Comments on “Wreckage: the culture war”

1) Family bonding and stability is the key to a decent society; monogamy makes people better human beings by promoting loyalty, respect, and civilized virtues. Homosexual urges are a biological fact, and when they do not have a socially sanctioned structure for their lives in the form of marriage, their character degenerates into promiscuity and vice.

2) A society should be judged first and foremost by how it cares for its weakest and most vulnerable members. Children are always the most vulnerable in any society; they lack options and are unable to escape oppression on their own. It is unfair to risk their safety and human development by subjecting them to the untested experiment of new forms of child-rearing. If an experimental change to a child’s upbringing would not be allowed by an IRB, it should not become a new social policy.

3) While consenting adults can make any contract they wish, children do not have the mental ability for meaningful consent, and therefore we must enforce default social contracts for them, based on our best understanding of their coherent extrapolated volition.

It is likely that almost everyone would choose to grow up in an environment that matches its biological needs for a psychologically healthy upbringing, and would be willing to sacrifice future freedoms to do so. Behind the veil of ignorance, most people would be willing to sign the contract “I will significantly increase the odds that I grow up in an environment that allows me to reach my full potential as a sapient being, and in exchange I forfeit my future right to raise sapient beings if I have any mutation that significantly impairs my ability to do so.”

Let ‘marriage’ be defined in our social code as a reserved keyword denoting a standard social institution optimized for the production of future healthy sapient beings. All marriages must satisfy conditions that a potential sapient being would wish to be raised in, so entry into this status is reserved for those who can demonstrate the ability to properly raise sapient beings.

As science advances, we will develop a more accurate understanding of the proper conditions for healthy psychological growth, and better tests for suitability to be a parent. However, as a first approximation, we can assume that a household with only two men or two women responsible for childrearing lacks some essential ingredients for the full healthy development of a child.

“It has also been terrific for the ruling class—both politicians and plutocrats. When politics is mostly about sex, drugs, religion, and cartoon frogs, it is much easier to cut backroom deals that capture regulatory agencies and redirect trillions of tax dollars to business interests. “

It is frustrating how few people understand this. The most disturbing thing to me about this US presidential election is not Trump, it is the extent to which the New Left identity grievance movement has managed to redirect attention away from it.

I haven՚t finished processing this post, but something about it is bothering me right off the bat. It doesn՚t seem to live in the current historical moment, which for me demands an attitude entirely different from this position of abstracted symmetry. The two sides are not equivalent – one of them is flirting openly with actual fascism.

Fascism is not merely a different set of values, and the proper reaction to fascism is not, in my opinion, trying to carefully model its moral system so that it can be persuaded with argument. It needs to be defeated with force, hopefully in this case just the force of numbers in an election, although the legitimacy and finality of elections are in the process of being undermined, so who knows.

So maybe I am just stuck at an early developmental stage or am otherwise unable to transcend my partisanship, but there it is. If there is a culture war I know what side I՚m on.

Of course I can see the value of your noble effort to adjudicate a peace in the culture wars by taking an abstract position meta to both sides. That sounds admirable, and encouraging people to empathetically model their opponents is admirable. But I think we are far past that stage, and I speak as someone who has tried to engage with the right-wing on the internet a lot over the years.

I also disagree strongly with the goal of “disentangling morality from politics” – I don՚t think this is either possible or desirable. Politics is either a conflict between different value systems, or else a mere tribal contest between rival ethnicities or gangs. I՚d rather it be the former.

You might be suffering from a form of antipolitics, a syndrome common in geek culture and stemming from a dislike of conflict. Wouldn՚t it be nice if we could transcend our differences and acknowledge each other՚s fundamental humanity? Well, yes, it would be. And we should try. But I՚m increasingly of the opinion that conflict – between political factions, between value systems, between ways of life – is just fundamental to human life, and the best we can hope for is a way to work out those conflicts without actual bloodshed.

One other point: I think your analysis conflates the larger cultural war – which in my personal factoring is mostly about the urban vs rural mentalities, but that divide maps onto the more-or-less equivalent left/right or your monist/dualist splits – with the various countercultures that arose in the 60s and 80s. The factions long predated the countercultures and while the countercultures grew into these factions and reshaped them, they don՚t really define them as a whole.

[and apologies if this is overly contentious and/or missing the point. I don’t pretend to any intellectual or (god forbid) moral authority in these matters. ]

This is the second-to-last post in a chapter on the 60s-80s movements, describing their legacy. It's not at all a complete discussion of current politics;

Right, I should remember that this is more part of a book-in-progress than commentary on the fleeting events of the day. Nonetheless you are talking at least in these parts about about recent history, so hard not to respond in that mode.

Well...some elements of the left are flirting openly with actual Stalinist communism, which is as bad, in my opinion

Some elements maybe, but their influence seems limited to a few precincts of Berkeley and Cambridge, whereas the right-wing crazies have coopted the candidate of a major political party. It՚s not really comparable.

Well... I have an idealistic, 18th century conception of politics, derived probably from a civics class I never took, as a process of collaborative rational deliberation about pragmatic policy questions.

I don՚t think so. It does, in its better forms, involve a good deal of reasoned deliberation, but I don՚t think it is ever free of the contest of concrete interests. If that isn՚t present, you don՚t really need politics, management and technical expertise will suffice.

Or, more deeply, it involves the creation of shared interests. A good politician is someone who can make the interests of a disparate group of people both appear to be aligned, and cause them to be actually aligned. The US is a sort of fiction, its interests are even more fictional, yet these fictions end up having enormous real-world power. The US coheres through various acts of magic, such as the ritual of elections through which the legitimacy of the government is maintained, and Americans are enabled to think of themselves as members of a collective rather than self-interested atoms.

This is a very basic and primal operation of all social groups. And it seems like it has to precede rationality, since it creates the conditions for cooperation.

Politics may be more about a contest of narratives than a contest of interests (eg the Trumpian story about how America has been taken advantage of but will be restored to greatness through better deals vs. the other side, harder to caricature but maybe it՚s “me and my friends at Davos are all so smart and capable and all we need is bit more money and bureaucratic power and we can fix anything”). But support for the narratives is grounded in interests or perceived interests.

Sorry, off on a tangent. Something about this stuff fascinates me...not even so much the politics per se but trying to find better ways to understand the dynamics of collectives.

I think I'm not making that mistake. I'm definitely not a libertarian,

Didn՚t mean to accuse you of libertarianism or any other ideology; if you are antipolitical it is surely your own personal flavor.

Please keep writing this kind of essay. The world needs it.

You mentioned you can’t think of a counter example similar to abortion on the left that keeps galvanizing people and being exaggerated. That’s because you probably mostly believe the myths of the left as well. Some of those include the over-exaggerated importance of racism, sexism, etc. Before everyone dogpiles to start giving all your arguments and evidence just realize, those on the right would do the same if I claimed “the negative impact of abortion is largely overstated”. Also realize that there is plenty of evidence showing a post-gender post-racial society at large (i.e. starting women engineers without children make 117% of starting male engineers, black president, etc), you’re probably just choosing to give more weight to evidence that supports your tribe.

you really really should read Alasdair Macintyre; I think you would find a lot of common ground and some strong intellectual ideas that would both challenge and bolster your thinking.

Hmm…
Well, this is potentially a big subject, and not one I have delved into deeply since my student days (I think I self-indulgently tweeted you my undergrad thesis - the contents page at list of which might be useful): https://model.report/s/nwni2n/benjamin_taylor_-_does_alasdair_macintyre_identify_a_rationally_acceptable_system_of_ethics
I can give the broad sweep, but not good references to texts any more, sorry!
He has some strong themes and an internally consistent philosophy which I find to be very persuasive, and in many respects I think might not be totally distinct from yours.
So - the breakdown of rationality in ethical argument - because of ‘cargo cult’ disconnection of ethical expression from the community and practices which in which context they held meaning: After Virtue.
The concept of the breakdown of meaning when a model of the world (Kuhnian paradigm) no longer has sufficient explanatory power - “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, & the Philosophy of Science” (this would, I think, be a good intro).
I don’t know if it is in there or in ‘whose justice, which rationality’ that he then makes the move into competing rationalities - and the idea that an incommensurable tradition which can explain both what the failing tradition fails to explain and what it can explain and why it failed.
Interestingly, in claiming that different rationalities (founded in practices and social groupings) compete for explanatory power of the human condition and useful interpretation of human context, and in the process justifying his own move from early socialism to late-life Aristotelian Thomism, Macintyre’s ultimate foundation of reality is a deeply circular one: the interpretation of the Word. And it seems to me that circular causation is a quite important point that I haven’t yet found in the samples I’ve read of your writing, but is probably there?
(Though, like Wittgenstein, he inevitably brings the Word and the Act together, since for him interpretation is not a merely intellectual process, it is an embodied and social one – and so I really resonated with meaning being created from action, with most ontological questions therefore dissolving away. (There’s a systems thinking/family therapy approach based on this called ‘co-ordinated management of meaning’, which is one of those many things I think more people should be more interested in).
There’s a very early paper he wrote on Marxism which talks about hermeneutics and in the last book I read (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry – Dependent Rational Animals came out after I left university – I bought it recently but haven’t read it), he returns to hermeneutics to justify his Thomism.
I think he holds views about modernism, post-modernism, and meaning in community that you would find interesting – I found it very consistent with a ‘there’s no self without other’ view, which I share since being infected with existentialist philosophy (and the Saint-Simon sort of side of Marx and Hegel which speaks to production, creation, and alienation - you might also say that there is no self without production (which might be creating relationships), and that self is therefore never limited to self-in-self cos there is self-in-other by definition (by essence) - this can be considered a definition of ‘wholeness’ or a definition of ‘alienation’, depending). But that’s where existentialism gets you - hyphenated composite words.

I’ll end with a good quote:

“I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?’”

I found this article super interesting and insightful but I feel like there was a major oversight that should be mentioned. You say that “conservatives [are primarily concerned] with civilization vs. barbarism” but that doesn’t really fit the small/anti-govt push of the last few decades, such as is being seen in the right’s extreme hostility towards Obamacare. It fits your overall monist vs dualist concept fairly well, but not so much the discussion on “Languages of Politics” as you describe it.

The “alliance of convenience” has been my thinking as well but it kinda muddies the waters in terms of “Languages of Politics” because it shows that individuals can swap around their “language” depending on the issue, since many conservatives will very passionately defend things with a more “anti-barbarism” argument on one issue and then switch to “anti-coercion” arguments for another. It makes the hope of mutual understanding and communication even more complicated.

“It’s an everybody-else-vs.-the-financial-industry issue. How can subsidies in excess of a trillion dollars a year persist, with no popular support from either the right or the left?”

What subsidies?

(P.S. – I can never enter anything into the ‘homepage’ field, or your spam filter blocks my comment.)

“The collapse of belief in all grand narratives is the defining feature of postmodernity. “

That’s what post-modernists would like you to believe. But post-modernism is also an eternalist dogma. It assumes that no other accounts of reality or meaning are possible other than 13th-century scholastic ones, that words are signifiers for eternal essences, and that “meaning” can only be a hypothetical connection between a word and an eternal, transcendent essence. The post-modern arguments against grand narratives are all arguments against 13th-century grand narratives and accounts of meaning. They subtly reject all scientific thought by pretending it doesn’t exist, by claiming to talk about science when they are talking about Aristotelianism.

I’ve heard the “one in 10 bridges is not structurally sound” quote many times before. We should stop using it; it’s obviously false. I don’t know how many concrete bridges there are on public roads in America, but if one in 10 were not structurally sound in 2013, then at least one of them would’ve collapsed since 2013– but as far as I know, none of them have.

“Disentangling morality from politics would be enormously helpful.”

I think these words are almost synonyms. If they aren’t, that would mean that people are amoral–that their social intentions (politics) are not driven by morals, and that “morality” means not a code of behavior that a person plans to follow himself, but one which he falsely promotes in the hope that other people will follow it.

“Research suggests that the differences in values between the tribes are much smaller than both think. Most supposed conflicts in fundamental values are actually disagreements about concrete issues (is euthanasia OK? is cultural appropriation OK?) that were given symbolic significance through mythological reasoning.”

Political conflicts are conflicts in conclusions. Conclusions differ for at least two main reasons:

1. People compress out different information when encoding information. Whatever algorithm we use to encode information, it must reduce its dimensionality first. Dimensionality reduction saves the dimensions which experience has taught the organism are most significant, and throws out the ones experience has taught it to be less significant. Conservatives and liberals will remember different parts of the same speech, and their reasoning will be better able to match and make use of information along the dimensions they consider important.

2. Given the information stored in their brains, people use different reasoning techniques. Both political parties today are Rationalist, meaning they believe politics should be based on theorem-proving, as in geometry. Each takes as axiomatic beliefs which are not empirically justified. They are unable to question, or even to conceive of questioning their axioms, and as Rationalists they are unable to think about certainty, which their logic cannot represent, and opposed to the idea of compromise.

You’re a co-author of that 1987 paper on Pengi, aren’t you?

… so you should understand when I say that Rationalism, the philosophy underlying both political parties today, is precisely GOFAI. This philosophy was brought over by the Puritans to New England, and has since taken over all positions of power in the US.

New England’s only strong political opponent among the Colonies was the South. New England puritanism took over the Southern churches by spreading Baptist theology to the south, much aided by the Great Awakening and the war with Britain, which both weakened American Anglicanism.

It consolidated its position by founding universities all across America, as well as evangelizing the West Coast. Most of the elite universities in the US (eg Harvard, Princeton, Yale) were founded /specifically to promote Rationalist theology/, which is what they still do today. The 4 main promulgators of post-modern ideology are the University of Paris, Yale, Harvard, and maybe Oxford, all of which were founded /not/ to promote “higher education”, but to teach an ontology and theology based on medieval scholastisism; and post-modernism is simply medieval scholastic beliefs circa 1300 minus God.

The keystone of their political dominance is the university system. All roads to cultural importance, whether financial, political, academic, scientific, or in the fine arts, now require going through an elite university–and all merit-based scholarships have been eliminated, and objective measures of academic merit downgraded in favor of “holistic” measures, meaning control of who gets in can be entirely ideological.

“symbolic meanings overlay and distort an underlying practical matter. Abortion…”

Is that really fair? Isn’t abortion a serious moral issue (or multiple issues), not just a political game piece?

After all, these questions seem deeply moral and philosophical:
- Is all human life sacred?
- Is all human life of equal value?
- When do the rights of one human life outweigh those of another?
- Is a fetus human?
- Is all life (even if non-human) sacred, equal value, etc? (animal rights movement as well as fetus)
- Is birth control of any form moral?
- Is sex for pleasure morally acceptable? Does it elevate or degrade the person?
etc.

That is to say, that the prevalence of the abortion issue may well be causally over-determined, both by morally irrelevant factors of political expediency (your “tribes” signaling and rallying cry), and by real, serious, moral, ethical, socio-political, philosophical concerns.

You left out one reproductive strategy; let’s number it “0” instead of “4” since it’s the null solution:
0. No children. (This may be a purely local decision, or a philosophical position of anti-natalism in general).

“perhaps they can agree to let each other get on with their own strategy…”
This sort of live-and-let-live relativism is problematic in an issue like reproduction, since the decisions made there have massive repercussions affecting others. Whether to bring more human lives into this world; whether those lives will offer constructive contributions to society, or be dysfunctional and destructive; etc.

Also, is it really so that morality is always a post-facto justification for tribal preference? Even if most persons at first inherit values, at least some thoughtful persons critically consider value judgements and form their own worldview rationally, and then choose any group/tribe/community based on those values, rather than vice versa. (Perhaps they are even strong enough to stand by those values without finding or joining any sympathetic group, as dissidents).

Of course, sexuality is more than just reproduction, so sexual ethics/morality are about more than just reproductive strategies.

Consider how many ethical/moral systems, address and often promote sexual temperance, or even abstinence, as methods to avoid self- and other- debasement and degradation. These views often relate to the views on the body (or even the entire material world) in general, and on pleasure in general.

In evolutionary psych terms, sex < reproduction. Ethical/moral systems are only needed to promote altruistic behavior. Behavior that’s good for the organism promoting it evolves on its own. Explaining moral codes in terms of “personal development” may explain their historical origins, but that is just the random noise which is the grist for evolution’s mill.

Every ethical dictum, therefore, is something which either (A) is a random development, (B) promotes group survival, or (C) promotes the reproduction of those who /don’t/ follow the dictum over those who do. People have evolved to have a wide discrepancy between the ethics they “believe in” (consciously), and the ethics they personally follow, because both promoting and violating ethical rules gives them a reproductive advantage.

Evolutionary psychology surely plays a role, but it does not seem to explain all human behavior. After all, we are able to choose values, and act, in ways that have little or no relation to reproductive success, or may even negate such success (e.g. as an extreme example, promoting anti-natalism for the entire species).

This is especially so once humanity is so established that it has no real competitors for world dominance. We are then able to have “luxury” acts, practices, values, cultural institutions etc. that have no survival or reproductive advantage.

Also extended lifespans means we live far beyond reproductive age, on average, at which point the choice of interests, acts, values confers no reproductive advantage or disadvantage.

More generally: I don’t believe we only come to judge as “good” post-facto that which survives (memes) or enables survival (evolutionary psychology). That explains some value judgements, perhaps; but there are also value judgement we can make at a more fundamental level (from, say, a rational or aesthetic ideal).

Evolutionary psychology explains human behavior in the way that chemistry or physics explains biology. It is often not the best or simplest explanation, but so far as I know, we can always expect it to be the ultimate explanation, if only for having created the playing field on which other games have been played. Note, of course, that stochastic variation in its working out does not need to be explained.

Rationality can operate only given fundamental values, which we can explain best by evolutionary psychology (or by evolution without any psychology; I don’t mean to set up a category of “terminal values” which draw a boundary between the products of evolution and the products of evolutionary psychology). Aesthetics are presumably one type of evolved value.

I forgot to say: You can’t simultaneously believe both that humans were produced via evolution, and that something other than evolutionary psychology explains some aspect of human psychology.

… re. my previous statement, I again mean ev psych as an ultimate cause, not as an efficient or proximal cause, and I’m again excluding random variations from the set of things which can be causally explained. And I’m again making a distinction that is useless from certain perspectives. If we ask why Catholics, Muslims, and Marxists have such a long history of attacking and trying to subvert neighboring countries, the behavior itself is proximally causally explained by their beliefs. But while “evolution” didn’t cause that behavior, the prevalence of that behavior, and of the psychology disposed to it, can be explained by evolutionary theory.

I’m trying to be more concise so my attempt at the Turing Test is less nuanced that it could be.

1. The fundamental unit of society is the family. All social stability is predicated on the successful reproduction of that family unit. Homosexuality represents a threat to the sanctity of the family and therefore to the health of society and its members. It is therefore wise to accept the need for homosexual marriage in order to align homosexuals with traditional values that preserve that social stability.

2. Marriage is an inherently unequal social relationship that preserves patriarchal power relations and perpetuates the violence of the nuclear family. To extend marriage rights to homosexuals would be to capture alternative ways of living within an oppressive social structure. This would be detrimental to the pursuit of alternative and curtail the possibility of developing more liberatory ways of living.

3. Consensual same-sex relationships are entirely legitimate but same-sex marriage should be prohibited because the extension of marriage rights to homosexuals requires an extension of state power. As state power is illegitimate it should be minimised wherever possible, therefore a consistent libertarian will oppose any unnecessary extension of that power.

I wonder if currently (late March 2016) we’re seeing a major turning point in the culture war. The coronavirus is forcing a firming up of barriers in a very practical sense, even among those who have been committed to the monist counterculture – maybe especially among them. (I’ve heard of a number of presumably-dualist Christians expressing confidence that God will protect them, but nothing similar on the other side.)

The culture war in general seems to have gone a bit quiet at the moment. There’s still a lot of tribal signalling, of course, but it seems to be mostly about trying to fix the blame for the mess, which is refreshingly practical.

Simply put, I think/hope counter-cultural monism has taken a massive beating from this. Even after the threat dies down and the culture war starts back up, I think/hope it will be just a little less heated.

Thank you for your kind offer of of a truce to the culture wars. I would be happy with a government that ensured an even playing field for the mating strategies you describe. In this spirit, I ask for the elimination of welfare and social programs that support children in families with minimal parental investment. I am sure you can agree that transfer payments that support strategy one do not make for an even playing field, and levying taxes to pay for these programs is not leaving people alone.

“Wreckage: the culture war”
I agree with most of the points in this essay and have previously thought about many of them.
I believe the main take away is that the culture war is at the very heart of what is wrong in America today and no matter what side of the war you’re on, you are contributing to societal destruction.
Destruction which is caused by both side constantly calling on government to regulate every detail of human existence, based on mythical thinking and the desire to punish “those awful people over there” rather than logic and reason. I can see why you would believe if these warring factions could just understand the things you outline here, they would stop this incessant call to self-interested politicians (government) who have a monopoly on the use of coercive violence. Good idea.
I would go a step further and say people need to seriously question whether or not an entity like government, which wields exceptional and extraordinary power over the vast majority of humanity should even exist.

1) By institutionalizing marriage for gay couples, they will respect the boundaries toward other people and society at large. They will be able to fulfil their love for each other, and will be loyal to the country.

2) The problem with same-sex marriage is that it will encourage the couples to adopt kids, and they will not be able to provide the same care for the children, in the same way, that heterosexual couples can. Also, it is encouraging their marginalization by proclaiming to the world at large that you are a gay person. It is better to be more subtle about these things.

3) Because it is enacting an unnecessary and perhaps even harmful institution imposed by the government, that forces people to be prescribed and labelled as gay, rather than doing it on their own terms, freely.