Failing to accept the constraint of being consilient with more fundamental structures of reality; that the social is emergent from the biological (using evolutionary reasoning V).
This five-post series on evolutionary reasoning is a genuine tour-de-force: each instalment demands careful reading, re-reading and digestion as it steadily builds a rigorous framework for understanding human societies. The culminating essay drives home its most profound point - that much of what passes for social “science” is not science at all, precisely because it refuses the constraint of consilience with more fundamental biological realities. By showing how the social is emergent from the biological, and how pre-Darwinian frameworks plus equality taboos divert attention from that fact, it exposes why these approaches leave us operationally stupider in the face of technology that already threatens to overwhelm (and even degrade) our evolutionary adaptations. A fitting and forceful close to an outstanding series.
As I began reading this essay, I had a sense of you having some underground termoil and anger at how this deviance from incorporating biological aspects into social thinking is so obvious it should never have gotten to this stage! By all means, keep those embers lit, but controlled to avoid an unwise "flare up". :-) Just a perception - all of which are subject to cognitive deficits.
"... cases of mass immigration stressing existing social fault-lines of a polity to the point of open warfare." I am not sure why you wouldn't apply this criteria to the American
Revolution as well? Four million European immigrants and their posterity, mostly of English heritage with ideas of governance and common law they felt were being violated by Parliament and the crown?
"It is Economics being used to manifest what sociologist Christopher Lasch famously called the revolt of the elites via overblown—and ultimately self-serving, especially as status games—claims of expertise to dismiss the concerns of fellow citizens, especially working-class citizens." I can see how the business and ecomonic and academic "elites" would look at globization as a good thing: "we are now internationalizing our expertise and capability into wider markets, leading to wider prosperity for all!" But it must have also been the case that union leaders thought of themselves as elites, too. "We are going to control the labor pools that support our eliteness, and ignore any laborers so foolish as to not join our cause".
The American Revolution I see as a somewhat different case because the population was so dominated by settlers from the British Isles. Yes, there were some Dutch and even some Germans, but overwhelmingly they were British. It was an argument within the British paradigm. But you can absolutely make the case that the process of immigration broke the existing political paradigm.
I note with the interest that such settlement in Canada, Australia, New Zealand did not have the same effect, mainly because the British political elite learnt from the failure with the 13 Colonies. So, it was a murkier case where the Texas and US Civil War cases are very clear.
Union leaders do see themselves as elites, but you get competition within and between elites and it is clear that globalisation has not been good for unions and union leaders (outside the public sector).
Tell me about it. As a very slow learner I struggled to learn calculus, just to know what Paul Samuelson was saying. Then I discovered he wasn´t saying much of anything real. So call it the Foundations of Economic ANALOGY - an analogy to something that is real. Like designing a bridge or something.
I had to take a couple of gender studies courses at my alma mater. You're correct - most of our readings were either (1) from 40 years earlier or (2) the kind of emotional, impressionistic, jargon-laden academic writing familiar to any modern sociology student. I thought it odd that so much of what we were taught in terms of suppositions or questions had DEFINITIVELY been answered by departments in buildings 3 or 400 feet away (evopsych, neurology, anthropology).
Of course, with feminization the rot has spread outward and infected adjacent disciplines such that MOST soft science academics now must make concessions to social desirability bias and ideology (whether they realize it or not).
I would wager that there's now much more interesting and productive social science happening on Substack than in all universities in this country... at probably 1/1000th the cost.
"The failure to respect the constraints that the social is emergent from the biological is the failure to respect the constraints of science, which means one is not really engaged in science, but a pretence thereof." Back when I did systems engineering, I also tried to place the "system" into a "meta-system" that included the environment within which the system would exist and/or operate; and the context where it was supposed to serve.
The environment might be the store shelf, the warehouse, or the desert military theatre.
The context might be display product to consumer, provide secure storage, or kill the enemy.
I am not sure I am using or interpreting this correctly, but "This conflation of measurable with valuable has been a classic example of Goodhart’s Law on a society-wide scale—that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure...." led me to the thought that maybe we need to find some better social measurements. Perhaps something related to "high quality" depictions of families, or career management, or personal satisfaction. For example, instead of relative salary, perhaps "how does my life, or my family life, compare to what was depicted on "the Honeymooners" or "Little House on the Prairie" or "The Jetsons" or ???? There are probably better examples, or they need to be selected based on age cohort? Something that says "how do I compare to those examples of "good families"? " or "successful career networkers", etc.
Monetary transactions are priced, and generate gains from trade, so give a measurement of value. They are a way of making subjective valuations measurable. Even within GDP, there are aspects of what is included (government expenditure on goods and services) that are not prices in that sense.
We cannot measure subjective valuations, so we have to go from behaviour. One does wonder if time allocations might be helpful here.
[I am about a third of the way thru the essay, but went back to capture this thought, triggered by this phrase: " ... (3) regularly being far more historically illiterate than much more historically-informed past thinkers." As I reflect on my engineerng/science education from over 5 decades ago, I think a presentation of the material with more historical background would have improved my understanding and appreciation of what was being taught. But almost all of it was provided "de Nova" from the page to the brain, building on past inputs, etc., but not with any deeper context.
It is disheartening to watch people and systems repeat mistakes. AJP Taylor wrote that people never hesitate to learn from past mistakes so they can make new ones. There is something in that, but watching exactly the same bad incentive structures that lost the Vietnam War lose the Afghan War is … not encouraging.
"Another way to put this, is that members of terminating human lineages are typically showing a much more hostile attitude towards preservation of the cultural heritage—or even basic functioning—of their societies than are members of continuing lineages."
I see a certain paradox here. Those in support of mass immigration are trying to preserve the culture, it is just that they see our cultural heritage as being hostile to the present day (immigration) culture. This, I suspect, is why racism has become such an issue. Racism threatens to undermine the coherence of a immigrant culture. And of course immigration threatens to undermine the coherence of our cultural inheritance. It's a stand off between the elites and the working class with the elites well out in front at the moment unfortunately.
“Those in support of mass immigration are trying to preserve the culture, it is just that they see our cultural heritage as being hostile to the present day (immigration) culture.”
I am sceptical to how much the first part is true. There is a lot of elite activity that seems deliberately corrosive of cultural heritage.
The paradox you describe is less a genuine tension than a dilution of the actual problem. Framing mass-immigration advocacy as merely “another culture trying to preserve itself” creates a false symmetry: it places defenders of the existing inheritance and those actively replacing it on equal moral footing, then invites endless “on the one hand… on the other hand” hand-wringing.
That rhetorical move leaves the field open to leftist and racial grifters who treat the host society as a temporary resource to be consumed, while conservatives are reduced to passive spectators watching the downhill slide. Lorenzo’s point is sharper and less comfortable: members of terminating lineages often display open hostility to the cultural and institutional inheritance that sustained their own society’s competence and cohesion. Treating every new arrival as interchangeable - and every criticism of that process as “racism” - is not cultural preservation; it is the systematic erosion of the very conditions that made the “club” worth joining in the first place.
The alternative is not perpetual flux or managed decline. It is deliberate preservation of a positive cultural equilibrium through selective assimilation and genuine asabiyya - the group solidarity required for institutions to function and for the society’s long-term well-being to improve rather than decay. Anything less is simply surrender dressed up as sophistication.
"it places defenders of the existing inheritance and those actively replacing it on equal moral footing, then invites endless “on the one hand… on the other hand” hand-wringing."
I am not speaking from a moral perspective. Treating racism as a moral issue is a typical form of self deception ubiquitous amongst humans. Morality adheres to our forms of life, and as forms of life change so too our moral sensibilities.
The problem is our cultural inheritance:
"The pervasive moral fetishisation of equality—thereby requiring that all relevant traits be deemed to be equally distributed among all human groups—is a large reason why that reality-constraint is not accepted."
Where do think this moral fetish of equality came from other than our cultural (largely Christian) inheritance?
The dilemma we face is that our cultural inheritance explains much of the problems we are facing today with immigration. The paradox is that most those who support immigration remain Christian in their moral psychology (though no longer a believing Christian), regarding equality, which Lorenzo correctly points out is not consilient with reality understood through a Darwinian perspective.
My philosophical background is in Nietzsche. I find a great deal in Lorenzo that I agree with. But revaluating our moral belief in equality would entail a major revision (and turning upside down) of our cultural inheritance.
As Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago (specifically addressed to atheists) 'We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge'.
The fetishisation of equality is a huge problem and it does ultimately come from Christianity: from Imago Dei—made in the image of God.
And yet, we saw nothing like the current mass immigration madness in Western European countries back when Christianity was much more vibrant. This suggests that other changes are more salient: either things that kept the concept of Imago Dei in bounds have weakened or vanished and/or other changes have inflated a secular version of the same.
It is quite clear that many folk pushing mass immigration are pushing precisely for its corrosive effects: that they can use it to undermine Western cultural heritage (and especially its Christian heritage). Others are pushing it because it advantages elites whose networks are transnational over those whose networks are locality-based.
When society was more ostentatiously Christian, elites were much less transnational and local networks were much stronger—not least due to Christian congregations. Even differences in forms of Christianity were mobilised to support more restrictive policies.
Ideas do nothing on their own, they have to resonate to replicate. Hence the importance of looking at social and institutional dynamics.
"It is quite clear that many folk pushing mass immigration are pushing precisely for its corrosive effects".
I agree the effects are corrosive. But those who support immigration likewise view racism as corrosive of the values of the community in which they identify. The herd will always protect itself from that which it sees as threats to the stability and cohesion of the herd. Yet our cultural heritage is never just one thing, it is made up of many different strands over time. We tend to identify with certain parts of this heritage - but never all of it.
Most atheists (and I am one) reject Christianity, but do so out of the same cultural psychology of values that Christianity bequeath the West. Nietzsche called these values hostile to life.
You point about equality not being consilient with reality is in many ways making the same point. The fetishization of equality is hostile to very conditions (constraints) that make life possible.
"Ideas do nothing on their own, they have to resonate to replicate."
I agree. But I don't know any other culture that has fetishized equality to the same degree as the West. To revise the value we place on equality (which I agree we should) would require a major revision of our cultural heritage.
I don't believe you can separate out the value of equality from our shared cultural inheritance.
“ view racism as corrosive of the values of the community in which they identify”. The whole point of every aspect of Critical Theory, including Critical Race Theory, is to be corrosive. The effect of DEI is to create a moral caste system based, on among other things, race. What had largely become a consensus in rejecting racism has been undermined by a re-racialising of identity by alleged progressives.
It all kicked off right around the time actual racism was quietly going extinct. In its place a shiny new progressive article of faith was born. And as long as there are progressives, they will keep diligently exorcising it - thereby keeping alive not the barely existent and practically inconsequential “racism” (after all, Affirmative Action was a 6 decades long racist overcorrection on behalf of blacks), but their unshakable faith in its everlasting evil. It’s basically the secular Devil: Christianity spent centuries battling the Devil with zero evidence he ever existed, and the modern version is proving every bit as industrious. Plus, invoking it forever keeps control of the black vote. And of course the same technique is now applied to the whole woke catechism - ending lately with trans, particularly if they are even further intersectionally "oppressed". Because, in the core, the cause is not the cause, the omni-cause is perpetual revolution. The eternal wish of breaking things doesn't even count as "culture", rather a lack of one.
This five-post series on evolutionary reasoning is a genuine tour-de-force: each instalment demands careful reading, re-reading and digestion as it steadily builds a rigorous framework for understanding human societies. The culminating essay drives home its most profound point - that much of what passes for social “science” is not science at all, precisely because it refuses the constraint of consilience with more fundamental biological realities. By showing how the social is emergent from the biological, and how pre-Darwinian frameworks plus equality taboos divert attention from that fact, it exposes why these approaches leave us operationally stupider in the face of technology that already threatens to overwhelm (and even degrade) our evolutionary adaptations. A fitting and forceful close to an outstanding series.
As I began reading this essay, I had a sense of you having some underground termoil and anger at how this deviance from incorporating biological aspects into social thinking is so obvious it should never have gotten to this stage! By all means, keep those embers lit, but controlled to avoid an unwise "flare up". :-) Just a perception - all of which are subject to cognitive deficits.
"... cases of mass immigration stressing existing social fault-lines of a polity to the point of open warfare." I am not sure why you wouldn't apply this criteria to the American
Revolution as well? Four million European immigrants and their posterity, mostly of English heritage with ideas of governance and common law they felt were being violated by Parliament and the crown?
"It is Economics being used to manifest what sociologist Christopher Lasch famously called the revolt of the elites via overblown—and ultimately self-serving, especially as status games—claims of expertise to dismiss the concerns of fellow citizens, especially working-class citizens." I can see how the business and ecomonic and academic "elites" would look at globization as a good thing: "we are now internationalizing our expertise and capability into wider markets, leading to wider prosperity for all!" But it must have also been the case that union leaders thought of themselves as elites, too. "We are going to control the labor pools that support our eliteness, and ignore any laborers so foolish as to not join our cause".
The American Revolution I see as a somewhat different case because the population was so dominated by settlers from the British Isles. Yes, there were some Dutch and even some Germans, but overwhelmingly they were British. It was an argument within the British paradigm. But you can absolutely make the case that the process of immigration broke the existing political paradigm.
I note with the interest that such settlement in Canada, Australia, New Zealand did not have the same effect, mainly because the British political elite learnt from the failure with the 13 Colonies. So, it was a murkier case where the Texas and US Civil War cases are very clear.
Union leaders do see themselves as elites, but you get competition within and between elites and it is clear that globalisation has not been good for unions and union leaders (outside the public sector).
Great research and writing. I don’t expect you to agree but, in my view, the humanities departments are spell casters shaping desires.
You and James Lindsay. You do not have to invoke supernatural claims (he doesn’t) to see something in such characterisations.
Looked around and found James Lindsay! So, you don’t think Mao was driven by spirits?
I do not feel the need to invoke supernatural claims to explain Mao’s behaviour.
Tell me about it. As a very slow learner I struggled to learn calculus, just to know what Paul Samuelson was saying. Then I discovered he wasn´t saying much of anything real. So call it the Foundations of Economic ANALOGY - an analogy to something that is real. Like designing a bridge or something.
I had to take a couple of gender studies courses at my alma mater. You're correct - most of our readings were either (1) from 40 years earlier or (2) the kind of emotional, impressionistic, jargon-laden academic writing familiar to any modern sociology student. I thought it odd that so much of what we were taught in terms of suppositions or questions had DEFINITIVELY been answered by departments in buildings 3 or 400 feet away (evopsych, neurology, anthropology).
Of course, with feminization the rot has spread outward and infected adjacent disciplines such that MOST soft science academics now must make concessions to social desirability bias and ideology (whether they realize it or not).
I would wager that there's now much more interesting and productive social science happening on Substack than in all universities in this country... at probably 1/1000th the cost.
(Interesting reading by Anuradha P.: https://www.radicallypragmatic.press/p/womens-society-debate)
"The failure to respect the constraints that the social is emergent from the biological is the failure to respect the constraints of science, which means one is not really engaged in science, but a pretence thereof." Back when I did systems engineering, I also tried to place the "system" into a "meta-system" that included the environment within which the system would exist and/or operate; and the context where it was supposed to serve.
The environment might be the store shelf, the warehouse, or the desert military theatre.
The context might be display product to consumer, provide secure storage, or kill the enemy.
I am not sure I am using or interpreting this correctly, but "This conflation of measurable with valuable has been a classic example of Goodhart’s Law on a society-wide scale—that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure...." led me to the thought that maybe we need to find some better social measurements. Perhaps something related to "high quality" depictions of families, or career management, or personal satisfaction. For example, instead of relative salary, perhaps "how does my life, or my family life, compare to what was depicted on "the Honeymooners" or "Little House on the Prairie" or "The Jetsons" or ???? There are probably better examples, or they need to be selected based on age cohort? Something that says "how do I compare to those examples of "good families"? " or "successful career networkers", etc.
Monetary transactions are priced, and generate gains from trade, so give a measurement of value. They are a way of making subjective valuations measurable. Even within GDP, there are aspects of what is included (government expenditure on goods and services) that are not prices in that sense.
We cannot measure subjective valuations, so we have to go from behaviour. One does wonder if time allocations might be helpful here.
[I am about a third of the way thru the essay, but went back to capture this thought, triggered by this phrase: " ... (3) regularly being far more historically illiterate than much more historically-informed past thinkers." As I reflect on my engineerng/science education from over 5 decades ago, I think a presentation of the material with more historical background would have improved my understanding and appreciation of what was being taught. But almost all of it was provided "de Nova" from the page to the brain, building on past inputs, etc., but not with any deeper context.
It is disheartening to watch people and systems repeat mistakes. AJP Taylor wrote that people never hesitate to learn from past mistakes so they can make new ones. There is something in that, but watching exactly the same bad incentive structures that lost the Vietnam War lose the Afghan War is … not encouraging.
https://www.amazon.com/Social-sciences-sorcery-Stanislav-Andreski/dp/0233962263
You are reminding me to go back to reading this book …
"Another way to put this, is that members of terminating human lineages are typically showing a much more hostile attitude towards preservation of the cultural heritage—or even basic functioning—of their societies than are members of continuing lineages."
I see a certain paradox here. Those in support of mass immigration are trying to preserve the culture, it is just that they see our cultural heritage as being hostile to the present day (immigration) culture. This, I suspect, is why racism has become such an issue. Racism threatens to undermine the coherence of a immigrant culture. And of course immigration threatens to undermine the coherence of our cultural inheritance. It's a stand off between the elites and the working class with the elites well out in front at the moment unfortunately.
“Those in support of mass immigration are trying to preserve the culture, it is just that they see our cultural heritage as being hostile to the present day (immigration) culture.”
I am sceptical to how much the first part is true. There is a lot of elite activity that seems deliberately corrosive of cultural heritage.
"There is a lot of elite activity that seems deliberately corrosive of cultural heritage."
I agree, it is corrosive. Yet I cannot help but notice that slavery was also once part of our cultural heritage.
And so was opposition to the same. To a degree not equalled by any other civilisation. While slavery was part of everyone’s cultural heritage.
The paradox you describe is less a genuine tension than a dilution of the actual problem. Framing mass-immigration advocacy as merely “another culture trying to preserve itself” creates a false symmetry: it places defenders of the existing inheritance and those actively replacing it on equal moral footing, then invites endless “on the one hand… on the other hand” hand-wringing.
That rhetorical move leaves the field open to leftist and racial grifters who treat the host society as a temporary resource to be consumed, while conservatives are reduced to passive spectators watching the downhill slide. Lorenzo’s point is sharper and less comfortable: members of terminating lineages often display open hostility to the cultural and institutional inheritance that sustained their own society’s competence and cohesion. Treating every new arrival as interchangeable - and every criticism of that process as “racism” - is not cultural preservation; it is the systematic erosion of the very conditions that made the “club” worth joining in the first place.
The alternative is not perpetual flux or managed decline. It is deliberate preservation of a positive cultural equilibrium through selective assimilation and genuine asabiyya - the group solidarity required for institutions to function and for the society’s long-term well-being to improve rather than decay. Anything less is simply surrender dressed up as sophistication.
"it places defenders of the existing inheritance and those actively replacing it on equal moral footing, then invites endless “on the one hand… on the other hand” hand-wringing."
I am not speaking from a moral perspective. Treating racism as a moral issue is a typical form of self deception ubiquitous amongst humans. Morality adheres to our forms of life, and as forms of life change so too our moral sensibilities.
The problem is our cultural inheritance:
"The pervasive moral fetishisation of equality—thereby requiring that all relevant traits be deemed to be equally distributed among all human groups—is a large reason why that reality-constraint is not accepted."
Where do think this moral fetish of equality came from other than our cultural (largely Christian) inheritance?
The dilemma we face is that our cultural inheritance explains much of the problems we are facing today with immigration. The paradox is that most those who support immigration remain Christian in their moral psychology (though no longer a believing Christian), regarding equality, which Lorenzo correctly points out is not consilient with reality understood through a Darwinian perspective.
My philosophical background is in Nietzsche. I find a great deal in Lorenzo that I agree with. But revaluating our moral belief in equality would entail a major revision (and turning upside down) of our cultural inheritance.
As Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago (specifically addressed to atheists) 'We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge'.
The fetishisation of equality is a huge problem and it does ultimately come from Christianity: from Imago Dei—made in the image of God.
And yet, we saw nothing like the current mass immigration madness in Western European countries back when Christianity was much more vibrant. This suggests that other changes are more salient: either things that kept the concept of Imago Dei in bounds have weakened or vanished and/or other changes have inflated a secular version of the same.
It is quite clear that many folk pushing mass immigration are pushing precisely for its corrosive effects: that they can use it to undermine Western cultural heritage (and especially its Christian heritage). Others are pushing it because it advantages elites whose networks are transnational over those whose networks are locality-based.
When society was more ostentatiously Christian, elites were much less transnational and local networks were much stronger—not least due to Christian congregations. Even differences in forms of Christianity were mobilised to support more restrictive policies.
Ideas do nothing on their own, they have to resonate to replicate. Hence the importance of looking at social and institutional dynamics.
"It is quite clear that many folk pushing mass immigration are pushing precisely for its corrosive effects".
I agree the effects are corrosive. But those who support immigration likewise view racism as corrosive of the values of the community in which they identify. The herd will always protect itself from that which it sees as threats to the stability and cohesion of the herd. Yet our cultural heritage is never just one thing, it is made up of many different strands over time. We tend to identify with certain parts of this heritage - but never all of it.
Most atheists (and I am one) reject Christianity, but do so out of the same cultural psychology of values that Christianity bequeath the West. Nietzsche called these values hostile to life.
You point about equality not being consilient with reality is in many ways making the same point. The fetishization of equality is hostile to very conditions (constraints) that make life possible.
"Ideas do nothing on their own, they have to resonate to replicate."
I agree. But I don't know any other culture that has fetishized equality to the same degree as the West. To revise the value we place on equality (which I agree we should) would require a major revision of our cultural heritage.
I don't believe you can separate out the value of equality from our shared cultural inheritance.
“ view racism as corrosive of the values of the community in which they identify”. The whole point of every aspect of Critical Theory, including Critical Race Theory, is to be corrosive. The effect of DEI is to create a moral caste system based, on among other things, race. What had largely become a consensus in rejecting racism has been undermined by a re-racialising of identity by alleged progressives.
I completely agree. This X post from Steve Sailer puts it into perspective: https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/2086427231660982530?s=20
It all kicked off right around the time actual racism was quietly going extinct. In its place a shiny new progressive article of faith was born. And as long as there are progressives, they will keep diligently exorcising it - thereby keeping alive not the barely existent and practically inconsequential “racism” (after all, Affirmative Action was a 6 decades long racist overcorrection on behalf of blacks), but their unshakable faith in its everlasting evil. It’s basically the secular Devil: Christianity spent centuries battling the Devil with zero evidence he ever existed, and the modern version is proving every bit as industrious. Plus, invoking it forever keeps control of the black vote. And of course the same technique is now applied to the whole woke catechism - ending lately with trans, particularly if they are even further intersectionally "oppressed". Because, in the core, the cause is not the cause, the omni-cause is perpetual revolution. The eternal wish of breaking things doesn't even count as "culture", rather a lack of one.