I reviewed Why Culture Matters Most, by David Rose.
According to David C. Rose, trust is essential for prosperity. A high-trust society is one in which almost everyone is trustworthy almost all of the time. . .
Rose’s thesis is interesting. But his focus is narrow in two respects. He boils culture down to a single variable, namely trustworthiness. And he boils trustworthiness down to an individual’s taste or inclinations.
I spell out these criticisms in the essay.
imagine electric companies stood up for progressive values by cutting off power to homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Even staunch supporters of free markets would likely object to these restrictions on expression by privately owned enterprises. When we examine why power companies shouldn’t be able to make service contingent on not violating political sensibilities, we see that analogous arguments should stop social media giants from exiling political dissidents.
. . .if an electric utility decided to just exclude a few customers, it would be extremely costly for a competing power company to sell energy to those people and the former customers would likely go unpowered.
Similarly, he argues that if your speech is cut off by Facebook, no competitor is going to jump in and offer you equivalent service. The network effect gives Facebook monopoly power.
My thoughts:
1. What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.
2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better to allow each listener to decide who he or she wants to hear. If I had sufficient control over my Facebook account, I would not see anybody’s political posts. (As it is, the best I can do is unfollow somebody who goes overboard with political posts. I done that.)
3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I would aim toward a subscription model, not an advertising model. This in turn would facilitate another major difference, which is that instead of having what you see determined by a secret algorithm, I would give you tools to set your own priorities.
4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.
white liberals recently became the only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias—meaning that among all the different groups surveyed white liberals were the only one that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own.
You may recall that I witnessed this at my third daughter’s college graduation. The graduation speaker reported recently reading that the U.S. is going to be majority minority by 2050, and the students erupted in whoops and applause. I thought to myself, “They have been indoctrinated to hate white people.” The other night at my talk, I thought that the same thing might be at work in the way that the students applauded particularly strongly for anti-free speech remarks made by African-Americans (although they also applauded similar remarks made by whites).
Goldberg also notes
The years between 2012 and 2016 were a watershed for white liberal racial consciousness. But the seismic attitudinal shifts of those years have implications that go beyond race: They are also tied to a significant decrease in support for Israel and—perhaps more surprisingly—a rise in the number of white liberals who express negative attitudes about the perceived political power of American Jews.
For most of my Jewish friends who are progressive, left-wing antisemitism doesn’t fit their preconceptions. Therefore, for them it doesn’t exist.
Perhaps the more “right-wing” regimes tolerate different sorts of income inequality. Cuba and the USSR had plenty of inequality, but the main earners, in terms of living standards, are restricted to people within the state apparatus. That means a lot of the talent will want to leave. Many fascist regimes, however, are quite willing to cultivate multi-millionaires and then try to co-opt them into supporting the state. Since you can still earn a lot in the private sector, exit restrictions are less needed.
What would be other hypotheses?
The goal is to explain why right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave, but Communist regimes don’t.
The term “right-wing authoritarian” is poorly chosen. It should be called “natural state” (North, Weingast, and Wallace) or “gangster government.” The goal is to remain in power and extract benefits from being in power. The ruler distributes privileges to those who might otherwise threaten the ruler. As a leader, you do not want to drive people away, but if people are unhappy, you would rather they leave than stick around and cause trouble.
Communist regimes do not operate on the basis of distributing privileges to others. Instead, they seek control through totalitarian methods. Their rule is based on intimidation and creating a climate of fear. But if people know that they can leave freely, why should they fear you? They can foment dissent and, if you turn up the heat, they just emigrate. You can’t really run an effective totalitarian state if you allow people to leave. You need to make sure that dissenters suffer, to set a clear example for other potential dissenters.
I offer a speculative answer.
a rapid influx of women and minorities, starting in the late 1960s, left women and minorities wondering whether they fit in. This motivated people on campus to focus on issues of race and gender. Attitudes have been in flux ever since. At the moment, they seem far from the equilibrium that I would hope to see reached.
I hope that any reactions to this essay are based on reading it carefully.
Cultural evolution may be moving along as lazily as always, but memetic evolution gets faster and faster. Clickbait news sites increase the intensity of selection to tropical-rainforest-like levels. What survives turns out to be conspiracy-laden nationalism and conspiracy-laden socialism. The rise of Trump was really bad, and I don’t think it could have happened just ten or twenty years ago. Some sort of culturally-evolved immune system (“basic decency”) would have prevented it. Now the power of convincing-sounding ideas to spread through and energize the populace has overwhelmed what that kind of immunity can deal with.
Think of gender roles. For many generations, they evolved very slowly. The pace of change in the twentieth century, which seemed rapid at the time, seems glacial by today’s standards. Back then, women steadily increased their participation in the work force. Over a period of decades, sexual taboos came to be relaxed, notably concerning divorce and pre-marital sex. Next came gay liberation, which took place roughly from 1970 to 2000.
But in the last five years, the memetic evolution has sped up enormously. It seems like we’ve had a new cool gender-identity flavor every month, and even “ordinary” gays are feeling as threatened as old-fashioned straights.
We have no idea whether these trendy gender fluidity memes represent progress. I certainly have my doubts. But it feels to me as if our culture is a passenger in a car with no brakes.
I agree that a Trump presidency would not have been possible a dozen years ago. To the Claremont folks, his victory is our way of trying to stop the runaway car. But I think it is more plausibly explained by Martin Gurri’s idea of the revolt of the public, made possible by the new media environment. The car is still going ahead full speed, just without the support of the Secretary of Education–for now.
Until very recently, the party elites and the mainstream media were powerful enough to prevent an outsider rebel like Mr. Trump from gaining a major party nomination, if they wanted to do so. Goldwater and McGovern made it past the party establishments, but each of them claimed to be aligned with the establishment in a more pure form, which made the establishment unwilling to wholeheartedly resist. Another reason that the establishment put up weak resistance to their insurgencies was that in both cases they expected to lose the general election, anyway.
Mr. Trump’s approach to politics is more personal than ideological. The establishment resistance to him was more highly motivated than the establishment resistance to Goldwater or McGovern, but it was utterly ineffectual.
This post is inspired by a lot of recent reading, too much to reference here. Some of it pertains to Sohrab Ahmari David French. But most of it pertains to Scott Alexander’s recent posts inspired by Joseph Henrich’s work. (Note that I also praised the Henrich book myself.)
In the latter post, Scott writes,
We are the heirs to a five-hundred-year-old tradition of questioning traditions and demanding rational justifications for things. Armed with this tradition, western civilization has conquered the world and landed on the moon. If there were ever any tradition that has received cultural evolution’s stamp of approval, it would be this one.
Sometimes, there is a conflict between the approach that you arrive at using your reasoning of the moment and the existing tradition. For example, Bryan Caplan argues that a reasoning libertarian should oppose immigration restrictions.
Under such circumstances, which should prevail: your momentary reason or tradition?
Conservatives argue for paying considerable respect to tradition. Your individual, momentary reason is not sufficient to overwhelm generations of experience. Henrich’s anthropology supports that (although Henrich does not define himself as a conservative). Always going with momentary reason would mean depriving ourselves of cultural intelligence.
But obviously, if you always go with tradition, you never evolve in a better direction. So you want some experimentation.
The Whig history is that our current society reflects retention of successful experiments. The dour conservative point of view is that it has all been downhill since. . .the radical Social Justice turn of the last five years. . .or the 1960s. . .or Rousseau. . .or John Locke. Take your pick.
A few hundred years ago, a lot of cultural transmission depended on the elderly. Old people knew more than young people, so it was hard for young people to question tradition.
Today, old people don’t know how to use smart phones as well as young people do. So why should young people think old people aren’t equally antiquated on issues of race relations, gender, or free speech?
I wish that old people and traditions had somewhat higher status than they do with young progressives, and I wish that momentary reason had somewhat lower status.
UPDATE: After I wrote this post but before it was scheduled to appear, Scott Alexander elaborated further. I will have another post on this tomorrow soon.
I suggest that we should stop trying to talk about culture and institutions as if they were separate. Instead, I propose that we think of culture as having two components: informal culture, which we can call folkways; and formal culture, which we can call institutions. In this framework, institutions are subsumed under culture, as an aspect of culture, a subset of culture, or a manifestation of culture.
f many people walking between two particular places take the same route, their trampling will eventually mark a path. That is a folkway. If the town paves the path with a sidewalk, that is an institution.
Our data shows that 62.4 percent of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning, whereas 11.3 percent were from sources rated as right-leaning. 26.3 percent of impressions were from news sources that didn’t have ratings. But even if that last set of unknown impressions happened to be right-leaning, the trend would still be clear: A higher proportion of left-leaning sources appear in Top Stories [on Google].
This reinforces my own impression. But I don’t think that the Google News algorithm is constructed in a sinister way. Suppose that the algorithm is designed to put at the top the stories that users are most likely to click on. To the extent that Google’s users tend to prefer left-leaning news sources, this will lead the algorithm to highlight those sources.
Moreover, the news outlets themselves are driven to appeal to a progressive audience. Progressives want the WaPo to give them news with a slant that makes Trump’s impeachment seem imminent, an the WaPo obliges.
In short, I suspect that the reason Google News promotes so much left-leaning outrage porn is that a lot of people want it.
Where Social Justice fails as a religion, is in its efficacy. Every religion that’s survived the historical gauntlet of religious Darwinism has done so by promulgating key features which make a society stable. This stability usually includes an order or hierarchy, but not always, as in the case of Buddhism or Wicca. The Golden Rule is a must have, for the in-group. It’s not necessary for the out-group (Burn the Heretic! Kill the Mutant! Purge the Unclean!) but Golden Rule principles within the in-group are not negotiable if a religion is to survive. Golden Rule indoctrination guides people towards good behavior among their peers without the need for a burdensome behavior enforcement apparatus. Social Justice fails on this, because of what we might call the Totem Pole of Oppression.
What he goes on to suggest is that regardless of whether or not you believe in the Social Justice religion, you can be labeled as belonging to the oppressor class. Thus, the religion will alienate some of its believers, and that is not stable.
I don’t find that prediction compelling. Plenty of straight white males want to be perceived as Social Justice adherents, and they can do so.
Elsewhere, Uri Harris writes that there are reasonable adherents of Social Justice
who wouldn’t dream of demanding that Jordan Peterson’s books be banned or of declaring math a social construct. However, they devote a lot of their attention to pointing out racial or gender disparities, arguing that social norms confer privileges on white people, or suggesting that giving a platform to speakers lends credibility to their views in the eyes of impressionable viewers. One can agree or disagree with any of these views, but there’s nothing necessarily authoritarian, bigoted, or anti-intellectual about them. They’re factual claims, even if they are sometimes presented in emotionally or morally charged language.
His claim is that Social Justice is not inherently authoritarian.
Suppose one makes a factual claim that disparities in race and gender outcomes are mostly due to differences in the distribution of abilities and preferences. The authoritarian will treat such a claim as blasphemy. The reasonable person will respond with empirical counter-claims. If Social Justice were predominantly reasonable, then the IDW would not exist.