Category Archives: culture

Russ Roberts and Yuval Levin

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They discuss Levin’s A Time to Build in a podcast. Levin says,

I think when reporters complain about Donald Trump–as they rightly do, in a lot of ways–they should think about whether what Trump is doing relative to what the Presidency is supposed to be isn’t very similar to what a lot of political reporters are doing relative to what journalism is supposed to be. They are engaging in a kind of indulgent performative version of the real thing that makes the real thing much harder to do.

There is a lot of interesting material here. I recommend the whole podcast.

David Brooks on family structure and community support

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Summarizing a long essay, David Brooks writes,

the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time.

I live in a nuclear-family bubble. Among my friends, divorces are rare, and children out of wedlock are unheard of.

So I imagine that the converse is true. There must be people who hardly know any nuclear families.

Brooks writes,

The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

The friends my age generally have married children, with grandchildren. All of us feel that we have won at life. I don’t think Brooks appreciates that spending time together with your spouse and your grandchildren pretty much takes care of the “need to belong” problems that his “forged families” try to solve.

I think that pretty much every advice column and advice book fails to take account of grandchildren. Certainly not Eli Finkel. True, there is nothing you can do in your youth to guarantee that your life will culminate in a stable marriage that includes grandchildren. But there are paths that you can go down that lead in a different direction, and I recommend trying to stay off of those paths.

Brooks and other social analysts see humans as wanting to care for others and to be cared for by others. If you need to be straightened out when you are messing up, or if you need help, or if you need a shoulder to cry on, it’s good to have people who are there for you.

Your church or your synagogue used to provide that, but nobody is joining any more. I wonder why.

1. Perhaps people are substituting other forms of togetherness, so they can do without church affiliation. But then presumably Brooks wouldn’t have a story to tell about how bad things are nowadays.

2. Perhaps people, or at least many of them, don’t really value togetherness the way we think they ought to. Bowling alone is a revealed preference. The chart that Brooks finds “haunting” shows that there are ten nations with more than 16 percent of households living alone (the U.S. is not one of them), including such supposed havens for happiness as Denmark (the leader in solo households), Finland, Norway, and Switzerland.

3. Conservative sociologists, of whom Yuval Levin is the heir, would in part blame the growth of government, particularly remote government, for usurping some of the roles of churches and synagogues, including providing relief for the poor. This lowers the status of churches, so people feel less inspired to join.

4. Perhaps the causality runs from having a nuclear family to being motivated to seek out community. We need to go back to the issue of the decline of nuclear families.

5. Maybe the bonding rituals at church–prayers, sermonizing–are too time-consuming these days.

Whether Brooks’ ideas about forged communities take off depends on which of these explanations is most important. If your money is on (2), (3), and (4), then attempts at creating community togetherness are fighting the cultural tide.

Thoughts on social epistemology

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Quentin Skinner wrote,

The golden rule is that, however bizarre the beliefs we are studying may seem to be, we must begin by trying to make the agents who accepted them appear as rational as possible.

Skinner’s golden rule of interpretive charity is cited by Jeffrey Friedman in Power Without Knowledge, a book that I am still not recommending.

I could phrase Skinner’s golden rule as, “Explain the beliefs of others the way that you would explain your own beliefs.” Because introspection leads me to find that my own beliefs are not based on a moral or mental defect, then I should not attribute your differing beliefs to a mental or moral defect.

So how to deal with disagreement? For example, I believe it is ok to eat meat, but other people disagree. I believe that what the Fed can control does not have much effect on the economy, but other people disagree.

My explanation for disagreement that is golden-rule compatible is that people decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. We probably start out by trusting our parents. We proceed to trust teachers. At some point, we develop a set of friends and peers that we trust. We develop trust in certain authors. We may trust celebrities, including business and political celebrities. Often, we distinguish domains–I trust my doctor’s opinion on upper respiratory infections, but not on health care reform.

From people we trust, we learn both what to think and how to think. When I don’t want to go to the trouble of working something out for myself, I let other people tell me what to think. I let my dentist tell me that I have a cavity and what I should have him do about it. But when I want to work out something for myself, I am using what I learned from other people about how to think.

Some implications of this hypothesis:

1. You and I have different beliefs in large part because over the course of our lives we have encountered different people who influenced what and how we think. Somewhere along the way, some thoughts were seeded into your brain that lead you to hold a point of view that I am convinced is wrong.

2, When you express a point of view that differs from mine, unless you change my mind, my trust in you is going to fall. If you contradict a view that I hold strongly, then my trust in you will fall really far. I think that this may explain the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning.” When you show me a study that supports my beliefs, I do not have to worry about whether I trust the methods used in the study. But when you show me a study that contradicts my beliefs, I have to either change my mind or find something wrong with the study. So I look more closely at the methods, probing for flaws. If I do find flaws, my trust in the study’s authors falls by a lot.

3, To change someone’s mind, you have to earn their trust. It seems that we rarely do this, and in fact we rarely try to do this.

4. What sorts of people earn our trust? In my case, I believe that my father set the tone with his First Iron Law of Social Science, “Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way.” All of my life, I have been inclined to trust people who look at multiple sides of an issue and who are able to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. But many others seem to prefer to trust those who display high confidence. Like Harry Truman, many people long for the the one-handed economist.

Sizing up the current scene

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Start with a bunch of excerpts.

1. Spencer Klavan writes,

The rise of woke politics, and the urgent need to defeat it, has made strange bedfellows of all of us in the new conservative coalition.

2. James Hankins writes,

A strategy of seeking total victory over cultural Marxism, in any case, gives it too much credit. It overlooks how intellectually feeble it already is. Cultural Marxism is able to flourish today precisely because of hyperpartisanship. It appears strong only because it is a weapon clasped in the fist of ideological tyranny. In a more pluralist culture, it would have to defend itself against critics who do not share its premises, and it would soon find itself at a serious disadvantage. Cultural Marxists are good at policing their own ranks for unorthodoxy and exposing the hidden power-relations that sustain (as they wrongly think) all non-Marxist structures of thought. They are not good at finding common premises with non-Marxists, and therefore at constructing arguments with universal validity. But in politics, constructing arguments with universal validity is what we call seeking the common good.

3. William A. Galston writes,

it isn’t hard to understand why only 15% of those under 30 think the U.S. is the greatest nation on earth, why nearly half believe hard work is no guarantor of success, or why so many of them support a single national health-care program—and Bernie Sanders for president.

4. Reacting to the recent European National Conservatism Conference, Titus Techera writes,

From this political point of view, intellectuals are supposed to fulfill a negative, defensive role: To protect reasonable politics from the attacks of elite institutions, especially in Brussels, but it’s not obvious whether intellectuals who want to discredit the EU as such and transform Europe could retain the necessary enthusiasm and urgency playing for what might seem like low stakes. They certainly don’t seem to have a future in government, where, Orbán stressed, the economy comes first.

(Jim Hoft gives a more complete, matter-of-fact report on the conference.)

My comments on these:

1. I agree with Klavan that those of us who oppose the religious/cult version of contemporary leftism should focus on that issue. For now, we ought to sweep under the rug our differences about free-market economics, Donald Trump, and the social issues that Klavan discusses.

2. Although Hankins’ essay overall is the best of the bunch, the quoted excerpt is the one with which I am least in agreement. The religious/cult version of contemporary leftism may look feeble intellectually, but its political power on college campuses is formidable. The administrative apparatus set up to enforce it is going to be around for a long time. Not so the professors who would stand for reason rather than religion, most of whom will retire over the next 15 years. I think that intellectual detente is possible between those of us on the right and those who are on the non-religious left. But we do have to inflict a long-lasting defeat on the religion/cult.

3. Galston is an interesting figure to watch. Earlier this year, he fretted over Sanders’ potential to drive away voters in November. I see this more recent column as the mirror image of a conservative writing “Donald Trump would not be my choice, but I understand where his supporters are coming from.” In any case, his analysis of polling data showing Sanders’ strong support among young people is quite sobering. Can we speculate on how a Sanders victory in November might affect the religious cult? It would give the cult a more sympathetic figure in the White House, and that seems dangerous. But it might dissipate some of the cult’s energy. In particular, in the absence of the Trump bogeyman, the non-religious left might be tempted to assert itself.

4. Techera speculates on the proper role for conservative intellectuals. He suggests that it is “negative, defensive,” and this may not be very motivating. Progressive ideology offers the intellectual a higher-status part to play, that of helping rulers enact and implement activist policies. And the religious cult offers intellectuals a role that is even higher status yet, that of stamping out heresy and punishing sinners.

I would suggest that conservative intellectuals worry a bit less about politics and a bit more about the hold of the religious cult on campus. To me, the situation at the major institutions of higher education looks hopeless. We need some alternative prestige hierarchy in which reason is given a higher value than religion.

The analogy with cults

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Jonathan Kay writes,

Cults can never be organized in any kind of democratic way because there is always some anointed class (often consisting of just one person) that monopolizes access to a critical body of revealed truths. And in this aspect, intersectionality is well-suited to a cult paradigm because its adherents presume that the “lived experience” that typifies every sub-group is fundamentally unknowable except to members of that sub-group. The conceit of secret knowledge confers an aura of mysticism on followers, especially in regard to the issue of gender identity, which is cast as an internally experienced secular rapture.

His main idea is that cults are distinguished by language that sounds meaningful but cannot be effectively translated into other idioms, because it is actually gibberish. But note that if the social justice movement is a cult, it is more decentralized than other cults. An emergent cult?

My way of distinguishing a cult is that people within it are unable to laugh at themselves–and in fact may lose the ability to laugh altogether. Jeffrey Frankel and I noticed that about the cult that surrounded Lyndon LaRouche while Jeff and I were students at Swarthmore in the early 1970s. Then, LaRouche was the head of a Marxist group called the National Caucus of Labor Committees. He subsequently adopted a more right-wing ideology.

But the high-sounding gibberish element was very much there as well.

When I first encountered Amway, my impression was that it was cult, and that impression never really left. That probably won’t help me get a high-level position with the Department of Education these days (not that I would seek one if there were a different education Secretary).

More Martin Gurri

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1. Kling and Gurri (self-recommending).

2. In a podcast with Jeff Schechtman, Martin Gurri said,

So there’s existential meaning that people try to extract from politics in a very utopian way. I am of course one who believes that you are not going to get that from politics. That’s not what politics is about. So part of the anger is fed by the fact that I’m asking for the government to give meaning to my life, and I mean how is that going to happen?

And also this:

the internet can be seen as bringing the public and the elites into kind of an unbearable proximity, and the reaction of the public has been anger, and the reaction of the elites has been to fly as high up into the top of the pyramid to escape.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Human migration and evolution

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One point that Charles Murray makes effectively in Human Diversity is that human migration necessarily creates different genetic patterns.

If we start with a tribe of 200 people, and 100 of them break off and move to a new location, those 100 cannot possibly take with them a representative sample of the gene pool of the whole tribe. There are many possible genetic combinations, but by arithmetic the new tribe can only take 100 combinations with them.

Here are some thoughts I have about that;

1. An assumption that Murray makes, which I believe is accurate, is that there is not much re-mixing. The old tribe and the new tribe cross-breed very little, if at all. In prehistoric days, the physical separation made cross-breeding unlikely. Also mutual tribal suspicion.

2. My guess is that some human colonies survived, and some didn’t. The ones that survived preserved their genetic tendencies and cultural traits.

3. Surviving colonies tend to stay put. If the colony really thrives and its population increases, then it will send out more migrant colonies.

4. My guess is that when long-distance communication and transportation was primitive, failing colonies tended to just fail. As technology improved, failing colonies would be more inclined to migrate, because they have better knowledge of where life might be better.

5. Of all of the colonies that humans ever created, only a relatively few were successful. When your genome is used to speculate about your ancestry, it is linking you back to one or more of the successful colonies.

6. If only a small proportion of colonies were successful, then of all of the viable combinations of genes, only a few will be present. Evolution will not have selected with extreme rigor. Yes, some of the colonies failed because of weak genes. But others failed because of bad luck or bad culture. And not very many combinations of genes were tried.

7. I think that this picture reinforces my skepticism about polygenic scores ever being able to explain much of the observed variation in heritable traits. We will observe some combinations of genes with great frequency, making additional sampling from those populations redundant from a statistical perspective. My intuition continues to be that we are now or soon will be at the point of greatly diminishing returns to increased sample size.

8. It is not just prehistoric migration that follows the colony model. Consider David Hackett-Fisher’s Albion’s Seed. Consider the Bosnian community in St. Louis, the Hmong community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, etc.

9. The more that a migrating colony marries endogamously and brings strong cultural beliefs when it migrates to a larger society, the longer it can persist without without dissolving into that society. Consider Orthodox Jews.

10. What will emerge from the migration process is populations with differences in both genetic makeup and cultural practices. Most of these differences are random, as opposed to selective. This will make it difficult to pin down the extent to which differences in outcomes across populations have genetic causes.

Speculative thoughts on evolution

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In a podcast, Eric Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu discuss a number of things, including evolution. I want to focus on that topic, which comes up sporadically, especially at minutes 11-15, 1:19, 1:24-1:31. A related issue is learning disability, which comes at minute 25, minute 57, minute 1:03, minute 1:17, and elsewhere.

My understanding of genetics and natural selection differs from Eric’s. Keep in mind that I never took a biology course, and most of any scientific discussion of alleles and so on goes right past me. So you should trust him more than you trust me.

I want to claim that evolution is like a statistician with insufficient data to determine whether a particular gene should be passed along or not. My slogan might be “Evolution selects for traits, and genes only code for proteins*” *or do other biochemical stuff.

Think of evolution as statistician. Call this EAS. EAS does not necessarily know which traits to keep. Take left-handedness, for example. Do we need to tell a just-so story in which left-handedness has survival value at a population level? Or can the genes for left-handedness have survived because they don’t have much impact on survival either way? Or is left-handedness an emergent property of gestation, not determined entirely by genetics? Maybe left-handedness is just a random variant that does not affect survival at either an individual or a group level.

EAS can figure out when single-gene mutations that are bad, and it can work on selecting those out. But a lot of traits are not single-gene based, and traits themselves are multidimensional. Suppose that we think in terms of an input-output matrix or a production function in which genes are inputs and traits are outputs. My sense is that the relationship between the inputs and the outputs is so complex that not only can we not figure out that relationship, but evolution cannot figure it out, either. So maybe there are some “bad” genetic combinations that get selected out, but there are plenty of genetic combinations that are far from optimal that do not get selected out.

Suppose that I have a combination of genes that is far from ideal for survival. But a lot of those genes overlap with genes that are ideal for survival, so evolution cannot be sure what to keep and what to discard. Furthermore, even though my combination of genes is “bad,” it is not so bad that I am unable to survive and reproduce. So “bad” combinations of genes can persist, and you cannot say that merely because a gene has persisted it must have some survival value. Same with traits.

So I am arguing against Eric’s inclination to see everyone as having good traits, and the rest of us should work to see the gifts that others have. I think instead that some people who just seem stupid or lazy are in fact stupid or lazy, due to a combination of the genes they inherited and the random adverse events that occurred during gestation. (One of my main takeaways from Kevin Mitchell’s Innate is that lots of bad things can happen during gestation.) EAS is not going to get rid of their traits or their genes. They are entitled to human dignity, but we should not set them up for failure by claiming that they really can perform great feats with the right encouragement.

Culture also affects selection. The person you want to mate with in an agricultural society may differ from the person you wanted to mate with in a hunter-gatherer tribe, so one can imagine culture changing the gene pool over time. In the last 20 minutes or so of the podcast, Eric argues that developments such as birth control and economic forces have affected sexual preferences. If so, then obviously this is a rapid cultural change, not a biological evolutionary one.

As an aside, I think that Eric and I share the trait of being disagreeable, and that it happened to work for us. He felt a strong need to prove himself to the educators who doubted him, and that was a powerful motivator for him. Similarly, when I was forty, I was tired of people saying that I was a visionary who could not implement anything, and that motivated me when I started my business. I decided that in order to succeed I needed to network, and I did more of that than I have ever done before or since. That helped make me lucky.

But being disagreeable and wanting to prove yourself to people who doubt you is hardly a guarantee of success. If it were, then the struggling students that Eric wants to champion might do better if their teachers are doubtful rather than supportive.

Eric’s view reminds me of that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Law of Compensation.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else

I do not think that the genetic/gestation lottery is as fair as that. Some defects are just defects. And some excesses are just advantages.

A religion that persecutes non-believers

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John Cochrane writes

I’m interested here in the politicization of our institutions. It is interesting that not everyone is on board this project, even in the UC system. There are still Jerry Coynes and Abigail Thompsons at major universities. Much of the project is to force political conformity and silence their dissent within the institution.

I recommend the whole post, which covers the controversy over the requirement of the UC system for faculty to submit “diversity statements.”

One more excerpt:

The game is no longer to advance candidates who are themselves “diverse.” The game is to stock the faculty with people of a certified ideological stripe, who are committed to advancing this cause. Tom Sowell need not apply. In case the litmus test is not perfectly clear:

Sowell, of course, is a distinguished economic conservative who happens to be black.

If you don’t say the right things in your diversity statement, you can be denied a promotion, a raise, or even a job. I think it is fair to say that this is a religion that persecutes non-believers.

How is this going to play out? For 250 years, Americans resisted religious persecution. It seems to me that either universities have to change, or America has to change. Which will it be?

Class war theory

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Michael Lind writes,

In the interest of inter-class peace and creedal coexistence, both labor markets and cultural institutions require a degree of regulation. Collective bargaining to set basic wages and workplace rights can take forms other than the failed American system of enterprise bargaining. There could be, for example, bargaining among representatives of all firms and employees in particular industries, occupation-specific wage boards or labor representation on corporate boards. As for the media and education, institutionalized consultation with religious institutions and other organizations represented on government oversight commissions could be part of a new Fairness Doctrine like the one that governed TV and radio in the 20th-century U.S.

It seemed to me that the essay could have been shorter, but it is an excerpt from a book. Hard to imagine.

I think that a more plausible path for social equilibrium is for the status of college education to fall sharply. We would be better off with a new set of prestige hierarchies.