Do we have a bit of conflation going on here? We seem to talk about social conservatives being stupider and the more liberal social elites being smarter, but is that the question, i.e., “the smarter elites should guide the way”, when discussing cultural progression.
In “Coming Apart:…” by Charles Murray, he describes two fictional communities, Belmont and Fishtown. Belmont represents an affluent, educated upper-class neighborhood, while Fishtown symbolizes a working-class, less educated area. Murray uses these communities to illustrate the growing cultural divide in America. Basically Belmont, the elite “smart” community does alright navigating the cultural change we now are witnessing. Fishtown, not so much. Fishtown are the “stupid” ones suffering all the pathologies we (fellow conservative troglodytes) so decry.
Could it be that the smarter we are the better able we are to control ourselves and our lives, whereas the stupider we are, the more we *need* conservative social morality imposed.
I would say that if you separate cultural transmission between vertical (from family members) and horizontal (in our time, school, media), you see that liberal ideas are far better transmitted in the horizontal, while traditional ideas have advantage in the vertical mechanism. The efficiency of horizontal transmission has been increasing for centuries.
The Susan Blackmore hypothesis on fertility is obviously better (but less accepted) than Becker materialism.
"In this paper, I build on (Blackmore 2000) to propose a formal theory of demographic transition (fertility decline) and associated growth of the stock of knowledge. The novelty of this theory is to entirely exclude private consumption from the objective function of the decision makers, and to assume that their goal is to maximize their social influence, that is, the number of people in the next generation utilizing their ideas."
Culture is important, but memes are not the only rapidly transmitted parasite that benefits from sterilizing its host and repurposing its reproductive resources. I would point at candida, HIV and COVID-19 as sterilizing influences that are *not* primarily cultural.
As the paper argues, it is the increased horizontal transmission is making these influences more maladaptive for their hosts. For memes this is associated with high speed communications networks. For other parasites, international travel and the sheer number of humans on the planet are similar factors that favor horizontal transmission.
My impression is that there are many cautionary tales of cultural drift, certainly in the Old Testament and I'm sure elsewhere. Is there a common theme of elites out-smarting themselves, as in the Tower of Babel?
Probably also relates closely to the concept of asabiyyah. Why can't the Romans, Mongols, etc., remain a tough, martial, united people? Because their success relaxes the selection pressures that formed that culture in the first place, and thus they drift towards something weaker.
You can read the OT from Joshua through 2 Kings as a tale of the Jews' asabiyyah deteriorating until the final fall to Babylon.
Is it not a standard collective action problem? Maybe it is good for me for society generally to conform to norm set X, but that doesn’t mean I always want to conform to those norms.
OTOH, if we want to cheat on sex norms, we need some other dissidents or nothing happens. Maybe simple hypocrisy? X for my daughters and my sisters, ~X for the scullery maid and that hottie at the pub? At least according to popular fiction (and record of known bastards of aristocrats), this was a fairly stable pattern in European history. If there was selection pressure, it was hard to notice it at work, other than the fact that VD carriers tended to be infertile.
What about the economic theory. People have a degree of natural empathy and an even greater desire to be seen as empathetic and compassionate.
As we get richer, we are naturally willing to spend more to satisfy those desires because of decreasing marginal utility of greater consumption in an area.
Opposing slavery is economically costly etc .. and even if back in the day you're personal interests weren't directly affected we are also pressured to align with views of the rest of our society and to be coherent.
Unfortunately, the most effective way to signal you care about, say, people who can't afford housing may not be the best way to actually help them. After all, maybe you really believe that opening up market rate development benefits them or maybe you're really just a developer shill but proposing affordability requirements on new construction is a harder to confuse signal (importantly those evaluating the signal are not themselves sure of what helps).
I said in the post that there might be natural tendencies for the rich to get more liberal, tendencies that were stopped when selection pressures were strong.
I see, I assumed by selective pressures you meant pressures based on the overall success/failure of the society. I didn't think that included individual preferences.
For instance, I think one could have had a much more liberal country in 1800 then we had that was otherwise roughly (not completely but small enough not to make it substantially less likely to persist) as strong but sacrificed a degree of personal comfort for more compassionate policies -- if people had stronger relative preferences for compassion to comfort.
Maybe you mean to incorporate that all into selection pressure -- given that people aren't willing to sacrifice that much comfort to look compassionate it would create selection pressure against such a society? Though I worry that definition is getting so broad it just means "is what happened".
Hanania nailed it when he said “Although some try to make secular arguments for the Christian positions on topics like euthanasia, abortion, and LGBT, very few people find such arguments convincing unless they’ve already accepted a religious framework.” I think that’s the key to understanding this problem.
Intellectual people with a Christian religious framework will be able to intuitively support some of these social conservative views, but those without a religious framework will not find such beliefs intuitive. In the last 100 years or so, universities have been a de-Christianizing cultural force, resulting in educated people increasingly having a less Christian framework than the less educated. Thus the correlation between education and social conservative views.
Framing this as a "moral realism" issue inheritis the confusions of that framing. What's so wrong with the theory that civilization, knowledge, technology and morality are all improving? It has little to do with "cultural drift". The infertility epidemic is not a great counter-argument. There is no rule that says that human DNA gets to go along for the ride.
The citation for "it predicts a random walk pattern" says: "This is not a random walk." It argues that people got gradually richer and their moral behavior gradually changed. That doesn't seem like a random walk either.
Of course, the expanding moral circle is not the result of a random walk. It's part of civilizational progress. Yes, evolutionary progress is a taboo topic, and many people promote nonsense about all races and cultures being equal - but I think we have to get with the program here.
Let le offer a different explanation. Christianity always had some internal contradictions. The Bible depicts a hippie Jesus, peaceful, do-gooder, forgiving and so on, but the average behaviour of a monarch or high priest during the Middle Ages was not like that at all. Perhaps, it was not possible or pragmatic.
Then society gets richer and more people are able to read, Protestantism happens, people read the Bible, and start to notice this. Slowly, very slowly, the attempt to be come less hypocritical and more and more actually act like Jesus. This is a slow process as it requires abandoning many of the old ways of doing things. But eventually we get to a point where do-gooder, forgiving, tolerant, peaceful Liberal Protestantism is big.
Then this slowly secularizes and the secularized version of do-like-Jesus becomes the norm of educated people.
You're reifying belief systems as real things. Being conservative points to nothing in particular. It more points away from things. Liberalism is a political ideology based in the individual as an ontology. People's beliefs, even completely equal, as not themselves a new, or their own, thing. You can't make larger assumptions about it because it doesn't exist equally as a larger assumption with liberalism.
It seems to me the most durable explanation for "elite" social beliefs over the millennia is: Elites believe whatever promotes their own self-interest. (And there is usually a strong correlation between "elites" in an economic/power sense, and elites in an IQ sense.)
What shifts over time is the answer to the question: What benefits the smart people? When religion was the primary glue and behavior-enforcer of society, the elites promoted religiosity and conservative norms because that kept the rabble in check and them in power. When the legal and police systems became the behavior-enforcers of society, the elites shifted to "liberal" values like educating women and bringing them into the workplace, because that benefitted them economically. It remains to be seen how elite values will shift now that fertility is dropping, and people are starting to understand the long-term economic consequences of that.
"Any of these variations predict norms/values getting more liberal in a relatively steady manner after selection pressures weakened recently. They presume that liberal norms were not previously adaptive, and suggest that such norms are also not adaptive now. "
Another hypothesis would be that "*liberal norms were not previously adaptive but those are adaptive now*". It seems likely that people who are more clever are more likely to question norms and find that some of them do not make sense.
An example of that would be homosexuality. Conservative society has generally had a strong stance against male homosexuality (but not so against female one). Indeed male-male sex without protection is particularly risky (ex: 1/72 risk of transmitting aids to a recipient of anal sex while the risk is 1/1250 for the recipient of vaginal sex and almost negligeable for female-female sex). So if unprotected male-male sex was very likely to spread STDs and there were no protections available, forbidding it made sense and societies doing so would have had a better fitness.
Now, with technology and science, we have protections (condoms), which can significantly reduce STD transmission risks and we are also better at curing those. So with the negative impacts of male homosexuality being greatly reduced, the positive impacts (having a life partner, greater mood, lack of sexual frustration, etc leading to more productivity for the individual and people close to him) may overcome the residual negative ones.
Clever people may have (on average) an easier time to understand that, but people with lower cognitive abilities may (on average) be less likely to understand it and just use current social norms, even if those are outdated.
Yes, but conservative morality is very random. They should be focusing on not getting teenage girls pregnant. Apparently they have more problem with trans and gay people. And when teenage girls get pregnant, they don't want them to get abortions.
It is not simply about playing life on safe mode, it is rather being against random things.
Do we have a bit of conflation going on here? We seem to talk about social conservatives being stupider and the more liberal social elites being smarter, but is that the question, i.e., “the smarter elites should guide the way”, when discussing cultural progression.
In “Coming Apart:…” by Charles Murray, he describes two fictional communities, Belmont and Fishtown. Belmont represents an affluent, educated upper-class neighborhood, while Fishtown symbolizes a working-class, less educated area. Murray uses these communities to illustrate the growing cultural divide in America. Basically Belmont, the elite “smart” community does alright navigating the cultural change we now are witnessing. Fishtown, not so much. Fishtown are the “stupid” ones suffering all the pathologies we (fellow conservative troglodytes) so decry.
Could it be that the smarter we are the better able we are to control ourselves and our lives, whereas the stupider we are, the more we *need* conservative social morality imposed.
I would say that if you separate cultural transmission between vertical (from family members) and horizontal (in our time, school, media), you see that liberal ideas are far better transmitted in the horizontal, while traditional ideas have advantage in the vertical mechanism. The efficiency of horizontal transmission has been increasing for centuries.
The Susan Blackmore hypothesis on fertility is obviously better (but less accepted) than Becker materialism.
>The efficiency of horizontal transmission has been increasing for centuries.
Valid point and an interesting frame.
>Susan Blackmore hypothesis on fertility
Hadn't heard of this and couldn't find it with a quick search. Do you have a summary or reference?
The original idea is presented in her 1999 book “The meme machine”. It was mathematized in this paper:
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/17478/1/MPRA_paper_17478.pdf
But perhaps the original idea was by Cavalli Sforza. I have written about this in this recent pre print:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4777057
Roman's paper is a reasonable one. It says:
"In this paper, I build on (Blackmore 2000) to propose a formal theory of demographic transition (fertility decline) and associated growth of the stock of knowledge. The novelty of this theory is to entirely exclude private consumption from the objective function of the decision makers, and to assume that their goal is to maximize their social influence, that is, the number of people in the next generation utilizing their ideas."
Culture is important, but memes are not the only rapidly transmitted parasite that benefits from sterilizing its host and repurposing its reproductive resources. I would point at candida, HIV and COVID-19 as sterilizing influences that are *not* primarily cultural.
As the paper argues, it is the increased horizontal transmission is making these influences more maladaptive for their hosts. For memes this is associated with high speed communications networks. For other parasites, international travel and the sheer number of humans on the planet are similar factors that favor horizontal transmission.
My impression is that there are many cautionary tales of cultural drift, certainly in the Old Testament and I'm sure elsewhere. Is there a common theme of elites out-smarting themselves, as in the Tower of Babel?
plausibly
Probably also relates closely to the concept of asabiyyah. Why can't the Romans, Mongols, etc., remain a tough, martial, united people? Because their success relaxes the selection pressures that formed that culture in the first place, and thus they drift towards something weaker.
You can read the OT from Joshua through 2 Kings as a tale of the Jews' asabiyyah deteriorating until the final fall to Babylon.
Is it not a standard collective action problem? Maybe it is good for me for society generally to conform to norm set X, but that doesn’t mean I always want to conform to those norms.
OTOH, if we want to cheat on sex norms, we need some other dissidents or nothing happens. Maybe simple hypocrisy? X for my daughters and my sisters, ~X for the scullery maid and that hottie at the pub? At least according to popular fiction (and record of known bastards of aristocrats), this was a fairly stable pattern in European history. If there was selection pressure, it was hard to notice it at work, other than the fact that VD carriers tended to be infertile.
Modern liberalism is an IQ shredder. It converts IQ assets into present consumption and spends them down like a reverse mortgage on societal fitness.
What about the economic theory. People have a degree of natural empathy and an even greater desire to be seen as empathetic and compassionate.
As we get richer, we are naturally willing to spend more to satisfy those desires because of decreasing marginal utility of greater consumption in an area.
Opposing slavery is economically costly etc .. and even if back in the day you're personal interests weren't directly affected we are also pressured to align with views of the rest of our society and to be coherent.
Unfortunately, the most effective way to signal you care about, say, people who can't afford housing may not be the best way to actually help them. After all, maybe you really believe that opening up market rate development benefits them or maybe you're really just a developer shill but proposing affordability requirements on new construction is a harder to confuse signal (importantly those evaluating the signal are not themselves sure of what helps).
I said in the post that there might be natural tendencies for the rich to get more liberal, tendencies that were stopped when selection pressures were strong.
I see, I assumed by selective pressures you meant pressures based on the overall success/failure of the society. I didn't think that included individual preferences.
For instance, I think one could have had a much more liberal country in 1800 then we had that was otherwise roughly (not completely but small enough not to make it substantially less likely to persist) as strong but sacrificed a degree of personal comfort for more compassionate policies -- if people had stronger relative preferences for compassion to comfort.
Maybe you mean to incorporate that all into selection pressure -- given that people aren't willing to sacrifice that much comfort to look compassionate it would create selection pressure against such a society? Though I worry that definition is getting so broad it just means "is what happened".
If selection pressures are weak, the word "adaptive" loses its meaning.
Hanania nailed it when he said “Although some try to make secular arguments for the Christian positions on topics like euthanasia, abortion, and LGBT, very few people find such arguments convincing unless they’ve already accepted a religious framework.” I think that’s the key to understanding this problem.
Intellectual people with a Christian religious framework will be able to intuitively support some of these social conservative views, but those without a religious framework will not find such beliefs intuitive. In the last 100 years or so, universities have been a de-Christianizing cultural force, resulting in educated people increasingly having a less Christian framework than the less educated. Thus the correlation between education and social conservative views.
Adaptation?
Framing this as a "moral realism" issue inheritis the confusions of that framing. What's so wrong with the theory that civilization, knowledge, technology and morality are all improving? It has little to do with "cultural drift". The infertility epidemic is not a great counter-argument. There is no rule that says that human DNA gets to go along for the ride.
The citation for "it predicts a random walk pattern" says: "This is not a random walk." It argues that people got gradually richer and their moral behavior gradually changed. That doesn't seem like a random walk either.
Of course, the expanding moral circle is not the result of a random walk. It's part of civilizational progress. Yes, evolutionary progress is a taboo topic, and many people promote nonsense about all races and cultures being equal - but I think we have to get with the program here.
Let le offer a different explanation. Christianity always had some internal contradictions. The Bible depicts a hippie Jesus, peaceful, do-gooder, forgiving and so on, but the average behaviour of a monarch or high priest during the Middle Ages was not like that at all. Perhaps, it was not possible or pragmatic.
Then society gets richer and more people are able to read, Protestantism happens, people read the Bible, and start to notice this. Slowly, very slowly, the attempt to be come less hypocritical and more and more actually act like Jesus. This is a slow process as it requires abandoning many of the old ways of doing things. But eventually we get to a point where do-gooder, forgiving, tolerant, peaceful Liberal Protestantism is big.
Then this slowly secularizes and the secularized version of do-like-Jesus becomes the norm of educated people.
You're reifying belief systems as real things. Being conservative points to nothing in particular. It more points away from things. Liberalism is a political ideology based in the individual as an ontology. People's beliefs, even completely equal, as not themselves a new, or their own, thing. You can't make larger assumptions about it because it doesn't exist equally as a larger assumption with liberalism.
It seems to me the most durable explanation for "elite" social beliefs over the millennia is: Elites believe whatever promotes their own self-interest. (And there is usually a strong correlation between "elites" in an economic/power sense, and elites in an IQ sense.)
What shifts over time is the answer to the question: What benefits the smart people? When religion was the primary glue and behavior-enforcer of society, the elites promoted religiosity and conservative norms because that kept the rabble in check and them in power. When the legal and police systems became the behavior-enforcers of society, the elites shifted to "liberal" values like educating women and bringing them into the workplace, because that benefitted them economically. It remains to be seen how elite values will shift now that fertility is dropping, and people are starting to understand the long-term economic consequences of that.
"Any of these variations predict norms/values getting more liberal in a relatively steady manner after selection pressures weakened recently. They presume that liberal norms were not previously adaptive, and suggest that such norms are also not adaptive now. "
Another hypothesis would be that "*liberal norms were not previously adaptive but those are adaptive now*". It seems likely that people who are more clever are more likely to question norms and find that some of them do not make sense.
An example of that would be homosexuality. Conservative society has generally had a strong stance against male homosexuality (but not so against female one). Indeed male-male sex without protection is particularly risky (ex: 1/72 risk of transmitting aids to a recipient of anal sex while the risk is 1/1250 for the recipient of vaginal sex and almost negligeable for female-female sex). So if unprotected male-male sex was very likely to spread STDs and there were no protections available, forbidding it made sense and societies doing so would have had a better fitness.
Now, with technology and science, we have protections (condoms), which can significantly reduce STD transmission risks and we are also better at curing those. So with the negative impacts of male homosexuality being greatly reduced, the positive impacts (having a life partner, greater mood, lack of sexual frustration, etc leading to more productivity for the individual and people close to him) may overcome the residual negative ones.
Clever people may have (on average) an easier time to understand that, but people with lower cognitive abilities may (on average) be less likely to understand it and just use current social norms, even if those are outdated.
Yes, but conservative morality is very random. They should be focusing on not getting teenage girls pregnant. Apparently they have more problem with trans and gay people. And when teenage girls get pregnant, they don't want them to get abortions.
It is not simply about playing life on safe mode, it is rather being against random things.