I generally agree with the call to action. I have a historical critique.
I think you are mistaken about the nature of villages being automatically bound together; I think this error is survivorship bias. Most settlements that have ever existed did so ephemerally: existing primarily for the extraction of a single resource (mining towns), or for a single goal (military garrisons). What you see as natural cultural bonds and communities are a mark of stability, a historical example of a group that has solved (at least for a little time) the problem that the rationalist community is working through, not one that has inherited it by natural right.
To refactor the analysis with this in mind, we will basically look at what makes those communities stable, and how ours compares. I think it is at least the following:
1. The presence of multiple industries. A typical farming village will grow multiple crops, possess hunters and loggers, millers and bakers; be able to provide for itself and also produce a surplus. Think of it as a diverse basket. We’re narrow on this front. Mostly concentrated in tech and in the mission.
2. A high degree of intermarriage. Maybe polyamory is a good substitute and quick workaround? Despite certain benefits it provides I still doubt polyamory is sustainable on a multigenerational scale.
3. Not being constantly under siege. Strong communities can get through tough times better than weak ones, but not inevitably so. Historically (think Oxford) the solution for intellectuals is to find wealthy patrons and/or government support. Looks like we’ve got the first.
I do not think “culture” is actually a factor here; it’s a weasel word that deserves a taboo in this community. I think “culture” tends to be, at a population level, an adaptation to political and material circumstances that surround that community. Cultures do not tend towards stability. This is once again survivorship bias.
Works which directly informed this:
The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott
The Intentional Community Movement, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
Zvi, thank you for writing this. I’ve been working through Baudrillard too and coming to the same conclusion—he is far more insight porn than philosophy, compared to famous scholars with similar metaphysics such as Foucault and Zizek. I’ve got a long post in the pipeline on this as well.
It’s really frustrating that this community has been spinning up an elaborate schema which is a misinterpretation of a sophist, where the original conversants both admitted they had by that point only read the Wikipedia summary of the book. This feels like the opposite of quality scholarship, not that this is entirely Benquo and jessicataylor’s fault, rather how the discussion ended up picking this up and running with it.
The rationalist community’s reading of Baudrillard tries to put some sense back into what is fairly sophisticated. But the main problem both groups make is assuming that Level 1 is some fallen ideal, rather than something progressively achieved. Baudrillard is baking a hotter take—which most rationalist discussion completely misses—that Level 1 is completely vanished and Level 2 is on its way out too. He thinks we live in a postmodern world (surprisingly to rationalists who haven’t read the postmodernists: like most postmodernist scholars he does not actually think this is very good) where meaning is composed wholly of simulacra, which does not actually reference the real world which our bodies live in, although he says the real world sure references it.
This misinterpretation of him is easy to make—partly because it sounds like he developed a philosophy out of being totally dissociated. He hated the Matrix, which the Wachowskis referenced him in, for this reason: in the Matrix the virtual reality can be escaped.
My alternative proposal is to re-ground the discussion in a better take about power relations and social games, noticing which groups throughout history play these games and which don’t. The basic conclusion is people generally converse as if they were in the 2nd order (level), jump up in simulation order whenever their access to resources they don’t produce are at stake, and jump down when they have a hand in producing resources. Global meaning has no particular order, unlike Baudrillard’s claim that it is of the 4th order.
More to come.