Compared to before writing, religions that had sacred texts were better able to resist changes to their religious dogmas and dogma-enforce social rules.
The concept of heaven (putting aside its metaphysical reality) functions (functioned?) as a social technology that modern frameworks don’t replicate. The usual ills mentioned – political and cultural polarization, short-term thinking, family disintegrating, crises of meaning – are more easily addressed with the heaven concept. It's not a sacred text but it is a sacred text.
Heaven is the anchor tenant for an accountability framework that extends beyond all other large and small social institutions, offering a psychological balm for the suffering injustice and (potentially) constraining those in power. It offers deferred justice as a correction to imperfect (or corrupt) earthly systems. It transforms relationships with mortality. It softens grief, creating intergenerational continuity. It both grounds and transcends rule-based ethics, privileging thoughtfulness and character development (internalizing values) over simple compliance. It counterbalances short-term biases, enabling more thoughtful engagement with multigenerational challenges. It encourages humility. Most importantly, it provides a framework for reconciliation, which absolutely no current value system offers.
Science is meant to be about what works. If a theory is seen to work and be useful, then treat it as true, even if it is known to be an approximation or have limited situations in which it can be used.
Science could find (and maybe has found) the concept of heaven to be effective and something that works, and so raise it's status.
I'm sure plenty of smart religious people in the past thought of heaven in this way - "maybe I can't directly see heaven, but I can see the good influence it is having so we need to treat it as being true".
The reasonably popular modern view that science and religion are opposed is not very scientific.
The Asian cultures emphasize obligation to the community, and as we see in Japan those obligations can be very effective at preventing (certain kinds of) culture drift.
Speaking as an atheist, it's too bad that the West achieved social stability by hitching its wagon to an easily-disproven sacred text. That mechanism wasn't very durable.
Something I've found salutary is recognizing that we have an enormous cultural blindspot, where respect for science is taken as evidence that non-natural things cannot exist
This is not true. Science by definition does not observe non-material things. Realizing that means opening a window to the benefits of belief that are unnaturally closed off by our rejection of it as even being possible
It's very clear that our material existence does not seem to be very probable. No one seems to believe in a single universe - and therefore they believe in something that cannot be observed from our own. It's irrational to believe in a possible multiverse and disbelieve in a possible supernatural under the rubric of science
And it is a lie, which robs people of much of what they could have gotten out of their brief, real lives here on earth, and often leads them to make terrible decisions, and even commit atrocities for the sake of bringing more people to heaven. And it is always embedded in a much larger system of manipulative lies which are largely designed to keep the poor in their place.
While the woke are creating an elite which speaks in the name of the poor, and decides for them what is best for them, you're promoting another system, speaking in the name of other people and wanting to decide for them that it's better for them to believe a lie than to know the truth.
And your defense of it implies that liberal democracy, law, and the free market are incapable. And, historically, religious institutions have always opposed liberal systems, because their lies don't work unless they're enforced.
Atheism has lead to far more atrocities and bad decisions. Religious institutions have not always opposed liberal systems. You need to check your facts.
I propose that the best societies are those in which religious systems exist in parallel to and in tension with liberalism. Together, progress. If one destroys the other, decay.
If we want an adaptive culture, we want to allow *some* wiggle room for new ideas - most new ideas are bad, but if we don't have a mechanism for testing them and only adopting the good ones, we don't adapt. FA Hayek wrote about this.
BTW, for a while I (and I suspect other of your readers) thought you were worried about *humanity* becoming maladapted, which seemed a bit pointless because humans don't have competitor species. I realized you're actually worried about your preferred culture (Western liberal democracy) becoming maladapted and losing out to other cultures.
I share the concern; you might want to make that a little more explicit for those of us who are slow.
Robin, it sounds to me like you're saying, "First, we all need to become conservatives."
A fundamental trade-off in every endeavor is between what genetic algorithms researchers call exploration (trying new things) and exploitation (a good kind of exploitation: repeating things that worked before). The use of 'exploitation' was a poor choice, but we're kinda stuck with it.
Politically, when you want your political unit to strike a balance on an issue it is not in balance on, the practical approach seems to be to take an extremist position opposite the dominant extremist position. But I think that theorists like Robin shouldn't do that; they should posit finding the right balance as the actual goal, as separate from political strategy. I call that the "God's-eye view".
Why do human values have this problem, while science, math, technology and language do not? That seems fairly simple: science, math, technology and language are places where the interestes of memes and genes are aligned. Whereas values are an area where they are typically different.
It is the common interest of many memes to turn humans into meme spreaders: preachers, teachers and influencers - and to make sure that no DNA-based offspring distract them from this task.
The problem is not anything to do with making too many undirected value changes in a row and then going off the rails. If that was the problem then math, science and technology would have the same issue. It's because human DNA genes now have a powerful opponent. A systematic competitor for reproductive resources.
This is why I am opposed to the "drift" story. It seems like a misdiagnosis of the problem. It makes it harder to solve our problems if we don't have an accurate picture of their causes.
We evolved behaviors and structures to keep memes in check. So if they are getting out of control, that must because the process by which we evolve ways to keep them in control have gone off the rails.
We do indeed have a memetic immune system - the product of meme-gene coevolution - which acts to keep bad memes out. However, even if our mental defenses are better than ever, other factors could still result in plagues of bad memes: the memes could themselves be more virulent, or the environment might contain a greater density of hosts or more "vectors" - i.e. things that carry memes between hosts.
There are good reasons to believe that all those things are true - there are more hosts for memes, more meme "vectors" and the memes themselves are more virulent - as a result of memetic engineering, more "horizontal" transmission and other factors.
Perhaps we should hope, not to decrease cultural drift, but to increase cultural fragmentation. That way even if some parts of the culture drift into bad places, other parts can thrive.
>Over the last few centuries our cultures have purposely rejected many prior sacred texts as no long binding.
Sure, but this hasn't been an arbitrary process. Previously it had been plausible that there's a coherent universal ontology with sacred dogma at its center, which was obviously no longer the case by the end of the 19th century. Conservatives still haven't accepted this simple fact, preferring to bury their heads in the sand instead. Until they adopt a new reasonable basis for their ideology, conservatism's capability to systematically restrain cultural drift seems very limited.
Definitely they can, but these historical systems are maladapted to the technological landscape we find ourselves in. AI could lead to the creation of new systems to maintain culture OR it could do exactly the opposite OR it could do both.
The problem is trying to maintain this diversity of cultures under the same political systems. Which leads to the huge conflict we see now. And doesn't allow cultures to compete so clearly as in the past, the memetic selection pressures on cultures need to be recreated too.
Network states offer one solution that would allow for a Cambrian explosion in the diversity of political systems and potentially offer more intrastate harmony, likely at the expense of less interstate harmony, unless some stable higher level system can be created. What's the equivalent of US hegemony for the 21st century?
Until the 20th century legal theory assumed that the law existed to promote good and minimize evil. A sort of natural law philosophy was standard. In other words systems existed, encoded in law, to stop cultural drift (let’s say, among the masses - elites had been drifting for a while). It worked ok until elites decided deliberately to tear it down, replacing natural law good and evil with a standard of neutrality. This was a purposeful act intended to enable cultural drift, and the masses shortly thereafter drifted, as intended. So yes, systems can prevent cultural drift, but they can also be subverted.
Robin wrote, "Cultural activists, who purposely change our norms and values, are our most celebrated heroes." Cultural activists may be the most-celebrated heroes; but they aren't the most-popular, as proven by Trump's election. Our system is out of balance not because there's a shortage of conservatives, but because conservatives are locked out of the cultural production & distribution systems, such as Hollywood and the mass media. Ironically, capitalism was one of the left's key instruments in seizing cultural power.
Trump was elected because for decades now, half of the US population has been ignored, legislated against, shat upon, insulted, and silenced by the other half. The situation is, as the left has often said, similar to Germany in the 1930s, and led to Trump's election in much the same way Germany's situation led to Hitler's election.
But the left always fails to say what that situation was: Germany had lost a war that was everyone's fault equally; and it was forced to sign a treaty accepting that blame, and forced to pay for everybody else's losses. It was a great injustice which led, quite predictably, to an even greater reaction.
The task right now isn't to theorize about politically-impossible mechanisms to make America conservative; the task is to stop the death spiral of hate.
I recently wrote a post on another website saying so directly, and calling out both parties as now being puppets of, and politically dependent on, hate. I was immediately mobbed by about 3 dozen far-leftists who called me pro-slavery, a racist, a Nazi, a misogynist, a coward unwilling to stand up to hate, a hater, and many other things. They provided no evidence and a few absurd arguments.
I treated the left and right equally, yet not a single person on the right was upset with me for saying exactly the same things about them as I had about the left.
Not one person in that community defended me. Many contacted me privately, to say they agreed with me, but were too afraid to say so. And some impartial, uninvolved community members saw all those people calling me evil, and nobody saying the contrary; and concluded they must be right.
THAT is the problem right there. Conservatives, moderates, and even moderate leftists are afraid to speak up. And it's understandable, because YOU WILL PAY for it when you speak up.
But if you can't speak up now, how can you pretend you'd speak up if you'd been in Nazi Germany when they started murdering Jews? If you can't even risk a reputation hit to your online persona, why do you think you'd risk the deaths of you and your family in a concentration camp? If you can't speak up now, you're no better than the people who didn't speak up in Nazi Germany, or the Stalinist USSR; and possibly much worse.
(I advise everyone who isn't already committed to an online identity to use a fictitious name, an email address untraceable to them, and a VPN that's based in Luxembourg or some other nation that doesn't open its records to US government agencies when asked.)
So in my eyes, there is no need for theorizing about the problem at present. The problem is that nearly everyone who isn't woke, is a coward. They keep pretending that "we've reached peak woke!", but I see no sign of that. Don't think Trump's election is a victory for conservatives. Trump's insanity is going to lose every one of the independents who won him the election, and things will be back on track for maximum wokeness in 4 years or less. We don't need Trump; we need people of all viewpoints to demand representation and to make themselves heard.
"Cultural activists may be the most-celebrated heroes; but they aren't the most-popular, as proven by Trump's election." Uh, Trump is very much a celebrated cultural activist.
You wrote, "And the main thing that modernist cultural communities have agreed on is to reject traditional cultural elements, and celebrate exploration of the widest possible range of alternatives. Cultural activists, who purposely change our norms and values, are now our most celebrated heroes."
If "cultural activists" are people who "reject traditional cultural elements, and celebrate exploration of the widest possible range of alternatives", Trump is not a cultural activist.
There has been a very recent phase change. Conservatism/libertarianism is now "cool", leftism is "lame". YouTube stars like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan are influential with young men.
And just yesterday Jeff Bezos finally came out of the closet as the libertarian some of us knew he was.
It has some momentum.
IMHO a lot of this is due to Elon Musk - he has tremendous cultural influence. After he got away with firing 80% of Twitter's staff, other SV companies started doing similar (not as extreme things). He gave them courage. And I think Musk's involvement with DOGE convinced Bezos to come out of the closet.
Uber blazed the trail by flouting laws throughout the world and making money out of it. Bezos was been breaking laws he didn't like for quite some time.
Where I grew up that was called "civil disobedience". If the law is unjust you don't follow it and make them prosecute you. They won't because they'll look stupid.
> how much someone people were hurt by things others died
Should be "did" instead of "died".
> But English doesn’t seem to be rotting, nor do most of our math systems, so it does seem possible to keep systems simple and robust enough to keep rot to a minimum.
I think you should do more thinking about what makes them different. I wouldn't say English is that "simple", although I guess there are far fewer of the most frequently used words than the total number of words in English. It's grammatically simple compared to other languages (themselves plenty complex) because many people (such as Vikings) had to learn it as adults, and they didn't pick up on things like grammatical gender.
We have pockets of people who want to go back to anchors. The rise of "trad" aesthetics and the appeal of figures who preach discipline and order shows that people want structure. But these are small and nostalgic and don't have enough power to change the bigger picture. Think reactions, not revolutions.
A shift would need either a catastrophe big enough to force unity or a cultural sea change we can’t yet see. Maybe if the stakes get existential, we’d pivot.
The concept of heaven (putting aside its metaphysical reality) functions (functioned?) as a social technology that modern frameworks don’t replicate. The usual ills mentioned – political and cultural polarization, short-term thinking, family disintegrating, crises of meaning – are more easily addressed with the heaven concept. It's not a sacred text but it is a sacred text.
Heaven is the anchor tenant for an accountability framework that extends beyond all other large and small social institutions, offering a psychological balm for the suffering injustice and (potentially) constraining those in power. It offers deferred justice as a correction to imperfect (or corrupt) earthly systems. It transforms relationships with mortality. It softens grief, creating intergenerational continuity. It both grounds and transcends rule-based ethics, privileging thoughtfulness and character development (internalizing values) over simple compliance. It counterbalances short-term biases, enabling more thoughtful engagement with multigenerational challenges. It encourages humility. Most importantly, it provides a framework for reconciliation, which absolutely no current value system offers.
Yes, widespread respect for science has cut the range of social tech available to us.
Science is meant to be about what works. If a theory is seen to work and be useful, then treat it as true, even if it is known to be an approximation or have limited situations in which it can be used.
Science could find (and maybe has found) the concept of heaven to be effective and something that works, and so raise it's status.
I'm sure plenty of smart religious people in the past thought of heaven in this way - "maybe I can't directly see heaven, but I can see the good influence it is having so we need to treat it as being true".
The reasonably popular modern view that science and religion are opposed is not very scientific.
The Asian cultures emphasize obligation to the community, and as we see in Japan those obligations can be very effective at preventing (certain kinds of) culture drift.
Speaking as an atheist, it's too bad that the West achieved social stability by hitching its wagon to an easily-disproven sacred text. That mechanism wasn't very durable.
Something I've found salutary is recognizing that we have an enormous cultural blindspot, where respect for science is taken as evidence that non-natural things cannot exist
This is not true. Science by definition does not observe non-material things. Realizing that means opening a window to the benefits of belief that are unnaturally closed off by our rejection of it as even being possible
It's very clear that our material existence does not seem to be very probable. No one seems to believe in a single universe - and therefore they believe in something that cannot be observed from our own. It's irrational to believe in a possible multiverse and disbelieve in a possible supernatural under the rubric of science
I don't see why science couldn't observe and study non material things.
And it is a lie, which robs people of much of what they could have gotten out of their brief, real lives here on earth, and often leads them to make terrible decisions, and even commit atrocities for the sake of bringing more people to heaven. And it is always embedded in a much larger system of manipulative lies which are largely designed to keep the poor in their place.
While the woke are creating an elite which speaks in the name of the poor, and decides for them what is best for them, you're promoting another system, speaking in the name of other people and wanting to decide for them that it's better for them to believe a lie than to know the truth.
And your defense of it implies that liberal democracy, law, and the free market are incapable. And, historically, religious institutions have always opposed liberal systems, because their lies don't work unless they're enforced.
No thank you.
Goodness can one not have a nice thought experiment on substack these days?
Atheism has lead to far more atrocities and bad decisions. Religious institutions have not always opposed liberal systems. You need to check your facts.
I propose that the best societies are those in which religious systems exist in parallel to and in tension with liberalism. Together, progress. If one destroys the other, decay.
If we want an adaptive culture, we want to allow *some* wiggle room for new ideas - most new ideas are bad, but if we don't have a mechanism for testing them and only adopting the good ones, we don't adapt. FA Hayek wrote about this.
BTW, for a while I (and I suspect other of your readers) thought you were worried about *humanity* becoming maladapted, which seemed a bit pointless because humans don't have competitor species. I realized you're actually worried about your preferred culture (Western liberal democracy) becoming maladapted and losing out to other cultures.
I share the concern; you might want to make that a little more explicit for those of us who are slow.
Yes, I'm worrying less about human extinction than about losing the things I value from our culture.
Robin, it sounds to me like you're saying, "First, we all need to become conservatives."
A fundamental trade-off in every endeavor is between what genetic algorithms researchers call exploration (trying new things) and exploitation (a good kind of exploitation: repeating things that worked before). The use of 'exploitation' was a poor choice, but we're kinda stuck with it.
Politically, when you want your political unit to strike a balance on an issue it is not in balance on, the practical approach seems to be to take an extremist position opposite the dominant extremist position. But I think that theorists like Robin shouldn't do that; they should posit finding the right balance as the actual goal, as separate from political strategy. I call that the "God's-eye view".
Why do human values have this problem, while science, math, technology and language do not? That seems fairly simple: science, math, technology and language are places where the interestes of memes and genes are aligned. Whereas values are an area where they are typically different.
It is the common interest of many memes to turn humans into meme spreaders: preachers, teachers and influencers - and to make sure that no DNA-based offspring distract them from this task.
The problem is not anything to do with making too many undirected value changes in a row and then going off the rails. If that was the problem then math, science and technology would have the same issue. It's because human DNA genes now have a powerful opponent. A systematic competitor for reproductive resources.
This is why I am opposed to the "drift" story. It seems like a misdiagnosis of the problem. It makes it harder to solve our problems if we don't have an accurate picture of their causes.
We evolved behaviors and structures to keep memes in check. So if they are getting out of control, that must because the process by which we evolve ways to keep them in control have gone off the rails.
We do indeed have a memetic immune system - the product of meme-gene coevolution - which acts to keep bad memes out. However, even if our mental defenses are better than ever, other factors could still result in plagues of bad memes: the memes could themselves be more virulent, or the environment might contain a greater density of hosts or more "vectors" - i.e. things that carry memes between hosts.
There are good reasons to believe that all those things are true - there are more hosts for memes, more meme "vectors" and the memes themselves are more virulent - as a result of memetic engineering, more "horizontal" transmission and other factors.
Perhaps we should hope, not to decrease cultural drift, but to increase cultural fragmentation. That way even if some parts of the culture drift into bad places, other parts can thrive.
Yes, that's one approach, but seems very hard.
"Cultural Drift" sounds so organic and accidental. And yet we have all been directed to this place, by the "unseen hand"
What unseen hand do you mean?
Really? Take your pick:
https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/invisible-hand.html
>Over the last few centuries our cultures have purposely rejected many prior sacred texts as no long binding.
Sure, but this hasn't been an arbitrary process. Previously it had been plausible that there's a coherent universal ontology with sacred dogma at its center, which was obviously no longer the case by the end of the 19th century. Conservatives still haven't accepted this simple fact, preferring to bury their heads in the sand instead. Until they adopt a new reasonable basis for their ideology, conservatism's capability to systematically restrain cultural drift seems very limited.
Definitely they can, but these historical systems are maladapted to the technological landscape we find ourselves in. AI could lead to the creation of new systems to maintain culture OR it could do exactly the opposite OR it could do both.
The problem is trying to maintain this diversity of cultures under the same political systems. Which leads to the huge conflict we see now. And doesn't allow cultures to compete so clearly as in the past, the memetic selection pressures on cultures need to be recreated too.
Network states offer one solution that would allow for a Cambrian explosion in the diversity of political systems and potentially offer more intrastate harmony, likely at the expense of less interstate harmony, unless some stable higher level system can be created. What's the equivalent of US hegemony for the 21st century?
Until the 20th century legal theory assumed that the law existed to promote good and minimize evil. A sort of natural law philosophy was standard. In other words systems existed, encoded in law, to stop cultural drift (let’s say, among the masses - elites had been drifting for a while). It worked ok until elites decided deliberately to tear it down, replacing natural law good and evil with a standard of neutrality. This was a purposeful act intended to enable cultural drift, and the masses shortly thereafter drifted, as intended. So yes, systems can prevent cultural drift, but they can also be subverted.
Robin wrote, "Cultural activists, who purposely change our norms and values, are our most celebrated heroes." Cultural activists may be the most-celebrated heroes; but they aren't the most-popular, as proven by Trump's election. Our system is out of balance not because there's a shortage of conservatives, but because conservatives are locked out of the cultural production & distribution systems, such as Hollywood and the mass media. Ironically, capitalism was one of the left's key instruments in seizing cultural power.
Trump was elected because for decades now, half of the US population has been ignored, legislated against, shat upon, insulted, and silenced by the other half. The situation is, as the left has often said, similar to Germany in the 1930s, and led to Trump's election in much the same way Germany's situation led to Hitler's election.
But the left always fails to say what that situation was: Germany had lost a war that was everyone's fault equally; and it was forced to sign a treaty accepting that blame, and forced to pay for everybody else's losses. It was a great injustice which led, quite predictably, to an even greater reaction.
The task right now isn't to theorize about politically-impossible mechanisms to make America conservative; the task is to stop the death spiral of hate.
I recently wrote a post on another website saying so directly, and calling out both parties as now being puppets of, and politically dependent on, hate. I was immediately mobbed by about 3 dozen far-leftists who called me pro-slavery, a racist, a Nazi, a misogynist, a coward unwilling to stand up to hate, a hater, and many other things. They provided no evidence and a few absurd arguments.
I treated the left and right equally, yet not a single person on the right was upset with me for saying exactly the same things about them as I had about the left.
Not one person in that community defended me. Many contacted me privately, to say they agreed with me, but were too afraid to say so. And some impartial, uninvolved community members saw all those people calling me evil, and nobody saying the contrary; and concluded they must be right.
THAT is the problem right there. Conservatives, moderates, and even moderate leftists are afraid to speak up. And it's understandable, because YOU WILL PAY for it when you speak up.
But if you can't speak up now, how can you pretend you'd speak up if you'd been in Nazi Germany when they started murdering Jews? If you can't even risk a reputation hit to your online persona, why do you think you'd risk the deaths of you and your family in a concentration camp? If you can't speak up now, you're no better than the people who didn't speak up in Nazi Germany, or the Stalinist USSR; and possibly much worse.
(I advise everyone who isn't already committed to an online identity to use a fictitious name, an email address untraceable to them, and a VPN that's based in Luxembourg or some other nation that doesn't open its records to US government agencies when asked.)
So in my eyes, there is no need for theorizing about the problem at present. The problem is that nearly everyone who isn't woke, is a coward. They keep pretending that "we've reached peak woke!", but I see no sign of that. Don't think Trump's election is a victory for conservatives. Trump's insanity is going to lose every one of the independents who won him the election, and things will be back on track for maximum wokeness in 4 years or less. We don't need Trump; we need people of all viewpoints to demand representation and to make themselves heard.
"Cultural activists may be the most-celebrated heroes; but they aren't the most-popular, as proven by Trump's election." Uh, Trump is very much a celebrated cultural activist.
You wrote, "And the main thing that modernist cultural communities have agreed on is to reject traditional cultural elements, and celebrate exploration of the widest possible range of alternatives. Cultural activists, who purposely change our norms and values, are now our most celebrated heroes."
If "cultural activists" are people who "reject traditional cultural elements, and celebrate exploration of the widest possible range of alternatives", Trump is not a cultural activist.
Those were two different sentences, with two different groups discussed.
There has been a very recent phase change. Conservatism/libertarianism is now "cool", leftism is "lame". YouTube stars like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan are influential with young men.
And just yesterday Jeff Bezos finally came out of the closet as the libertarian some of us knew he was.
It has some momentum.
IMHO a lot of this is due to Elon Musk - he has tremendous cultural influence. After he got away with firing 80% of Twitter's staff, other SV companies started doing similar (not as extreme things). He gave them courage. And I think Musk's involvement with DOGE convinced Bezos to come out of the closet.
Uber blazed the trail by flouting laws throughout the world and making money out of it. Bezos was been breaking laws he didn't like for quite some time.
Where I grew up that was called "civil disobedience". If the law is unjust you don't follow it and make them prosecute you. They won't because they'll look stupid.
But now they won't prosecute because the people breaking the law can sack them. Many revolutions start out as "civil disobedience". It can go too far.
> how much someone people were hurt by things others died
Should be "did" instead of "died".
> But English doesn’t seem to be rotting, nor do most of our math systems, so it does seem possible to keep systems simple and robust enough to keep rot to a minimum.
I think you should do more thinking about what makes them different. I wouldn't say English is that "simple", although I guess there are far fewer of the most frequently used words than the total number of words in English. It's grammatically simple compared to other languages (themselves plenty complex) because many people (such as Vikings) had to learn it as adults, and they didn't pick up on things like grammatical gender.
It is mostly the grammar that is locked and not rotting in language. The words are not very well locked down.
I think African-American Vernacular English modified English grammar, and some of that can filter into broader English dialects.
*...were hurt by things others did"
We have pockets of people who want to go back to anchors. The rise of "trad" aesthetics and the appeal of figures who preach discipline and order shows that people want structure. But these are small and nostalgic and don't have enough power to change the bigger picture. Think reactions, not revolutions.
A shift would need either a catastrophe big enough to force unity or a cultural sea change we can’t yet see. Maybe if the stakes get existential, we’d pivot.