It’s a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole “McCarthyist” reaction (a.k.a. the “Second Red Scare”) did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it’s always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials.
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit.
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
McCarthyists [...] did want to make Communism disreputable
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to get classified as promoting “hate” by the SPLC.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
By the way, did you know that the media assault on [McCarthy] was in fact CIA-orchestrated?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions.
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
ever since the New Deal
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history)
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
“Our civilization this and our civilization that.”
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise
** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneselfandnature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
And even said so:
improvements in the sense you have defined
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Prosperity is the state of flourishing, thriving, good fortune and / or successful social status. [1] Prosperity often encompasses wealth but also includes others factors which are independent of wealth to varying degrees, such as happiness and health.
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
and more
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time?
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
“The rate of increase in the mean fitness of any organism at any time ascribable to natural selection acting through changes in gene frequencies is exactly equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time”
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier.
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so. (And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical [...] in the Western world it can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
It’s a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole “McCarthyist” reaction (a.k.a. the “Second Red Scare”) did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it’s always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
It didn’t even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
This, however, didn’t translate into having his policies implemented.
Britain has regime changes they’re just peaceful.
As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Um… Orwell? :)
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
You know, I’ve got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
The thing is, it’s not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn’t irrational in any useful sense.)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That’s a pretty huge more-or-less.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise ** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneself and nature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
One blatant example, yes.
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
And even said so:
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
and more
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
You’re not making sense to me. What is “This”?
What are you talking about?
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I’m eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I’m not really convinced by it either.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
Like these guys?
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Eee-nope. Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
And this precisely what we observe.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Incidentally this is the perfect voter too.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so.
(And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
(I hope I’m making myself clear enough, am I?)
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
In other news, Barack Obama is literally Stalin and his Socialist Healthcare will dismantle dissenters for spare organs.
(C’mon, bro.)
Dammit it all makes sense now! I just knew I was missing something.
Seriously, though, the comparison is preposterous. Look at how Anders Breivik (curse his name) is treated.
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
The time we are talking about was not “after Stalin’s death”.
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.