Gangs and religions and militaries have long understood that making a new recruit undergo a painful trial to gain acceptance is the surest way to get a loyal adherent. Perhaps our egos can't accept the possibility that we made a willing sacrifice for no reason.
Steve Sailer likes to quote Benjamin Franklin to the effect that if you want someone to like you, don't do him a favor. Instead, have him do you a favor:
One's relative capacity to endure sacrifice and even go on to thrive and succeed despite it is also a good way to demonstrate one's differential merit and wherewithal, thus class, rank, status. It's reasonable to expect that one's conspicuous willingness to endure sacrifice is correlated with that capacity for endurance and thus a decent indirect signal for the values of those elements of status. Thus we have a chain of relationship between status, sacrifice, and the sacred.
Education is a great example here, particularly elite higher education....so much time and money sacrificed for it, it must be sacred. Not "we sacrificed for it because it is valuable" but "it's valuable because we sacrificed for it."
I'm often annoyed by the common view that behaving well - being "good" to others - is not considered morally praiseworthy if done for self-interested reasons. Adam Smith's baker isn't good if he bakes our bread in order to earn a living. He's only good if he gives the bread away for free.
The TV series "The Good Place" leaned heavily into this.
So "be nice to other people so they'll like you" (what we all say to our small children) isn't moral advice. That's just self-interest.
Robin, you write, 'But we are quite reluctant to admit that social values are our main positive values. So our cultures give us other varied “sacred” positive values to focus on and aspire to. While these sacred values seem to function in practice mainly to help us achieve our social values, it is important to us that we not see them this way.' I'm more than prepared to accept this is true, but what puzzles me is why. Why does it matter to us that we hide our positive social values behind a mask of sacred ones? I've heard different takes on this elsewhere, but I remain unclear about the fitness, or any other, advantage of behaviour that is seemingly so weird and very often so costly. A few simple examples might help me get my head round it.
Robin wrote, "For example, if we see that our greatest sacrifices lately have been for religion, we try harder to push more of us to be more strictly religious, via more personal sacrifice, and to convert outsiders, which cases suffering via conflict. If our greatest sacrifices have been wars to promote our nations, religions, or ideologies, then we get more eager to promote such things via new wars."
The greatest reactions against religion in Western history, IMHO the peace of Westphalia, and the creation of the Royal Society of London, both happened after, and in reaction to, the 30 Years' War, when Protestants and Catholics each tried to kill the other off, in which 1/5 to 1/3 of the population of the Holy Roman Empire died. These religious wars didn't cause religion to gain status.
The earlier French wars of religion were perhaps more violent, as were the genocidal Orthodox and Catholic crusades against other sects of Christians, from Justinian's invasions of the Western Roman Empire, to the Albigensian and Bohemian crusades. In these cases, religiosity may have gone up. But in these cases most people left alive were winners who hadn't sacrificed much.
The period after WW1 did not see as much gung-ho nationalism as the period before it, I think. In Germany and Austria, maybe.
I suspect the state transition function f(sacrifices in generation g) -> sacrifices in generation g+1 looks more like f(g+1) = 1 - g. If it does have a section with positive slope, there's a weariness threshold above which f(g) crashes.
I asked Gemini, "would you say there was a long time of peace after the 30 years war because people were tired of war and cynical about religion and royalty, or more because the Peace of Westphalia was well-thought-out and implemented, and/or Cardinal Richelieu was so clever?"
It replied, "It is helpful to look at this through three lenses: the "exhaustion" factor, the "Westphalian" system, and the legacy of realpolitik. ... [long response omitted] ... Conclusion: It was likely a mix. Richelieu provided the intellectual framework (Raison d'État), Westphalia provided the legal framework (Sovereignty), and exhaustion provided the emotional will to stick to those frameworks."
Personally, I give most of the credit to Richelieu, for making Machiavellian Realpolitik acceptable, if not respectable. The Peace of Westphalia was perhaps the biggest turning point in European history, when Christian Europe stopped pretending to be Christian, and made politics openly consequentialist. Its main insights were "Religious wars are stupid" and "All the other nations of Europe must keep the Germans from uniting."
“when we don’t have much of a way to tell which are our greatest values, but instead infer our values to be whatever we most sacrifice for, this can create self-reinforcing cycles that create great suffering”
This feels closely related to “chasing losses”, i.e. risk-seeking behaviour, specifically continuation & escalation (rather than giving up), when you have incurred a loss. Placing even bigger bets (making greater sacrifices), typically in the hope of restoring the original situation if the loss was due to something external (eg a war).
I'm thinking of those words heard in the private social fraternity in 1980, about how none come to God except through "me," with an emphasis on their absolute logic in the English words attributed to their described Lord, living in the Levant over 2,000 years ago. A kind of weaponisation of an English translation, but in this "Rush" party. They wanted me, being a known Monotheistic theory writer and not a Trinitarian, to explain to them how anyone could perform "miracles" in front of so many witnesses if they weren't possessing absolute authority from God? I returned their question with a question about another strange English translation that may appear in the same Bible they are referring to, and they almost threw me out of the party they invited me to, just to test me socially. It seems unpleasant when someone is telling you they have reasons not to agree with your passionately embraced absolute value doctrines. But they are not alone. At a symposium of the 500th birthday of Copernicus in 1973, Astrophysicist Brandon Carter presented the "Anthropic Principle", described as a claim about our ways of observation limited in implications by the human condition. It might seem obvious, but the realities are of a non-obvious quality of meaning. Because, to ask, "Why is the universe so well suited for life?" when the inquirer's mind is in a position that is within the embedded reality that's basically in its own selection-effect, is circular. The inquirer can only ask from within a position in a universe that is already compatible with the existence of life forms who present existentially as the questioners inquiring. So, a hypothetical alternative universe that is incompatible with the existence of life gives no referential comparisons because no living thing there could produce observers living there who could, from there, stand wondering why in contrast, they have their position? So, the "Anthropic Principles" isn't exactly what it sounds like on the surface. But our sample of the universe here has to be biased toward the conditions allowing our existence, observing this sample of the universe that we have before us. The speed of light is in the geometry of the physics of our universe, and in 1978, Philippe Eberhard published how, in the context of quantum mechanics, it is not possible to transmit classical bits of information by means of carefully prepared mixed or pure states, whether entangled or not. Do we perceive a religious sacrifice meme, like an "End Times" because of implications of the silence referenced to Fermi's Paradox, while yet in 2001, Steven Baxter asked what would motivate "Alien" civilizations to want to be seen anyway by a remote emerging space-faring civilization of unknown stability? The universe is mostly empty space with radiation, and physical expansion would cost massive amounts of energy and materials using a lot of time considering the distances, so AI virtual reality technology as Anders Sandberg reports, building computing infrastructure away from hot stars at the outer edge of solar systems with no energy loss, and no electromagnetic leaks, invisible to infra-red signature is quiet security and so Claude Shannon's 1948 information theory contrasts to this grim apocalyptic interpretation of silence. We're only 100 years into this. Why is the "Judgement Day" hypothesis politically so attractive as an answer so soon during this rapidly expanding scientific discovery period? We're within this "Anthropic Principle" and it is a bias we are doing.
I don't think the amount of sacrifice in our culture wars is at all comparable. During the Civil Rights Era, there were some real sacrifices being made (for example, MLK spent time in jail, and eventually got assassinated). But the biggest change in my lifetime, the advance of gay marriage, didn't require that. They won over the lawschools, then the courts, and then even the voters who had opposed it whenever they got the chance came to accept it as the status quo.
The desire to be part of some greater cause is just as innate and biological as any social or harm avoidance value. No society can exist without a religion or higher cause for long. Wokeness / Marxism / critical theory took advantage and filled the temporary vacuum in the hearts of the secular left.
The best path forward will be the one in which people deliberately rally around a positive and pro-social religion / higher cause / set of values. Creating a vacuum and waiting for opportunistic schemers to fill the void with random self-serving viral religious substitutes is not a bright future.
My point is that whatever higher cause we rally around, we won't keep around it unless we continue to see ourselves sacrificing lots for it. Which is expensive.
How would you distinguish between 'sacrifice' and 'appreciation of opportunity cost?' As Stephen points out, maintenance of any kind requires tradeoffs, and when it comes to sacred values, the modern world seems to have become pretty good at generating lots of appealing competition for the resources otherwise necessary to preserve traditions or allegiances to just about anything.
I don’t know that “seeing ourselves” sacrifice is the key to maintaining sacred values. I think holding fast to sacred values just inherently requires the sacrifice of discipline, the sacrifice of abandoning other goals and values that are not aligned with our sacred values. Yes, there is a cost in the short term calculus, but *if* we have chosen appropriate sacred values, there is huge upside. It’s a societal investment. But again it comes back to the key being to identify and rally around the right set of sacred values.
There are positive social aspects about coming together to sacrifice for a higher cause, yes, and that may build morale along the journey, but I don’t think it’s the main thing.
Oh, identity is a bit of a curse, isn't it? Interesting where such an idea could have come from. Wondering how long before people in the western world figure it out.
But then they would have to admit how much damage it did.
Gangs and religions and militaries have long understood that making a new recruit undergo a painful trial to gain acceptance is the surest way to get a loyal adherent. Perhaps our egos can't accept the possibility that we made a willing sacrifice for no reason.
Steve Sailer likes to quote Benjamin Franklin to the effect that if you want someone to like you, don't do him a favor. Instead, have him do you a favor:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/02/is_self-asserti.html#comment-119162
One's relative capacity to endure sacrifice and even go on to thrive and succeed despite it is also a good way to demonstrate one's differential merit and wherewithal, thus class, rank, status. It's reasonable to expect that one's conspicuous willingness to endure sacrifice is correlated with that capacity for endurance and thus a decent indirect signal for the values of those elements of status. Thus we have a chain of relationship between status, sacrifice, and the sacred.
Yes, sacrifice also signals capacity.
Education is a great example here, particularly elite higher education....so much time and money sacrificed for it, it must be sacred. Not "we sacrificed for it because it is valuable" but "it's valuable because we sacrificed for it."
So good an example that I added it.
Not “I added it because it’s so good an example”, but “It’s so good an example because I added it”?
I'm often annoyed by the common view that behaving well - being "good" to others - is not considered morally praiseworthy if done for self-interested reasons. Adam Smith's baker isn't good if he bakes our bread in order to earn a living. He's only good if he gives the bread away for free.
The TV series "The Good Place" leaned heavily into this.
So "be nice to other people so they'll like you" (what we all say to our small children) isn't moral advice. That's just self-interest.
Robin, you write, 'But we are quite reluctant to admit that social values are our main positive values. So our cultures give us other varied “sacred” positive values to focus on and aspire to. While these sacred values seem to function in practice mainly to help us achieve our social values, it is important to us that we not see them this way.' I'm more than prepared to accept this is true, but what puzzles me is why. Why does it matter to us that we hide our positive social values behind a mask of sacred ones? I've heard different takes on this elsewhere, but I remain unclear about the fitness, or any other, advantage of behaviour that is seemingly so weird and very often so costly. A few simple examples might help me get my head round it.
Robin wrote, "For example, if we see that our greatest sacrifices lately have been for religion, we try harder to push more of us to be more strictly religious, via more personal sacrifice, and to convert outsiders, which cases suffering via conflict. If our greatest sacrifices have been wars to promote our nations, religions, or ideologies, then we get more eager to promote such things via new wars."
The greatest reactions against religion in Western history, IMHO the peace of Westphalia, and the creation of the Royal Society of London, both happened after, and in reaction to, the 30 Years' War, when Protestants and Catholics each tried to kill the other off, in which 1/5 to 1/3 of the population of the Holy Roman Empire died. These religious wars didn't cause religion to gain status.
The earlier French wars of religion were perhaps more violent, as were the genocidal Orthodox and Catholic crusades against other sects of Christians, from Justinian's invasions of the Western Roman Empire, to the Albigensian and Bohemian crusades. In these cases, religiosity may have gone up. But in these cases most people left alive were winners who hadn't sacrificed much.
The period after WW1 did not see as much gung-ho nationalism as the period before it, I think. In Germany and Austria, maybe.
I suspect the state transition function f(sacrifices in generation g) -> sacrifices in generation g+1 looks more like f(g+1) = 1 - g. If it does have a section with positive slope, there's a weariness threshold above which f(g) crashes.
The peace change right after the 30 years war is one of the most unusual and puzzling historical events of which I know.
I asked Gemini, "would you say there was a long time of peace after the 30 years war because people were tired of war and cynical about religion and royalty, or more because the Peace of Westphalia was well-thought-out and implemented, and/or Cardinal Richelieu was so clever?"
It replied, "It is helpful to look at this through three lenses: the "exhaustion" factor, the "Westphalian" system, and the legacy of realpolitik. ... [long response omitted] ... Conclusion: It was likely a mix. Richelieu provided the intellectual framework (Raison d'État), Westphalia provided the legal framework (Sovereignty), and exhaustion provided the emotional will to stick to those frameworks."
Personally, I give most of the credit to Richelieu, for making Machiavellian Realpolitik acceptable, if not respectable. The Peace of Westphalia was perhaps the biggest turning point in European history, when Christian Europe stopped pretending to be Christian, and made politics openly consequentialist. Its main insights were "Religious wars are stupid" and "All the other nations of Europe must keep the Germans from uniting."
Good food for thought. Thanks
“when we don’t have much of a way to tell which are our greatest values, but instead infer our values to be whatever we most sacrifice for, this can create self-reinforcing cycles that create great suffering”
This feels closely related to “chasing losses”, i.e. risk-seeking behaviour, specifically continuation & escalation (rather than giving up), when you have incurred a loss. Placing even bigger bets (making greater sacrifices), typically in the hope of restoring the original situation if the loss was due to something external (eg a war).
I'm thinking of those words heard in the private social fraternity in 1980, about how none come to God except through "me," with an emphasis on their absolute logic in the English words attributed to their described Lord, living in the Levant over 2,000 years ago. A kind of weaponisation of an English translation, but in this "Rush" party. They wanted me, being a known Monotheistic theory writer and not a Trinitarian, to explain to them how anyone could perform "miracles" in front of so many witnesses if they weren't possessing absolute authority from God? I returned their question with a question about another strange English translation that may appear in the same Bible they are referring to, and they almost threw me out of the party they invited me to, just to test me socially. It seems unpleasant when someone is telling you they have reasons not to agree with your passionately embraced absolute value doctrines. But they are not alone. At a symposium of the 500th birthday of Copernicus in 1973, Astrophysicist Brandon Carter presented the "Anthropic Principle", described as a claim about our ways of observation limited in implications by the human condition. It might seem obvious, but the realities are of a non-obvious quality of meaning. Because, to ask, "Why is the universe so well suited for life?" when the inquirer's mind is in a position that is within the embedded reality that's basically in its own selection-effect, is circular. The inquirer can only ask from within a position in a universe that is already compatible with the existence of life forms who present existentially as the questioners inquiring. So, a hypothetical alternative universe that is incompatible with the existence of life gives no referential comparisons because no living thing there could produce observers living there who could, from there, stand wondering why in contrast, they have their position? So, the "Anthropic Principles" isn't exactly what it sounds like on the surface. But our sample of the universe here has to be biased toward the conditions allowing our existence, observing this sample of the universe that we have before us. The speed of light is in the geometry of the physics of our universe, and in 1978, Philippe Eberhard published how, in the context of quantum mechanics, it is not possible to transmit classical bits of information by means of carefully prepared mixed or pure states, whether entangled or not. Do we perceive a religious sacrifice meme, like an "End Times" because of implications of the silence referenced to Fermi's Paradox, while yet in 2001, Steven Baxter asked what would motivate "Alien" civilizations to want to be seen anyway by a remote emerging space-faring civilization of unknown stability? The universe is mostly empty space with radiation, and physical expansion would cost massive amounts of energy and materials using a lot of time considering the distances, so AI virtual reality technology as Anders Sandberg reports, building computing infrastructure away from hot stars at the outer edge of solar systems with no energy loss, and no electromagnetic leaks, invisible to infra-red signature is quiet security and so Claude Shannon's 1948 information theory contrasts to this grim apocalyptic interpretation of silence. We're only 100 years into this. Why is the "Judgement Day" hypothesis politically so attractive as an answer so soon during this rapidly expanding scientific discovery period? We're within this "Anthropic Principle" and it is a bias we are doing.
I don't think the amount of sacrifice in our culture wars is at all comparable. During the Civil Rights Era, there were some real sacrifices being made (for example, MLK spent time in jail, and eventually got assassinated). But the biggest change in my lifetime, the advance of gay marriage, didn't require that. They won over the lawschools, then the courts, and then even the voters who had opposed it whenever they got the chance came to accept it as the status quo.
Yes, the amount of sacrifice has been going down. Which I predict makes us feel less sure of our values.
The desire to be part of some greater cause is just as innate and biological as any social or harm avoidance value. No society can exist without a religion or higher cause for long. Wokeness / Marxism / critical theory took advantage and filled the temporary vacuum in the hearts of the secular left.
The best path forward will be the one in which people deliberately rally around a positive and pro-social religion / higher cause / set of values. Creating a vacuum and waiting for opportunistic schemers to fill the void with random self-serving viral religious substitutes is not a bright future.
My point is that whatever higher cause we rally around, we won't keep around it unless we continue to see ourselves sacrificing lots for it. Which is expensive.
How would you distinguish between 'sacrifice' and 'appreciation of opportunity cost?' As Stephen points out, maintenance of any kind requires tradeoffs, and when it comes to sacred values, the modern world seems to have become pretty good at generating lots of appealing competition for the resources otherwise necessary to preserve traditions or allegiances to just about anything.
I don’t know that “seeing ourselves” sacrifice is the key to maintaining sacred values. I think holding fast to sacred values just inherently requires the sacrifice of discipline, the sacrifice of abandoning other goals and values that are not aligned with our sacred values. Yes, there is a cost in the short term calculus, but *if* we have chosen appropriate sacred values, there is huge upside. It’s a societal investment. But again it comes back to the key being to identify and rally around the right set of sacred values.
There are positive social aspects about coming together to sacrifice for a higher cause, yes, and that may build morale along the journey, but I don’t think it’s the main thing.
Re: "Activists see the value of their causes in the suffering of advocates at the hands of opponents."
Have woke activists suffered at the hands of opponents?
>We really need to find a better way to find and affirm our highest values.
You mean, to replace them with more tame, domesticated ones.
Oh, identity is a bit of a curse, isn't it? Interesting where such an idea could have come from. Wondering how long before people in the western world figure it out.
But then they would have to admit how much damage it did.