In a new essay, Martin Gurri writes,
Post-truth, as I define it, signifies a moment of sharply divergent perspectives on every subject or event, without a trusted authority in the room to settle the matter. A telling symptom is that we no longer care to persuade. We aim to impose our facts and annihilate theirs, a process closer to intellectual holy war than to critical thinking.
He and I are going to try to do a podcast on the topic, since I have also been interested in it.
During good times culture dominates but under stressful periods consciousness dominates
Interesting how this seems like the complete flip of Scott Alexander’s thrive/survive model of progressive/conservative political minds. Oddly both models seem to make sense. Maybe I’m making a false equivalence
During good times the society should keep doing what it has been doing. When it is stressed, it may be better off trying something different.
I think that Scott is looking at things from an individual’s point of view. The conservative individual is biased toward sticking with the tried and true, on the theory that things could be worse. The progressive individual is biased toward novelty, on the theory that things could be better.
One can link the two notions by suggesting that in good times the society does best by relying on conservatives, while in times of stress it may do better relying on progressives.
I would rather not think in terms of personality types. My philosophy of risk taking is to take risks that have high upside and low downside and avoid risks that have high downside and low upside. That philosophy sometimes favors novelty and sometimes doesn’t.
American socialism offers an alternative explanation of the classical theme of economic inequality, why some are wealthy and others are not. Under the logic of traditional socialism, class is the barrier to economic prosperity. If class were eliminated, then wider prosperity would be possible. But if the struggle is to equalize minorities, the principal barriers to economic prosperity are now sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia.
…The new villain is not the bourgeois, but the white heterosexual American Christian male.
…there is only one vanguard, the “woke.” To enforce unanimity, the vanguard deploys its activists, media-adjuncts, and ultimately the power of the state not to persuade but to destroy opponents. The vanguard seeks to destroy rather than to persuade because persuasion involves compromise with those who have reservations about some of particular practical goals of the moral crusade, as well as self-examination about the whole theoretical basis for the moral crusade. The upshot of these hesitations is to risk falling back unto mere reformism, giving up the revolutionary passion. The vanguard cannot allow this. A revolution permits no obstacles, delays, or scruples.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying appeared with Robby George to discuss an anthropological theory. They claim that it addresses two question. First, why do humans occupy many ecological niches, rather than just one. And second, why did consciousness emerge.
The answer that they offer is that humans adapt to many niches. In order to do so, they have to be able to innovate. In order to innovate, they need to brainstorm and to test out new ideas. In order to do that, we need to have an ability to recognize the minds of others and our own minds, which requires consciousness.
The wisdom that we accumulate gets embodied in culture. Culture is a conservative force, one that works well in stable environments. Consciousness is an adaptive force, one that works well in novel environments. In a stable environment, we should not disturb Chesterton’s fence. In a novel environment, perhaps we should.
The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?
If the printing press helped produce the Enlightenment, then perhaps the iPhone is producing the Endarkenment.
AEI’s Michael Strain weighed into the debate over whether living standards stagnated in recent decades with The American Dream is Not Dead, which I reviewed. In the end, I wrote
In the 1950s, the ideal for young Americans was to marry, have children, and move to a house in the suburbs. Today, marriage rates are low, fewer children grow up with married parents, and many young people are urban renters.
The decline of the Fifties Dream raises questions that go beyond Strain’s statistical analysis. Has the Fifties Dream lost its appeal? Or has it become harder to obtain, and if so, what are the cultural or economic impediments that are standing in the way?
Here’s are some columns from a table from the World Employmentand Social Outlook: Trends 2020 published by the International Labour Organization in January 2020. As the report points out, around the world about 60% of workers have informal jobs; in low-income countries, it’s more like 90%
Read the whole post. The ability to cooperate in groups above the Dunbar number is extremely important for economic development. You might hate big corporations, but they are actually a miracle of civilization, as Tim and others have pointed out.
More couples are deciding to live together instead of marrying, and strained finances are a top reason many cite. A survey last year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that among those who live with a partner and wish to get married, more than half said they or their partner weren’t financially ready.
About half of middle earners were married in 2018, a drop of 16 percentage points since 1980. Among the highest U.S. earners, 60% were married in 2018, a decline of 4 percentage points over the same period. That marks a reversal. In 1980, a higher proportion of middle-class Americans than top earners were married.
1. You have to decide whether or not to have children.
2. You have to decide whether to live independently or together.
3. If you live together, you have to decide whether or not to get married.
It seems to me that the decision that ought to most be affected by economic circumstances is (1). Raising children is expensive. And that decision in turn would affect (2) and (3).
Whatever you decide about (1), I can also see (2) having an effect, since it is cheaper to live together. And that in turn would affect (3).
But mostly the article is written as if financial status directly affects (3). Both the headline and one of the academics quoted in the story refer to marriage as having become a “luxury good.”
I don’t see (3) as the likely margin along which financial status affects decisions. Something is wrong with this picture.
If the chain of thinking were “We’ve decided that we can’t afford children, and if we can’t afford children then there is no point in getting married,” would make sense. It also would be very sad.
But the article says:
More couples are forming families without matrimony. One in four parents living with a child is unmarried, according to Pew. More than one-third of them are living with a partner, up from one in five in 1997, the Pew study of 2017 data found.
Seriously? People are thinking We wanted children, but getting married seems like too much of a commitment. We can’t afford to make that kind of commitment yet. ?????
I still think that replacing means-tested entitlements with a UBI would make low-wage men more attractive as marriage partners. Indeed, the article profiles a couple with children who fit with my model of non-marriage.
They said they want to get married but are holding off because Ms. Dlouhy is enrolled in a publicly funded program that pays for her to earn a nursing license. Combining their income could jeopardize that assistance, she said, as well as her state health-insurance subsidies.
James Lindsay and Mike Nayna wrote,
to the degree that we can accept that Social Justice is a faith-based program based upon a kind of locally legitimized special revelation, we should feel serious concerns and discomfort about institutionalizing its beliefs in any space that isn’t wholly devoted to them. We should also be quick to be honest about which spaces are and which aren’t. Public institutions like public universities, being public, should be very hesitant to implement Social Justice initiatives. Private institutions, like corporations and private universities, can make their own choices on the matter and accept the benefits and consequences of openly aligning with a faith initiative as they come.
. . .Social Justice, because it is an (applied) postmodern mythological system upon which a moral tribe is built, is not technically a religion but is a kind of faith system. This raises serious questions about how we should deal with its attempts to institutionalize itself in various cultural enterprises—especially education—under the guise of being secular in the broad sense merely because it qualifies in the narrow sense. Most importantly, however, it provides all of us with explicit permission to treat its claims and advances in the same way we would any other faith—say, like Scientology—and to proceed accordingly without the guilt it attempts to foist upon us as a conversion mechanism.
I linked to the essay when it first appeared, but when I recently came across it again I felt it deserved another mention.
In a review of Primal Screams, I wrote,
When a tribe is formed out of families, members feel secure in their status. One’s identity is established as a father, mother, sibling, uncle, aunt, or grandparent.
In contrast, when a “forced pack” is constructed out of isolated individuals, there are constant struggles to resolve the uncertainty over who belongs and where members fit in relation to one another. Eberstadt suggests that under such circumstances:
… some people, deprived of recognition in the traditional ways, will regress to a state in which their demand for recognition becomes ever more insistent and childlike. This brings us to one of the most revealing features of identity politics: its infantilized expression and vernacular.
Her thesis, about which I raise doubts in my review, is that young people turn to identity politics to try to address needs that are unmet in today’s weak family environment. I can imagine Eberstadt reading the David Brooks essay to which I referred last week and coming out with her own primal scream.