Sometime in the last few million years, our ancestors began to get better brains, use tools and weapons, speak language, and live in larger groups in a wider range of environments.
because evil cannot be universally willed into law, it destroys itself. It's all so simple, you just have to do it. Competition is what created all the material wonders of today, but yes it can be bad if the competitors cannot differentiate between actions that can be universally willed vs those that cannot. Perhaps no one can, and in the end it's up to God to sort it all out.
Psychopathy and other far tail-ends of "malevolent" personality traits come with handicaps. For example, psychopathy predisposes a person to impulsivity, disagreeableness and violent behavior, which may be adaptive in a group as long as the entire group does not consist of psychopaths.
What Robin is suggesting (and has more firmly established in The Elephant In The Brain) is that "evil" traits such as gossiping and fierce status competition often work as non-psychopathic people's adaptive tools even when they don't confess it or believe so themselves, e.g. people are hypocritical by nature. This does not mean that "evil" traits don't have issues of their own: the "good" behaviors and norms also help mitigate the issues caused by "evil" behavior.
>the "good" behaviors and norms also help mitigate the issues caused by "evil" behavior
I agree with this, but it appears to contradict the notion that "evil" stuff drives evolution. Saying that both "evil" and "good" drive it in tandem is already a hot enough take, going overboard doesn't seem either correct or useful.
If I didn't misunderstand the post, Robin tackles this in his book The Elephant In The Brain. His core claim is that people are far more hypocritical than we'd like to think, and that most behavior is driven by status competition and signaling. Because he thinks selfish competitive motives often drive even seemingly cooperative behavior, he thinks "evil" stuff drives evolution.
This isn't to say cooperative behavior is only a smoke screen, or that it is useless.
I read EitB, and largely agree with its claims and that they are underappreciated. Still, if this post is intended to be a summary/take-away from it, I'd say that it won't convince anybody who wasn't already convinced.
I read this post as taking that for granted, arguing that since "evil" norms and behaviors have driven evolution, they are likely more adaptive than our current cultural norms and behaviors. Thereby our culture is bound to be eventually replaced by or transformed into something more adaptive, such as full-on capitalism or insular fertile subcultures.
Robin thinks that evolutionary pressures on culture have decreased for a long time, and that especially since cultural activism has taken a foothold in driving culture, that has aggravated (maladaptive) cultural drift. Thereby what we perceive as "good" and "evil" might be orthogonal or even at odds with what is adaptive, and elsewhere he argues that they in fact are.
This is an interesting and provocative way to frame it. My instincts are to disagree, but I think your basic point is sound.
I would frame it as we need constructive competition to constantly clear out the cultural drift that is destroying our ability to coordinate. But I think I might be saying the same thing as you just with different words?
You're using definitions of good and evil that seem strange to me. Any careful examination of what we mean by "good" and "bad" seems to show that they're about what we believe leads to survival and extinction.
We disagree about consequences, so we disagree about values. (Also there’s always the question “who’s survival?”; what’s good for you might be bad for me.)
this post is bit confusing as you're moving between traditionalist intuitions for the terms "good" and "evil", while being a bit unclear when moving between:
- some 'objective' notion of adaptiveness/fitness (note that *this technically requires specifying a definition of species & niche(s)* - one config of 'capitalist' features may be fitness enhancing in one context/niche, then fail to be in another)
- some objective notion of 'the general welfare'
- your personal preferences re: civilization and culture(s)
- a presumption that the majority of readers here share most/all of your preferences above
In any case, whether you're using 'adaptive' in the descriptive (e.g the distribution of norms over all future cultures) or prescriptive senses (e.g. the distribution of norms of those cultures we would be willing to consider proper 'heirs' of our own), may I humbly suggest you consider life-years (and the attendant need to think about how one counts), as the key metric:
Re. "In the farming era, religions and norms evolved to support and not oppose wars" -- Organized religion and war both appeared at the same time in the archaeological record. I think religions evolved to support war. Humans don't march off to war without either hope of booty, or an ideological motivation.
Historically, we have many cases of religions being invoked to justify war and genocide (Justinian's invasion of the Western Roman Empire, all the Muslim invasions, Charlemagne's conquests of the Arians, Catholic conquests and colonization and war on southern France, Bohemia, Lithuania, Britain, the Americas, India, & Africa; other Catholic crusades; the Armenian genocide; communist revolutions and massacres, Nazi invasions and genocides, the US Civil War, the cooperation of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X in the largest genocide on record, that in the Belgian Congo; Pope Pius XII's guilt in Nazi extermination of Jews and Catholic extermination Orthodox Christians, the recent Yugoslavian civil war).
There are far fewer instances of a religion stopping a war. Some cases in Europe from the 11th-13th centuries: the Truce of God and Peace of God movements, Pope Innocent III using the threat of excommunication to stop war between France & England. But Pope Innocent III is the same guy who ordered the Albigensian genocide, so he doesn't score any points as a peacemaker with me.
“capitalism has driven evolution” is a bizarre conceptual jumble. What is meant by evolution here? Clearly not the better defined biological kind — the time frame is just nowhere long enough to move allele frequencies. So presumably the more nebulous cultural/technological evolution? But you could plausibly argue that the central conflict of the past century was the not intra-capitalism but between capitalism and self identified anti-capitalist systems.
And that leaves aside the question of when you start the clock on capitalism…
I also frown a bit on using the strictly defined term 'evolution' when discussing developments which resemble biological evolution but don't map clearly on it.
However, it is not difficult to see that by 'evolution' Robin means social, cultural and technological developments which set a given society subject to flourish or fail. Yes, tremendous variation exists and boundaries are difficult to set, but the grand idea is easy enough to catch up on.
As for capitalism driving so-called evolution - that is, driving the selection of adaptive norms and behaviors - that is mostly due to capitalism creating harsh selection pressures on companies. One of Robin's main theses is that cultural evolution, especially technology, has diminished selection pressures up to the point that trends which might be maladaptive aren't selected fast enough, and that such trends might eventually lead to collapse. He takes the upcoming fertility crisis as one sign of this.
However, evolution defined as "change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations" (Wikipedia) doesn't account for cultural phenomena as the heritable attributes, the characteristics of their heritability and the meaning of a generation differs between biology and culture.
I also don't object to culture possessing such traits enough so that selection is possible, which is key to your claims on cultural drift. I would just be clear when using the word evolution to describe the more strictly defined biological evolution, and when using it to describe analogous, less strictly defined phenomena.
Can you talk more about potential binding mechanisms? Is the idea to have a culture that celebrates adaptation, except for a small number of inviolable rules? It doesn't sound implausible to me, but it also sounds unstable. Not that I have a better idea.
I just don't see how you can say 'we must abandon our values from the past because evolution doesn't favour them' and then go on to say 'we must defy an ongoing change to preserve our values.' Shouldn't you, by your own argument, be abandoning those values as maladaptive?
Personally, a thing that I value in our shared world culture is that it promotes kindness and community feeling to some extent. I think that's pretty mainstream.
I think I would prefer global Amish to a version of our current culture that eschews those values. Even if all I cared about was my own survival, I think I would still go for that option. It would be a question of conversion, not replacement if the choice really was that stark. I think that is probably pretty mainstream too.
Issues Robin has already brought up include diminishing innovation via our fertility crisis, leading to systemic decline. This very possibly includes painful transition states, including societal collapse, disorder, violence and the loss of things we currently value.
Yes. I didn't mean so much "what might happen," as "why should we care?" I think that simply referring to 'things we currently value' in an article which, as a starting point, questions the validity of the concepts of good and evil is making a lot of assumptions that, in the context, should probably be examined.
Competition is often described as bad or even evil. But bad for what or whom? Furthermore, Competition is inevitable, and the way that Competition has evolved and will evolve is determined by those who win the competitions.
Business competition is *about* which enterprise can best *cooperate* with suppliers, customers, and employees. There is nothing bad or evil about that.
If "evil" characteristics are in fact more adaptive, then why are psychopaths such a small percentage of the population?
because evil cannot be universally willed into law, it destroys itself. It's all so simple, you just have to do it. Competition is what created all the material wonders of today, but yes it can be bad if the competitors cannot differentiate between actions that can be universally willed vs those that cannot. Perhaps no one can, and in the end it's up to God to sort it all out.
Psychopathy and other far tail-ends of "malevolent" personality traits come with handicaps. For example, psychopathy predisposes a person to impulsivity, disagreeableness and violent behavior, which may be adaptive in a group as long as the entire group does not consist of psychopaths.
What Robin is suggesting (and has more firmly established in The Elephant In The Brain) is that "evil" traits such as gossiping and fierce status competition often work as non-psychopathic people's adaptive tools even when they don't confess it or believe so themselves, e.g. people are hypocritical by nature. This does not mean that "evil" traits don't have issues of their own: the "good" behaviors and norms also help mitigate the issues caused by "evil" behavior.
>the "good" behaviors and norms also help mitigate the issues caused by "evil" behavior
I agree with this, but it appears to contradict the notion that "evil" stuff drives evolution. Saying that both "evil" and "good" drive it in tandem is already a hot enough take, going overboard doesn't seem either correct or useful.
If I didn't misunderstand the post, Robin tackles this in his book The Elephant In The Brain. His core claim is that people are far more hypocritical than we'd like to think, and that most behavior is driven by status competition and signaling. Because he thinks selfish competitive motives often drive even seemingly cooperative behavior, he thinks "evil" stuff drives evolution.
This isn't to say cooperative behavior is only a smoke screen, or that it is useless.
I read EitB, and largely agree with its claims and that they are underappreciated. Still, if this post is intended to be a summary/take-away from it, I'd say that it won't convince anybody who wasn't already convinced.
I read this post as taking that for granted, arguing that since "evil" norms and behaviors have driven evolution, they are likely more adaptive than our current cultural norms and behaviors. Thereby our culture is bound to be eventually replaced by or transformed into something more adaptive, such as full-on capitalism or insular fertile subcultures.
Robin thinks that evolutionary pressures on culture have decreased for a long time, and that especially since cultural activism has taken a foothold in driving culture, that has aggravated (maladaptive) cultural drift. Thereby what we perceive as "good" and "evil" might be orthogonal or even at odds with what is adaptive, and elsewhere he argues that they in fact are.
This is an interesting and provocative way to frame it. My instincts are to disagree, but I think your basic point is sound.
I would frame it as we need constructive competition to constantly clear out the cultural drift that is destroying our ability to coordinate. But I think I might be saying the same thing as you just with different words?
You're using definitions of good and evil that seem strange to me. Any careful examination of what we mean by "good" and "bad" seems to show that they're about what we believe leads to survival and extinction.
We disagree about consequences, so we disagree about values. (Also there’s always the question “who’s survival?”; what’s good for you might be bad for me.)
this post is bit confusing as you're moving between traditionalist intuitions for the terms "good" and "evil", while being a bit unclear when moving between:
- some 'objective' notion of adaptiveness/fitness (note that *this technically requires specifying a definition of species & niche(s)* - one config of 'capitalist' features may be fitness enhancing in one context/niche, then fail to be in another)
- some objective notion of 'the general welfare'
- your personal preferences re: civilization and culture(s)
- a presumption that the majority of readers here share most/all of your preferences above
In any case, whether you're using 'adaptive' in the descriptive (e.g the distribution of norms over all future cultures) or prescriptive senses (e.g. the distribution of norms of those cultures we would be willing to consider proper 'heirs' of our own), may I humbly suggest you consider life-years (and the attendant need to think about how one counts), as the key metric:
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/lineage-life-years-llys-a-unique
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/the-veil-of-future-heirs-holys-excerpt?utm_source=publication-search
Re. "In the farming era, religions and norms evolved to support and not oppose wars" -- Organized religion and war both appeared at the same time in the archaeological record. I think religions evolved to support war. Humans don't march off to war without either hope of booty, or an ideological motivation.
Historically, we have many cases of religions being invoked to justify war and genocide (Justinian's invasion of the Western Roman Empire, all the Muslim invasions, Charlemagne's conquests of the Arians, Catholic conquests and colonization and war on southern France, Bohemia, Lithuania, Britain, the Americas, India, & Africa; other Catholic crusades; the Armenian genocide; communist revolutions and massacres, Nazi invasions and genocides, the US Civil War, the cooperation of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X in the largest genocide on record, that in the Belgian Congo; Pope Pius XII's guilt in Nazi extermination of Jews and Catholic extermination Orthodox Christians, the recent Yugoslavian civil war).
There are far fewer instances of a religion stopping a war. Some cases in Europe from the 11th-13th centuries: the Truce of God and Peace of God movements, Pope Innocent III using the threat of excommunication to stop war between France & England. But Pope Innocent III is the same guy who ordered the Albigensian genocide, so he doesn't score any points as a peacemaker with me.
“capitalism has driven evolution” is a bizarre conceptual jumble. What is meant by evolution here? Clearly not the better defined biological kind — the time frame is just nowhere long enough to move allele frequencies. So presumably the more nebulous cultural/technological evolution? But you could plausibly argue that the central conflict of the past century was the not intra-capitalism but between capitalism and self identified anti-capitalist systems.
And that leaves aside the question of when you start the clock on capitalism…
I also frown a bit on using the strictly defined term 'evolution' when discussing developments which resemble biological evolution but don't map clearly on it.
However, it is not difficult to see that by 'evolution' Robin means social, cultural and technological developments which set a given society subject to flourish or fail. Yes, tremendous variation exists and boundaries are difficult to set, but the grand idea is easy enough to catch up on.
As for capitalism driving so-called evolution - that is, driving the selection of adaptive norms and behaviors - that is mostly due to capitalism creating harsh selection pressures on companies. One of Robin's main theses is that cultural evolution, especially technology, has diminished selection pressures up to the point that trends which might be maladaptive aren't selected fast enough, and that such trends might eventually lead to collapse. He takes the upcoming fertility crisis as one sign of this.
Cultural evolution is Darwinian natural selection just as much as DNA evolution is. It is literally so, nothing "nebulous" about it.
Well, I won't argue that.
However, evolution defined as "change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations" (Wikipedia) doesn't account for cultural phenomena as the heritable attributes, the characteristics of their heritability and the meaning of a generation differs between biology and culture.
I also don't object to culture possessing such traits enough so that selection is possible, which is key to your claims on cultural drift. I would just be clear when using the word evolution to describe the more strictly defined biological evolution, and when using it to describe analogous, less strictly defined phenomena.
cultural features are definitely "inherited" over time via cultural evolution.
Agreed on that.
Can you talk more about potential binding mechanisms? Is the idea to have a culture that celebrates adaptation, except for a small number of inviolable rules? It doesn't sound implausible to me, but it also sounds unstable. Not that I have a better idea.
I'm just imagining features we like being mixed in. No inviolable rules.
So there are values which we may see as good - e.g. cooperation - but in fact it is values which we see as evil - e.g. greed which drive evolution.
Now we are faced with the possibility of change to societies which are similar to that of the Amish, who value co-operation and not greed.
This change must be stopped.
Why?
If there's nothing in our shared world culture that you value over Amish culture, then you don't mind being replaced.
I just don't see how you can say 'we must abandon our values from the past because evolution doesn't favour them' and then go on to say 'we must defy an ongoing change to preserve our values.' Shouldn't you, by your own argument, be abandoning those values as maladaptive?
Personally, a thing that I value in our shared world culture is that it promotes kindness and community feeling to some extent. I think that's pretty mainstream.
I think I would prefer global Amish to a version of our current culture that eschews those values. Even if all I cared about was my own survival, I think I would still go for that option. It would be a question of conversion, not replacement if the choice really was that stark. I think that is probably pretty mainstream too.
Issues Robin has already brought up include diminishing innovation via our fertility crisis, leading to systemic decline. This very possibly includes painful transition states, including societal collapse, disorder, violence and the loss of things we currently value.
Yes. I didn't mean so much "what might happen," as "why should we care?" I think that simply referring to 'things we currently value' in an article which, as a starting point, questions the validity of the concepts of good and evil is making a lot of assumptions that, in the context, should probably be examined.
"why should we care?"
I don't like painful transition states including societal collapse, disorder, violence and the loss of things we currently value.
well you did it again there: 'things we currently value.'
Competition is often described as bad or even evil. But bad for what or whom? Furthermore, Competition is inevitable, and the way that Competition has evolved and will evolve is determined by those who win the competitions.
Business competition is *about* which enterprise can best *cooperate* with suppliers, customers, and employees. There is nothing bad or evil about that.