In this podcast with Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson speaks with all of his old passion and intensity. Peterson even earns a Caveat point. Perhaps his central proposition is that there is value in institutions that socialize people, but he does include the caveat that they can become corrupt.
Category Archives: culture
The week in FITs
In a summary, I write,
my vote for the most impressive item this week is the podcast with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. Both of them demonstrated steelmanning twice (each one separately steelmans Kmele Foster at the end), with McWhorter also scoring two caveat points and one Open to changing his mind point.
Do you agree that this podcast showed two intellectuals at the top of their game?
Will persuasion work?
Across much of the democratic world, philosophical liberals lack both the ideological self-confidence and the institutional base to stand up for their convictions. This is an existential crisis for the values of a free society. For only if philosophical liberalism can prove that it embodies a truly universal set of principles—one that can win adherents from Hyderabad to Hamburg, from Nairobi to New York—can it hope to retain and expand its influence in the 21st century.
His effort is a substack publication/community. I wish him well. I would like to believe that the number of Americans who are sympathetic to what Mounk calls philosophical liberalism is greater than the number who have adopted the religion that thrives on persecuting heretics.
Incidentally, with a separate post, Mounk scored the first point of the Fantasy Intellectual Teams May season.
My Shelby Steele review
I review Shelby Steele’s White Guilt.
In the United States, whites abused blacks for many decades. Legally, this abuse ended with the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But those acts did not erase the sordid history. Steele’s thesis is that sensitivity to this history produces white guilt and fuels black anger. The result is that blacks have become the abusers, and whites—liberal whites, especially—have become the abused.
Fantasy Intellectual Teams update
Cass Sunstein and Tyler Cowen led their team to victory in the first Fantasy Intellectual Teams contest. The May contest is underway. Longer report here.
Movements vs. Weberian bureaucracies
Weber insisted that to exercise real power, charismatic authority cannot keep relying on the spiritual calling of committed followers. It must establish its own structures of bureaucracy and tradition. According to Weber, this is how prophetic religious movements of the past created lasting regimes.
We seem to live in a time when various Weberian bureaucracies, notably those of the major political parties, have broken down. Meanwhile, new movements, as Martin Gurri points out, emerge without the Weberian elements. In that regard, Yuval Levin writes,
The frustrations that stand in the way of more effective bargaining and policy-making in Washington now add up to an argument for more explicit intra-party groupings that would negotiate with one another and with factions in the other party. But too few of the frustrated activists and politicians in both parties seem to see that, and so too few are engaged in building durable institutional structures for constructive factional engagement — at least beyond the level of rhetoric and communication strategy.
Journal of Controversial Ideas
McMahan, Singer and their third collaborator, Francesca Minerva, a moral philosopher at Ghent University in Belgium, sit on the political left. But they envision their journal as a home for all well-reasoned, if dangerous, ideas.
Elsewhere, I have read that Larry Summers, Jonathan Haidt, and Philip Tetlock will be on the editorial board. So will the journal be, like, Steve Sailer’s blog but with peer review?
The mind and moral categories
Long time reader Roger Sweeny emails.
I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. . . .
I will copy the full email below. But for now, I have to say that this book presents a very powerful model of how people frame moral issues. I have a learned a lot just from reading a few pages.
The book argues, based on empirical analysis, for a moral dyad theory, based on the extent to which an entity is viewed as having experience (being able to feel pain or joy) and/or having agency (having the ability to change outcomes). Consider this matrix.
| low agency | high agency | |
|---|---|---|
| high experience | a baby | a healthy adult |
| low experience | a rock | a robot |
Sweeny wants to apply this moral dyad theory to the social justice movement. Suppose that the social justice advocates see whites as privileged, i.e., having “a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer,” like the robot in the matrix, while blacks occupy the opposite pole, like the baby.
Note that John McWhorter and other black intellectuals who deplore the social justice movement are most angry at the way that it denies agency to blacks. It treats them as if they were nothing more than dogs helplessly beaten.
Most people see George Floyd as comparable to the baby and Derek Chauvin as comparable to the robot. That is, Floyd could suffer, but he could do nothing about his suffering. Chauvin was making conscious decisions, but he has no feelings..
But one could tell the story the other way. Floyd chose to resist arrest. Chauvin was reacting to the situation in response to his fears and those of the other policemen. I am not saying that this is the right framing, just that it leads to a different moral assessment.
The authors point out that people see corporations as being akin to robots–having no feelings but having powerful capabilities. There is much more to be said about how the moral dyad relates to political economy, but I will save that for when I have finished the book.
Note that fans of Girard talk of a scapegoat mechanism, which also addresses how people assign moral rights and responsibilities. I like the moral dyad better. It is better defined and apparently more empirically grounded. Here is what Sweeny wrote:
Sub-Dunbar vs. Super-Dunbar
Among the relevant psychological characteristics that humans developed in the Pleistocene were our propensities toward tribalism, egalitarianism, and zero-sum thinking. We evolved in small bands composed of 25 to 200 individuals. We all knew and were often related to one another. Everyone knew who contributed to the band’s survival and who shirked his or her responsibilities. Cheaters and free riders were targets of anger and, sometimes, punishment.
…To summarize, the psychology that evolved when our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer groups prepared us to cope with a world of personal cooperation and exchange in small communities. It did not prepare us to cope with a world of impersonal cooperation and exchange between millions of people (i.e., a typical advanced economy) or billions of people (i.e., the global economy). In a way, the complexity of the modern economy outran the ability of our Stone Age minds to understand it. Yet it is that transition, from personal simplicity to impersonal complexity, that makes capitalism so effective at producing great wealth. To complicate matters further, the extended marketplace of millions or billions of people enables enterprising individuals with value-creating ideas to amass greater wealth than they would be able to amass while catering to small communities. That resulting wealth inequality rubs against our egalitarian predispositions and zero-sum thinking. Finally, our tribalism helps to explain why, even when we do consent to trade with other nations, we often continue to resent them and suspect them of thriving at our expense.
I have written a lot about this, both in Specialization and Trade and in essays such as Camping Trip economics vs. Woolen Coat economics.
One reason I suspect that people are reverting back to sub-Dunbar thinking is that smart phones have confused the intimate sub-Dunbar world and the remote super-Dunbar world. Corporate CEO’s used to be part of the remote world, and you did not care about them personally. Now they show up on the same screen as your friends. So they have to take positions on social issues in order to remain on your good side.
Julia Galef watch
I found out about her from a FITs owner, who was very enthusiastic. It looks like he was right. Here is Michael Shermer reviewing her new book, The Scout Mindset.
Scouts, Ms. Galef explains, “revise their opinions incrementally over time, which makes it easier to be open to evidence against their beliefs.” They also “view errors as opportunities to hone their skill at getting things right, which makes the experience of realizing ‘I was wrong’ feel valuable, rather than just painful.” In fact, the author suggests, we should drop the whole “wrong” confession and instead describe the process as “updating”—a reference to Bayesian reasoning, in which we revise our estimations of the probability of something’s being true after gaining new information about it. “An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin,” Ms. Galef continues. “An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.”