>We can collect many plausible explanations for this change.
It's amusing that you don't include "postmodernists were largely right" as one. Of course, making a correct diagnosis doesn't mean that you're automatically qualified to treat the disease, as pomo-ists demonstrated by promptly going off the deep end themselves, but, like it or not, the dream of modernism is naive and infeasible, and at some point humanity (or whatever replaces us) would have to grow up.
Brilliant insight. You are indeed a deep thinker. And you are absolutely right about the need for abstraction. Unfortunately we live in a world driven by emotion and sound bites and I’m not sure what we can do about that.
Nevertheless, thank you for your article. On a related issue, I’ve been probing various AI models to see if they might have the capacity for abstract thought. Inconclusive results, but I’m having fun testing them
For a shock, read Francis Wayland’s The Elements of Moral Science (1835; try also here), “one of the most widely used and influential American textbooks of the nineteenth century“.
As Wayland – prior to Darwin’s theory of evolution – explained, conventional Christian morals were based on the idea that Man was made by God, and so had special moral responsibilities.
Darwin knocked that bucket over, and in the process broke the long-accepted rationales for all kinds of legal, moral, and ethical rules. The reverberations from that were still being felt at least into the 1970s, and included socialism, progressivism, communism, the sexual revolution (of the 1920s, not the 1960s one), fascism, bad art, ugly buildings, environmentalism, hippies, flower power, and more. Some of it was good, more of it was bad. Things didn’t really start to settle down until the 1980s in the US, the 1990s in Europe, and still aren’t settled in the Islamic world.
And there are plenty of people – all over the world – who still haven’t made peace with it.
In Asia there wasn’t as much commotion about Darwin because Asian societies tended to take their social rules from non-theistic sources (as the West does now, mostly); Darwin’s revelations didn’t invalidate them.
It is telling, I think, that East and West had more-or-less similar rules (and still do, post-Darwin), despite supposedly getting them from independent sources.
I think that shows the rules really came from social evolution, a la Friedrich Hayek (certain rules tend to make societies dominant). Ironic, no?
Greg Cochran has recently been arguing that the changes people have been writing about for the University of California system have been the result of that (relying on GPA rather than standardized test scores being a vehicle for recruiting a different demographic mix).
I'll think about this. But for now I'll note that this "Fall of Abstraction" seems roughly time-correlated with a fall in traditional religious belief. Jung was deeply concerned about the problems this raised for us both individually and socially. *Man and His Symbols* is explicitly about how the disconnection of modern man from the (abstract?) symbols of dreams, myths, and art was a major threat to our ability to create a sense of wholeness and meaning.
What literary criticism called “theory” was postmodernism, and its principal targets were (a) Marxism; (b) modernism. “Skepticism towards meta narratives” was skepticism that you could have valid theories of certain kinds.
So, “theory” has an ambiguous meaning in the OP, either the kind of theory that the modernists thought you could have, or the theoretical-arguments-against-having-theories of the postmodernists.
It just read very ambiguously to me, because talking about the downfall of modernism invokes a particular context (postmodernist philosophers/literary criticism) in which “theory” meant something confusingly different.
No; "theory" in literary theory means critical theory. See Vincent Leitch's /Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism/, which has been the standard textbook of graduate-level English departments since 2001, more than half of which is critical theory. Post-modernism and marxism comprise maybe 1% of it.
I appreciate that you noted "The rising emphasis on abstraction plausibly caused the Flynn Effect, i.e. the rise in IQ scores in rich nations in the 20th century." This is what James Flynn said in his Ted talk of 15 years (approx) ago. That in the 20th century, everyone in the developed world put on scientific spectacles (adopted scientific habits of mind). And, IQ in those countries has reached a plateau.... ??
The defining conflict of our era runs deeper than parties, nations, ideologies, or social classes. It is a psychological struggle between two states of mind: one conditioned into authoritarian submission and system-justifying beliefs, and another—still emerging—that sees concentrated, unaccountable power for what it is and refuses to grant it legitimacy.
The UDHR can be read as a shared floor for civilization: a minimum below which no person, anywhere, may be pushed if rule is to count as legitimate at all. It encodes basic protections for food, housing, healthcare, education, social security, freedom from torture and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary detention and disappearance, and protection from targeted persecution in the name of growth, security, development, or national interest.
It also sets a limit on self-enrichment. No individual, corporation, or state can credibly claim legitimacy for wealth or power built on practices that systematically push people below that floor—through war, debt, ecological devastation, or economic policy.
The UDHR is therefore a measuring device for aligning local and global action around that floor and evaluating institutions, laws, and fortunes against it. It links civil and political rights to economic and social rights as a single operating system for keeping human life above the baseline threshold.
Great essay. I enjoyed the links back to older thoughtful analysis. A reaction against (or even hatred of) abstraction and sweeping analysis is at the core of postmodernism. My take is that Marxists and others who despised everything The West stands for realized starting in the 1930s and definitely by the 1960s that 1) Marxist theory had failed, 2) honest cross-cultural analyses and sweeping historical analyses consistently revealed that The West (including their nemeses Christianity and Capitalism) were empirically pretty awesome. Rather than admit defeat and put their support behind the forces of progress (Christian values and Capitalism) they realized they could generate a critical mass in academia sufficient to just nuke all abstraction and push to the margins any scholar who wouldn’t go along, and then they did just that. It’s a terrible tragedy, inflicted deliberately.
My hypothesis is that some of it is due to specialization, and the need to specialize in the modern world. In the sciences you see this as a drop in the number of "polymaths" like von Neumann and Fermi – people who understood the majority of what was going on and could contribute across many disciplines. The need to specialize means you have fewer people able to synthesize across broad areas, i.e., think abstractly.
I think also academic culture in particular does more gatekeeping these days. People are criticized for swimming outside their lane. That might be an outcome of the supply/demand imbalance that hit academia full force starting in the 1970s.
Knowledge has been growing exponentially but the amount that fits into a single brain hasn't. Surely this fact alone will change the way we think, over time.
Also, not all abstractions are created equal. The really useful ones explain a lot of details in a unified way, but it could be that there is a finite number of useful ones, and we're seeing fewer discovered today because we've already picked the low hanging fruit.
Just speculating of course. I agree with your base observation and I see many possible explanations but no obvious winner.
The key mistake of the Nazis was an embrace of authoritarianism and tribalism, which are instinctive behaviors opposed to abstract analysis. A strong feeling that all the community's problems are caused by outgroups, combined with a leader who is given absolute power because he promises to hurt the outgroups. A society organized around personal loyalty and obedience to the leader, and hatred for the outgroups, rather than abstract law. Every authoritarian shithole is like this, from USSR to 1975 Cambodia to North Korea to Trumpism.
Abstract analysis is difficult in such a context because contradicting or criticizing the leaders is strictly not allowed, and personal success hinges on whether you are able to be seen as part of the ingroup, which demands ideological conformity. Either you accept what they claim, no matter how contrary to the facts, or you're ostracized and maybe killed.
Socrates was killed because his students included:
- Alcibiades, who urged Athens on to the disastrous invasion of Sicily [thanks, Christopher], and later betrayed Athens to Sparta
- Critias, the head of the 30 tyrants whom the Spartans placed over Athens after the war, who then murdered 5% of all Athenian citizens
- Charmides, either one of the 30 tyrants, or an administrator for them
- Aristoteles, another member of the 30 tyrants
- Xenophon, whose role with the tyrants is unclear, but who fled Athens after the revolt against the Tyrants, for fear of retribution
- Plato, whose writings show he loved Sparta and despised Athens, and who probably also participated in the aristocrats' betrayal of Athens to Sparta
That is why he was charged with "corrupting the youth".
But the reason he collected and inspired such allies was his abstract analysis.
Sicily, not Crete.
Oh, right. How embarassing.
I would venture that ET Jaynes has made a unified theory of inference already. It hasn't caught on yet.
His Probability Theory is an amazing book, highly recommended.
It's hard to imagine a book that's better. And I say this as someone without a math background. In fact, I've started learning because of him.
Brilliant essay. It has provoked a wide range of thoughtful discussion, which confirms its importance.
Thanks as always!
>We can collect many plausible explanations for this change.
It's amusing that you don't include "postmodernists were largely right" as one. Of course, making a correct diagnosis doesn't mean that you're automatically qualified to treat the disease, as pomo-ists demonstrated by promptly going off the deep end themselves, but, like it or not, the dream of modernism is naive and infeasible, and at some point humanity (or whatever replaces us) would have to grow up.
You are right, and I've added that explanation to the post.
Brilliant insight. You are indeed a deep thinker. And you are absolutely right about the need for abstraction. Unfortunately we live in a world driven by emotion and sound bites and I’m not sure what we can do about that.
Nevertheless, thank you for your article. On a related issue, I’ve been probing various AI models to see if they might have the capacity for abstract thought. Inconclusive results, but I’m having fun testing them
From https://mugwumpery.com/its-all-darwins-fault/
It’s all Darwin’s fault
May 28th, 2015
For a shock, read Francis Wayland’s The Elements of Moral Science (1835; try also here), “one of the most widely used and influential American textbooks of the nineteenth century“.
As Wayland – prior to Darwin’s theory of evolution – explained, conventional Christian morals were based on the idea that Man was made by God, and so had special moral responsibilities.
Darwin knocked that bucket over, and in the process broke the long-accepted rationales for all kinds of legal, moral, and ethical rules. The reverberations from that were still being felt at least into the 1970s, and included socialism, progressivism, communism, the sexual revolution (of the 1920s, not the 1960s one), fascism, bad art, ugly buildings, environmentalism, hippies, flower power, and more. Some of it was good, more of it was bad. Things didn’t really start to settle down until the 1980s in the US, the 1990s in Europe, and still aren’t settled in the Islamic world.
And there are plenty of people – all over the world – who still haven’t made peace with it.
In Asia there wasn’t as much commotion about Darwin because Asian societies tended to take their social rules from non-theistic sources (as the West does now, mostly); Darwin’s revelations didn’t invalidate them.
It is telling, I think, that East and West had more-or-less similar rules (and still do, post-Darwin), despite supposedly getting them from independent sources.
I think that shows the rules really came from social evolution, a la Friedrich Hayek (certain rules tend to make societies dominant). Ironic, no?
> Since 2010, student tests scores have been falling, and the Flynn effect of rising IQ scores has recently reversed into falling scores.
Is that adjusted for ethnic composition?
I don't know.
Greg Cochran has recently been arguing that the changes people have been writing about for the University of California system have been the result of that (relying on GPA rather than standardized test scores being a vehicle for recruiting a different demographic mix).
I'll think about this. But for now I'll note that this "Fall of Abstraction" seems roughly time-correlated with a fall in traditional religious belief. Jung was deeply concerned about the problems this raised for us both individually and socially. *Man and His Symbols* is explicitly about how the disconnection of modern man from the (abstract?) symbols of dreams, myths, and art was a major threat to our ability to create a sense of wholeness and meaning.
What literary criticism called “theory” was postmodernism, and its principal targets were (a) Marxism; (b) modernism. “Skepticism towards meta narratives” was skepticism that you could have valid theories of certain kinds.
So, “theory” has an ambiguous meaning in the OP, either the kind of theory that the modernists thought you could have, or the theoretical-arguments-against-having-theories of the postmodernists.
Outside of literary theory, "theory" has a pretty consistent meaning.
It just read very ambiguously to me, because talking about the downfall of modernism invokes a particular context (postmodernist philosophers/literary criticism) in which “theory” meant something confusingly different.
But, ok, not that sense of “theory”.
Marxism is a kind of modernism, so you don't need to separate them into (a) and (b).
No; "theory" in literary theory means critical theory. See Vincent Leitch's /Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism/, which has been the standard textbook of graduate-level English departments since 2001, more than half of which is critical theory. Post-modernism and marxism comprise maybe 1% of it.
Jean Francois Lyotard’s _The Postmodern Condition_ blames the computer scientists for postmodernism, in two ways:
(A) Research into (e.g.) programming languages makes related philosophical problems suddenly become salient
(B) A society in which computers are heavily _used_ suddenly has a bunch of newish problems deserving of analysis
I appreciate that you noted "The rising emphasis on abstraction plausibly caused the Flynn Effect, i.e. the rise in IQ scores in rich nations in the 20th century." This is what James Flynn said in his Ted talk of 15 years (approx) ago. That in the 20th century, everyone in the developed world put on scientific spectacles (adopted scientific habits of mind). And, IQ in those countries has reached a plateau.... ??
The defining conflict of our era runs deeper than parties, nations, ideologies, or social classes. It is a psychological struggle between two states of mind: one conditioned into authoritarian submission and system-justifying beliefs, and another—still emerging—that sees concentrated, unaccountable power for what it is and refuses to grant it legitimacy.
The UDHR can be read as a shared floor for civilization: a minimum below which no person, anywhere, may be pushed if rule is to count as legitimate at all. It encodes basic protections for food, housing, healthcare, education, social security, freedom from torture and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary detention and disappearance, and protection from targeted persecution in the name of growth, security, development, or national interest.
It also sets a limit on self-enrichment. No individual, corporation, or state can credibly claim legitimacy for wealth or power built on practices that systematically push people below that floor—through war, debt, ecological devastation, or economic policy.
The UDHR is therefore a measuring device for aligning local and global action around that floor and evaluating institutions, laws, and fortunes against it. It links civil and political rights to economic and social rights as a single operating system for keeping human life above the baseline threshold.
What I'm getting out this article is that Americans are so dumb that the Flynn effect works backwards for them
Great essay. I enjoyed the links back to older thoughtful analysis. A reaction against (or even hatred of) abstraction and sweeping analysis is at the core of postmodernism. My take is that Marxists and others who despised everything The West stands for realized starting in the 1930s and definitely by the 1960s that 1) Marxist theory had failed, 2) honest cross-cultural analyses and sweeping historical analyses consistently revealed that The West (including their nemeses Christianity and Capitalism) were empirically pretty awesome. Rather than admit defeat and put their support behind the forces of progress (Christian values and Capitalism) they realized they could generate a critical mass in academia sufficient to just nuke all abstraction and push to the margins any scholar who wouldn’t go along, and then they did just that. It’s a terrible tragedy, inflicted deliberately.
My hypothesis is that some of it is due to specialization, and the need to specialize in the modern world. In the sciences you see this as a drop in the number of "polymaths" like von Neumann and Fermi – people who understood the majority of what was going on and could contribute across many disciplines. The need to specialize means you have fewer people able to synthesize across broad areas, i.e., think abstractly.
I think also academic culture in particular does more gatekeeping these days. People are criticized for swimming outside their lane. That might be an outcome of the supply/demand imbalance that hit academia full force starting in the 1970s.
But wasn't the need for specialization also increasing 1800 to 1950, as theory and abstraction rose?
Knowledge has been growing exponentially but the amount that fits into a single brain hasn't. Surely this fact alone will change the way we think, over time.
Also, not all abstractions are created equal. The really useful ones explain a lot of details in a unified way, but it could be that there is a finite number of useful ones, and we're seeing fewer discovered today because we've already picked the low hanging fruit.
Just speculating of course. I agree with your base observation and I see many possible explanations but no obvious winner.
The key mistake of the Nazis was an embrace of authoritarianism and tribalism, which are instinctive behaviors opposed to abstract analysis. A strong feeling that all the community's problems are caused by outgroups, combined with a leader who is given absolute power because he promises to hurt the outgroups. A society organized around personal loyalty and obedience to the leader, and hatred for the outgroups, rather than abstract law. Every authoritarian shithole is like this, from USSR to 1975 Cambodia to North Korea to Trumpism.
Abstract analysis is difficult in such a context because contradicting or criticizing the leaders is strictly not allowed, and personal success hinges on whether you are able to be seen as part of the ingroup, which demands ideological conformity. Either you accept what they claim, no matter how contrary to the facts, or you're ostracized and maybe killed.
Is China's culture lacking in theoretical knowledge, too? or only the Western society?
China has eagerly assimilated Western abstractions, but hasn't add so many of its own.
Sounds strange, considering the number of scientific works per year in China. 1,1 mln in 2024. It's more than in the US!
Most academic publications don't contribute much to the most potent types of abstract analysis I focus on in my post.
But what contributes much?