Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich write,
the institutions built around kinship and marriage vary greatly across societies (21–23) and that much of this variation developed as societies scaled up in size and complexity, especially after the origins of food production 12,000 years ago (22, 24–29). In forging the tightly-knit communities needed to defend agricultural fields and pastures, cultural evolution gradually wove together social norms governing marriage, post-marital residence and ingroup identity (descent), leading to a diversity of kin-based institutions, including the organizational forms known as clans, lineages and kindreds (21, 27, 30). The second insight, based on work in psychology, is that people’s motivations, emotions, perceptions, thinking styles and other aspects of cognition are heavily influenced by the social norms, social networks, technologies and linguistic worlds they encounter while growing up (31–38). In particular, with intensive kin-based institutions, people’s psychological processes adapt to the collectivistic demands and the dense social networks that they interweave (39–43). Intensive kinship norms reward greater conformity, obedience, holistic/relational awareness and in-group loyalty but discourage individualism, independence and analytical thinking (41, 44). Since the sociality of intensive kinship is based on people’s interpersonal embeddedness, adapting to these institutions tends to reduce people’s inclinations towards impartiality, universal (non-relational) moral principles and impersonal trust, fairness and cooperation. Finally, based on historical evidence, the third insight suggests that the branch of Western Christianity that eventually evolved into the Roman Catholic Church—hereafter, ‘the Western Church’ or simply ‘the Church’—systematically undermined the intensive kin-based institutions of Europe during the Middle Ages (45–52). The Church’s marriage policies and prohibitions, which we will call the Marriage and Family Program (MFP), meant that by 1500 CE, and likely centuries earlier in some regions, Europe lacked strong kin-based institutions, and was instead dominated by relatively weak, independent and isolated nuclear or stem families (49–51, 53–56). This made people exposed to Western Christendom rather unlike nearly all other populations.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who tells us how politically incorrect the paper is by saying that he expected (but did not find) a Steve Sailer citation. This paper should be catnip for the IDW.
Possibly related, but not as controversial: I did a podcast with Russ Roberts recently (it may or not already be up) on the theme that human beings are social. I argue for the importance of culture, based in part on my reading of Henrich. Compared with animals, for humans the ratio of culturally learned behavior to innate behavior is extremely high. This is important, in my view.
Almost certainly related: The Origins of English Individualism, by Alan MacFarlane.
Which occupations give more money to D’s and which give more to R’s? This graphic tells the story. Maybe the pairings are manipulated, but taking each occupation one by one, I don’t think there are too many that you would have guessed wrong.
Pointer from Charles Chu.
As this is being written, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were supposed to have a discussion of religion at a theater in Vancouver the nights of June 23rd and 24th. This post is going up the following day.
The Disputation of Barcelona took place about 750 years ago. My guess is that it’s been quite a while since we’ve had a disputation. The Peterson-Harris battle is so highly anticipated that tickets cost a fortune. And it may have been sold out!
I find this very encouraging. I would much rather see people going for this than reading newspaper columns and twitter feeds.
Although Harris is not a fan of what he sees as the baggage of religion, he is a fan of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Peterson is a fan of Jungian views of a sort of universal unconscious.
My own view is that the value of insights that we might get from altered states of consciousness is low and getting lower.
Let me start with a metaphor in which we have a physical layer, an operating system, and an application layer. So when you eat, your digestive system is the physical layer. Your cravings and your inclination to enjoy sugar and fat come from the operating system, which is your brain as shaped by evolution and your particular genetic inheritance. But at the application layer–how you find food, how your food is prepared, what you choose to eat, and so on–that is all cultural. You copy others, you learn from others, you experiment within the context of the people and technology around you.
I am not saying that this is a scientifically useful metaphor. But I use it to point out that most of what we are is cultural. We come into the world knowing nothing at all about pizza or french fries or sushi. Over many generations, humans have built up this vast storehouse of cultural paraphernalia–buildings, equipment, social norms, organizations, books, electronic devices, art, music, dance, sports, science. We put tremendous effort into communicating with one another, teaching with one another, and exchanging with one another in order to share access to the contents of this vast cultural supermarket.
Is there stuff sitting in altered states of consciousness that we can’t find in the rest of our cultural supermarket? Is that stuff really so important that we should devote a lot of our lives to exploring it through Biblical stories or Buddhist meditation or psychedelics? I am not dismissing that such exploration is worthless, just questioning whether it is of great value to more than a few people.
I understand that people want there to be meaning in their lives. But you don’t necessarily need altered states of consciousness to find meaning. You can find meaning from caring–about family, friends, art, science, sports, philosophy, religion, politics, nature, you name it. My guess is that the more you care about what you are close to, like your family, and the less you try to derive meaning from caring about distant phenomena, like celebrities or politics, the better off all of us are.
the governance technologies and strategies of authoritarian regimes have become much more efficient.
I’m not sure that this holds in general. Venezuela?
I am willing to speculate that right now autocrats have a comparative advantage at staying in power. That is, in a Martin Gurri world, where the public is in revolt in many places (Italy, Germany, the U.S., Iran, various countries in Latin America), it is easier for an official to remain in power if he has the tools to suppress the most challenging forms of opposition.
I think it’s more likely that tribal emotions, behaviors, and tactics may be a consequence of perceptions regarding how high the stakes are in a political contest and anxieties regarding trends in relative power and status. That is to say, not something that can be defused by normative recommitments, but only by lowering what’s at stake, which could only be accomplished by some reliable guarantee of security for the status quo and giving up on one’s agenda for political reform in exchange for comity and peace.
He wrote that before I posted on Lilliana Mason’s book. I see her as arguing that political feelings are heated because of group-psychology factors. She cites a number of empirical studies to show that differences in policy issues do not loom so large in accounting for increased polarization. I see Handle as taking the opposite point of view. He thinks that the policy differences loom large, so that appealing to social psychology is a cop-out.
According to a study by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, which I have not read, many Americans who identify as conservative actually hold liberal policy positions. From the book’s Amazon page:
Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans’ attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.
Pointer from Lillian Mason’s book, Uncivil Agreement, that I recently raved about.
One can interpret this sort of study in either a liberal-favoring way or a conservative-favoring way. The liberal-favoring way would be to say that conservatism is a form of “false consciousness.” People have been manipulated into identifying as conservatives, even though what they really want are liberal policies.
The other interpretation is that, as someone (help me out, I am forgetting who) once said, people are conservative about what they know best. They want government to get involved in issues that they know least about.
Those who like their own party least, often loath the opposition most. I will refer to this as the defensiveness hypothesis.
Tyler Cowen’s post put me on the trail that ended with this paper.
Suppose you identify with one party, but you find that increasingly you do not like what the party is doing. You might think that your response would be to tone down your partisanship. But instead, you dial up your opposition to the other party. This approach avoids the cognitive dissonance that otherwise would result from supporting a party that is not doing what you like.
According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the families moving out, $70,015 to $57,376.
Conversely, in the struggling Syracuse metropolitan area (Clinton 53.9 percent, Trump 40.1 percent), families moving in between 2005 and 2016 had median household incomes of $35,219 — $7,229 less than the median income of the families moving out of the region, $42,448.
It’s a long essay, worth reading in its entirety. Edsall’s focus is on the evolution of the political coalition that makes up the Democratic Party. But I find the economic phenomenon interesting. The data support the Handle Hypothesis that urbanization has become a winners-take-most game. The article by Issi Romem that Edsall refers to is also worth reading. Romem writes,
Why do the expensive coastal metros exhibit positive income sorting? These metros are expensive because they have restricted their supply of new housing even as they continue to generate strong demand for it.
Kevin Erdmann and many others have been saying this for quite some time.
Related: Pew reports,
In 2001, 13 percentage points separated the shares of white and African-American renter households that were burdened: 26 and 39 percent, respectively. . .By 2015, the share of African-American-led renter households that were burdened had risen to 46 percent
Rent-burdened is defined as spending more than 30 percent of a household’s income on rent. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I think that the political threat to the Democratic Party is minimal. Group identity seems to overcome anything. The Democrats can be anti-Israel and still get most of the Jewish vote. Their policies make housing less affordable and drive African-Americans out of Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, but they still get most of the black vote.
William Galston provides highlights from a Pew survey of how party support has shifted over the past twenty years. He writes,
Democrats’ advantage in urban counties has shot up from 18 to 31 points, while Republicans have gone from a tie with Democrats in rural areas to a 16-point lead today.
He gives many other examples. He does not say so, but most of the demographic categories that favor Democrats are growing larger, while those that favor Republicans are shrinking. I recommend the entire column.
But I was most struck by this sentence fragment:
among voters with no more than a high school diploma—the so-called working class
In 1950, if you added together manufacturing production workers and mine workers, you could get a large enough total to constitute a “class.” I would guess close to one-third of adult males, maybe more. They made the AFL-CIO a big deal.
Today, those two groups would be much less than 10 percent of all employment. So, less than 5 percent of adult males? In any case, not enough to really call a class. So Galston has to describe working class as “no more than a high school diploma,” and he has to include the qualifier “so-called.”
My point is not to knock Galston or to deny the significance of differences based on educational attainment. I’m fine talking about a social or political divide that correlates with education. I just want to get rid of the term “working class.” In the 21st century, I don’t see how it can be defined in a useful way.