Scott Alexander proposes that we think of culture as a branch of government.
Each branch of government enforces rules in its own way. The legislature passes laws. The executive makes executive orders. The judiciary rules on cases. And the culture sets norms. In our hypothetical world, true libertarians are people who want less of all of these. There are people who want less of the first three branches but want to keep strong cultural norms about what is or isn’t acceptable . . .The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.
Sounding like one of Alexander’s “real libertarians,” one of my commenters complains about,
. . . A tiny subset of the population, media-ready and always on, always practicing PR, permanently in performance mode, not expressing themselves except in precisely those expressions that can be guaranteed to win the approval of the bigots and authoritarians who appointed themselves the police of society. Enforcers of conformity. Stamping out creativity. Stomping on self-expression.
I think it is best to take Scott Alexander’s view and turn it around: government is a branch of culture. I suggest defining culture as socially communicated practices and beliefs. We may think of government as the subset of practices and beliefs that are defined formally and enforced coercively.
Take property rights. We can think of them as culturally defined, even in the absence of government. But property rights take on more significance when the government establishes and enforces them. De Soto in The Mystery of Capital argues that without formal property rights an economy cannot develop properly.
Just as an economy has both a formal sector and an informal sector, culture has both a formal and an informal sector. The formal sector is where norms are enforced by government.
As a metaphor, think of footpaths. The paths where people walk are culture. Those paths that are not paved are the informal sector. Those paths that are paved are the formal sector.
Alexander argues that the proper libertarian position is to oppose enforcement of social norms, either formally or informally. But you cannot have a society without social norms, and you cannot have meaningful social norms without enforcement.
I think that a more viable libertarian position is that where social norms are contested, contests should be resolved peacefully. You don’t want the Protestants and Catholics burning heretics and fighting civil wars. But if Protestants want to engage in nonviolent attempts to set standards of behavior for Protestants and to convert Catholics to those standards, then that is ok.
A hard case for libertarians is when Google fires James Damore on religious grounds. Whose religious freedom should concern us most, Google’s or Damore’s? And once we choose sides, do we want the formal cultural institution, namely government, to enforce our point of view?
Libertarians often seek black-and-white answers, but I don’t think they are always easy to find.
And once we choose sides, do we want the formal cultural institution, namely government, to enforce our point of view?
Yeah; it seems a problem with Libertarianism is that it requires a monopolistic, centralized state to enforce its precepts.
Yeah, it’s kind of sounding like a Libertarian is someone who never read The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
It’s a short read, but the basic point is that groups can’t accomplish anything much without making decisions, and that means leaders. Lack of formal leaders either means nothing gets done, or it means decisions are made by an informal elite with no accountability to the group as a whole and little visibility (often leading to corruption).
Structurelessness is more of a leftist-anarchist value, where hierarchies of any form are ostensibly opposed, although I’m sure with some sympathy, from some part of the broad libertarian spectrum.
The common denominator for libertarianism is more the social unacceptability of *any* individual introducing the tools of physical violence into an agreeable voluntary interaction, but otherwise letting the larger societal cards fall (or evolve) as they may.
Depending upon the cultural setting, this may anticipate relative structurelessness. But it may also anticipate rigid or oppressively shame-driven (albeit nonaggressive) hierarchies.
Either way, or any other way, libertarian (broadly speaking) values are preserved, since the common denominator of those values is narrowly only about a particular hard form of one-on-one interaction.
from wikipedia:
“The Tyranny of Structurelessness is an influential essay by American feminist Jo Freeman inspired by her experiences in a 1960s women’s liberation group that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives.
“The essay reflected on the experiments of the feminist movement in resisting the idea of leaders and even discarding any structure or division of labor. However, as Hilary Wainwright wrote in Z Magazine, Freeman described how “this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.” As a solution, Freeman suggests formalizing the existing hierarchies in the group and subjecting them to democratic control.”
One version can be found on her website:
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Evgeny Morozov has made this point too in his criticism of the libertarian ethos that facilitated the rise of the internet.
And Martin Gurri expanded at book length on the “no leaders = nothing coherent gets done” option.
It is good and sensible to look behind the apparently unifying call for ‘less government’ to what is really being sought. Some people believe that formal government – control with explicit rules – is costly, rigid, ineffective, a brake on growth, and easily gamed.
Inefficiency is the real enemy.
Others don’t like the control of one person over another; if it must occur, it should be as inefficient as possible and as limited as possible. Individual freedoms are the only priority – as much buffer between people as biologically feasible.
Others see freedom as encompassing the freedom to impact the local community; so communities need to be free to form and develop internal rules with internal enforcement mechanisms – so control should be as local as possible. This could be a true expression of personal freedom even though it involves people controlling each other most of the time, to varying degrees; so it is not individualistic.
These are each fundamentally different and essentially incompatible…
It seems to me we have a very good example of a cultural norm that has been in flux and that nobody is proposing a good solution for. Namely, the post sexual revolution sex norms.
We abolished the old norms and replaced them with “consenting adults”. However, consenting adults sometimes have relations one or both regret (think Brett kavagugh). So now feminists want formal norm enforcement of an altered “consenting adults” ideology (hence kangaroo courts in College). This has its own problems, and isn’t really fair or workable.
Similarly SSC is probably anti-sex norms enforcement. For instance he is big on polyamory. And yet polyamory worked very poorly amongst his rationalist set, including some high profile bad outcomes. You would think one would learn from that that norms exist for a reason.
I’d propose something else. In the absence of norms around certain behavior, a kind of formal norm system will fill the void. It might be government, but it could just as easily be any private bueracratic system.
In terms of James Damore, the only functional society I know of that engages in biological realism formally outlawed all identity politics and has special set aside areas where the major groups can enforce their own norms (Singapore). The state formally told people what its opinion on these matters were and enforced them. Luckily the state was run by a pragmatic shitlord.
Norm enforcement via spineless UMC committee or Twitter rage isn’t great, but the abolishment of norms enforcement isn’t possible either. There is no substitute for doing the work of coming up with and enforcing workable norms.
P.S. Some would say we’ve adjusted to the post sexual revolution sex norms, but the lack of children being raised in two parent households is way down. We sort of solved the divorce revolution by getting married less and having fewer children, which is a sort of phyrric victory.
I’d be interested in how you characterize the “old” sexual norms. I think there’s a tendency to view them as sort of an idealic, black and white movie, teenagers sharing a milkshake at a drive-in type thing, but I’m not sure that’s true. I recently read both Albion’s Seed and Stefon Zweig’s The World of Yesterday and both give a sense of much different cultural norms that that, in particular it seems prostitution (and syphilis etc) was much more common and socially acceptable.
I don’t think James Damore’s firing was a hard case. IIRC he composed the memo on company time and distributed it internally. He knew, or should have known, that it would make a lot of his coworkers uncomfortable. That’s just not how you’re expected to comport yourself at a big company.
He could have put it on his blog and emailed it to coworkers after hours. Had they fired him for *that*, it would have been a hard case.
I don’t recall ever seeing that he composed it on company time. How do you know that?
p.s. I note that the anti-Damore people most likely did all their stuff on company time as well, and certainly distributed a lot of hatefulness internally.
He composed a memo in response to a request for people to provide such opinions on that very subject. He had also recently been through bias training and was aware of company policies surrounding this issue that he felt would be counter productive, so he composed a polite and well researched memo in response to a company request in the hopes it would make for a better company.
Now, maybe he should have realized this company request for feedback was kind of like Stalin asking for criticism of his regime to he could root out and shoot dissidents, but he didn’t seem to believe google was like that.
You might say, he f*cked up — he trusted them.
If Mashable had never got its hands on what he wrote he’d likely still be there today. Google wasn’t trying to trap him. He became a problem only after what he wrote became public and placed into a cliched narrative about Silicon Valley oppression to which Google was compelled to respond.
This isn’t to say Google couldn’t have had more of a backbone in all this, but it’s not as if they were coaxing him into getting himself fired, trying to root out the dangerous subversives by faking some kind of commitment to glasnost.
If we focus on (a) patterns of cause and effect and (b) constitutional democracies, then the hypothesis that government is a branch of culture (Arnold Kling) has more empirical bite than the hypothesis that culture is a branch of government (Scott Alexander). For example, let me assert without evidence, emergent norms against smoking shaped changes in policies about cigarettes more than policy shaped norms about smoking.
But we should be foxes rather than hedgehogs here. Three other factors can add a lot of realism: (1) Pathologies of voice; specifically, a distinction between culture and majority rule. (2) Limits to exit. (3) Exogenous disequilibrium elements; specifically, science and technology.
(1) Voice. Let me paraphrase several rival conceptions of the relationship between culture and majority rule:
(i) Folk wisdom says, ‘We get the government we deserve.’ (Culture shapes policy.)
(ii) Bryan Caplan rebuts, ‘No, we (the minority) get the government they (the majority) deserve.’ (He highlights the problem of politically irrational majorities in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.)
(iii) Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler counter, ‘Government nudges us through policies we would want if we considered the issues carefully; and majority rule delivers this insofar as we launder our preferences at the ballot box, to prevent ourselves from backsliding in day-to-day life.’
(iv) Robert Sugden rebuts, ‘No, we (the minority) get the government they (the majority) think we deserve.’ (He highlights the problem of paternalistic tyranny of the majority.)
If Caplan and Sugden are correct, then there is substantial mismatch between culture and government, due to pathologies of majority rule. Sizable sub-cultures suffer the mismatch.
(2) Exit. Ready access to exit enables people to sort by culture:
Sexual-orientation minorities cluster via individual migration. Small, selective colleges exhibit cultural self-selection in the applicant pool: College x is crunchy, College y is preppy, College z is green. And so on.
Where exit (self-sorting) works well, informal governance through social norms enjoys broad legitimacy. Formal government then has less bite. Where exit is absent or very costly, we’re back to substantial mismatches of culture and government.
(3). Disequilibrium technology. Science and technology are powerful disequilibrium elements:
A classic example is the impact of the pill and new abortion technology. According to Akerlof and Yellen, these technologies caused the collapse of social norms of shotgun marriage. In the context of out-of-wedlock sex, men could say: ‘Pregnancy is on you, not me.’ Policy adapted, partly via State legislation, partly through Supreme Court rulings. Again, voters in the minority felt culturally beleaguered.
Similarly, the internet, software matching platforms, blockchain, and so on, are disequilibrium elements. Old norms dissolve, new ones emerge (or sometimes don’t?).
The upshot is that culture is a branch of technology!
Both phrases are valid in the way they are meant, but Alexander’s is superior given the context, which focuses more on behaviors than beliefs.
The idea is to draw a spectrum of influence from hardest to softest. Maybe one could use ‘social’ to distinguish from ‘geopolitical’ and say ‘social hard power’ and ‘social soft power’. There is no bright dividing line, just as duress or coercion (or if you prefer, ‘oppression’) is a socially constructed standard and there is no objective, bright-line way to distinguish voluntary from involuntary obedience (see, e.g., Nozick’s “tale of the slave”).
Now, all of this is nothing new. It is an old progressive and libertarian complaint and insight that, in addition to the state, what ‘governs’ the individual is various kinds of “social hard power”.
You could call the whole spectrum ‘culture’, but people don’t use the term that way. They do tend to erroneously associate the non-criminal hard part of the spectrum with ‘the government’, conflating that with state-law-based government, but some people notice that this ‘government’ part of the spectrum is actually broader than the state, and not exclusively occupied by officially demarcated state authorities, agents, and mechanisms.
So, a full picture of the ‘government’ of individuals in a society like ours has other entities in the hard part of the spectrum too.
The context of Alexander’s post is the degree of pressure exerted on the individual, and the kind of expected subsidy for obedience or negative consequences for transgression that are necessary to get the typical individual to behave in a particular way.
When the pressure is high and consequences gaps substantial and certain, we like to call that degree of influence ‘power’, and, ‘hard power’ or ‘coercive’ if there is a focus on ‘sticks’, that is, negative consequences imposed by threat of punishment and forceful repercussions versus an unsubsidized, unmolested baseline. When the pressure is low and compliance mostly ‘voluntary’ and a matter of ‘soft power’ persuasion, or by spontaneous and effortless adoption and imitative conformity to social conventions and expectations, people usually prefer to call it ‘culture’.
Obviously there is no natural bright line between the two spheres, and the one we tend to emphasize and focus our attention upon is the socially constructed idea of a formal ‘government’ with certain, usually exclusive, sovereign powers, and enforcing some known doctrine of authority and law, with recourse to coercion in the event of disobedience.
The argument for such exclusive focus is that the state government is especially prone to certain kinds of abuses and the impact of such state abuses is especially severe. However, there are cases when other hard social power have equally bad propensities to what I’ve called ‘Social Failure Modes’, and where the impacts on individuals are just as severe.
How ‘hard’ the power or pressure is seems to depend on the extent, impact, and the suitability of alternative opportunities, which are the usual arguments made in favor of anti-discrimination / anti-free-association laws affecting private parties, and the current debate about whether to regulation the big internet companies seems to be about the broader question about whether ‘free speech’ and other constraints on social hard power ought to be a merely positivist restriction on exercise of official state authority, or more along the lines of a social ideal giving all individuals protection against any ‘government-level’ social power.
So, Alexander meant it in the usual way, saying ‘branches’ instead of ‘estates’ as in, “since it has has no much influence over public opinion and effective power in a democracy, the press is the ‘fourth estate’ of government.”
For example, here’s a fun quote from Oscar Wilde’s ‘Libertarian Socialist’ word, The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
So, perhaps a true libertarian would prefer social hard power from any source, state or otherwise, to be minimized, with the big questions being whether to employ the state to contain the other powers, and at what point do organizations or associations grow large and powerful enough to deserve such containment.
I would argue that progressives would prefer to accumulate all hard power in the state, with the final goal of formalizing progressive social ideology and morality into black letter law, enforce by the state government. But, to the extent that they can or must temporarily deploy social hard power outside a constrained state to accomplish their social goals and agenda, in the form of high-status norms or otherwise, they are perfectly willing to do so for the sake of expediency. When there is finally perfect alignment and agreement between state law and ideological norms, we have the equivalent of a theocracy.
This seems like Scott Alexander longs for the day when older church ladies controlled local society and kept everyone in-line with culture. Or free society worked best when we did not have the freedom of divorce laws.
1) I do believe there is a lot of Andy Griffin Syndrome of any system of the past. So if you lived an unhappy marriage, tough it out for society. Or how much of local society was managed with segregation laws or institutions. How many people over 40 who knew their Grandparents saying stuff like at least “I was not an African-American.” (Well in more colorful language.)
2) In reality single motherhood IS dropping since 2008 and the US is on its way to closer the Far Asian societies. I find significant that the most libertarian of nations, Singapore, has also been called the most Marxist of nations.
3) In terms of the James Damore case, the biggest issue is the 10 page memo stated women were too emotional to work at Google which would become Exhibit A in every sex discrimination or arbitration for the next 10 years. It was probably less ideology but simply protecting company assets.
4) I still say the biggest issue of economic libertarians is the decline of the role of religion and they offer nothing to counteract that. The freer a society is the less religion plays a role and I increasingly believe without religion society is depending upon public school teachers to teach society norms.
” In terms of the James Damore case, the biggest issue is the 10 page memo stated women were too emotional to work at Google”
He stated no such thing!
+1.
You didn’t read the memo.
Maybe you read one of the many journalists who wrote about it without reading it.
What he says is found clearly in psychology papers you can find on google.scholar.com. Bit of an irony there.
For example, “Men and Things, Women and People: A Meta-Analysis of Sex Differences in Interests”, Su et al 2009:
“..Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d 0.93) on the Things–People dimension..”
I did read some of the many uninformed journalists informing the public on the awfulness of the Damore memo. One of their quotes was something like “he says women are more neurotic than men! What a misogynist!”
Well, neuroticism, in the context of personality is a technical term. There are 5 “big personality traits”, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (OCEAN). On the 2nd to last, women are more agreeable than men. On the last, women are more neurotic than men. This means, more prone to negative thoughts, depression..
And in both these cases, we are talking 2 overlapping bell curves. So men and women aren’t distinct. Some men are more agreeable than some women. But the group average of women is higher than the group average of men. Some men are more neurotic than some women, but the group average..
This is just what psychology finds when measuring people.
Media reaction to the Damore memo is a lovely case study of science meets religion. And how little research journalists do.
Defining culture as the “rules of life in society”, Mises’ statement below shows the progression from culture to government as an agent of culture.
“We call the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion that induces people to abide by the rules of life in society, the state; the rules according to which the state proceeds, law; and the organs charged with the responsibility of administering the apparatus of compulsion, government.”
–Mises, Ludwig von, Liberalism (pp. 35-36)
I would say the Libertarian should strive to have as little of culture imposed by the state as possible and still function as a society.
Many people today seems to work backwards hoping to use the government via laws to induce the state to define the culture. That attack on cake bakers is an example of this and while in isolation can destroy the individual, the efforts toward compulsion and coercion seems only to rally the forces and harden the positions making changing the culture unlikely.
If you’re deep inside the bubble at Google, a member of the Inner Party, what you tell the Outer Party and the Proles is that men’s bodies and women’s bodies are identical. That’s the position. But when you need to google the correct dosage for some specific medicine that you’re ingesting, then that’s different. You don’t want to overdose. It’s your body, and facts are facts. Two plus two makes five within Google, in Mountain View, when you speak publicly. Just not when it’s your own bloodstream you’re messing with.
Or instead of a position at Google you’re a stand up comic. You’re Kevin Hart or Dave Chapelle. You know about your own neuroses and fears. You aren’t misled about your own feelings. But you can’t explore them out loud in public. It used to be that a stand up comic had a lot of freedom to riff or exaggerate or explore all sides of the distinction between “bad thoughts” and “good thoughts” (a Louis C.K. routine). Comedians have progressed since then. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Comics are allowed to offend Christians. That’s it. Everything else is off limits. Caitlyn Jenner is an excellent driver.
Or maybe you’re Galileo: “And yet it moves.”
I admit that:
“The real libertarians also believe that cultural norms enforced by shame and ostracism are impositions on freedom, and fight to make these as circumscribed as possible.”
sounds good. Yet on the other hand I am not particularly inclined to go protest outside Amish country. Nor am I particularly inclined to have anything negative at all to say about the Amish or Anabaptists in general at all. I admire their ability to keep their culture. And the more they can be left in peace to pursue their way of life so much the better. So I concur wholeheartedly with Dr. Kling.
Perhaps unintentionally, Scott may go too far with minimizing non-governmental impositions on freedom. Somehow I doubt he wants libertarians to try to minimize the strictures of Islam or Hasidic Judaism. In general libertarians, as well as everyone else on the planet, are best advised to mind their own beeswax on matters cultural generally and elevate attention on such matters only when the welfare of children or others unable to speak for themselves are put at risk.
Scott’s libertarians too would do well to to think about the unintended consequences of all their social engineering. There is a lot to appreciate about western culture that once destroyed may be sorely missed and not be so easy to bring back. As the great Roger Scruton said “Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.”
It is somewhat strange what the libertarian label has become attached to.
A real libertarian in a libertarian society ought have no concern based on politics about Google firing someone based on religious principles. I hedge with “in a libertarian society” because one could construct hypothetical scenarios where Google is so intertwined with government that Google’s action is governmental action.
This fundamentally goes back to the distinction drawn between formal and informal sanction. When the government sanctions someone, they cannot simply walk away; if they attempt it and find like-minded people to hang out with, they are a criminal gang on the run. When a voluntary group sanctions someone (by ostracism or public criticism), they can walk away; if they find like-minded people to hang out with, that’s just a competing group.
The confusion among libertarians between formal governmental (backed by force) and informal private action (not backed by force) has consequences. The past 20 years have seen a codification of social norms into law in many, many fields. Regulation after regulation has turned a lack of good business judgment into bank fraud, or a lack common courtesy into some form of harassment. When the law prescribes everything, freedom is gone.
I’m not sure I would agree with “ought have no concern”. It does seem concerning to me. Not as concerning as if it were the government, but still of concern. The greatest concern to me is that the hyper-“religious” people the elite universities are cranking out right now will be running the government in 20 years. And I’m pretty sure they don’t respect your (or my) rights as much as you respect theirs.