The Rise And Fall of Abstraction

Most animals see the world around them in pretty concrete terms. And they reason about that concrete world, though it’s not clear how consciously or explicitly. We humans, in contrast, not only use language and logic to consciously and explicitly reason about our concrete world, we also so reason about the abstractions we use to make sense of that world.

As we tend to express our high ideals using high abstractions, reasoning that is more explicit, systematic, and that more challenges our more abstract abstractions tends to threaten to undermine our cherished abstract ideals. Which is why most cultures tend to suppress such especially “potent” reasoning. It’s why Socrates was killed, and why most ancient scholars “esoterically” hid their analysis from wider audiences.

The modern world, however, has gone crazy for abstraction. Printing allowed widespread use of reading and math, and then schools emphasizing abstractions were used to select people for engineering, organizational, urban, financial, legal, and civic roles that used abstraction. The rising emphasis on abstraction plausibly caused the Flynn Effect, i.e. the rise in IQ scores in rich nations in the 20th century.

As schools came to determine prestige, the most elite schools gave top prestige to those who most succeeded at potent abstract analysis. To people like Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Freud, who used systematic abstract reasoning to challenge and change some of our most fundamental concepts and assumptions. Such “theorists” became key heroes of the modern world. Their conclusions have been widely trumpeted, and are no longer esoterically hidden.

(As “abstraction”, I have in mind concepts and claims expressible in math and language, subject to math and formal reasoning, emphasizing conceptual clarity, and with concise expressions that describe and integrate wide scopes of important things. On average, humans adept with such things are generally impressive, and seem worthy elites.)

Once new science, tech, and business abstractions induced high sustained rates of disruptive social change, elites in the arts, humanities, politics, and other areas of “culture” switched from trying to preserve culture under changing conditions, to searching in a much wider space for new cultural elements. The one thing they were sure of is that traditional culture wouldn’t do. So they sought different styles and concepts that could re-conceive and re-orient culture. This was called “modernism.” Such cultural activists have became the other key kind of modern hero.

(Note: I’m saying that abstraction was important feature of modernism, not that it was the most distinctive feature.)

Born in 1959, upon adulthood I deeply internalized this modern ideal of the deep thinker who reframes key concepts and assumptions. And I’ve spent my life since then trying to achieve that ideal. But alas, over that same roughly half century, the world has been turning away from it.

In academia, the prestige of “theory” has fallen, while the prestige of social activism has risen. Theory-heavy humanities have declined, while the writing norm of “show don’t tell” become stronger. We see fewer deep theoretical advances, fewer theory classes are assigned in college since the 1980s, and less math is used in school. In commerce, the importance of theory-heavy engineering has fallen greatly relative to less-theorized design. Innovation has slowed. Since 2010, student tests scores have been falling, as have college standards, and the college wage premium has stagnated. Also, the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores has recently reversed into falling scores.

The neutrality and analyticity of journalism peaked ~1965, and since then media has moved toward less text, more video, shorter forms, and less elite gatekeeping. Book reading peaked ~1990. Public intellectuals have risen in prestige relative to academic scholars. And the prestige of neutral elite-credentialed analysts has fallen both in policy and politics, replaced by more partisan rhetorical populists. Polls show confidence in the scientific community peaking before 1980, and show a rising preference for intuition over hard evidence since the 1990s.

Over the prior century, cultural elites had lamented their losing cultural authority relative to abstraction elites in science, engineering, and commerce. Then near the start of this switch, many cultural elites declared a switch from “modernism” to “post-modernism”, which Lyotard first defined as “incredulity toward meta-narratives”, i.e., grand, overarching accounts of history, society, or human progress. (Though some say postmodernism is indefinable.)

Post-modernists said modernists were too elitist, and had put too much confidence in abstract analysis, i.e., in objective truth, reason, universal principles, a view from nowhere, and technocratic analysis. They blamed all this for war, nukes, genocide, totalitarianism, urban disruption, and spiritual and environmental decay. Post-modernists tried to undermine prior abstractions by emphasizing social construction, fragmentation, subjectivity, context dependence, parody, and irony. They sought to undermine abstract distinctions like fact vs. fiction, authority vs. amateur, made vs. found, original vs. derivative. “Power corrupts” was the main abstraction they trusted.

Post-modernism was embraced mainly by the humanities and the arts. That embrace increased their “two cultures” split with STEM, boosted their confidence in having a distinct and important intellectual role, and made them better resist outside influence.

Men tend to use abstract systems thinking more than women, and this last half century has also been described as a period switching from male to female styles and priorities.

We can find many plausible explanations for this change. Modernists had in fact put too much confidence in abstractions, and their emphasis on abstraction did contribute to inequality and elite dominance. The rising ease of computing and data collection reduced the value of theory in academia and commerce, and intellectual fillers generally suppress framers. Rising wealth made us care less about productivity and more about comfort, morality, and cherished ideals. And weakening cultural selection predicts that exceptional deviations will regress back to prior means.

But recall that historically, most cultures suppressed potent abstract analysis, as it tended to undermine cherished ideals. What cherished ideals might this era of high abstraction have so threatened to induce elites to then turn away from abstraction?

The biggest cultural event of the 20th century was World War II, and the one thing everyone agreed on afterward was that they were all now anti-Nazi. Intellectuals then framed the key Nazi mistake as “social Darwinism”; German military aggression, racism, and genocide were said to be due to Germans seeing themselves as in a fierce competition with other peoples. (Never mind that Hitler didn’t believe in human evolution.) And soon afterward, many decided to choose “post-modernism”.

So my guess is that Darwinism applied to humans was the key abstraction that elites saw as too threatening to their cherished ideals. A threat big enough to induce them to reject the till-then inspiring vision of finding an integrated abstract analysis of everything important. A vision toward which humanity was making rapid progress.

Note that abstraction is still needed to navigate our complex modern world, and we still assign prestige based on abstraction abilities shown in school. Cultural activists are still going strong changing culture fast, even introducing new abstractions to support their changes. It is STEM-like systematic analysis of deep abstractions that is way down; blocking that helps cultural activists to follow their feels.

The Bible says the Jewish people came to the promised land about a year after leaving Egypt, but then lost their confidence and turned away, and wandered the desert for another forty years before returning to try again. I fear it may be many centuries before humanity again finds the confidence to seek an integrated abstract analysis of everything. Especially if our civilization falls soon, to be replaced by others.

Added 10Dec: Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen R. C. Hicks, argues that socialism was the cherished ideal that postmodernists wanted to protect from abstract analysis.