Category Archives: culture

Culture = institutions + folkways

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My recent essay:

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.

Why does the Google News algorithm lean left?

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Nicholas Diakopoulos writes,

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.

On the Social Justice movement

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BJ Campbell writes,

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.

Narrower, deeper, older watch

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The WSJ reported,

What’s uncertain is how much longer this kind of bridge club can survive. Below age 60, bridge players are far scarcer. . .

The American Contract Bridge League, a nonprofit that promotes the game and holds tournaments, has about 165,000 members, down from 175,000 in the late 1990s. The average age has risen to around 71 from 58 in the same period.

See my original post on narrower, deeper, older.

I worry about what deplatforming signifies

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Tyler Cowen writes,

I worry about deplatforming much less than many of you do. I remember the “good old days,” when even an anodyne blog such as Marginal Revolution, had it existed, had no platform whatsoever. All of a sudden millions of new niches were available, and many of us moved into those spaces.

In recent times, a number of the major tech companies have dumped some contributors, due to a mix of customer and employee protest. So we have gained say 99 instead of say 100, and of course I am personally happy to see many of the deplatformed sites go, or move to other carriers. Most of the deplatformed sites, of course, I am not familiar with at all, but that is endogenous. I would say don’t overreact to the endowment effect of having, for a while, felt one had literally everything. You never did. You still have way, way more than you did in the recent past.

Suppose we grant that we should not worry about a few uncouth individuals losing platforms on major web sites. We still might want to pay attention to what deplatforming signifies about the inclinations of the zealots of the new religion.

Those who seek to eliminate blasphemy see themselves as cleansing society of its impurities. It is a short step from cleansing society of blasphemy to cleansing society of “impure” people themselves.

Imagine that it’s 1931 and Tyrone is telling the Jews of Germany that he worries much less than many of them do. He reminds them that they still have way, way more than they did in the recent past.

Pro-Trump rhetoric

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Thomas D. Klingenstein writes,

Multiculturalism conceives of society as a collection of cultural identity groups, each with its own worldview, all oppressed by white males, collectively existing within permeable national boundaries. Multiculturalism replaces American citizens with so-called “global citizens.” It carves “tribes” out of a society whose most extraordinary success has been their assimilation into one people. It makes education a political exercise in the liberation of an increasing number of “others,” and makes American history a collection of stories of white oppression, thereby dismantling our unifying, self-affirming narrative—without which no nation can long survive.

. . .Trump is the only national political figure who does not care what multiculturalism thinks is wrong. He, and he alone, categorically and brazenly rejects the morality of multiculturalism. He is virtually the only one on our national political stage defending America’s understanding of right and wrong, and thus nearly alone in truly defending America. This why he is so valuable—so much depends on him.

In an interesting rhetorical move, he equates the fight against multiculturalism with the fight against slavery.

multiculturalism, as with abolition, has the potential to energize the conservative movement.

His essay is a counterpoint to an essay from two years ago by Yuval Levin. Levin contrasts conservatism with alienation.

Conservatives incline to be heavily invested in society and its institutions, even when deeply concerned about their condition and their fate. When these institutions are threatened from the left, conservatives tend to be defensive of them. Even when they are dominated by the left, as so many of our institutions are, conservatives by instinct and reflection tend to argue for reclamation and recovery—for building spaces within these institutions more than for rejection and contempt of them. If our traditional ways of doing things speak to yearnings that arise anew in every generation, then there is always reason to hope for a resurgence of orthodoxy and to work for it.

Alienation denies or rejects the possibility of such resurgence and therefore the importance of working to keep that possibility open. The work of keeping it open is the work that conservatives can often be found doing, particularly outside politics, as in the service of religious missions or of liberal education, among other causes.

Think of academia, the chief bastion of multiculturalism. A conservative would seek to reform it, by pursuing efforts such as Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy. The more alienated opponent of academia would place little hope in such attempts.

In that regard, I am probably closer to the alienated frame of mind. I doubt that Haidt has enough support among professors born after 1975.

Another dispatch from the IDW

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Alex Mackiel writes,

a recent study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience found evidence for sex differences in brain functional connectivity in utero and therefore presumably before socialization could possibly have been at play

Later in the essay:

I believe that most of the resistance to evolutionary psychology both then and now stems from two fallacies: (1) that the nasty aspects of our human nature, such as tendencies for violence, are natural and therefore, good. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy; and (2) that an evolved human nature necessarily implies genetic determinism and inflexibility

The naturalistic fallacy is that what is natural is good. What I might call the converse of the naturalistic fallacy is that what is good must be natural. So if it is good to be nonviolent, it must be natural to be nonviolent. I think that this converse of the naturalistic fallacy is what underlies some of the opposition to evolutionary psychology.

Everyone agrees that human behavior reflects both natural instincts and social constraints, with the latter coming from traditional norms and institutions. One might say that the inclination on the left is to see the natural instincts as good and the social constraints as causing problems. And the inclination on the right is to see the natural instincts as causing problems and the social constraints as good.

Later in the essay:

It is my contention that sociocultural factors that have been proposed in place of evolutionary factors as causal influences on mind and behavior have been overstated, while the importance of evolutionary factors have been understated.

That correlates with the predominance of the ideological left in academia.

Mackiel’s essay refers to a paper by David M. Buss and William von Hippel. The authors write

We conclude with the irony that our evolved psychology may interfere with the scientific understanding of our evolved psychology.

Attribution of the other’s motives

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Zara Zareen writes,

Couples who strive to judge each other benevolently — interpreting each other’s good behaviour as deliberate and habitual, and each other’s transgressions as accidental and limited (wherever possible and sensible) — are more likely to be satisfied in their relationships overall.

In political discourse these days, we do the opposite. We see the other’s good behavior as accidental and limited, and we see the other’s bad behavior as deliberate and habitual.

Internet culture and legacy culture

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Tyler Cowen writes,

In the internet vs. culture debate, the internet is at some decided disadvantages. For instance, despite its losses of mindshare, culture still holds many of the traditional measures of status. Many intellectuals thus are afraid to voice the view that a lot of culture is a waste of time and we might be better off with more time spent on the internet. Furthermore, many of the responses to the tech critics focus on narrower questions of economics or the law, without realizing that what is at stake are two different visions of how human beings should think and indeed live. When that is the case, policymakers will tend to resort to their own value judgments, rather than listening to experts. For better or worse, the internet-loving generations do not yet hold most positions of political power (recall Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress).

For a different perspective, Jordan Hall writes,

the dynamic of Culture War 2.0 shows up as one of intense fragmentation and disorientation, where none of our 20th Century techniques for generating social coherence stand up to the rapidly changing reality. From this level, the experience will likely be one of increasing chaos in all aspects of culture, society and individuality. If you are running a 20th Century sensemaker, it will feel like a descent into some flavor of madness.

Is Hall’s essay an insightful piece or a word salad? Maybe a bit of both. He links to a somewhat more digestible essay, by Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes.

We define a culture war as a memetic war to determine what the social facts are at the core of a given society, or alternatively, to determine society’s boundaries of the sacred and the profane. Political arguments have become indistinguishable from moral arguments, and one cannot challenge political positions without implicitly possessing suspect morals. This makes politics an exhausting and unproductive game to play, and it makes the culture war intractable.

What I take away from the latter two essays is that our culture is splintering. If our political system reflected this, then we would have many small parties.

Politics used to consist mostly of negotiation about interests. The legacy political parties used to be coalitions. Members with somewhat divergent interests were willing and able to work together and aim for common objectives. The median voter model was in force.

Today, politics is about cultural identity. That is not something that is negotiable. It does not lend itself to coalition politics.

Going back to Tyler’s post, I think that the denizens of legacy culture are not equipped to deal with the fragmentation that the Internet has wrought. So I think they are mostly at a disadvantage.

The 1960s and today

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How does the political and cultural polarization today compare to that in the 1960s?

I was a teenager in the late 1960s, and I was paying rapt attention to what was going on. So I speak from that perspective.

1. The most bitterly polarizing issue was the Vietnam War. From 1965-1968, the most bitter division among political office-holders was Democrat against Democrat. President Johnson and his supporters defended the war. Senator Fulbright and other leading Democrats in Congress opposed it.

2. When Richard Nixon became President and continued the war, with expanded bombing, the issue became more clearly partisan, with Democrats opposed. But a lot of the public pressure to end the war slowly eased, because Nixon drew down the number of troops, ended the draft, and ultimately signed a peace agreement.

3. Culturally, the hippies were a big phenomenon in the late 1960s. They contrasted with working-class youth, who were known as “greasers” because of the product that young working-class men wore in their short hair. But by the mid-1970s, there was no more divide between hippies and greasers. Guys of every social background had long hair, along with those mutton-chop sideburns and thick mustaches so emblematic of the decade. And the hippies grew up, took showers, and got jobs. So I would say that by about 1975 American culture was more blended than separated. And of course back then everyone saw the same movies, watched the same TV shows, and had the same news sources.

4. Today, I would say that there is nothing as politically divisive as the Vietnam War. There is no enduring political issue per se. Like Seinfeld, politics these days is a show about nothing.

5. Instead, what we see now is plenty of political rage, directed against particular individuals or particular groups. The actual issues that attract attention are relatively minor incidents that get magnified in the media. Gone are the common sources of information, so that many people seem to live in bubbles in which those who disagree appear to be demons.

6. Today, the cultural divide is much starker. Social classes have much less interaction with one another, and this reinforces the tendency to demonize others.

On net, I believe that this is a more dangerous time than the 1960s. I suspect that many people would like to see the divisions healed. But the path that led to healing of the divides of the 1960s is not available today. We will have to find a different path.