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.
Religious figures are history's most prolific moral experts. Modern religions like Marxism are just worse at this by a wide margin, while older religions have declined.
These have been a big part of culture historically and still are. A typical person does not have both the reasoning capability and the will to create an internally consistent framework of morals in context of how they mesh with everyone else. They need or at least strongly want to just believe something without that work.
In the past, that was religions like Christianity. In the present, it's a mix of government worship, cults of personality, Marxism, and a remaining spread of older religions. The older religions have a better track record. I say that as an atheist. I don't think we can or should go back. Need new religions that don't kill us or plummet fertility.
Religious figures have a mixed track record at best. After all, we mostly just judge their moral frameworks when the religions were successful at expanding and at building better-working societies, which is kind of a selection effect ('bad' religions just chose moral norms that were inefficient or faulty for group survival and expansion). I don't disagree that most people work well and feel happy with just some simple model they don't have to derive from first principles and that 'just works'. Unfortunately, one of the trade-offs for Modernity and WEIRD societies (the most successful until now) is precisely what Robin hints at, i.e., very strong individualism, value of rationality, self-discovery and intense mistrust of any legacies of past beliefs and norms.
Over a multi-generational time frame this will all get ironed out via selection. Somebody will show up to the future. Whether everyone will be Amish, or Muslim, or a humanoid robot, or something else – is the great unknown.
Deciding how culture should direct itself to be "optimal" in the future strikes me as obviously unsolvable. It depends on everything – the arc of scientific discovery, technology, human values, and so on – any one of which is impossible to predict on its own.
This is why I've been trying to draw his attention to life-years. They:
- naturally emerge when considering evo in finite time at *non* equilibrium, accommodating e.g. speciation
- bridge pragmatically to policy - just integral under population curve (count x clock)
- literally correspond to an invariant in physics - proper time from relativity
- allow fundamental pluralism, as different communities will have different boundaries/identities (how they 'count')
- recovers universalist intuitions in finite time, no 'reflective equilibrium'/view from nowhere' required (two groups that don't go extinct, assuming some non-zero rate of migration/marriage, eventually both their descendents=all humanity, and become totally 'aligned')
"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. This is why Greek myths about the rape of Helen / Persephone / Leda / Europa / Ganymede are sometimes called "the seduction of X", and are ambiguous about consent: the ancient Greeks didn't care about consent. 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, and it was no longer /raptus/. 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 40 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.
No comment on the content but just wanted to say that was a phenomenal post.
Minor quip, you over sell modern freedom of speech. Speech was vastly more free in the past in practice. Today a significant portion of the prison population is there because of speech crimes, and I'd bet at a vastly higher rate than yesteryear sans places like Nazi Germany or the the Soviet states. And today's cancel mobs are vastly worse than yesteryear where you could just move, start over, and leave your past behind you. I think a lot of people confuse the theory with practice on speech. The SCOTUS has consistently been narrowing the first amendment for the past couple decades for all speech EXCEPT political which is what people like you I feel tend to measure “free speech” by hence we now how strict liability criminal speech in America where even their mere utterance, outside political speech, will get you decades in prison but words that could be freely said fifty, hundred, thousand years ago just fine.
I believe people used to accept guidance from society much more readily than they do now. Socrates had to tell people to think for themselves: they were just beginning to do it. But we now find it hard even to imagine that ancient non-autonomous state of mind; there is no going back, no retreat from moral individualism.
After thinking a bit more about the relationship between Romanticism and "type B" thinking, I think that Robin's ontology of epistemologies needs to be revised.
First, I question the usefulness of the category "type C thinker". For Robin, type C thinkers /are/ naturally a thing, because he studies the role of experts in governmental decisions. I study mass movements, ideologies, art, and culture. Experts are outside of that mainstream. They do pop up throughout history--Taylorists, Le Corbusier, John Dewey on education--but looking at them, I see Taylorists as empiricists, Le Corbusier as a rationalist, John Dewey as a pragmatist, and that's the most useful way of categorising them, not putting them all into a single category of "expert". The failures in their theory are due to the failure modes of their epistemologies.
I don't think experts are even identifiable at present. Our institutions for identifying or creating them--mostly Harvard & Co.--are completely corrupt. The Biden administration tried Modern Monetary Theory, which any honest economist knows is bullshit. We have thousands of years of history proving it wrong. The politicians created a demand for Modern Monetary Theory, and it appeared. The second most-prestigious economic theory at present seems to be Marxism.
The confusion between Romanticism and type B thinkers that I noted in my last comment is due to the fact that every type B Rationalist acts like a type A thinker. Both the type A thinker, and the type B rationalist, begin with a set of unquestionable axioms. There is no epistemic difference between taking your axioms from your ancestors, and taking them from your peer group. All rationalism has a bedrock of romanticism, because the axioms a rationalist ideology is based on are an aesthetic choice. The type B rationalist goes through the motions of independent thought, but his conclusions are pre-determined by his axioms.
Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, and SJWs are all type B rationalists. The Marxists have an aesthetic vision of an egalitarian, friction-free future where the state withers away and humanity achieves total collective harmony. Nazis see the dark, romantic myth of blood, soil, and racial purity. The SJWs see a perfectly balanced ledger among unique yet perfectly indistinguishable groups, where every group outcome matches their demographic ratio. Each group sees any failures of reality to match their vision as proof of sabotage, by aristocrats, bourgeoisie, Jews, or racists.
We can put all 4 of these groups under one roof by calling them all children of Rousseau. They all start with the axiom that the Revolutionary Vanguard represents the absolute, infallible General Will of the People, which is inherently virtuous and aiming for human perfection. Therefore, anyone who opposes, questions, or even hesitates to support the Revolutionary Vanguard is opposing virtue itself.
The people I think Robin is /thinking of/ as type B are type B empiricists, people who base their independent thoughts beliefs in observation of the physical world. They behave entirely differently from type B rationalists and type A.
So I have eliminated type C, split type B into type B rationalists and type B empiricists, and rolled type A into type B rationalism. So we are left with just rationalists and empiricists. Which I think is a cleaner ontology of epistemologies, easily distinguished in the history of epistemology.
The A/B/C framework has a missing dimension: it can't distinguish between foundational moral principles and contingent social arrangements. The Bible itself makes this distinction — the Ten Commandments don't change, but debt servitude rules do. Slavery in the ancient world was an economic institution regulated by moral guardrails, not a moral institution itself. The framework treats "transmitted moral truth" and "transmitted cultural habit" as the same category, which is why it can't find a stable C — you can't design an adaptive structure to source morals if you can't separate the parts that should adapt from the parts that shouldn't.
That's an interesting claim, and very explicitly Rationalist. A rigorous empiricist would claim that the "foundation" of epistemology is the laws of statistics and correlations, which are pure math, and no proposition about real-world phenomena can ever be foundational.
You're reading me as making a philosophical claim, but I'm making a practical one. I don't need to resolve Rationalism vs. empiricism to point out that "don't murder" has shown up independently in every civilization we know of, while debt servitude rules vary all over the place. That's not a metaphysical assertion - it's just what the record shows.
And that's the gap in Hanson's framework. He needs to distinguish between those two kinds of inherited moral content if he wants to build a working C, and he doesn't. You can't design an adaptive structure to source morals if you're treating the Ten Commandments and Bronze Age contract law as the same kind of thing.
I see your point, but the word "foundational" has a technical epistemological meaning which goes far beyond "important" or "common". It means a rule which can't be questioned or hedged on. The weakest point of rationalist ethics is always these "foundational" rules, which are supposed to be its strongest points, because they are the easiest to exploit, by coming up with an argument for extending the reach of this foundational rule ever further, to weaponize justice for injustice. As is happening today by the elaborate sophistical arguments as to why the foundational principle of "justice" must be extended from individuals to identity groups, and from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, and must be exempt from demands for evidence of injustice, and (when an accusation is made in a private institution rather than a law court) that even allowing a person from a privileged group to give a defense is unjust.
I doubt any civilization has a foundational principle "don't kill". That would leave them unable to defend themselves from invaders, and (without the great wealth and organization needed to maintain prisons), unable to stop murderers from murdering more. The very word "murder" was invented to avoid creating a foundational principle. "Murder" is just a variant of "kill" which lets the people in charge make a long list of exceptions to the rule.
(Also, many societies did /not/ have rules against murder, often because they had no concept of murder. In ancient Greece before the 7th century BC, preventing people from killing each other wasn't seen as the business of the state. Killing was seen as a private matter, to be left up to the families involved; and they had no concept of "murder", which means something like an illegitimate killing. There was no point defining legitimacy when there was no mechanism to enforce it. If X killed Y, and Y's brother Z wanted to kill X, it was nobody's business to stop Z, or to judge whether X had killed in self-defense, or unintentionally. It was always up to each person to decide whether they wanted to kill someone enough to suffer the consequences. The Vikings had the wergild, which on the surface looks as if its only function was to protect killers, but it can also be seen as more just than Western legal systems, which don't allow the relatives of murder victims to take any recompense from the killer. They also had no special rules for accidental killings, but they did have an indirect mechanism analogous to a self-defense plea.)
"I'll cop to not being a philosopher - I used 'foundational' loosely and if it carries technical weight I didn't intend, sorry about that. Your Greek and Viking examples are well taken; 'every civilization' was too broad.
But the word choice doesn't change the observation. Norms against killing arose independently across unrelated civilizations in a way that debt servitude terms don't. Whatever you call that distinction - convergent, deeply recurring, high-cross-cultural-correlation - it's a real category difference in the data. And Hanson's framework treats both kinds of inherited moral content the same, which is why it can't find a stable C."
It may be a category difference under a rationalist epistemology, which tries to assign phenomena in the world to discrete categories. But I'm going to be a stickler, because the central argument in my "Two Cultures" substack--which I haven't posted a single post on yet, shame on me--is that the divide between rational and empirical epistemology is the most-important thing in the history of the West, and that most people are indoctrinated into rationalist epistemology, and go their entire lives without ever grasping what empiricist epistemology is. Also that rationalist epistemology has a frequent catastrophic failure mode (religious wars and exterminations) due to the overconfidence rationalism is designed to create.
An empiricist epistemology has no real category differences. We need to label data with category differences in order to reason verbally about them, but if we're dealing with phenomena which are all of the same ontological type--they're all the same sort of thing, generated by the same set of processes, such as the different categories of clouds that weathermen use--then category differences are never "real" in the sense of having a different essential nature, of being ontologically incommensurate. Clouds which are prototypical instances of the different types behave reliably in different ways, but the cloud categories (and the clouds) are fuzzy at the edges.
You want to distinguish between foundational moral principles and contingent social arrangements. With our current political and legal systems, we have to make such distinctions, because we have no practice of how to debate or even write laws which use an empiricist epistemology. Our laws rely on sharp category boundaries; this is why our income tax books have pages of tax brackets instead of one single tax equation.
But Robin is working at a very abstract, theoretical level, and he can and should use an empiricist epistemology, because only an empiricist, real-valued model can work for complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Robin takes a utilitarian approach to ethics (IIRC, Robin?), which is empirical, dealing only in real-valued data. A legal system which divided its values into "foundational" and "contingent" can't be implemented in a utilitarian framework, because you wouldn't know how many contingent things to trade off for one foundational thing. Utilitarianism requires expressing all values in the same currency. If there are even 2 different ontological types of values, you can no longer rank all possible outcomes.
Aren’t activists, public intellectuals, political leaders, some religious leaders (outside the west) the current C-type morality generators? With pretty strong influence. Modern westerners choose which viewpoints they prefer, but they’re mostly not really thinking for themselves (B), just picking between Cs.
Not certain why C would not be adaptive, except maybe because these movements are fragmented in the west, and somewhat piecemeal, rather than concentrated into separate societies? Also because there’s not that much variety between Cs - eg MAGA and woke Americans are mostly pretty similar?
I'd like to re-examine the claim that AI can't save us from maladaptive opinions/habits/morality. I can't find the essay right now, but I read a fairly convincing one that, despite a few highly-publicized cases of cranks spiraling into LLM psychosis, AIs are currently shaping most people's beliefs more toward mainstream consensus: As endlessly patient interlocutors familiar with the orthodox positions on ~everything, they can address the reasons for each person's individual belief, and guide them toward better-founded beliefs in a way that human experts don't have the time or patience to do.
It seems likely that a similar process--a mixture of B and C--could apply to morality.
> But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.
Sure, so that they can be rewarded/punished for making the right/wrong choices. We pretend to endorse diversity and pluralism, but in practice dissent on crucial questions isn't tolerated. Yes, the orthodoxy is likely maladaptive, but that isn't the most important consideration for our "morality experts".
Or, we might say that the masses are the soldiers, and the experts are the generals. Soldiers must go forth, fight, and be killed, so that we can decide which generals to glorify.
It just seems like a whole lot of A. High school is a lot of A. The bar I just got home doing drugs from is really mostly A. My most recent mutually destructive situationship was mostly A. Everything else is superficial, it's really just A.
"we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900", either i completely misunderstood your post, or Saint Thomas Aquinas would strongly disagree with you here?
Adopted personal and moral standards should be a choice and not something that is force fed; however, there is a place for A, B and C in your article. We "inherit" at least part of our morality from our parents, culture and arguably our DNA. In category C different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets etc. Hierarchies like churches, university administrations, corporate boards or specific professions do not provide moral or ethical standards unless they have already been specifically codified to some kind of professional standard such as the Hippocratic Oath for Doctors. Speculative markets have no ethical standards. They serve profit of shareholders, although if they are regulated, they can be maintained at ethical standards. Items in your group C and those characteristics we have inherited serve to develop with us, assuming we have been educated by our culture to reason critically, so that we can consider personally what our ethical standards are and how we can contribute to the debate. The professional experts in category C are important, but we should never let them think for us. Which experts do I trust and by whom will they be employed? What vested interested will they serve or will they serve the public good? If they serve speculative markets, they serve the markets and not necessary the public.
In a market system where negative externalities are minimized it is necessary to provide and produce value in order to serve the market, whereas non-market actors do not have to necessarily provide value.
They are arguably more free to act selfishly either in service of increasing their own self perception or others positive perception of them, which may or may not correspond to value creating activity!
While I concede that B has contributed to our current mess in the way you describe, that seems like more of a contingent historical fact than a law that no adaptive society can rely too much on B. What about Renaissance Europe? Surely that involved a lot of B relative to other places and times near then and was highly adaptive.
Isn't the problem that the information climate right now leads most people "thinking for themselves" to come to the same egalitarian, anti-progress conclusions? In a better information climate people would make better decisions when "thinking for themselves"
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.
Religious figures are history's most prolific moral experts. Modern religions like Marxism are just worse at this by a wide margin, while older religions have declined.
These have been a big part of culture historically and still are. A typical person does not have both the reasoning capability and the will to create an internally consistent framework of morals in context of how they mesh with everyone else. They need or at least strongly want to just believe something without that work.
In the past, that was religions like Christianity. In the present, it's a mix of government worship, cults of personality, Marxism, and a remaining spread of older religions. The older religions have a better track record. I say that as an atheist. I don't think we can or should go back. Need new religions that don't kill us or plummet fertility.
Religious figures have a mixed track record at best. After all, we mostly just judge their moral frameworks when the religions were successful at expanding and at building better-working societies, which is kind of a selection effect ('bad' religions just chose moral norms that were inefficient or faulty for group survival and expansion). I don't disagree that most people work well and feel happy with just some simple model they don't have to derive from first principles and that 'just works'. Unfortunately, one of the trade-offs for Modernity and WEIRD societies (the most successful until now) is precisely what Robin hints at, i.e., very strong individualism, value of rationality, self-discovery and intense mistrust of any legacies of past beliefs and norms.
Over a multi-generational time frame this will all get ironed out via selection. Somebody will show up to the future. Whether everyone will be Amish, or Muslim, or a humanoid robot, or something else – is the great unknown.
Deciding how culture should direct itself to be "optimal" in the future strikes me as obviously unsolvable. It depends on everything – the arc of scientific discovery, technology, human values, and so on – any one of which is impossible to predict on its own.
|have no clear metric
I've got one- all you need to supply is a count...and add a clock:
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/defending-life-years-as-the-primitive
https://pragmaticfutures.substack.com/p/the-life-years-movement
Robin's view seems to be that morality needs to be adaptive, otherwise it will eventually be replaced by adherents of more functional morality.
This is why I've been trying to draw his attention to life-years. They:
- naturally emerge when considering evo in finite time at *non* equilibrium, accommodating e.g. speciation
- bridge pragmatically to policy - just integral under population curve (count x clock)
- literally correspond to an invariant in physics - proper time from relativity
- allow fundamental pluralism, as different communities will have different boundaries/identities (how they 'count')
- recovers universalist intuitions in finite time, no 'reflective equilibrium'/view from nowhere' required (two groups that don't go extinct, assuming some non-zero rate of migration/marriage, eventually both their descendents=all humanity, and become totally 'aligned')
"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. This is why Greek myths about the rape of Helen / Persephone / Leda / Europa / Ganymede are sometimes called "the seduction of X", and are ambiguous about consent: the ancient Greeks didn't care about consent. 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, and it was no longer /raptus/. 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 40 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.
No comment on the content but just wanted to say that was a phenomenal post.
Minor quip, you over sell modern freedom of speech. Speech was vastly more free in the past in practice. Today a significant portion of the prison population is there because of speech crimes, and I'd bet at a vastly higher rate than yesteryear sans places like Nazi Germany or the the Soviet states. And today's cancel mobs are vastly worse than yesteryear where you could just move, start over, and leave your past behind you. I think a lot of people confuse the theory with practice on speech. The SCOTUS has consistently been narrowing the first amendment for the past couple decades for all speech EXCEPT political which is what people like you I feel tend to measure “free speech” by hence we now how strict liability criminal speech in America where even their mere utterance, outside political speech, will get you decades in prison but words that could be freely said fifty, hundred, thousand years ago just fine.
I believe people used to accept guidance from society much more readily than they do now. Socrates had to tell people to think for themselves: they were just beginning to do it. But we now find it hard even to imagine that ancient non-autonomous state of mind; there is no going back, no retreat from moral individualism.
Interesting! I'll say though that I think this post would be easier to read if you use 'Inherit, Consider, Specialize' instead of A, B, C.
After thinking a bit more about the relationship between Romanticism and "type B" thinking, I think that Robin's ontology of epistemologies needs to be revised.
First, I question the usefulness of the category "type C thinker". For Robin, type C thinkers /are/ naturally a thing, because he studies the role of experts in governmental decisions. I study mass movements, ideologies, art, and culture. Experts are outside of that mainstream. They do pop up throughout history--Taylorists, Le Corbusier, John Dewey on education--but looking at them, I see Taylorists as empiricists, Le Corbusier as a rationalist, John Dewey as a pragmatist, and that's the most useful way of categorising them, not putting them all into a single category of "expert". The failures in their theory are due to the failure modes of their epistemologies.
I don't think experts are even identifiable at present. Our institutions for identifying or creating them--mostly Harvard & Co.--are completely corrupt. The Biden administration tried Modern Monetary Theory, which any honest economist knows is bullshit. We have thousands of years of history proving it wrong. The politicians created a demand for Modern Monetary Theory, and it appeared. The second most-prestigious economic theory at present seems to be Marxism.
The confusion between Romanticism and type B thinkers that I noted in my last comment is due to the fact that every type B Rationalist acts like a type A thinker. Both the type A thinker, and the type B rationalist, begin with a set of unquestionable axioms. There is no epistemic difference between taking your axioms from your ancestors, and taking them from your peer group. All rationalism has a bedrock of romanticism, because the axioms a rationalist ideology is based on are an aesthetic choice. The type B rationalist goes through the motions of independent thought, but his conclusions are pre-determined by his axioms.
Jacobins, Marxists, Nazis, and SJWs are all type B rationalists. The Marxists have an aesthetic vision of an egalitarian, friction-free future where the state withers away and humanity achieves total collective harmony. Nazis see the dark, romantic myth of blood, soil, and racial purity. The SJWs see a perfectly balanced ledger among unique yet perfectly indistinguishable groups, where every group outcome matches their demographic ratio. Each group sees any failures of reality to match their vision as proof of sabotage, by aristocrats, bourgeoisie, Jews, or racists.
We can put all 4 of these groups under one roof by calling them all children of Rousseau. They all start with the axiom that the Revolutionary Vanguard represents the absolute, infallible General Will of the People, which is inherently virtuous and aiming for human perfection. Therefore, anyone who opposes, questions, or even hesitates to support the Revolutionary Vanguard is opposing virtue itself.
The people I think Robin is /thinking of/ as type B are type B empiricists, people who base their independent thoughts beliefs in observation of the physical world. They behave entirely differently from type B rationalists and type A.
So I have eliminated type C, split type B into type B rationalists and type B empiricists, and rolled type A into type B rationalism. So we are left with just rationalists and empiricists. Which I think is a cleaner ontology of epistemologies, easily distinguished in the history of epistemology.
The A/B/C framework has a missing dimension: it can't distinguish between foundational moral principles and contingent social arrangements. The Bible itself makes this distinction — the Ten Commandments don't change, but debt servitude rules do. Slavery in the ancient world was an economic institution regulated by moral guardrails, not a moral institution itself. The framework treats "transmitted moral truth" and "transmitted cultural habit" as the same category, which is why it can't find a stable C — you can't design an adaptive structure to source morals if you can't separate the parts that should adapt from the parts that shouldn't.
That's an interesting claim, and very explicitly Rationalist. A rigorous empiricist would claim that the "foundation" of epistemology is the laws of statistics and correlations, which are pure math, and no proposition about real-world phenomena can ever be foundational.
You're reading me as making a philosophical claim, but I'm making a practical one. I don't need to resolve Rationalism vs. empiricism to point out that "don't murder" has shown up independently in every civilization we know of, while debt servitude rules vary all over the place. That's not a metaphysical assertion - it's just what the record shows.
And that's the gap in Hanson's framework. He needs to distinguish between those two kinds of inherited moral content if he wants to build a working C, and he doesn't. You can't design an adaptive structure to source morals if you're treating the Ten Commandments and Bronze Age contract law as the same kind of thing.
I see your point, but the word "foundational" has a technical epistemological meaning which goes far beyond "important" or "common". It means a rule which can't be questioned or hedged on. The weakest point of rationalist ethics is always these "foundational" rules, which are supposed to be its strongest points, because they are the easiest to exploit, by coming up with an argument for extending the reach of this foundational rule ever further, to weaponize justice for injustice. As is happening today by the elaborate sophistical arguments as to why the foundational principle of "justice" must be extended from individuals to identity groups, and from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, and must be exempt from demands for evidence of injustice, and (when an accusation is made in a private institution rather than a law court) that even allowing a person from a privileged group to give a defense is unjust.
I doubt any civilization has a foundational principle "don't kill". That would leave them unable to defend themselves from invaders, and (without the great wealth and organization needed to maintain prisons), unable to stop murderers from murdering more. The very word "murder" was invented to avoid creating a foundational principle. "Murder" is just a variant of "kill" which lets the people in charge make a long list of exceptions to the rule.
(Also, many societies did /not/ have rules against murder, often because they had no concept of murder. In ancient Greece before the 7th century BC, preventing people from killing each other wasn't seen as the business of the state. Killing was seen as a private matter, to be left up to the families involved; and they had no concept of "murder", which means something like an illegitimate killing. There was no point defining legitimacy when there was no mechanism to enforce it. If X killed Y, and Y's brother Z wanted to kill X, it was nobody's business to stop Z, or to judge whether X had killed in self-defense, or unintentionally. It was always up to each person to decide whether they wanted to kill someone enough to suffer the consequences. The Vikings had the wergild, which on the surface looks as if its only function was to protect killers, but it can also be seen as more just than Western legal systems, which don't allow the relatives of murder victims to take any recompense from the killer. They also had no special rules for accidental killings, but they did have an indirect mechanism analogous to a self-defense plea.)
"I'll cop to not being a philosopher - I used 'foundational' loosely and if it carries technical weight I didn't intend, sorry about that. Your Greek and Viking examples are well taken; 'every civilization' was too broad.
But the word choice doesn't change the observation. Norms against killing arose independently across unrelated civilizations in a way that debt servitude terms don't. Whatever you call that distinction - convergent, deeply recurring, high-cross-cultural-correlation - it's a real category difference in the data. And Hanson's framework treats both kinds of inherited moral content the same, which is why it can't find a stable C."
It may be a category difference under a rationalist epistemology, which tries to assign phenomena in the world to discrete categories. But I'm going to be a stickler, because the central argument in my "Two Cultures" substack--which I haven't posted a single post on yet, shame on me--is that the divide between rational and empirical epistemology is the most-important thing in the history of the West, and that most people are indoctrinated into rationalist epistemology, and go their entire lives without ever grasping what empiricist epistemology is. Also that rationalist epistemology has a frequent catastrophic failure mode (religious wars and exterminations) due to the overconfidence rationalism is designed to create.
An empiricist epistemology has no real category differences. We need to label data with category differences in order to reason verbally about them, but if we're dealing with phenomena which are all of the same ontological type--they're all the same sort of thing, generated by the same set of processes, such as the different categories of clouds that weathermen use--then category differences are never "real" in the sense of having a different essential nature, of being ontologically incommensurate. Clouds which are prototypical instances of the different types behave reliably in different ways, but the cloud categories (and the clouds) are fuzzy at the edges.
You want to distinguish between foundational moral principles and contingent social arrangements. With our current political and legal systems, we have to make such distinctions, because we have no practice of how to debate or even write laws which use an empiricist epistemology. Our laws rely on sharp category boundaries; this is why our income tax books have pages of tax brackets instead of one single tax equation.
But Robin is working at a very abstract, theoretical level, and he can and should use an empiricist epistemology, because only an empiricist, real-valued model can work for complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Robin takes a utilitarian approach to ethics (IIRC, Robin?), which is empirical, dealing only in real-valued data. A legal system which divided its values into "foundational" and "contingent" can't be implemented in a utilitarian framework, because you wouldn't know how many contingent things to trade off for one foundational thing. Utilitarianism requires expressing all values in the same currency. If there are even 2 different ontological types of values, you can no longer rank all possible outcomes.
Aren’t activists, public intellectuals, political leaders, some religious leaders (outside the west) the current C-type morality generators? With pretty strong influence. Modern westerners choose which viewpoints they prefer, but they’re mostly not really thinking for themselves (B), just picking between Cs.
Not certain why C would not be adaptive, except maybe because these movements are fragmented in the west, and somewhat piecemeal, rather than concentrated into separate societies? Also because there’s not that much variety between Cs - eg MAGA and woke Americans are mostly pretty similar?
A C-type social influencer would be adapted to gain social influence and prestige, not to be correct.
I'd like to re-examine the claim that AI can't save us from maladaptive opinions/habits/morality. I can't find the essay right now, but I read a fairly convincing one that, despite a few highly-publicized cases of cranks spiraling into LLM psychosis, AIs are currently shaping most people's beliefs more toward mainstream consensus: As endlessly patient interlocutors familiar with the orthodox positions on ~everything, they can address the reasons for each person's individual belief, and guide them toward better-founded beliefs in a way that human experts don't have the time or patience to do.
It seems likely that a similar process--a mixture of B and C--could apply to morality.
Moving people toward a consensus just doesn't solve the problem of that consensus drifting into maladaption.
> But people also rejected C on such topics; it felt important that everyone “think for themselves”.
Sure, so that they can be rewarded/punished for making the right/wrong choices. We pretend to endorse diversity and pluralism, but in practice dissent on crucial questions isn't tolerated. Yes, the orthodoxy is likely maladaptive, but that isn't the most important consideration for our "morality experts".
Or, we might say that the masses are the soldiers, and the experts are the generals. Soldiers must go forth, fight, and be killed, so that we can decide which generals to glorify.
It just seems like a whole lot of A. High school is a lot of A. The bar I just got home doing drugs from is really mostly A. My most recent mutually destructive situationship was mostly A. Everything else is superficial, it's really just A.
"we see a relatively sudden jump from A to B at the modernism transition ~1900", either i completely misunderstood your post, or Saint Thomas Aquinas would strongly disagree with you here?
Adopted personal and moral standards should be a choice and not something that is force fed; however, there is a place for A, B and C in your article. We "inherit" at least part of our morality from our parents, culture and arguably our DNA. In category C different types of structures: hierarchies, professions, speculative markets etc. Hierarchies like churches, university administrations, corporate boards or specific professions do not provide moral or ethical standards unless they have already been specifically codified to some kind of professional standard such as the Hippocratic Oath for Doctors. Speculative markets have no ethical standards. They serve profit of shareholders, although if they are regulated, they can be maintained at ethical standards. Items in your group C and those characteristics we have inherited serve to develop with us, assuming we have been educated by our culture to reason critically, so that we can consider personally what our ethical standards are and how we can contribute to the debate. The professional experts in category C are important, but we should never let them think for us. Which experts do I trust and by whom will they be employed? What vested interested will they serve or will they serve the public good? If they serve speculative markets, they serve the markets and not necessary the public.
In a market system where negative externalities are minimized it is necessary to provide and produce value in order to serve the market, whereas non-market actors do not have to necessarily provide value.
They are arguably more free to act selfishly either in service of increasing their own self perception or others positive perception of them, which may or may not correspond to value creating activity!
While I concede that B has contributed to our current mess in the way you describe, that seems like more of a contingent historical fact than a law that no adaptive society can rely too much on B. What about Renaissance Europe? Surely that involved a lot of B relative to other places and times near then and was highly adaptive.
Isn't the problem that the information climate right now leads most people "thinking for themselves" to come to the same egalitarian, anti-progress conclusions? In a better information climate people would make better decisions when "thinking for themselves"
Most people are too busy to think, much less think for themselves.