Lorenzo, are you still planning on writing the essays laid out in Worshipping The Future ? I loved the series and am really keen to read the rest of them.
# 82 " ... especially for women, who have a much wider range of possibilities the more education and other social possibilities they have—and increasing urbanisation. This combination increasingly eliminates the large family “tail” needed for positive fertility. "
Is it possible there is already then a biological and evolutionary "meta understanding" in play, such that somehow "humanity" realizes [is realizing] that the global population may tail off to 5 or 6 billion over the next few hundred years vs. the current projected peak of 9 billion or so? Or is this more directly a cultural evolution driven from the biological elements you are cateloging?
# 81 "... Careful comparison of economic performances by different countries show that the alleged wider economic (and even more social) benefits of such movement of labour, and even of capital, are regularly over-sold."
So how does this play into the Ricardo/Smith scheme of specialization and trade? It is now clear that the real benefits of prosperity come from combining energy with human capital. If you can copy - replicate - enhance your human capital vs. that of your trading partners, [and then import any needed energy resources] you should be able to come close to matching any commercial society on the planet.
We could argue the same ought to apply for the import of political systems as well? Of course that is more easily distorted by prior social norms, etc.
While the USA's constitution emphsizing checks and balances on power is still exhibiting some flaws, it seems that few developing [or already developed] societies/ nations seek the same level of restraints, opting instead for a more legislative power base in parlimentary systems of one stripe or another. One could say the elites in those countries don't want to constrain their own power over their citizens. Am I misreading the global sitution? [setting aside a couple dozen authortarian states?]
The specialisation and trade story still applies, but you have to add to it institutions and culture. What you are pointing to is the difficulty in maintaining an accountable state apparatus. Presidential systems have generally not fared very well outside the US. So, I don’t think you are misreading the situation, I would caution against holding that Parliamentary systems are automatically either better or worse at dealing with it: it depends on the balance of culture and institutions.
After # 90 "... the failure to accept the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological means that much of social “science” is not, in fact, science."
And yet the long list of books and articles in your references suggest you have managed to accumulate and then integrate a large quanity of this "science" within your own braincase.
All to the benefit of your readers!! :-)
We end up needing to trust you to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
Yes, there are still a lot of excellent studies. There are areas of Economics, for example, where the failure to do the grounding I advocate has minimal effects—all models are false, some are useful. The more encompassing the issue, the more likely the failure to be consilient bites. Immigration is an encompassing issue.
#54: Expressing myths in epic poetry operates as an effective oral transmission mechanism, since poetic metre provides an error correction device: breaking the rhythm and/or the rhyme (depending on how a language works) reveals an error. The Vedas, the Homeric and Vedic epics, could thus be transmitted across centuries orally.
An idea I had not seen expressed before. It made me wonder if we wrote our constitutions and laws in a poetic fashion, if they could be made sterner, firmer, clearer, etc. ["an effective ... transmission mechanism"] Then perhaps they could have better resisted the "living constitutionalism" of the "progressives" and much of the distortions of [at least Western] civilization that resulted from flawed outlook.
Then again, the multiple interpretations of the recent 'The Odyssey' movie may leave too many avenues for intellectual and emotive exploration to truly define core meanings??
Plus the Gilamesh and Dante's Inferno come to mind as not being particulary prominent in modern knowledge [certainly I only know the general outlines, etc.]
And with further thought, we can recognize that as often as not the lawyers really want to obfuscate legal meanings as clarify them, so as to enhance their social status as interpreters, etc.
It is a fascinating point regarding metre and verse, which would not have occurred to me, hence the links. Oral cultures use metre and verse far more than prose cultures do, as writing externalises memory (hello Dawkins and the extended phenotype).
The idea of requiring legislative and constitutional drafters to be poets as well is certainly an entertaining one. Metre and verse still have great power, we just put them to music: I thought giving Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature was actually very perceptive of the Nobel committee.
Perhaps the most evocative words in Australian culture are in verse:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
These words are recited every Anzac Day and used to be every November 11.
So so interesting. Your essays are among the very few of my 500+ subscriptions, that I actually read word for word and think about as I'm reading - as opposed to skimming and giving very little thought. They are wonderful. Thank you for them.
There is an implication to this that the left has supported evolutionary theory largely because opposition to it is right-coded, and it is flattering to be a champion of science. Do you think the most hardcore social justice activists might eventually reject evolution altogether in favor of a religious view of human origins, whether Christian or New Age or something else entirely, or perhaps split the baby by saying that animals evolved but humans have an additional divine genius that comes from outside of nature (but where would that leave vegans in the coalition, since it would eliminate any argument against meat-eating outside of pure sentimentality)
It depends which bit of the Left. Large sections absolutely saw opposition to evolutionary thinking as what mad Christian creationists did. But they have lost ground to folks who have huge problems with applying any hint of genetic effects to discussing humans and human social dynamics. How to ground that is a real question. Simple moral intimidation seems to get a fair way. How stable that is, open question. What alternatives they have, unclear.
I think part of what made the 2010s woke movement so aggressive is that moral intimidation doesn't work like it used to, because the morals being played on are an inheritance from Christianity that has been almost entirely spent down. A new spirituality means a new morality, and when it comes it will shatter the existing left coalition.
As has been noted before, the grand irony and galactic blind spot of modern progressivism is the ethics used to refute traditional Christian/Western ethics are themselves Christian/Western to the bone.
It does get hard to lean on a value system whose values you are subverting.
What follows, who can say? There’s a definitively non-zero chance that it is substantially less supportive of progressives’ imagined perfection than otherwise.
Taking the Freudian view, it is exactly the red in tooth and claw version of human existence that they secretly wish to engender. Recapitulating the Fall all the way down.
Internal and external consistency of worldview is incredibly difficult to maintain; impossible when it’s not even a goal.
Ethics are the guide to dealing with the results of that consistency. As a baseline, Christian ethics are pretty good; but I would say that being a cultural, if not entirely propositional, Christian.
I’d posit that progressives already have rejected human evolution in their wholesale adoption of the perfectible blank slate human ideology. Discuss the behavior of hummingbirds, trees, orcas, ants, or any other non-human organism and there is no questioning the evolved nature of even learned and adaptive patterns. But the moment you try to talk about human behavior, you get flat denial of the possibility. It’s all culture, it’s all malleable, and it’s all perfectible.
If that’s not the very embodiment of the most derisively caricatured version of religious belief, I don’t know what is.
The real question is, would they ever cop to it? Christian creationists will straight up tell you that they believe humans were created by God for a specific purpose devised by God. Blank slatism tries to have it both ways for now, but if the hard sciences become sufficiently right-coded, I could see the religious element become overt.
Since this brain dead phone app does not let me edit comments, I will add here that blank slatism built on an explicitly spiritual foundation would be easier to defend (since there is quite literally no arguing with faith), and I think paganism is where religion in Europe and especially America is headed. Once again there would be big problems maintaining the coalition partnership with vegans (who cannot abide a hard separation between animals and humans) and Muslims (who cannot abide an alliance with a neo-pagan religious movement).
Yes, I do appreciate the accountability of the faithful: this is what I believe, it’s detailed here in this book, and that’s the way it is.
A scientific understanding of the above would acknowledge that we are religious primates, it’s one of our heritable adaptations. And the lessons enumerated in tradition have developed over vast spans of time to be maximally adaptive to a varying span of environments.
Progressives having it both ways is also adaptive, salience again, as clearly demonstrated by the social status ascendancy of blank slateism. But it is not scientific.
I am going to have to stop you at "tradition"--whose traditions? Where? When? "Tradition" is not some timeless thing passed down from God, it is specific to a culture which exists in time and place, and the tradition includes what the culture thinks the divine is and how to relate to it. It is, furthermore, a living thing that cannot be resurrected when it perishes, and attempts to do so produce empty imitations of the original. *Our* tradition is dead. The Christian god is dead and so is the moral universe that revolved around him. Our artistic traditions are dead and all attempts to revive them have come as ridiculous pastiche. New Atheism, progressivism, and other such tendencies, existing in relation to a dead thing, will die too. A new tradition will have to be built--is being built, below the fossilized surface of our culture--that will be profoundly alien to what came before. New gods, new morality, a new idea of the sacred, a new idea of the proper relations between men and women, and more. Our artistic achievements will be sorted and triaged--and much of it thrown away--by the new tradition, by its criteria and for its purposes, and what remains will be imbued with new meaning so that the pagan future can relate to it.
Tradition as such, not necessarily any one from any time or place.
I accept and acknowledge everything you’re saying about the death of God and our traditions. Evolution is most rapid at the margins, and as far as ethical tradition goes, we are in a deeply marginal place presently.
The worry, of course, is that the margin is also where organisms perish from want.
I would also note that the arrival of a new tradition would not be a victory for "the right", but would bring its own political system orthogonal to modern left and right.
Lorenzo, are you still planning on writing the essays laid out in Worshipping The Future ? I loved the series and am really keen to read the rest of them.
Especially, the What Is To Be Done part!
That is the plan. I have an essay in the pipeline.
Another excellent post, which also precipitated a lively enlightened discussion.
# 82 " ... especially for women, who have a much wider range of possibilities the more education and other social possibilities they have—and increasing urbanisation. This combination increasingly eliminates the large family “tail” needed for positive fertility. "
Is it possible there is already then a biological and evolutionary "meta understanding" in play, such that somehow "humanity" realizes [is realizing] that the global population may tail off to 5 or 6 billion over the next few hundred years vs. the current projected peak of 9 billion or so? Or is this more directly a cultural evolution driven from the biological elements you are cateloging?
I would say it is cultural evolution. It is not clear to me what mechanisms exist to have the feedback effect you are positing as a possibility.
# 81 "... Careful comparison of economic performances by different countries show that the alleged wider economic (and even more social) benefits of such movement of labour, and even of capital, are regularly over-sold."
So how does this play into the Ricardo/Smith scheme of specialization and trade? It is now clear that the real benefits of prosperity come from combining energy with human capital. If you can copy - replicate - enhance your human capital vs. that of your trading partners, [and then import any needed energy resources] you should be able to come close to matching any commercial society on the planet.
We could argue the same ought to apply for the import of political systems as well? Of course that is more easily distorted by prior social norms, etc.
While the USA's constitution emphsizing checks and balances on power is still exhibiting some flaws, it seems that few developing [or already developed] societies/ nations seek the same level of restraints, opting instead for a more legislative power base in parlimentary systems of one stripe or another. One could say the elites in those countries don't want to constrain their own power over their citizens. Am I misreading the global sitution? [setting aside a couple dozen authortarian states?]
The specialisation and trade story still applies, but you have to add to it institutions and culture. What you are pointing to is the difficulty in maintaining an accountable state apparatus. Presidential systems have generally not fared very well outside the US. So, I don’t think you are misreading the situation, I would caution against holding that Parliamentary systems are automatically either better or worse at dealing with it: it depends on the balance of culture and institutions.
After # 90 "... the failure to accept the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological means that much of social “science” is not, in fact, science."
And yet the long list of books and articles in your references suggest you have managed to accumulate and then integrate a large quanity of this "science" within your own braincase.
All to the benefit of your readers!! :-)
We end up needing to trust you to help separate the wheat from the chaff.
Yes, there are still a lot of excellent studies. There are areas of Economics, for example, where the failure to do the grounding I advocate has minimal effects—all models are false, some are useful. The more encompassing the issue, the more likely the failure to be consilient bites. Immigration is an encompassing issue.
#54: Expressing myths in epic poetry operates as an effective oral transmission mechanism, since poetic metre provides an error correction device: breaking the rhythm and/or the rhyme (depending on how a language works) reveals an error. The Vedas, the Homeric and Vedic epics, could thus be transmitted across centuries orally.
An idea I had not seen expressed before. It made me wonder if we wrote our constitutions and laws in a poetic fashion, if they could be made sterner, firmer, clearer, etc. ["an effective ... transmission mechanism"] Then perhaps they could have better resisted the "living constitutionalism" of the "progressives" and much of the distortions of [at least Western] civilization that resulted from flawed outlook.
Then again, the multiple interpretations of the recent 'The Odyssey' movie may leave too many avenues for intellectual and emotive exploration to truly define core meanings??
Plus the Gilamesh and Dante's Inferno come to mind as not being particulary prominent in modern knowledge [certainly I only know the general outlines, etc.]
And with further thought, we can recognize that as often as not the lawyers really want to obfuscate legal meanings as clarify them, so as to enhance their social status as interpreters, etc.
It is a fascinating point regarding metre and verse, which would not have occurred to me, hence the links. Oral cultures use metre and verse far more than prose cultures do, as writing externalises memory (hello Dawkins and the extended phenotype).
The idea of requiring legislative and constitutional drafters to be poets as well is certainly an entertaining one. Metre and verse still have great power, we just put them to music: I thought giving Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature was actually very perceptive of the Nobel committee.
Perhaps the most evocative words in Australian culture are in verse:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
These words are recited every Anzac Day and used to be every November 11.
So so interesting. Your essays are among the very few of my 500+ subscriptions, that I actually read word for word and think about as I'm reading - as opposed to skimming and giving very little thought. They are wonderful. Thank you for them.
There is an implication to this that the left has supported evolutionary theory largely because opposition to it is right-coded, and it is flattering to be a champion of science. Do you think the most hardcore social justice activists might eventually reject evolution altogether in favor of a religious view of human origins, whether Christian or New Age or something else entirely, or perhaps split the baby by saying that animals evolved but humans have an additional divine genius that comes from outside of nature (but where would that leave vegans in the coalition, since it would eliminate any argument against meat-eating outside of pure sentimentality)
It depends which bit of the Left. Large sections absolutely saw opposition to evolutionary thinking as what mad Christian creationists did. But they have lost ground to folks who have huge problems with applying any hint of genetic effects to discussing humans and human social dynamics. How to ground that is a real question. Simple moral intimidation seems to get a fair way. How stable that is, open question. What alternatives they have, unclear.
I think part of what made the 2010s woke movement so aggressive is that moral intimidation doesn't work like it used to, because the morals being played on are an inheritance from Christianity that has been almost entirely spent down. A new spirituality means a new morality, and when it comes it will shatter the existing left coalition.
As has been noted before, the grand irony and galactic blind spot of modern progressivism is the ethics used to refute traditional Christian/Western ethics are themselves Christian/Western to the bone.
It does get hard to lean on a value system whose values you are subverting.
What follows, who can say? There’s a definitively non-zero chance that it is substantially less supportive of progressives’ imagined perfection than otherwise.
Taking the Freudian view, it is exactly the red in tooth and claw version of human existence that they secretly wish to engender. Recapitulating the Fall all the way down.
Internal and external consistency of worldview is incredibly difficult to maintain; impossible when it’s not even a goal.
Ethics are the guide to dealing with the results of that consistency. As a baseline, Christian ethics are pretty good; but I would say that being a cultural, if not entirely propositional, Christian.
I’d posit that progressives already have rejected human evolution in their wholesale adoption of the perfectible blank slate human ideology. Discuss the behavior of hummingbirds, trees, orcas, ants, or any other non-human organism and there is no questioning the evolved nature of even learned and adaptive patterns. But the moment you try to talk about human behavior, you get flat denial of the possibility. It’s all culture, it’s all malleable, and it’s all perfectible.
If that’s not the very embodiment of the most derisively caricatured version of religious belief, I don’t know what is.
The real question is, would they ever cop to it? Christian creationists will straight up tell you that they believe humans were created by God for a specific purpose devised by God. Blank slatism tries to have it both ways for now, but if the hard sciences become sufficiently right-coded, I could see the religious element become overt.
Since this brain dead phone app does not let me edit comments, I will add here that blank slatism built on an explicitly spiritual foundation would be easier to defend (since there is quite literally no arguing with faith), and I think paganism is where religion in Europe and especially America is headed. Once again there would be big problems maintaining the coalition partnership with vegans (who cannot abide a hard separation between animals and humans) and Muslims (who cannot abide an alliance with a neo-pagan religious movement).
Yes, I do appreciate the accountability of the faithful: this is what I believe, it’s detailed here in this book, and that’s the way it is.
A scientific understanding of the above would acknowledge that we are religious primates, it’s one of our heritable adaptations. And the lessons enumerated in tradition have developed over vast spans of time to be maximally adaptive to a varying span of environments.
Progressives having it both ways is also adaptive, salience again, as clearly demonstrated by the social status ascendancy of blank slateism. But it is not scientific.
I am going to have to stop you at "tradition"--whose traditions? Where? When? "Tradition" is not some timeless thing passed down from God, it is specific to a culture which exists in time and place, and the tradition includes what the culture thinks the divine is and how to relate to it. It is, furthermore, a living thing that cannot be resurrected when it perishes, and attempts to do so produce empty imitations of the original. *Our* tradition is dead. The Christian god is dead and so is the moral universe that revolved around him. Our artistic traditions are dead and all attempts to revive them have come as ridiculous pastiche. New Atheism, progressivism, and other such tendencies, existing in relation to a dead thing, will die too. A new tradition will have to be built--is being built, below the fossilized surface of our culture--that will be profoundly alien to what came before. New gods, new morality, a new idea of the sacred, a new idea of the proper relations between men and women, and more. Our artistic achievements will be sorted and triaged--and much of it thrown away--by the new tradition, by its criteria and for its purposes, and what remains will be imbued with new meaning so that the pagan future can relate to it.
Tradition as such, not necessarily any one from any time or place.
I accept and acknowledge everything you’re saying about the death of God and our traditions. Evolution is most rapid at the margins, and as far as ethical tradition goes, we are in a deeply marginal place presently.
The worry, of course, is that the margin is also where organisms perish from want.
I would also note that the arrival of a new tradition would not be a victory for "the right", but would bring its own political system orthogonal to modern left and right.