The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices

We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era. For my purposes, the key distinction here is that the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture. The pre- era is before we broke this, and the post- era is after we fix it.

We can consider morality in these three eras at two different levels: the level of the underlying process which shapes and changes our morals, and the level at which our minds accept particular authorities when making hard moral choices. As our minds can’t well see the underlying process of cultural change, we and the universe see morality differently.

At the deeper process level, the pre-modern era of healthy cultural evolution was when we had a great many cultures, strong selection pressures, slowly changing contexts, and reluctance to change. In the modern era, in contrast, we have far less variety, far weaker selection pressures, fast changing context, and an activism-driven eagerness for cultural change. As a result, we may be drifting into maladaption. If the post modern era is not to just return to pre-modern processes, we must find ways to consciously manage cultural evolution; I’ve so found three so far.

At the level of our minds, we in all eras act as if we believe in moral truth, and have some ways to estimate it. But eras differ in what we take as our sources of moral authority. In the pre-modern era, we were deeply immersed in communities with stable habits and attitudes, and strong intuitive agreements on what to value and approved behaviors. These didn’t need to be expressed in words very carefully; they felt obvious. Our north star was tradition: what people like us had been doing for as long as anyone could remember.

In the modern era, many once isolated groups now mix together, forcing us to express morals more abstractly in words. Rejecting tradition, we now instead locate moral authority inside us. Christianity, protestantism, democracy, modern fiction, and creativity have all pushed toward interiors. When in doubt, we look to our hearts and conscience, and try to be true to ourselves. Our ideals have become artists and activists, who find new and distinctive yet very sincere stances and expressions.

For the post-modern era, the process solutions that I’ve found to cultural drift are (a) letting capitalism run everything, (b) groups managed to raise futures market price estimates of future group adaptive success, and (c) large regions managed to improve futures market estimates of dates when we achieve sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse. At the mind level, the new moral authority that seems to best support these solutions is: speculative market prices.

In all three eras, the sources we treat as moral authorities are things we can see well enough to anchor moral choices. At a deeper level such authorities are actually caused by evolutionary processes, but those are far too opaque to advice personal moral choices. In the pre-modern era, we couldn’t see the eons of evolution that picked out their traditions, but we could see our local traditions. In the modern era we can’t see the processes that embed moral intuitions deep inside us, but we can use such intuitions to guide choices. Similarly, in the post-modern era we could see what speculative market price recommendations say re managing our cultures, even as the processes which set such prices remain opaque to us.

But how, you ask, could we be persuaded to accept such prices as our primary moral authorities? Wonder also how in the past two eras we were persuaded to accept tradition and our inner hearts as such strong moral authorities. I don’t know how such a change will happen, or how long it might take. Yet even so, my analysis suggests a rough guess for our post-modern moral authority: speculative prices.

Added 18Sep: Tradition can be seen as the obvious authority in a slowly changing world. Interiors can be seen as the obvious second choice if tradition doesn’t work. This suggests may be quite hard to get people to accept prices as their top authority.