Those legitimate governments don't usually abolish their legislature either.
Your argument here reminds me of the folks I see on Facebook who claim that the casualties that the Israelis are inflicting in Gaza are completely unjustified. They never seem to notice that the war there could end today if the Hamas leaders would surrender.
There are times when it is hard to tell who the bad guys are. Star Wars wasn't such a case.
Even before that, the kind of regime that murders someone's aunt & uncle outside of self defense, then desecrates their bodies and home for little reason save instilling fear seems reasonable to rebel against.
Especially when the planet itself is not in rebellion outside of a few individuals.
Also slaughtering an entire ancient religious order, overthrowing the prior elected government, leaders who casually murder subordinates for minor infractions, only allowing humans to hold high offices or military ranks (not stated but clearly shown).
No biological feature of a species or behavioral feature of a culture is "adaptive" or "maladaptive" in isolation, but rather in relation to some selection pressure. When selection pressures in general are lowly constraining, drift occurs because a broader range of features survive selection. Whether those features are "adaptive" or "maladaptive" cannot be determined until highly constraining selection pressures arise again. Since we don't know what those pressures will be, we can't know whether features arising during periods of low selection constraint will be adaptive or maladaptive relative to constraints in future periods of high selection.
OK, I can’t let the Star Wars example go. We get to sit in on council meetings where the plan is presented to build a terror weapon to keep all the systems in line. Later, a senior leader decides to annihilate Alderaan as an act of state violence, to terrify everyone in the galaxy. He says right then in that scene that the planet with the actual enemies of the Empire is too remote, so he’s going to make an example of an undefended system that is presumably full of loyal Imperial citizens. There’s no indication that anyone else on the Death Star thinks this is weird or unlawful order , either. These are not good guys making hard choices for the benefit of all.
I think that concerns about Amish or Haredim takeover are overblown. Both of those are essentially parasitic relative to mainstream cultures they're embedded in, without any convincing evidence that they can become self-sufficient without profound changes.
Of course, mainstream cultures also likely require profound changes to become long-term sustainable, but the essential characteristics of technological/material world that they would need to adapt to still seem unclear and potentially highly variable, so the primary immediate concern is maintaining relative stability during which the outlines of that world become clearer.
why pretend you don't know why people are having fewer children when your environmentalists (at the Dept of Education in D.C.) write the national public-school curriculum and put up the reduce-reuse-recycle posters in every classroom in all grade-levels?
What do you think cultural adaption is? Have you strictly defined it? You claim that cultural adaptation is no longer the means through which our norms change in Western society, rather, it's through activists & possible manipulators. Have you not considered that this is the way it has always been? Martin Luther's 95 theses? The spread of Christianity to Rome? Are these not activism / forced manipulation?
I understand what you are going for here, and you present an interesting framework through which we can view the relationship between trust & culture, but I believe this deserves more rigor. I hope more people can keep thinking about this niche, & I'm personally going to try and look up some academics that've written on the topic. I wonder what leading anthropologists have to say about it, y'know? Someone definitely has thought about cultural adaptations in an academic way before. Gotta go find out who.
Macaques use tools in different ways. Sometimes, macaques who use tools one way will get mad at macaques in their tribe who use the tools the other way. They kill each other over it. Entire monkey wars are fought over this. This is "activism" in a primal sense. I believe what you have described as a modern phenomena is just a technologized version of how cultural adaptation has always existed.
What do you think cultural adaption is? Have you strictly defined it? You claim that cultural adaptation is no longer the means through which our norms change in Western society, rather, it's through activists & possible manipulators. Have you not considered that this is the way it has always been? Martin Luther's 95 theses? The spread of Christianity to Rome? Are these not activism / forced manipulation?
I understand what you are going for here, and you present an interesting framework through which we can view the relationship between trust & culture, but I believe this deserves more rigor. I hope more people can keep thinking about this niche, & I'm personally going to try and look up some academics that've written on the topic. I wonder what leading anthropologists have to say about it, y'know? Someone definitely has thought about cultural adaptations in an academic way before. Gotta go find out who.
are you arguing that all our intrinsic moral values are to optimize adaptivity of our societies?
also, i agree that there are ways culture is changed and ingrained in people where people consciously think their values are similar to the culture they are part of, but that actually their true values are different; they were influenced by surrounding culture. and in that case figuring out which values they might have been "pressured" to follow, and introspecting on them, potentially changing those values, is good.
but maybe some of the values we now have are because of drift in intrinsic values, and those we might not want to change them.
it's just the way we were made: who we truly are.
we definitely want to change today's culture to those values, and to prevent further drift; but that doesn't mean we should undo past intrinsic true value drift, or that we should change all our values to the ones maximally adaptable and non-driftable.
like, we might value not drifting and adaptability _because_ it lets us act on the _other_ values.
sorry if I misunderstood you or if you wrote about this somewhere else. but i felt this wasn't addressed directly in the posts I've read.
This is a very interesting post with a unique perspective.
I suggest that folks interested in how cultures change read "How Christianity Changed the World", a scholarly book by Alvin Schmidt. It is eye-opening. Also "Dominion" by Tom Holland.
we're told that the more children we have, the more time the doctors and dentists will have to spend taking care of our family, and the less time they'll have to take care of the rest of the community
if you want every family to have a chance to go to the doctor and get care, you need to have fewer children so they get to each family quicker. Fewer children means less wait time for your next appointment
every year of school we're told that diapers fill up landfills and that we need to "stop at one" to save the environment and "big families need big cars that destroy the environment"
and "we need to stop-at-one to leave room for the immigrants"--if you want people to live under freedom, they can only do it in your country, so don't fill up your country and force immigrants to remain outside the u.s., i.e., in tyranny
all school-children are told from first-grade through college that more people equals more pollution and climate-change.
Low-fertility happens everywhere regardless of race, religion, constitution, properity, etc. The one constant from big-cities in China to Iran to Brazil to the US is that they all have the same teacher-union educational-system that teaches children that they/humans are the source of the environment's problems
(high-fertility cultures like the amish either school themselves or only go school until high-school, when the anti-natalism brain-washing can still be reversed)
so why blame culture (or smart-phones, or women in the work-force) when you elites are the very ones preaching anti-natalism to our children in public-schools?
america and europe generally allow people to believe what they want, dress how they please, and engage in lgbt-intmacy (have social-liberalism, expressive-individualism). Islam and China are open-air prisons, and do not have any freedom or inner-life. Yet both areas have low-fertility rates.
It seems like higher-population-density (from a culture of properity), not culture-itself, leads to lower-fertility (mal-adaptiveness, cultural-drift).
You live in high-rise apartments and you don't think we need any more people cause we've got enough and where would they live?
you live on a farm and see your neighbors once a week, and you get lonely and want lots of children.
but if today's norms-and-values are just higher-level-abtractions of yesterday's norms-and-values, weren't they inevitable in a literacy/reason culture?
we intellectually defend freedom-of-religion and free-markets with the no-harm/non-aggression-principle (because you won't let us say free-speech is an end-in-itself). So of course the no-harm-principle would eventually become more important than freedom-of-religion because it can defend freedom-of-religion.
If the no-harm-principle can bring back free-speech after it's lost (it ended the fairness doctrine), then it is culturally even more important than free-speech
And once the no-harm-principle is valued more than the rights it protects, it will be taken to its logical extreme by in the last few centuries by the Jewish lawyers at the ACLU. Happy Hanukkah!
I would think destroying an entire populated planet would be prima facie evidence.
A wide range of governments, including many legitimate ones, tolerate civilian casualties while repressing a rebellion.
Those legitimate governments don't usually abolish their legislature either.
Your argument here reminds me of the folks I see on Facebook who claim that the casualties that the Israelis are inflicting in Gaza are completely unjustified. They never seem to notice that the war there could end today if the Hamas leaders would surrender.
There are times when it is hard to tell who the bad guys are. Star Wars wasn't such a case.
But, hey! You've got a shovel, so keep digging.
Even before that, the kind of regime that murders someone's aunt & uncle outside of self defense, then desecrates their bodies and home for little reason save instilling fear seems reasonable to rebel against.
Especially when the planet itself is not in rebellion outside of a few individuals.
Also slaughtering an entire ancient religious order, overthrowing the prior elected government, leaders who casually murder subordinates for minor infractions, only allowing humans to hold high offices or military ranks (not stated but clearly shown).
No biological feature of a species or behavioral feature of a culture is "adaptive" or "maladaptive" in isolation, but rather in relation to some selection pressure. When selection pressures in general are lowly constraining, drift occurs because a broader range of features survive selection. Whether those features are "adaptive" or "maladaptive" cannot be determined until highly constraining selection pressures arise again. Since we don't know what those pressures will be, we can't know whether features arising during periods of low selection constraint will be adaptive or maladaptive relative to constraints in future periods of high selection.
Doesn't seem that hard to me to guess future environments, and thus to guess what features are more likely to be adaptive.
Freedom of religion, speech, and commerce are all values that were vigorously promoted by the cultural activists of their day.
Sure, but selection acted further on them after that.
OK, I can’t let the Star Wars example go. We get to sit in on council meetings where the plan is presented to build a terror weapon to keep all the systems in line. Later, a senior leader decides to annihilate Alderaan as an act of state violence, to terrify everyone in the galaxy. He says right then in that scene that the planet with the actual enemies of the Empire is too remote, so he’s going to make an example of an undefended system that is presumably full of loyal Imperial citizens. There’s no indication that anyone else on the Death Star thinks this is weird or unlawful order , either. These are not good guys making hard choices for the benefit of all.
I think that concerns about Amish or Haredim takeover are overblown. Both of those are essentially parasitic relative to mainstream cultures they're embedded in, without any convincing evidence that they can become self-sufficient without profound changes.
Of course, mainstream cultures also likely require profound changes to become long-term sustainable, but the essential characteristics of technological/material world that they would need to adapt to still seem unclear and potentially highly variable, so the primary immediate concern is maintaining relative stability during which the outlines of that world become clearer.
They seem symbiotic, not parasitic, especially the Amish.
Very bizarre collection of accounts spouting the same point with the same intonation and same seethe. Why even do this?
You mean a bunch of recent comments here. Yes, we seem to have been spammed.
why pretend you don't know why people are having fewer children when your environmentalists (at the Dept of Education in D.C.) write the national public-school curriculum and put up the reduce-reuse-recycle posters in every classroom in all grade-levels?
What do you think cultural adaption is? Have you strictly defined it? You claim that cultural adaptation is no longer the means through which our norms change in Western society, rather, it's through activists & possible manipulators. Have you not considered that this is the way it has always been? Martin Luther's 95 theses? The spread of Christianity to Rome? Are these not activism / forced manipulation?
I understand what you are going for here, and you present an interesting framework through which we can view the relationship between trust & culture, but I believe this deserves more rigor. I hope more people can keep thinking about this niche, & I'm personally going to try and look up some academics that've written on the topic. I wonder what leading anthropologists have to say about it, y'know? Someone definitely has thought about cultural adaptations in an academic way before. Gotta go find out who.
Macaques use tools in different ways. Sometimes, macaques who use tools one way will get mad at macaques in their tribe who use the tools the other way. They kill each other over it. Entire monkey wars are fought over this. This is "activism" in a primal sense. I believe what you have described as a modern phenomena is just a technologized version of how cultural adaptation has always existed.
What do you think cultural adaption is? Have you strictly defined it? You claim that cultural adaptation is no longer the means through which our norms change in Western society, rather, it's through activists & possible manipulators. Have you not considered that this is the way it has always been? Martin Luther's 95 theses? The spread of Christianity to Rome? Are these not activism / forced manipulation?
I understand what you are going for here, and you present an interesting framework through which we can view the relationship between trust & culture, but I believe this deserves more rigor. I hope more people can keep thinking about this niche, & I'm personally going to try and look up some academics that've written on the topic. I wonder what leading anthropologists have to say about it, y'know? Someone definitely has thought about cultural adaptations in an academic way before. Gotta go find out who.
are you arguing that all our intrinsic moral values are to optimize adaptivity of our societies?
also, i agree that there are ways culture is changed and ingrained in people where people consciously think their values are similar to the culture they are part of, but that actually their true values are different; they were influenced by surrounding culture. and in that case figuring out which values they might have been "pressured" to follow, and introspecting on them, potentially changing those values, is good.
but maybe some of the values we now have are because of drift in intrinsic values, and those we might not want to change them.
it's just the way we were made: who we truly are.
we definitely want to change today's culture to those values, and to prevent further drift; but that doesn't mean we should undo past intrinsic true value drift, or that we should change all our values to the ones maximally adaptable and non-driftable.
like, we might value not drifting and adaptability _because_ it lets us act on the _other_ values.
sorry if I misunderstood you or if you wrote about this somewhere else. but i felt this wasn't addressed directly in the posts I've read.
This is a very interesting post with a unique perspective.
I suggest that folks interested in how cultures change read "How Christianity Changed the World", a scholarly book by Alvin Schmidt. It is eye-opening. Also "Dominion" by Tom Holland.
we're told that the more children we have, the more time the doctors and dentists will have to spend taking care of our family, and the less time they'll have to take care of the rest of the community
if you want every family to have a chance to go to the doctor and get care, you need to have fewer children so they get to each family quicker. Fewer children means less wait time for your next appointment
every year of school we're told that diapers fill up landfills and that we need to "stop at one" to save the environment and "big families need big cars that destroy the environment"
and "we need to stop-at-one to leave room for the immigrants"--if you want people to live under freedom, they can only do it in your country, so don't fill up your country and force immigrants to remain outside the u.s., i.e., in tyranny
all school-children are told from first-grade through college that more people equals more pollution and climate-change.
Low-fertility happens everywhere regardless of race, religion, constitution, properity, etc. The one constant from big-cities in China to Iran to Brazil to the US is that they all have the same teacher-union educational-system that teaches children that they/humans are the source of the environment's problems
(high-fertility cultures like the amish either school themselves or only go school until high-school, when the anti-natalism brain-washing can still be reversed)
so why blame culture (or smart-phones, or women in the work-force) when you elites are the very ones preaching anti-natalism to our children in public-schools?
What is preached in schools is very much part of culture.
america and europe generally allow people to believe what they want, dress how they please, and engage in lgbt-intmacy (have social-liberalism, expressive-individualism). Islam and China are open-air prisons, and do not have any freedom or inner-life. Yet both areas have low-fertility rates.
It seems like higher-population-density (from a culture of properity), not culture-itself, leads to lower-fertility (mal-adaptiveness, cultural-drift).
You live in high-rise apartments and you don't think we need any more people cause we've got enough and where would they live?
you live on a farm and see your neighbors once a week, and you get lonely and want lots of children.
Culture has greatly influenced population density.
What parts of Christianity were/are adaptive?
but if today's norms-and-values are just higher-level-abtractions of yesterday's norms-and-values, weren't they inevitable in a literacy/reason culture?
we intellectually defend freedom-of-religion and free-markets with the no-harm/non-aggression-principle (because you won't let us say free-speech is an end-in-itself). So of course the no-harm-principle would eventually become more important than freedom-of-religion because it can defend freedom-of-religion.
If the no-harm-principle can bring back free-speech after it's lost (it ended the fairness doctrine), then it is culturally even more important than free-speech
And once the no-harm-principle is valued more than the rights it protects, it will be taken to its logical extreme by in the last few centuries by the Jewish lawyers at the ACLU. Happy Hanukkah!
But today's norms and values are far from being just the simple obvious abstraction o yesterday's versions.