I don’t understand how “if it looks like the highest magnitude feature in describing this behavior pattern is ‘conquer’, you’re probably doing a bad thing” is postmodernism?
“Postmodernism” is a famously confusing term, but I am here using it to refer to the position of “you cannot compare goodness across different societal perspectives, you always have to evaluate a moral system from within that society and can’t make comparisons that aggregate across multiple moral perspectives”. This is of course only one of the 15 things that “postmodernism” means, but it’s the one I was referring to here.
I think you can! Though it’s of course tricky.
but it might rapidly go up if it turns out that habryka actually does disvalue mass suffering and deletion
Huh, I am very confused. Of course those things are very bad. The whole reason why I chose American colonialism as an example is because it’s so bad, and so poses the greatest challenge to a position of “when you see bad things happening as part of your efforts to do good, nope out”, which I think was a reasonable interpretation of my first post.
So we are obviously on the same page here! I mention a lot of times that things were really bad, and they continue to be really bad! But I also find it extremely interesting that really a surprising fraction of modern western democratic institutions were birthed in that mess, and that even despite all the badness it seems more likely than not for it to have been the right call to do, and that it would have been a moral mistake to nope out.
“Postmodernism” is a famously confusing term, but I am here using it to refer to the position of “you cannot compare goodness across different societal perspectives, you always have to evaluate a moral system from within that society and can’t make comparisons that aggregate across multiple moral perspectives”. This is of course only one of the 15 things that “postmodernism” means, but it’s the one I was referring to here.
The thing you are describing here is more typically called moral and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism in the social sciences largely originates with Franz Boas (pioneer of modern anthropology) in the 19th century; moral relativism in philosophy goes back to antiquity. It is in any event much older than the various movements in 20th-century anthropology, art, and other fields that attracted the “postmodernism” label.
Sure! I think cultural relativism is a major strand of postmodernism, and the “postmodernist” version of it is the one I am interested in responding to and engaging with. I certainly agree that aspect of postmodernism is much older!
This post is in a meaningful sense a defense of modernism, and so it seems natural to engage with postmodernist critiques of it, of which this is one of the standard big ones.
My understanding is that the way these words are used in sociology, anthropology, etc., cultural relativism is very much present in modernism. The thing you are calling “modernism” seems to be something else; something more connected to naïve realism, traditionalism, conservatism, reaction, etc.
I am confused what you mean by “modernism” here? I mean this thing that Wikipedia is talking about:
It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a socially progressive movement that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[c] From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find the ones they believe to be holding back progress, replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end.
To be clear, I am maximally sympathetic to all of these words being super vague and abstract and hard to use, so I am very happy to use different words. But I do also find it helpful to have handles for this kind of stuff.
This comment does seem to be arguing against one thing gears is saying,
but, I think gears is also say: (and I kind of agree, at least as an isolated point) that you a choice of what to call the post, and “let goodness conquer all it can defend” is a phrasing that leans into the bad-parts-specifically of the American project.
(Choosing good titles is hard tho. I have different titles for somewhat different posts I might have written for both this post and the last but they would have been fairly different posts)
The choice of “conquering” in the title is important because it shields against the usual kumbaya aspects of people thinking in the space.
Like, man, yes, if you want to create good things you will have a lot of fighting to do, and while under the umbrella of the modern world individuals can largely get away with not having to do any literal fighting, I find myself similarly frequently frustrated when people sneer at creating successful companies and taking the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions that are necessary for good things to exist in that space.
The “conquering” part, or something of its kind, feels load-bearing to me. Though of course, title space is deep and wide, and it’s still putting emphasis on something, but I don’t regret the emphasis on this point (and of course as I said above, the whole point of choosing the American colonization is as to be the most far-out example of something to analyze).
I don’t mean to follow you around and pester you, but this:
Like, man, yes, if you want to create good things you will have a lot of fighting to do, and while under the umbrella of the modern world individuals can largely get away with not having to do any literal fighting, I find myself similarly frequently frustrated when people sneer at … the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions that are necessary for good things to exist...”
Seems like a crux that I didn’t understand about your viewpoint. I’m a thoroughly modern dude who, while I wouldn’t sneer at competition engaged in in its appropriate places (like between companies, where the rules of how they can compete are pretty carefully circumscribed), strongly prefer fight-avoidance in general, and will try hard to find cooperative solutions to problems. I think one of the things I like most about the world I live in, is we’ve found ways to coordinate to put various methods of conflict off-limits, and only “fight” in nice mostly harmless ways. “Have the ability to conquer, but don’t use it”, “talk softly and carry a big stick” etc. carry a lot of appeal to me. Ideally in future-utopia-according-to-me, we swear off weapons any more hurtful than big sticks, and anyone who decides to defect about that gets beaten with the sticks until they decide that maybe that was a bad plan. And “colonialism was worth it” carries strong vibes (for me) of “get the biggest weapons you can find for the side of good, and use them to conquer and defend your notion of the good”. I feel like that’s what the colonial empires were doing—trying to bring the light of Civilization as they understood it to the dark continents, by force and replacing the inferior people with superior ones. EDIT: On further reflection, this part is not something I actually think. Think of them as inferior: Yes. Think they should be replaced with people from the home country: No.
I like the umbrella of the modern world very much, but recognize it’s fragile and do not want to poke holes in it. :D I fundamentally don’t think fighting and conquering is how Good wins, whereas I think the colonialists did think that’s how Good wins (because back in the day, war between countries was expected and normal). In my view, Good wins by deterring fights (by having the capacity to fight if needed), and being appealing. I’m not sure if you’d actually endorse “Good should conquer”, but “if you want to create good things, you have to fight” might be something you’d say? If so, I’d be able to meet you at “if you want to create good things, you have to be willing and able to fight if it comes to it”.
The blogpost I had in mind to write someday is “The Moral Obligation to be Powerful”, which is making a somewhat different point, but has the same desiderata of “fight against kumbaya/innocence vibe”.
I think my reaction here is to the implication that what actually happened was on the pareto frontier; that if we’re able to counterfact by sending back to a small group of people some reasonable amount of foreseeing-good-and-bad-outcomes, that the bad ones can’t be averted without preventing the good ones. Like, I don’t think the natives had to be screwed over so badly to get the good outcomes you’re talking about! explaining what the colonists meant by property and how their legal system worked would probably have done a lot of what I’m saying. the diseases would be harder to avoid but there might be some short message you can imagine someone figuring out at the time that we can counterfact on.
Besides the obvious direct moral cost, which was enormous, a lot of why people complain about the effects on today is that the natives were already pretty good at governance, they weren’t governing for expansion but they were pretty good at governing stability, so if they’d had more of a vote in governing for expansion there’s reason to expect it would have been slightly slower in exchange for much more stable. I doubt being nicer to natives results in no revolutionary war, the crown still was trying to stay in control pretty hard If they had been involved in setting up the USA after throwing off the crown; so most of the counterfactual of “find a way to warn natives about what’s coming” seems likely to produce a civ closer to NZ, which doesn’t seem like a particularly bad outcome. So like, the hint I’m getting isn’t like, “I accept tradeoffs”, it’s “I accept subpar tradeoffs where the negative side is hugely more negative than it needed to be in order to achieve what I see as good”.
I am reassured moderately, but I’m still confused by this pattern, and in particular, “conquer” still is setting off alarm bells for me that the representation in your head might be voting yes on things I think the natural abstraction of the good thing you’re trying to defend does not need to vote yes about.
“Postmodernism” is a famously confusing term, but I am here using it to refer to the position of “you cannot compare goodness across different societal perspectives, you always have to evaluate a moral system from within that society and can’t make comparisons that aggregate across multiple moral perspectives”. This is of course only one of the 15 things that “postmodernism” means, but it’s the one I was referring to here.
I think you can! Though it’s of course tricky.
Huh, I am very confused. Of course those things are very bad. The whole reason why I chose American colonialism as an example is because it’s so bad, and so poses the greatest challenge to a position of “when you see bad things happening as part of your efforts to do good, nope out”, which I think was a reasonable interpretation of my first post.
So we are obviously on the same page here! I mention a lot of times that things were really bad, and they continue to be really bad! But I also find it extremely interesting that really a surprising fraction of modern western democratic institutions were birthed in that mess, and that even despite all the badness it seems more likely than not for it to have been the right call to do, and that it would have been a moral mistake to nope out.
The thing you are describing here is more typically called moral and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism in the social sciences largely originates with Franz Boas (pioneer of modern anthropology) in the 19th century; moral relativism in philosophy goes back to antiquity. It is in any event much older than the various movements in 20th-century anthropology, art, and other fields that attracted the “postmodernism” label.
Sure! I think cultural relativism is a major strand of postmodernism, and the “postmodernist” version of it is the one I am interested in responding to and engaging with. I certainly agree that aspect of postmodernism is much older!
This post is in a meaningful sense a defense of modernism, and so it seems natural to engage with postmodernist critiques of it, of which this is one of the standard big ones.
My understanding is that the way these words are used in sociology, anthropology, etc., cultural relativism is very much present in modernism. The thing you are calling “modernism” seems to be something else; something more connected to naïve realism, traditionalism, conservatism, reaction, etc.
I am confused what you mean by “modernism” here? I mean this thing that Wikipedia is talking about:
To be clear, I am maximally sympathetic to all of these words being super vague and abstract and hard to use, so I am very happy to use different words. But I do also find it helpful to have handles for this kind of stuff.
This comment does seem to be arguing against one thing gears is saying,
but, I think gears is also say: (and I kind of agree, at least as an isolated point) that you a choice of what to call the post, and “let goodness conquer all it can defend” is a phrasing that leans into the bad-parts-specifically of the American project.
(Choosing good titles is hard tho. I have different titles for somewhat different posts I might have written for both this post and the last but they would have been fairly different posts)
The choice of “conquering” in the title is important because it shields against the usual kumbaya aspects of people thinking in the space.
Like, man, yes, if you want to create good things you will have a lot of fighting to do, and while under the umbrella of the modern world individuals can largely get away with not having to do any literal fighting, I find myself similarly frequently frustrated when people sneer at creating successful companies and taking the appropriate competitive zero-sum-contest-winning-actions that are necessary for good things to exist in that space.
The “conquering” part, or something of its kind, feels load-bearing to me. Though of course, title space is deep and wide, and it’s still putting emphasis on something, but I don’t regret the emphasis on this point (and of course as I said above, the whole point of choosing the American colonization is as to be the most far-out example of something to analyze).
I don’t mean to follow you around and pester you, but this:
Seems like a crux that I didn’t understand about your viewpoint. I’m a thoroughly modern dude who, while I wouldn’t sneer at competition engaged in in its appropriate places (like between companies, where the rules of how they can compete are pretty carefully circumscribed), strongly prefer fight-avoidance in general, and will try hard to find cooperative solutions to problems. I think one of the things I like most about the world I live in, is we’ve found ways to coordinate to put various methods of conflict off-limits, and only “fight” in nice mostly harmless ways. “Have the ability to conquer, but don’t use it”, “talk softly and carry a big stick” etc. carry a lot of appeal to me. Ideally in future-utopia-according-to-me, we swear off weapons any more hurtful than big sticks, and anyone who decides to defect about that gets beaten with the sticks until they decide that maybe that was a bad plan. And “colonialism was worth it” carries strong vibes (for me) of “get the biggest weapons you can find for the side of good, and use them to conquer and defend your notion of the good”. I feel like that’s what the colonial empires were doing—trying to bring the light of Civilization as they understood it to the dark continents, by force
and replacing the inferior people with superior ones. EDIT: On further reflection, this part is not something I actually think. Think of them as inferior: Yes. Think they should be replaced with people from the home country: No.I like the umbrella of the modern world very much, but recognize it’s fragile and do not want to poke holes in it. :D I fundamentally don’t think fighting and conquering is how Good wins, whereas I think the colonialists did think that’s how Good wins (because back in the day, war between countries was expected and normal). In my view, Good wins by deterring fights (by having the capacity to fight if needed), and being appealing. I’m not sure if you’d actually endorse “Good should conquer”, but “if you want to create good things, you have to fight” might be something you’d say? If so, I’d be able to meet you at “if you want to create good things, you have to be willing and able to fight if it comes to it”.
The blogpost I had in mind to write someday is “The Moral Obligation to be Powerful”, which is making a somewhat different point, but has the same desiderata of “fight against kumbaya/innocence vibe”.
Yeah, OK, fair enough.
I think my reaction here is to the implication that what actually happened was on the pareto frontier; that if we’re able to counterfact by sending back to a small group of people some reasonable amount of foreseeing-good-and-bad-outcomes, that the bad ones can’t be averted without preventing the good ones. Like, I don’t think the natives had to be screwed over so badly to get the good outcomes you’re talking about! explaining what the colonists meant by property and how their legal system worked would probably have done a lot of what I’m saying. the diseases would be harder to avoid but there might be some short message you can imagine someone figuring out at the time that we can counterfact on.
Besides the obvious direct moral cost, which was enormous, a lot of why people complain about the effects on today is that the natives were already pretty good at governance, they weren’t governing for expansion but they were pretty good at governing stability, so if they’d had more of a vote in governing for expansion there’s reason to expect it would have been slightly slower in exchange for much more stable. I doubt being nicer to natives results in no revolutionary war, the crown still was trying to stay in control pretty hard If they had been involved in setting up the USA after throwing off the crown; so most of the counterfactual of “find a way to warn natives about what’s coming” seems likely to produce a civ closer to NZ, which doesn’t seem like a particularly bad outcome. So like, the hint I’m getting isn’t like, “I accept tradeoffs”, it’s “I accept subpar tradeoffs where the negative side is hugely more negative than it needed to be in order to achieve what I see as good”.
I am reassured moderately, but I’m still confused by this pattern, and in particular, “conquer” still is setting off alarm bells for me that the representation in your head might be voting yes on things I think the natural abstraction of the good thing you’re trying to defend does not need to vote yes about.