We Must Change How We Source Morality
Consider three sources of opinions or habits:
(A) Inherit - passed down via DNA or culture, mostly sit in background unquestioned, give assumptions for B,C.
(B) Consider - personally think own thoughts, conscious or otherwise. Influenced by what hear, debates join.
(C) Specialize - people sit at niches in a structure, learn skills to contribute there, defer to outputs from other niches. Hear, debate near niche. Different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets.
Before big brains, A dominated most everything. Then with big brains, A dominated stuff that was pretty constant over space and time, while B dominated the rest. And as we learned more kinds of abstractions, we collected more kinds of A that could help with B. While C has long been a thing, the modern world arose mainly due to a huge increase in C, mostly in orgs, markets, and professional networks. As our lives started to change faster and to get more specialized, that also induced a big increase in B to help us adapt to local context.
Looking more particularly at morality, norms, and adjacent culture, we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900. People felt morality should change as fast as other habits were changing, and youth movements led the charge. But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.
In adjacent areas of policy, sometimes C has been deferred to, but the ideology of democracy opposes doing too much of this. Over the last half century, we’ve seen a general decline in respect for and deference to C sources, especially near morals and politics, plausibly due to a long slow drift toward forager styles.
Alas, our civilization now plausibly suffers maladaptive cultural drift, in part from this new habit of setting morals and norms via B instead of A. And our civilization will fall unless we somehow fix this. (Even if we make AGI.) Yes, some C-like structures often feed indirectly into this B, but they don’t seem very adaptive. But short of returning to a stable low-tech highly-fragmented pre-modern world, it seems quite hard to return to A. So key question is: can we find an adaptive-enough C to source our morals?
I’ve explored a number of possible options here. While none seem especially promising, at least there’s some hope. But in this post I want to note that all of them will require us to accept no longer sourcing our morals mainly via “thinking for ourselves”. Maybe some people can be fooled into seeing themselves as vibing their morals, but there will in fact have to be a big effective structure that sets and changes morals, where people specialize on their small part and while deferring to other parts.
"Looking more particularly at morality, norms, and adjacent culture, we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900."
(I assume Robin is talking exclusively about the West, although he could make a much better case if he were talking about Japan, Turkey, or Hungary.)
That seems to me to need support. Earlier examples of B include the pre-socratics, Democritus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Hellenistic mathematicians and engineers, Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Spinoza, Voltaire, the Encylopedists, the Freemasons, a whole host of Renaissance thinkers, David Hume and the rest of the British enlightenment, all the founders of the USA, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Sutton and Lyell, Wagner, Darwin, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Baudelaire, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde--you get the idea.
Robin knows all this. So perhaps he dismisses all these earlier type B thinkers as being too few, or as just elites, the tip of an iceberg; and that the sudden jump /by the masses/ came around 1900.
But this might not work either. America has been drenched in radical type B religions throughout its history, starting with the Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, the freedom-of-religion colonists of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, Moravians, Shakers, and Mormons. Unitarian Universalists, Transcendentalists, and Hegelians, all radical progressive type-B "secular Christianities", took over America's top universities in the years 1800 to 1900.
The American colonials and frontier people from 1620 until, ironically, about 1900, were markedly type B, because their type-A European knowledge wasn't ready to deal with frontier life. (For instance, I think the frontier was almost the only time and place that prostitution was legal in the US.) There were enough type B to pull off the American Revolution. Back in Europe, the masses switched to type B in the French Revolution, and in all the revolutions of the 1840s, although these may have been nearly all urban populations only. Yet in 1914, the masses of all Western nations marched enthusiastically into the meat grinder of WW1. They were, if anything, more compliant type-A's than they had been for the past 100 years.
I think this is an issue where, if you want to make a quantified claim like Robin is making, you really have to figure out an objective way to count. The problem is that when people try to think of "radical" ideas, they think of ideas that /they/ still think of as radical. We are now at the point where people have forgotten that free speech is radical. Most have no idea that taking measurements of the physical world, then measuring time or temperature, reading silently, writing music down on paper, the number zero, making maps which correspond to the territory, trying to make drawings that didn't look like they were made by an 8-year-old, doing arithmetic, using money, using paper, believing people can discover new knowledge unknown to the ancients (none of these were common in Europe between the 8th and 13th century), distinguishing art from craft, attending church, using real numbers, allowing the continuum into physics, pockets, believing that people can invent new things like pockets, universal conscription, that being cruel to animals, slavery, war for profit, rape, child labor, or wife-beating were bad, or that inventing new things wasn't inherently bad (here we've reached the 19th century), and many many other ideas, were radical before the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and scientific revolution.
I think the old-fashioned notion of "Renaissance, Enlightenment, and scientific revolution" is more correct than "on or about December 1910, human character changed".
Browsing the full Oxford English Dictionary is one way to stumble across these changes. Did you know that no language in Europe had a word for "rape" before the late Middle Ages? (They had the same /word/, but not the same meaning.) What mattered to them wasn't the woman's consent, but the consent of her owner. Early medieval soldiers had no way of even /considering/ the idea that rape was wrong, because once they'd captured a woman, they were her owner. Problem solved. AFAIK the issue wasn't considered until courtly romances, in the late 12th century, and their treatment of it was inconsistent.
I like to tell people under the age of 30 that, before they were born, suitcases had no wheels. They're always astonished. Some don't believe me. Then I explain that's because they were meant to be carried by your servants, and they believe me even less. Or I tell them that before about 1960, nobody had ever even /thought/ about listening to music /by yourself/.
I would guess that toleration by the state of divergent opinions might be the most-important inflection point for type-B thinking. For many centuries, the biggest problem in Europe with independent thought was getting burned at the stake. But toleration came to different people and places to different extents at different times; and I haven't got a theory to explain it. It seems like it was much harder for Russia to control free speech in 1900 than in 1800, but much easier for the US to do so in 1917 than in 1800. I don't know why.
Some people would claim literacy, printing, and universal education were the turning point. But literacy and printing both became common long before 1900, and the original purpose of universal education was to program children with type A thinking. (This could explain WW1.)
Maybe Robin is mistaking modernist performative nonconformance and skepticism for independent thinking? But that became a noted media phenomenon in 1774, when Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" convinced droves of young German men to commit suicide in exactly the same "individualist" way as Young Werther.
Which raises a complication: Rousseau and the Romantics blurred the line between type A and type B. Rousseau and Goethe were type B thinkers, but their followers--Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, SJWs--presented as type B thinkers who mysteriously all converged on the same morality. That became a hallmark of modernity: mass movements of absolute unity and conformity which pretended to be based on independent thought.
Or perhaps Robin is confusing independent thinking with relativism, the idea that morality, and even objective facts about reality, are subjective. That did become suddenly popular around 1900, but it wasn't independent thinking anymore. Again, the first trend-setter who said that morality and objective reality are subjective (Nietzsche) was a type B thinker, but the people saying it in 1900 (German Romantics, Rationalist Idealists, phenomenologists, and race theorists--not coincidentally, all proto-Nazis) were trend-followers, type A posing as type B.
I'm just not convinced of "a relatively sudden jump from A to B" around 1900. I think we should clarify what strata of society we're talking about, whether we're talking about an inner attitude or professed ones, elite or mass, urban or rural, recorded or inferred, how we're sampling. I think we'll have to pin the thing down more to make a statement like that.
I don't quite see how morality can fit into C, though -let alone if it is desirable-. If I understood properly, C englobes areas like medicine, engineering, markets, law, science, bureaucracies,etc... where there are experts and relatively agreed-upon and clear metrics. Morality doesn't seem to fall into that. First, moral experts have been historically quite laughable and unpersuasive. But also, we have no clear metric to optimize and measure moral expertise and moral advice for: survival? democratic authorization? market success? philosophical insight?. In engineering, people can see that a bridge either stands or falls. Here, we don't even agree in what should be built, let alone on the criteria for success.