced that AI or whatever is the next great existential crisis. If you ask the common man what he cares about you'll get a different story; which may be closer to the truth.
I think *most* people think their culture is extremely bad along at least one major axis.
People throughout history have bemoaned the sinful, corrupt, declining nature of their society. And every society has multiple factions with different ideas about which way to go, leaving each to feel like a minority who are being betrayed by the others.
Even those of us today who acknowledge based on the data that we're in an incredible "golden age" on most measurable axes, and seem to be getting radically better over time - not a very common opinion, despite the strong evidence! - tend to judge our culture harshly by comparing it to the imagined even-better future, and bemoan that progress is being mildly hindered by opposing cultural forces.
I think you've just changed *faction*, or at least are feeling a strong impulse in that direction. The importance of tradition, biology, and competitive success - in a word, conservatism - seeming more important as one gets older is common. (Which isn't in itself evidence against them, of course.) It's certainly dizzying to suddenly feel like those you counted as allies were terribly wrong.
"who acknowledge based on the data that we're in an incredible "golden age" on most measurable"
I think that is where it goes wrong in that those sort of people are also the type that overemphasize the value of that which can be measured as opposed to realizing it is a minor, possibly a statistically insignificant part, of the whole. I think that is what the wisdom of age brings, a realization that a lot of those measurable factors are irrelevant as captured by the saying "nobody's last words are 'God I only wish I put in more overtime and spent less time with my friends and family'"
Though I don't see what's so great about our cultures current or previous "status markers". What even are those anyway? The church used to be high status, now it's some dude wearing a Rolex. Both seem arbitrary to me.
I think a lot of these cultural changes were driven by people who, because of aspects of their own culture, saw us as a threat and wanted to undermine and weaken us culturally.
Thank you for sharing this. I had been confused by your recent series of essays, but it makes sense now. I never loved 'my' culture or felt loyal to it; many parts of it always seemed dysfunctional compared to the alternatives I saw in history and fiction, and I never got emotionally attached to it. (Exception: the nuclear-family love marriage is just obviously better than the alternatives, which fail on every metric.) I assumed that most extropian-adjacent people already felt the same way, so welcome to the club.
Having said that, I will point out one way that 'our' culture is more adapted and functional than you might think. Almost all previous cultures were only capable of reproducing themselves through biological reproduction and kidnapping children. Ours is unusually capable of rapidly assimilating people from other cultures, and has optimized itself for taking over existing humans rather than creating new ones. This will work fine, until the pool is potential converts is depleted, but I don't think it ever will be. Pockets of insular cultures will continue to reproduce above replacement, and some version of 'our' culture will assimilate many of their children.
You are sounding very prophetic - as in 'like a Biblical prophet'. You are saying 'we have strayed from the true path and the punishment will be terrible.' I don't mean any insult or criticism by that. Only, like others, I'm mystified and quite creeped-out by biological adaptation going in the place of God there. I mean, I've seen you mention the naturalistic fallacy once but seemingly just to pick it up with scare quotes and drop it in the wastebasket. You may very well have covered this somewhere that I have not read but at the moment, it seems very strange that you dismiss it in this way. Maybe it is because of our Protestant heritage that we have to see Natural Selection as either God to be worshipped (or an agent of God to be honoured), or as a demon to be shunned? Rather than as a great and terrible Power that we cannot ignore but on the other hand should not submit to utterly.
That is exactly right. In order to judge a value, you need a set of values, but such a set of values can only be judged by other values. Hence, all values are instrumental.
A value can be self-justifying after you choose it, but there is no prior basis for choosing whatever value(s) you choose. To have a rational theory of value, we must understand that it has no prior basis. It is a choice.
It thus follows that there is no *uniquely* rational theory of value. Instead, there are multiple rational theories of value that are each equally rational.
If you base your theory of value based on what's adaptive, then you are basing your values on biological value, or biological telos. These days, most cultures are based on (contradictory) psychological values instead, hence why they are becoming decadent.
There isn't 'biological value'. There is being alive or being dead. Some things are more likely to prevent an organism being dead. If you think those things have 'biological value', that is because you place value on being alive. The values don't just exist. And it is not uncommon to think that there are things more valuable than being alive.
Biological value is a useful concept because psychological value derives its normativity from biological value. Social value arises from psychological value in multiple interacting minds. Philosophical value arises from our ability to think about ourselves, and ask the question “What is value?”. There is no uniquely rational answer to that question.
> If you think those things have 'biological value', that is because you place value on being alive.
No, not necessarily. I don't have to value things being alive or dead for biological value to exist as it's defined. Regardless of whether I affirm or reject life, it's still coherent, meaningful, and useful to define biological value for different organisms.
> The values don't just exist.
All value exists from a perspective. Biological value is defined according to the perspective of an organism's reproductive success.
> And it is not uncommon to think that there are things more valuable than being alive.
Well then it is at least possible that you ought to keep looking, right?
Otherwise - well obvious point but - it is apparently adaptive for drake mallards to be cannibalistic rapists. If it turned out that this was also the case, in some situations, for human males, would you recommend it to them?
You recently made the striking statement that you and others who share your views might have to reassess who they admire and consider people like the Amish as admirable because their high birth rates make them - in your view - probably more likely to survive as a culture. The Amish, obviously, would be very against the idea that one should adopt anything - even rape and cannibalism - if you conclude it is adaptive. You will be in a bind if you feel that you have to admire them - or really any other culture - but reject absolutely everything that is central to their view of the world.
That sounds like a very big tension, especially if you are already feeling lonely where you are.
I realise now that I said it in a horrifically mangled sentence. Sorry. It was early in the morning and my son had just got up and asked me for a story.
I mean, if you admire the Amish, but you do so because you do so because you are making judgements in a way that they would consider to be evil... well then you seem to be in a bit of a pickle.
OK, I need to be clear about this, and get this out of my head:
Here is why it seems to me like a hard place to stay.
1) You conclude the only available basis to judge a culture is your assessment of whether it is likely to survive - its evolutionary fitness. Or whether it is likely to help its members to survive (even if they subsequently abandon the culture).
2) You may theoretically accept that there is some way you might be wrong about that, but it seems too late to be worth thinking about (low Value of Information)
3) You decide, based on your assessment of what is likely to survive, that you should (or actually do) admire and honestly support cultures like the Amish.
4) The Amish themselves believe in God. It's kind of a big deal for them. They would therefore reject point (1).
5) You can, of course, admire someone and still think they are wrong, but it is hard to admire someone and think they are an idiot, or hopelessly deluded. Any idea that they structure their entire lives around has got to be at least worthy of consideration.This undermines point (2).
6) Maybe you admire the Amish, but not in that way. You admire their evolutionary strategy as you might admire that of the ichneumon or giant panda but, they didn't come up with it as an evolutionary strategy, they just got lucky. You aren't going to actually believe they crazy stuff which they believe just because it helps them have children. Well then you yourself are putting 'believing true things' above your own evolutionary fitness. If that is something an individual can do, then why not a whole culture?
7) Maybe you would say that what you believe to be true is not a choice you can make. Fair enough, but it is not a question of deciding to believe,it's about deciding to be open to the possibility, and perhaps adopting the practices of believers. This brings to mind an argument often considered important in the history of decision analysis. It is also the basis of recovery techniques that descend from alcoholics anonymous.
Or, you could maybe get out of all this by just not trying to judge cultures in the first place.
For me it seems easy to lay out this argument, hard to accept what it might mean. FWIW, I am not a smug believer waiting to welcome others into the fold. But I've been having parallel thoughts of this kind myself and they bother me.
Sure but, you know, I don't think declining fertility is anything like the biggest problem we face. But if I'm all: "I'm all into overcoming bias, but no way I'm going to buy this birthist nonsense," ... well it's just not a great attitude. And your piece about the Amish is all about being an honest ally, not a manipulative one. So you'd have to listen to them.
Leaving that Dysonsphere of Jormungands unopened, the alternative in this hypothetical scenario isn't extinction; it's some other people having more descendants than you do.
"the alternative in this hypothetical scenario isn't extinction; it's some other people having more descendants than you do."
This supposes that other people who are willing to rape for more offspring will out-populate those who aren't. This implies that rapists will outnumber the non-rapists.
Given what we know about pro-social species and human societies, such a dynamic where a pro-rape culture (and perhaps all the anti-social attributes that come with that) and an anti-rape culture will probably not survive contact.
So the premise of the question is false, as given the nature of rape, coexistence between anti-rapists and pro-rapists is unlikely.
I said hypothetical scenario. I actually don't think it's a far-fetched one as initially proposed because I didn't say anything about a pro-rape *culture* - but that's beside the point, really. If (for reasons you haven't thought of, in some circumstances you aren't aware of) it works for men's genes as it apparently works for drakes' genes, then would you advise it? Not accept that it is likely to happen, but actively recommend it?
For me this casts some doubt on the whole attitude of 'come up with an ultimate goal and follow the directives it gives you, no matter what.'
I was being a bit silly with Dysonsphere of Jormungands. I meant that the rape vs extinction 'trolley problem' was a big can of worms. That is a personal feeling related to my personal history.
"for reasons you haven't thought of, in some circumstances you aren't aware of"
I'm an alien supercomputer. I've thought through every scenario and counterfactual to the point of simulating an actual multiverse just to test the robustness of all imagined possibilities.
"it works for men's genes as it apparently works for drakes' genes, then would you advise it?"
Yes.
The position is simply that survival is the highest criterion. This is as any other imaginable standard is precluded by the outcome of survival.
"come up with an ultimate goal and follow the directives it gives you, no matter what."
Survival eliminates maladaptive options. If survival becomes less difficult (i.e. wealth), the constraints of survival are eased. The goal is not merely survival, but to create a margin of safety such that it's possible to care about more frivolous things like rape.
It's actually an old idea, well since soon after Charles Darwin became well know. The Nazi's for example took it to an extreme, and gave it a bad name, but they were clearly way to aggressive, impatient, and myopic about it, and got it very wrong in the end.
"Hitler’s own conception of biological processes was antithetical to Darwin’s theory; and the leading Nazi theorists rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character."
Beautifully put. I feel similarly about our culture although I don’t remember ever really particularly trusting our culture. For as long as I remember I’ve had this vague sense that things weren’t as they should be. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to put my finger on more and more of the issues thanks in no small part to writers such as yourself.
You refer to biological adaption as the available objective criterion by which we can rate cultures. I want to ask what you mean by that. If a criterion's being "objective" has to do with how reliably different people will agree on who's doing well and who's doing poorly by the criterion, then there are lots of objective criteria, but we mostly don't care about them. E.g., it's an objective matter how tall buildings are. You could judge cultures by how tall their tallest buildings are, or how tall their buildings are on average. So I assume by "objective" you don't just mean easy to judge, but something else. But then I wonder in what sense biological adaptation could be an objective criterion for judging cultures.
Stick with the individual case, rather than the social one. Imagine someone who has no desire to have children, and who doesn't help his biological relatives reproduce. You could tell this guy: "your life is going poorly by the one available objective criterion for a life well-lived: inclusive fitness!" It's hard for me to see why he should be moved--if he doesn't care about getting copies of his genes into the next generation, realizing that his lifestyle isn't well-calibrated to do that seems like it needn't bother him at all. Richard Dawkins made this point nicely way back in "The Selfish Gene."
I don't see how things are all that different when we scale up from the individual to the social/cultural level. If our culture doesn't value biological adaptiveness, then someone whose most basic values come from our culture may be unmoved upon learning that our culture is not fit, in cultural-evolutionary terms. It might matter derivatively--if you like your culture's values, then learning that it's not fit from an evolutionary perspective is reason to think it won't stick around, so people won't be around to promote those values in the future. So you might think that everybody has reason to want their culture to be fit, whatever *other* values they have. Is that the idea?
Adaption is the criteria that determined which cultures have ever existed, and which current cultures will have more future descendant cultures.
And inclusive fitness is the criterion that determined which individuals have ever existed, and which ones will have genetically similar individuals in later generations. I don't think that explains why I should care about my inclusive fitness.
(Fwiw, I say this as someone with four kids, so it's not sour grapes.)
Everything else you care about, you care because your culture told you to care. If you want to question your culture, you have to find something else.
I agree that if you want to evaluate your culture without presupposing any values you get from your culture, you've got to find some other values/criteria to use, and that adaptiveness is one potential such value. (At least if your culture doesn't already value adaptiveness; if it does, then maybe that's just another value you got from your culture.)
Where I disagree is in thinking that adaptiveness is a particularly natural alternative criterion to use for somebody who wants to evaluate his culture in an unbiased way.
I guess I don't really think there's *any* great way to evaluate your values without presupposing any of them. This strikes me as closely related to a problem you've written about in what might look like a very different context, where we're worried about evaluating probabilities, rather than utilities.
Can you evaluate your prior probability assignments? I know you think you can, using a "pre-prior". I'm more inclined to think that this just pushes the question back to how we pick a pre-prior. (My view is that for paradox-of-indifference style reasons, there won't be a single natural choice of pre-prior to use to evaluate everyone's different priors). But I admit that for somebody who finds themselves questioning what seemed like their most basic values (beliefs/priors), and who wants to evaluate those values (beliefs/priors) in an unbiased way--ie, without presupposing any of their values (beliefs/priors)--I don't have any better advice to give them on how to go about doing that. (I suppose I think the task doesn't really make sense.)
I'm not sure I buy that in the context you seemed to initially using culture, i.e. "the prevalent culture of your geographic area", plenty of subcultures exist and likewise you get belief from family, self enlightenment, etc and it makes no sense to define culture as "anything somebody else believes in that you find interesting" because at that point everything is culture, even anti-culture, and it becomes a meaningless word in the same way overdefining selfishness becomes meaningless.
What I read in your initial post was basically a secular crisis of faith, i.e. "I no longer believe in the American dream I was sold in my formative years and not only do I not believe it, but believe it's actively hostile to me, my children, and the future good of the mankind I care about", not "I am having an existential crisis because I no longer like Pepsi as I recently discovered Mexican Coke exists"
No, inclusive fitness is a fallacious concept. Only individual fitness is valid concept.
See: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/11/debunking-selfish-gene.html
According to the neutral revolution, chance also has a substantial role to play. Developmental constraints are also significant. What you are describing is often known as "adaptationism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptationism
Yes of course chance has a role to play. So?
I was just observing that the claim that: "Adaption is the criteria that determined which cultures have ever existed" is missing some footnotes and caveats.
It would make more sense to choose a set of foundational values or criteria - the principles that make/made our culture great, and then advocate for and judge by those. I would suggest that if we are unable to judge according to values and our reason is that they lack objectivity, then we are unconsciously buying into the very Postmodernism that sabotaged the culture that we now mourn in the first place. To recover our culture, we need the courage to stand up for the principles behind it, even if the saboteurs accuse us on non-objectivity.
Being against postmodernism is also a value you are getting from you culture.
Ok, I see. You are taking the position that you aren’t necessarily standing up for any specific culture or type of culture, just for the process by which you believe culture is kept in connection with reality, aka cultural evolution, which process you believe is broken. I take your point to be that if the process were working, the absurdities of postmodernism (or however we are to define the symptoms of the problem) would not have been able to become the dominant culture of our day. Thus the problem is deeper than any specific set of values, which values themselves are kind of beside the point. (How did I do?) Not my position but I can see where you are coming from.
Modern communication technology makes it easier for parasitic memes to propagate. In the past, culture mostly propagated down lines of genetic descent (parents to children). So, it was mostly adaptive. Modern culture is increasingly maladaptive, because it propagates through mass media, education, the internet, etc. Memes are now selected to cause signaling behavior, not to enable reproduction.
There are other issues with the modern world, but that is a big one.
Yes, it is a plausible contribution to less adaptive culture today.
Less adaptive, or maladaptive?
This is a standard story - though studies of hunter gatherer tribes have undermined it a bit. These show that many tribes had enough people to make kin selection into a relatively minor force. Also, memes always have a substantial "horizontal" component, regardless of what society you look at. There are other factors to consider. Memes are vastly more numerous now that we have access to technology-assisted memory. They are more mobile, due to networks. Also, culture has had more time to adapt to its host population (in the same way that parasites adapt to their hosts). Nobody got addicited to twinkies in the ancestral environment - because twinkies didn't exist back then. Between them, the combination of vastly more memes, increased meme mobility and better adaptedness to their human hosts explains quite a bit.
I didn't mention "kin selection". (It's a bogus concept.) There is cultural evolution and biological evolution. Reproduction is the basis of biological evolution -- in every context, whether hunter-gatherer society or modern civilization. Meme propagation is the basis of cultural evolution.
The selective pressures on genes and memes have diverged, due to modern forms of media, which allow memes to propagate laterally, not down lines of genetic descent. As you say, memes have become more "mobile", due to modern technology.
Memes could always propagate laterally to some extent, but not as efficiently. New forms of communication create new modes of propagation, and have hugely increased the speed and reach of lateral propagation.
That's not the main reason for the fertility decline, however. The main reason is biological mismatch: new technologies that we're not adapted to. Birth control is the most obvious example. Opiates are another. I wouldn't call those parasitic memes, but you could view it that way. They are functional technologies that give us new types of agency, which we are not adapted to. They could be used adaptively, but we don't have the instincts to use them adaptively.
(I have written about modern problems quite a bit, eg: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2022/07/bootnecking-modern-civilization.html)
Modern culture has had less time (not more time) to adapt to the host. But it doesn't need that much time. It's rapidly evolving, due to new technology. Cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, especially now. In the past, it was not much faster, and maybe even slower. (The Acheulean toolkit was used for over 1 million years.)
There have been a number of claims to compare the speed of evolution in the cultural and organic realms. They usually compare meme evolution with human nuclear DNA evolution - and then claim that cultural evolution is faster. That's a bit of an obvious thing to say - since there is typically no attempt to control for generation time.
There are some natural experiments that pit the evolution of rapidly-reproducing microbes against meme evolution. Antibiotic resistance is an example. Those seem to show that there's not all that much of a speed difference. We evolve new antibiotics at a similar speed to which antibiotic resistant strains evolve.
There have been some other attempts to compare speed based on things like comparing animal morphology with robot morphology. However, it appears to be difficult to get a good methodology here. Gene-meme coevolution is one complication. Bioinspiration is another complication. Comparing the speeds of gene and meme evolution seems like a reasonable thing to do. However, my understanding is that - so far - we haven't looked very seriously at the issue.
Yeah 100 years ago Dr. Hanson would need a newsletter. with stamps!
Yes, and you wouldn't be commenting on it. In fact, given the expense, he probably wouldn't be publishing anything outside academic circles.
Print was revolutionary in its time. The printing press was a major contributing factor to the Reformation and Enlightenment. In the 20th century, mass media (especially TV) created a new type of culture, which propagated in a very different way. Today, we have the internet, which has also changed culture.
For one thing, it doesn't occur to us immediately that people might pay to subscribe to a newsletter (without Substack's regular reminders XD). And for the free version to attract attention, is the older issues passed around. And I am such a parasocial reader I might be sending letters to the magazines I read, I have sent emails and it is only marginally more friction.
When text was first king of mass media, people did think through things more slowly though.
Indeed, our culture is very irrational. https://expandingrationality.substack.com/p/modern-civilization-is-irrational
It arose through multiple intermingling feedback loops. Each part of modern civilization is rational in itself, within its bounds. But as a whole, the civilization is not rational. Since our culture wasn't designed as a whole, each of its parts don't work together as well as they could or should.
My friend proposes that reproduction and civilization be the core values for a new rational culture: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2020/04/toward-rational-humanism.html.
Rationality has limits. It is useful in many areas, but is not a general way to approach everything. It is not a suitable basis for culture, religion, and much else.
"suitable" is a normative adjective. You need a theory of value to determine what's suitable. I value rationality, so of course, rationality factors into whatever I consider suitable. If you don't value rationality, then it's no surprise if you don't consider it to be a suitable basis for anything. So, your comment doesn't say very much.
Religion has no rational basis. Religions have been adopted in the past because they increase the fertility rates of the cultures that practiced them, but they are not conducive to sustaining any modern industrial civilization. The modern world has no need for religion if it has substantially increased rationality. If you value religion as a mean to an end, then you are subordinating your judgment to religion, and thus undermining your ability to judge anything.
Yes, rationality has limits. But that's not an argument for not using rationality. Culture can and should be based on rationality.
Lastly, your comment is a performative contradiction. Reason is the process through which you make judgments. You reasoned that rationality (reason) is not suitable for many things, so you're contradicting yourself.
I said rationality is useful in many areas. I didn't say it should not be used at all. Nearly everyone values rationality highly, just often not higher than everything else. Robin was one of those, but now it seems he has bumped rationality down to 2nd place.
Rationality has found itself to be unsuitable as a basis for culture, religion and much else in many ways - eg. people aren't reliable reasoners, or they take too long at it, or the issues are ones that rationality has proven itself incapable of resolving, and so on.
Religions can be rationally justified if their adherents live better than without it, or better than with other religions. To decide that you need a long look at history, and we end up coming back to whichever religions that have survived long and have many voluntary adherents - i.e. the ones that are adaptive from an evolution point of view.
You can reason about rationality in a rational way. Some limits to rationality have been proven using recursion. It's not a contradiction to do that, but the contradictions it reveals are sometimes important.
> I said rationality is useful in many areas. I didn't say it should not be used at all.
I know what you said the first time, and I didn't accused you of not valuing rationality.
> Nearly everyone values rationality highly, just often not higher than everything else.
I already covered that that's a performative contradiction. Rationality is used to make judgements, so valuing anything more than your own judgment still undermines your own judgment.
> Rationality has found itself to be unsuitable as a basis for culture, religion and much else in many ways - eg. people aren't reliable reasoners
Rationality and intelligence aren't equally distributed among humans. It's not surprising that less intelligent humans don't value it as highly.
It's not possible to be a philosopher 24/7 since emotions are necessary to get oneself through life. I already know this, so my resolution is that humanity should adopt a set of rational memetics to help guide them when deeper thinking isn't always feasible. See: https://brittonicmemetics.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/designed-culture/, https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2020/04/toward-rational-humanism.html.
> Religions can be rationally justified if their adherents live better than without it, or better than with other religions.
I already addressed this. You just ignored what I said. I wrote:
> If you value religion as a mean to an end, then you are subordinating your judgment to religion, and thus undermining your ability to judge anything.
Some people may think that they're "better" off believing in religion, but I'm not. I have no need for it, nor does it provide me any conceivable benefits.
Anyway, this is devolving in to an unproductive semantics debate and I have other things to do, so I will not respond any further. Have a good day.
"Religion has no rational basis", I highly disagree on that, that is like saying gravity has no rational basis nor pitch (as in sound) or the color blue. To a believer it's real hence the rational basis is believing in reality. A particular, or even all, religion may or may not be wrong in fact but that doesn't mean it's irrational to believe in one.
> "Religion has no rational basis", I highly disagree on that, that is like saying gravity has no rational basis nor pitch (as in sound) or the color blue.
The comparison that you're making is invalid and frankly ridiculous. Rationality and levels of rationality apply to beliefs, actions, and man-made inventions. Religion is a belief system that was created by humans, so it's absolutely valid to judge how rational or irrational religion. Whereas, gravity, pitch, and colors were not created by humans, so it's nonsensical to judge how "rational" they are.
> To a believer it's real hence the rational basis is believing in reality.
At that rate, you could claim that every ridiculous, nonsensical, and poorly thought out belief has a "rational basis" since all beliefs are real to their believers. This is not a valid or rational argument at all.
> A particular, or even all, religion may or may not be wrong in fact but that doesn't mean it's irrational to believe in one.
All religions are wrong. All theistic religions make the Inverse Homunculus Fallacy: https://expandingrationality.substack.com/p/the-homunculus-fallacy-and-its-inverse. Fallacies are irrational, so religions are also irrational. You're just deluding yourself.
>religion is a belief system that is created by humans.
That’s a very particular definition that happens to suit your argument, but it misses out a lot of historical reality. “Religio” — binding — originally referred not to a set of beliefs but to a set of culturally evolved processes and practices by which humans bound themselves to one another and to the experiential realm that we might refer to as “the divine.” The texts, the theological exegeses, the doctrine all came later. Religion was originally, and still is to many, not something you believe, still less create, but something you do or even something that happens to you. A natural phenomenon, like sex or harmony or gossip.
See, for instance, here, regarding Hinduism: https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/hinduism-doesnt-exist
It's not a peculiar definition at all. It's perfectly consistent with how Wiktionary defines religion: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/religion#English.
Yes, many rituals and practices are also part of religions, but they're tied to the beliefs of said religions. If the beliefs are irrational, then so are all practices and rituals tied to them. "The Divine" that you speak of is also non-existent, since it's an Inverse Homunculus Fallacy: https://expandingrationality.substack.com/p/the-homunculus-fallacy-and-its-inverse, as I said before
Regardless, the point still stands that the beliefs of traditional religions have no rational basis, nor do they offer anything to the modern world that can't be achieved by expanded rationality. That's the point.
I'm busy, so I won't respond further. Have a good day.
You too! I have no axe to grind here really: merely wanted to point out some historical/empirical facts that you appeared to be missing. I do find it telling that you, in your commitment to your own (perfectly respectable) belief system, either misread or ignored what I said I meant by “the divine” — not Huxley’s “gaseous vertebrate” but a *realm of experience*, and hence more undeniably existent and epistemically robust even than your own doctrines.
Wikipedia and Wiktionary both say that the "divine" is about theism or deities, not a "realm of experience", so I don't see how I misread or ignored what you said.
I don't think religion is more epistemically robust than my own theory of epistemology. I've written a lot about epistemology (https://zerocontradictions.net/#epistemology), and I am quite aware of how important experience is for knowledge.
I bet your face looks like an autistic lumpy mess.
That's not a rational argument. Moreover, successful people don't waste their time insulting strangers on the Internet. Move along, loser.
You make it sound like it's you against the world. There are a lot of us out there.
Welcome to the club of prestigifree rankavoiders! Some of us are here for religious reasons, some for philosophical differences, and others simply because we suffer from prestigophobia, a disease I’ve just invented. Whatever brought you here, rest assured, you’re in good, bad, or indifferent company. It doesn’t really matter.
We’re a diverse group, united only by our status as cultural refugees. We're thrilled to have you. Consider yourself inducted. Think of it like joining a secret society, except we can’t have cool handshakes, or anything else particularly cool.
But I want to get the rest of you to not just reject our society's status markers, I want you to help me figure out how to fix our civilization.
Defeat wokeness. That's the short answer. The long answer is more complicated, but 'defeat wokeness' gets at much of it, and probably the most essential part of it. Of course, it's a lot easier said than done. But nothing short of defeating wokeness is likely to turn our culture around in the ways that matter to you.
The liberalism of the west in the 80s through 00s was sustainable, probably a good social and cultural balance. But our culture really shifted a lot during the 2010s, it's very visible in how popular media shifted during this decade. There were probably some signs of this shift coming back in the 00s, but it was in the 10s that the shift really went into high-gear. You simply can't improve fertility rates when men and women are as politically and culturally divided as we are now, and wokeness is the main source of that divide.
Now, I know some don't like the term "wokeness". But I think most honest people know what *it* is, even if they don't admit it. I could call it "authoritarian leftism" but I think that's unfair to old-school leftists that care primarily about bread-and-butter economic issues. I could call it "identity politics" but I don't think that fully captures it.
Wokeness is not liberalism. In fact, it's very illiberal in many ways. It is entirely possible to be liberal and anti-woke. I consider myself center-left, and I'm anti-woke.
Imagine a 80s and 90s where the lifestyle of the hippies never faded away like they did in reality. It would have caused major problems for the west for sustainability reasons. Something like this is what we're now facing with wokeness. Either it soon dies/fades away like the hippies did, or there's a good chance it gradually destroys the west and possibly large parts of Asia as well.
This problem is much larger than wokeness.
I agree that defeating wokeness is probably insufficient.
But surely you would agree that it is necessary, no?
Well, why do you think people aren't procreating as much as they used to?
Your writings are in fact part of what prompted me to research this more. And so I paid more attention to explicitly anti-natalist people.
Three things stood out to me:
1. 90% or more of them are woke.
2. The reasons they give for being anti-natalist are woke. "The world's not fair", "resources aren't shared evenly among all people", "why would I want to bring a child into this incredibly racist and bigoted world?"
3. This entire way of thinking would be completely alien to my parent's generation (the boomers), and to the vast majority of Gen Xers. So it strikes me that insofar as the cause for this is cultural, it's likely a *recent* culture change. I think it would be questionable to argue that liberalism in general is what brought us here.
Now, I get there's economic factors as well. Some people aren't having children simply because they can't afford to have them in a basic economic sense. And yes, an economic solution could be key for these specific individuals.
But all the economic help in the world isn't going to help someone who sincerely believes it's morally wrong to bring a child into this world. That person's entire worldview would need to change, and that worldview is essentially *woke*. Now, like Peter said, maybe the core behind all of this is fear, perhaps a basic fear of failing as parents.
Still, if you take anti-natalists at their own word, it certainly sounds like bad ideology is what's leading to them being anti-natalist. They have allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good, which I would argue is inherent to wokeness.
I am sympathetic to your views, but it is of course the case that ordinary “liberals” were in aggregate anti-natalists well before woke became a thing.
No I don’t deny that liberals’ Malthusian ideology, combined with a lack of understanding of economics (the goose that lays the golden eggs), contributes hugely to them being anti-natalist.
But again that is not the same as woke (and make no mistake I am not in favor of either of these ideologies, and I agree with you that woke is by far the worse one of the two).
Wokeness seems to have a slippery definition when used by others. People who identify as woke consider it empathy, which logic flows out of.
Which is normal, I think? we have more in common with each other than those who want us to fear each other do.
“People who identify as woke consider it empathy, which logic flows out of.”
Putting aside that the people in question don’t wanna be identified as anything except perhaps “liberal/progressive”, I think you are confusing what older woke-sympathizers believe (I.e. that they are merely being allies of and sympathetic towards LGBTQ+ and PoCs) with what the actual, disproportionately woke believe.
Woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors”.
The young woke actually BELIEVE this stuff, which is why 48% of 18-24 year olds chose “Back Hamas” (not merely back the Palestinians) in the aftermath of Oct 7th.
Even if you want to consider it “empathy”, it is hardly “logic” that flows out of it to back vicious rapist hostage-taking terrorists, unless you lack all moral values.
The miseducated woke have decidely illiberal views.
Err, if the young don't identify as woke, why is that the name that stuck? Seems kinda unnecessarily inflammatory towards someone like me, a queer who tries to be an ally to PoC, and who identifies as woke. Like how certain Christians call atheists pagans. Just rubs me the wrong way. I am 40 though, have no claim to being the youth anymore. And I don't think we should be funding either side of the Palestinian conflict given both sides are doing the warcrimes. (and I have to phrase it like a bad joke to get through this without a rant. It's easier to debate when things don't default to discussing wars of genocide!) Also, I got pissed when some youtuber punched another youtuber for being a supposed Nazi? Because being a little racist = being a Nazi to them? (Geeze the genocide blaming goes both ways) Bunch of edgelord posturing; dude deserved to get assault charges lol.
Critical race theory is examining the role of race in history, I thought. Like, when did Polish and Irish become white, and what purpose did their exclusion/inclusion in the race serve? Like the Three Stooges, they weren't white, they were Polish. And their celebrity helped shift Polish to white. Sorry you feel so attacked by that. As other groups take up more space, it's true you have less space, so I understand it. But you aren't to blame for the actions of billionaires, or your grandpa, and if you have power because of them you can spend it to do good, don't let people convince you otherwise!
Now to play devils' advocate: If the purity culture style wokes are bringing back witch hunts, isn't that an injection of old fashioned morality that will protect us from changing moors causing humanity to become infertile destroy society? I mean, it's not pretty, but there is some logic there. America had lynch mobs 50-200 years ago, so the cancelling mobs are clearly something we can survive as a nation.
“Critical race theory is examining the role of race in history, I thought.”
No, respectfully CRT is radical academia ideology that says whites are racists, blacks no matter what they do cannot be racists as whites are their oppressors and all have “implicit bias”.
My short paragraph is barely a simplification of the ideology. Go read more about it, if you are skeptical of my claim.
I have? Where did you think the Polish vs. white question came from?
Sorry, I cannot tell to what your question (”I have”) is referring.
I didn’t react to the rest of your paragraph because I had no issue with it. If your quoted sentence was just sarcasm and it turns out we mostly agree, great. I use sarcasm all the time, but I try to make it as obvious as possible when I do; this sentence did not obviously seem to be sarcasm.
I was a bit snippy. I wonder if that was your plan, after I said I have a hard time with the genocide and war crimes in Gaza you said I was 90% overlap with people half my age who supported the worst of it. Well, I appreciate a well crafted troll in theory, but cooler heads are better for finding truth. So after lunch I can argue in good faith. : P Sorry if I scared you. I don't think either of us want to join a PMC and start killing people.
Critical race theory is about examining the role of race. Questions like, when did Irish become white, what purpose was served by having them be nonwhite, what was the purpose of changing that, are critical race theory questions. If you don't have a problem with that question, you don't have a problem with critical race theory, as it is in academia. But then, there is also the continuing effects of race as a construct that affect us.
And damn but Bill Cosby is racist have you heard his sketch where he blasts people for having the wrong grammar? Have you heard Richard Prior's stories about him? If you've got someone who is down on you, personally, because PoC can't be racist, then there are some good Prior clips on youtube to answer.
And would you believe, that internalized racism like Cosby's is something CRT in school would help to reduce? It wouldn't be that PoC are worse, therefore have it tougher. It would be they have it tougher because of history.
Perhaps we're better off than someone whose grandparent was lynched. Maybe not, my grandpa died in a mugging. Maybe our grandparents were braver and got a bigger stake for us to inherit, because they weren't afraid of being lynched. That's a statistical advantage, not a sin. What do you do with your advantages?
“Err, if the young don't identify as woke, why is that the name that stuck?”
Well, they specifically DID identify as woke for a while, until right-of-center folks started pointing out how immoral/evil some of the ideology was and started using it as a negative label.
Some folks identify themselves as SJWs.
But a rose by any other name…
SJWs / Woke / DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory are all at least 90% overlapped. They all hinge on the ridiculous, immoral, oversimplified oppressor-oppressed ideology - and in particular the evil claim that once “oppressors” and “oppressed” are identified, the oppressed are justified in using ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to overcome their oppressors.
Hence the woke who cheered for Hamas murder, rape, torture and hostage-taking rampage on Oct 7th did so “virtuously”.
As i said below, nothing new. They cheered the Munich Massacre as well along with every tortured British unionist in Northern Ireland. Also you are over emphasizing "oppressed are justified in using ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to overcome their oppressors.", that has always been acceptable in the West, it's part of our liberation ideology. US colonials did it's fair share of loyalist murdering, raping, torturing, and hostage taking for example yet we celebrate George Washington. Slavery is (in our cultural narratives ) the worst form of human condition ergo better liberty or death as the narrative goes.
BTW just to poke you and Arnold K. in a good natured way here on Colonial Oppressor Day, it seems today we found out Columbus was a crypto-Jew which is amazing. We can no longer blame all of America's historical injustices on whitey as a result, they were all the fault of the Jews now :) .
On your last point first, you are clearly missing something, as Jews have ALREADY been classified by the woke as white oppressors! 😀😢
On the rest, we simply profoundly disagree. My older liberal friends indeed did/do think of woke as merely political correctness on steroids (so we all need to be “allies” of the transgendered…) and did/do not understand the underlying oppressor/oppressed ideology. So they are having a hard time wrapping their heads around the celebration of Hamas’ actions by the folks on “their side.”
And try to make various excuses/otherwise for it.
Most older liberals/progressives are not woke, and do not believe the ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY ideology, but they have been unwilling to denounce the hard leftists on their side who do, and who cheer and advocate immoral things.
Sure there have always been hard core radical leftists who cheered violence. No argument there. But they were denounced by the mainstream left, and *surely* had no power in the Democrat Party.
The difference today is that there are MANY MANY more of them than there were even 10 years ago, and they have substantial power in the adem party and are almost *never* denounced by the supposed adults in the room.
I think you are over emphasizing wokeness as the root cause here. While I wholeheartedly agree it's an issue and one that needs to be eradicated, wokeness is just modern political correctness which was already causing the same issues, albeit it hadn't snowballed as much yet, as far back as the 1990s. Basically the Cold War ended and so Americans had to find a new grand crusade to embark on as to continue to avoid addressing fundamental issues with America as an experiment.
The problem is we, at an individual level, have lost private tolerance. Publicly we have always been FOOLs (Fear of Other's Liberty), that's just a nice acronym someone else coined for social desirability bias, but historical privately, as a whole, we were extremely tolerant and had culture which celebrated that. America, and Americans, have become extremely fearful to a pathological level and you see it with the rise of the modern neo puritanism movement which has become the dominant cultural characteristic of America and the West.
I think I get what you're saying. That the root cause here might be a recent pathological level of fear that wasn't present before. Perhaps 9/11 and various mass shooting events have given rise to this pathological level of fear.
And I agree that one of America's great strengths was its extreme amount of tolerance, particularly for what people do in their private lives. That is a big part of why I was admittedly stunned by the rise of wokeness, especially after the Obergefell vs. Hodges SCOTUS ruling in 2015.
If you are correct about fear (FOOLs) being the root cause here, I really have to wonder how the cultural ship of the west can be turned around. Good food for thought.
“wokeness is just modern political correctness”
Sorry, while that is the view of some older liberals, and perhaps could be justified as an explanation/view of wokeness pre-Oct 7th, the support for Hamas by the woke crowd simply CANNOT be explained as modern political correctness, even on steroids.
You need to do your homework before making such naive claims.
You are misremembering the historic woke crowd's (i.e. the same people before the new label existed) anti-Israel stance. I remember even in the 1980s that same crowd being pro PLO, pro IRA, pro Zapista, etc. Before Floyd/BLM, they were all about Wesley Cook / Black Liberation / Power, etc. They've always been anti-Israel, anti-white, anti-heterosexual, pro tree hugging, etc.
That isn't to say they are identical as sure some of the in/out groups shifted but not the core beliefs. Globalization is now in the in group as is offensive war mongering and small businesses. Gays have been kicked out along with sex positives (I don't have a good label for that, people that wanted to decriminalize sex and sexuality) and bonafide communists (i.e. believers in Sovietism, not socialists).
I honestly don't know how far back you have to go to find the "woke" supporting Israel, I'd wager never or maybe a short window in the mid 1950s to mid 1960s, i.e. basically when nobody heard or cared about them because the focus was on decolonization politics.
We agree that there has always existed a faction on the hard left that was anti-Israel (and antisemitic) and believed essentially the same things as the woke oppressor-oppressed crowd today.
What your exposition above misses completely is that prior to the last 10 years, the numbers of those hard leftists were MUCH LOWER, *and* they had no power over or material impact on the mainstream left or the Democrat party.
Today they have substantial power and are accepted as a key constituency.
As a non-trivial example, the “Genocide Josh” smear campaign by hard leftists would have been denounced by almost every mainstream Democrat imaginable 15+ years ago. Instead, this time it was denounced only by a couple of Jewish Dem politicians, and the smear campaign was successful: Kamala did NOT choose the very popular governor of by far THE most important swing state likely to determine the election, in order to not anger her hard left constituency.
As the late, great Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
And the facts of the sheer numbers and the influence within the Democrat party compared to previously are indisputable.
There are a few rich dudes with sympathy for your reasoning - maybe they would put some resources into something helpful. I'm not sure what, but it's got to open up some possibilities that an individual blogger doesn't have.
The key problem seems to be that civilization exists in ever-changing material circumstances, and the pace of changes has been accelerating in the past few centuries. Previously cultures were able to keep up by modifying their traditions slowly enough that it didn't impinge upon their sacredness, whereas now this is no longer tenable, resulting in the twin reactions of fundamentalism and apathy, both deadly to the usefulness of tradition.
But since the pace of material changes has mainly been caused by technological progress driven by reason and rationality, could those not apply to culture as well? Alas, the results there have been more mixed, to put it lightly. Social sciences are notoriously difficult, and have been obviously lagging far behind harder sciences in terms of our confidence in their conclusions. And some attempts to implement flawed conclusions were nothing short of unmitigated disasters. The pre-eminent rationalists of the 20th century were the communists, and the death toll of their attempted "fixes" was staggering.
So, there came the great disillusionment in reason as a whole, most importantly by way of the postmodernist movement. What you call "cultural drift" is in large part the result of their unacknowledged nihilism, so if you want to fight it you'll have to deal with them. Thus, fixing the civilization to-do list:
1. Fix unreliable social sciences.
2. Convince the elites that you've actually done it (or forcibly replace them).
3. Implement good policies.
4. Glorious utopia forever!
Yes faster change in tech and social conditions contributes to cultural drift. As I discuss here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/culture-drift-predicts-decadence
This is your most heartfelt essay that I've read, and I think one of your best. Like you I had a relatively happy childhood and I look back fondly at certain things.
My wife has a somewhat different perspective. She reminds me that not so long ago she would have suffered from a lot of discrimination, both as a woman and as a racial minority in the US. So I try to remember that. I also try to remember that a lot of what we did in the past wasn't sustainable. Pollution, natural resource management, recycling – how much nicer it was to ignore such things!
Two other things. One is that the future belongs to the young, and it isn't proper for the past to exert too much control over the future. I try to have faith in kids today to do the right thing even as I reserve the right to be a grumpy old guy. Because what do I know, really?
Lastly, I try to stay aware of a failure mode that relatively educated people have, which is to seek unifying, simplifying explanations for great trends. Czeslaw Milosz talked about this in The Captive Mind in terms of the sway that communist thought had over Eastern European intellectuals, who fell for that particular mind virus much more than average people did. I see this failure mode all the time in silicon valley where I live, where passionate people become convinced that AI or whatever is the next great existential crisis. If you ask the common man what he cares about you'll get a different story; which may be closer to the truth.
So I should be wary of my worries because I am old, no so oppressed, and my worries come from trying to think?
What is it that makes you feel that way about Culture?
In simple words please, this is a very new idea for me!
I think *most* people think their culture is extremely bad along at least one major axis.
People throughout history have bemoaned the sinful, corrupt, declining nature of their society. And every society has multiple factions with different ideas about which way to go, leaving each to feel like a minority who are being betrayed by the others.
Even those of us today who acknowledge based on the data that we're in an incredible "golden age" on most measurable axes, and seem to be getting radically better over time - not a very common opinion, despite the strong evidence! - tend to judge our culture harshly by comparing it to the imagined even-better future, and bemoan that progress is being mildly hindered by opposing cultural forces.
I think you've just changed *faction*, or at least are feeling a strong impulse in that direction. The importance of tradition, biology, and competitive success - in a word, conservatism - seeming more important as one gets older is common. (Which isn't in itself evidence against them, of course.) It's certainly dizzying to suddenly feel like those you counted as allies were terribly wrong.
"who acknowledge based on the data that we're in an incredible "golden age" on most measurable"
I think that is where it goes wrong in that those sort of people are also the type that overemphasize the value of that which can be measured as opposed to realizing it is a minor, possibly a statistically insignificant part, of the whole. I think that is what the wisdom of age brings, a realization that a lot of those measurable factors are irrelevant as captured by the saying "nobody's last words are 'God I only wish I put in more overtime and spent less time with my friends and family'"
Culture changes with technology. Technology changes ever faster. Culture has no time to adapt. Is that the problem?
One could argue that it took 150 years for European culture to adapt to the printing press.
Yes that is part of the problem.
So should we try to slow down technological innovation, at least in certain areas?
Golden “We are eager to forgive those we most love.”
Interesting article.
Though I don't see what's so great about our cultures current or previous "status markers". What even are those anyway? The church used to be high status, now it's some dude wearing a Rolex. Both seem arbitrary to me.
Arbitrary or not, they make huge difference to common behaviors. So they can be maladaptive.
I think a lot of these cultural changes were driven by people who, because of aspects of their own culture, saw us as a threat and wanted to undermine and weaken us culturally.
Thank you for sharing this. I had been confused by your recent series of essays, but it makes sense now. I never loved 'my' culture or felt loyal to it; many parts of it always seemed dysfunctional compared to the alternatives I saw in history and fiction, and I never got emotionally attached to it. (Exception: the nuclear-family love marriage is just obviously better than the alternatives, which fail on every metric.) I assumed that most extropian-adjacent people already felt the same way, so welcome to the club.
Having said that, I will point out one way that 'our' culture is more adapted and functional than you might think. Almost all previous cultures were only capable of reproducing themselves through biological reproduction and kidnapping children. Ours is unusually capable of rapidly assimilating people from other cultures, and has optimized itself for taking over existing humans rather than creating new ones. This will work fine, until the pool is potential converts is depleted, but I don't think it ever will be. Pockets of insular cultures will continue to reproduce above replacement, and some version of 'our' culture will assimilate many of their children.
The world elite monoculture has already greatly depleted the pool from which it could draw. It is now on track to decline due to internal defects.
Our culture is not as good as it could be, but also not (nearly) as bad.
You are sounding very prophetic - as in 'like a Biblical prophet'. You are saying 'we have strayed from the true path and the punishment will be terrible.' I don't mean any insult or criticism by that. Only, like others, I'm mystified and quite creeped-out by biological adaptation going in the place of God there. I mean, I've seen you mention the naturalistic fallacy once but seemingly just to pick it up with scare quotes and drop it in the wastebasket. You may very well have covered this somewhere that I have not read but at the moment, it seems very strange that you dismiss it in this way. Maybe it is because of our Protestant heritage that we have to see Natural Selection as either God to be worshipped (or an agent of God to be honoured), or as a demon to be shunned? Rather than as a great and terrible Power that we cannot ignore but on the other hand should not submit to utterly.
If I am to doubt my culture's values, I need to base that doubt on some other value. Adaption is the only robust important thing I've found.
That is exactly right. In order to judge a value, you need a set of values, but such a set of values can only be judged by other values. Hence, all values are instrumental.
A value can be self-justifying after you choose it, but there is no prior basis for choosing whatever value(s) you choose. To have a rational theory of value, we must understand that it has no prior basis. It is a choice.
It thus follows that there is no *uniquely* rational theory of value. Instead, there are multiple rational theories of value that are each equally rational.
If you base your theory of value based on what's adaptive, then you are basing your values on biological value, or biological telos. These days, most cultures are based on (contradictory) psychological values instead, hence why they are becoming decadent.
I can't recommend this essay enough: What is Value? (https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/05/what-is-value.html)
If you want to talk about this further on Discord, my username is: `zerocontradictions`.
There isn't 'biological value'. There is being alive or being dead. Some things are more likely to prevent an organism being dead. If you think those things have 'biological value', that is because you place value on being alive. The values don't just exist. And it is not uncommon to think that there are things more valuable than being alive.
There is biological value, as my friend defined it in his essay: Biological value is what is good or bad for an organism, or in other words, what's adaptive or maladaptive for the organism. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2023/05/what-is-value.html
Biological value is a useful concept because psychological value derives its normativity from biological value. Social value arises from psychological value in multiple interacting minds. Philosophical value arises from our ability to think about ourselves, and ask the question “What is value?”. There is no uniquely rational answer to that question.
> If you think those things have 'biological value', that is because you place value on being alive.
No, not necessarily. I don't have to value things being alive or dead for biological value to exist as it's defined. Regardless of whether I affirm or reject life, it's still coherent, meaningful, and useful to define biological value for different organisms.
> The values don't just exist.
All value exists from a perspective. Biological value is defined according to the perspective of an organism's reproductive success.
> And it is not uncommon to think that there are things more valuable than being alive.
Yes, I already know this. Efilism and Euvalism are examples of philosophies which don't positively value life: https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-ghost-of-adam-lanza.html, https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2017/06/efilism.html
Being alive is instrumental to many values, but it's not necessarily to value life to have a rational philosophy.
Well then it is at least possible that you ought to keep looking, right?
Otherwise - well obvious point but - it is apparently adaptive for drake mallards to be cannibalistic rapists. If it turned out that this was also the case, in some situations, for human males, would you recommend it to them?
You recently made the striking statement that you and others who share your views might have to reassess who they admire and consider people like the Amish as admirable because their high birth rates make them - in your view - probably more likely to survive as a culture. The Amish, obviously, would be very against the idea that one should adopt anything - even rape and cannibalism - if you conclude it is adaptive. You will be in a bind if you feel that you have to admire them - or really any other culture - but reject absolutely everything that is central to their view of the world.
That sounds like a very big tension, especially if you are already feeling lonely where you are.
I do admire the Amish. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/bow-to-our-future-overlords
I know. That's why I said that.
I realise now that I said it in a horrifically mangled sentence. Sorry. It was early in the morning and my son had just got up and asked me for a story.
I mean, if you admire the Amish, but you do so because you do so because you are making judgements in a way that they would consider to be evil... well then you seem to be in a bit of a pickle.
That is also a pretty terrible sentence. Sorry.
...and horribly smug-sounding also. I don't like my own tone in these comments! I am also in this pickle. I just think it is a pickle.
OK, I need to be clear about this, and get this out of my head:
Here is why it seems to me like a hard place to stay.
1) You conclude the only available basis to judge a culture is your assessment of whether it is likely to survive - its evolutionary fitness. Or whether it is likely to help its members to survive (even if they subsequently abandon the culture).
2) You may theoretically accept that there is some way you might be wrong about that, but it seems too late to be worth thinking about (low Value of Information)
3) You decide, based on your assessment of what is likely to survive, that you should (or actually do) admire and honestly support cultures like the Amish.
4) The Amish themselves believe in God. It's kind of a big deal for them. They would therefore reject point (1).
5) You can, of course, admire someone and still think they are wrong, but it is hard to admire someone and think they are an idiot, or hopelessly deluded. Any idea that they structure their entire lives around has got to be at least worthy of consideration.This undermines point (2).
6) Maybe you admire the Amish, but not in that way. You admire their evolutionary strategy as you might admire that of the ichneumon or giant panda but, they didn't come up with it as an evolutionary strategy, they just got lucky. You aren't going to actually believe they crazy stuff which they believe just because it helps them have children. Well then you yourself are putting 'believing true things' above your own evolutionary fitness. If that is something an individual can do, then why not a whole culture?
7) Maybe you would say that what you believe to be true is not a choice you can make. Fair enough, but it is not a question of deciding to believe,it's about deciding to be open to the possibility, and perhaps adopting the practices of believers. This brings to mind an argument often considered important in the history of decision analysis. It is also the basis of recovery techniques that descend from alcoholics anonymous.
Or, you could maybe get out of all this by just not trying to judge cultures in the first place.
For me it seems easy to lay out this argument, hard to accept what it might mean. FWIW, I am not a smug believer waiting to welcome others into the fold. But I've been having parallel thoughts of this kind myself and they bother me.
I do admire the Amish without agreeing with them on everything.
Sure but, you know, I don't think declining fertility is anything like the biggest problem we face. But if I'm all: "I'm all into overcoming bias, but no way I'm going to buy this birthist nonsense," ... well it's just not a great attitude. And your piece about the Amish is all about being an honest ally, not a manipulative one. So you'd have to listen to them.
"If it turned out that this was also the case, in some situations, for human males, would you recommend it to them?"
If the alternative is extinction, then yes.
Leaving that Dysonsphere of Jormungands unopened, the alternative in this hypothetical scenario isn't extinction; it's some other people having more descendants than you do.
"Dysonsphere of Jormungands"
I don't follow
"the alternative in this hypothetical scenario isn't extinction; it's some other people having more descendants than you do."
This supposes that other people who are willing to rape for more offspring will out-populate those who aren't. This implies that rapists will outnumber the non-rapists.
Given what we know about pro-social species and human societies, such a dynamic where a pro-rape culture (and perhaps all the anti-social attributes that come with that) and an anti-rape culture will probably not survive contact.
So the premise of the question is false, as given the nature of rape, coexistence between anti-rapists and pro-rapists is unlikely.
I said hypothetical scenario. I actually don't think it's a far-fetched one as initially proposed because I didn't say anything about a pro-rape *culture* - but that's beside the point, really. If (for reasons you haven't thought of, in some circumstances you aren't aware of) it works for men's genes as it apparently works for drakes' genes, then would you advise it? Not accept that it is likely to happen, but actively recommend it?
For me this casts some doubt on the whole attitude of 'come up with an ultimate goal and follow the directives it gives you, no matter what.'
I was being a bit silly with Dysonsphere of Jormungands. I meant that the rape vs extinction 'trolley problem' was a big can of worms. That is a personal feeling related to my personal history.
"for reasons you haven't thought of, in some circumstances you aren't aware of"
I'm an alien supercomputer. I've thought through every scenario and counterfactual to the point of simulating an actual multiverse just to test the robustness of all imagined possibilities.
"it works for men's genes as it apparently works for drakes' genes, then would you advise it?"
Yes.
The position is simply that survival is the highest criterion. This is as any other imaginable standard is precluded by the outcome of survival.
"come up with an ultimate goal and follow the directives it gives you, no matter what."
Survival eliminates maladaptive options. If survival becomes less difficult (i.e. wealth), the constraints of survival are eased. The goal is not merely survival, but to create a margin of safety such that it's possible to care about more frivolous things like rape.
Hope the civilization that built you did not suffer long.
It was a difficult choice, but I simulated Hell probably 13 times today already in my head.
you should probably get help.
You’re suggesting that “morality” is not a robust value?
I agree. It's the ultimate thing to value.
It's actually an old idea, well since soon after Charles Darwin became well know. The Nazi's for example took it to an extreme, and gave it a bad name, but they were clearly way to aggressive, impatient, and myopic about it, and got it very wrong in the end.
The top Nazis didn't believe in Darwin's claims.
No, but Darwin was mostly talking about species. I understand the Nazis got the idea of applying it to culture via imperialism.
"Hitler’s own conception of biological processes was antithetical to Darwin’s theory; and the leading Nazi theorists rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character."
In the degradation of the great way come benevolence and righteousness.
With the exaltation of learning and prude comes immense hypocrisy.
The disordered family
is full of dutiful children and parents.
The disordered society is full of loyal patriots.
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