Category Archives: culture

Thoughts on hippie culture

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Some readers have asked me to elaborate on my perspective on youth culture now vs. the 1960s. To me, campus culture today seems idiotic. I think that the hippie culture of my youth also was idiotic, but it was not as aggressive. If you weren’t a hippie, the hippies didn’t try to shut you up or get you fired.

What was idiotic about hippie culture? Drugs and communes come to mind.

In my opinion, the “higher consciousness” that drugs supposedly fostered is Baloney Sandwich. I know that psychedelics are making a bit of a comeback, and I read Pollan’s book, and I still think it’s Baloney Sandwich.

As for communes, I see them as a reversion to small-scale society, with the governing principle “we care for one another.” In large-scale society, you have specialization governed by markets. You have social relationships grounded in families. Sooner or later, a commune is going to run into friction over the inefficiency of not having specialized economic roles, and also over relationships that are not grounded in traditional families.

Michael Strong on Evolutionary Mismatch

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He writes,

If our existing schooling system is unnecessarily exacerbating mental health issues, then parents, teens, educators, and policy-makers should re-evaluate the premises of our existing schooling system. If schooling-as-we-know-it is excessively different from our environment of evolutionary adaptation, then how should we rethink schooling in order to create healthier adolescent populations in the future?

It is a long essay, which covers a lot of research on the problems of contemporary adolescents. As I read it, I applied my rule of thumb, which is to focus on technology as a cause. Also, I came across the essay concurrently with my reading of Panic Attack by Robby Soave.

For example, Strong lists five characteristics of adolescent tribal life that are not shared by today’s youth. I will put them in a table.

tribal life modern life
(1) small tribal community of a few dozen to a few hundred with few interactions with other tribal groups. exposed to hundreds or thousands of age peers directly in addition to thousands of adults and thousands of electronic representations of diverse human beings (both social media and entertainment media).
(2) shared one language, one belief system, one set of norms, one morality, and more generally a social and cultural homogeneity that is unimaginable for us today. exposed to many languages, belief systems, norms, moralities, and social and cultural diversity.
(3) immersed in a community with a full range of ages present, from child to elder. largely isolated with a very narrow range of age peers through schooling.
(4) engaged in the work of the community, typically hunting and gathering, with full adult responsibilities typically being associated with puberty. Have little or no opportunities for meaningful work in their community and no adult responsibilities until 18 or even into their 20s.
(5) mating and status competitions would have mostly been within their tribe or occasionally with nearby groups, most of which would have been highly similar to themselves. are competing for mates and status with hundreds or thousands directly and with many thousands via electronic representations (both social media and entertainment media).

Of these five contrasts, (3) and (4) are linked to our schooling process. (1), (2), and (5) are much exacerbated in the world of smart phones and the Internet. I speak of it as the world of our new species, Homo Appiens.

The mental health problems of Homo Appiens have been emphasized by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Robby Soave on speech-critical youth

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In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,

it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.

I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.

Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.

I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.

But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.

At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.

Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.

Contemporary dating culture

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From the NYT:

for some singles, sex has become the getting-to-know you phase of courtship. In a study conducted for Match.com, Dr. Fisher found that among a representative sample, 34 percent of singles had sex with somebody before the first date. She calls it “the sex interview.”

I find the idea of deciding whether to begin dating someone by first having sex with the person to be. . .counterintuitive.

Of course, stories like this tend to be sensationalized, so one takes them with a grain of salt. Yet I think that there is a genuine generational difference. It used to be that your first impression of someone came from an in-person encounter. For young people today, it often comes from an app.

Lately, the thought has occurred to me that we are evolving a new species, that I might call Home Appiens, to distinguish it from Homo Sapiens. Technology is changing us in ways that we have not begun to grasp. Smart phones and the Internet are giving us new experiences and taking away old ones. People are developing new skills and new patterns of behavior. The factors that influence social dynamics are changing.

Culture, trust, and economics

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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.

Social media platforms as utilities

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James D. Miller writes,

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.

Group (self-) hatred

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Zach Goldberg writes,

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.

Where did the Social Justice movement emerge from?

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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 vs. memetic evolution

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Scott Alexander writes,

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.

Tradition or momentary reason?

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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.