I'm curious what you think of historical attempts at a sacred goal. Do you view it as something that was common in past societies or something that is basically unprecedented?
Although cultures can vary quite a bit my guess is there are some cultural changes that are much more difficult to achieve than others and sacred goal seems to me a) quite hard to achieve and b) certain flavors are much harder than others.
When I think of historical precedents, I think of things like the Carolingian courts interest in "correctio" (reforming society along the lines of the Kingdom of God), the Iranian revolutionaries, or Marxism-Leninism. The immediate things that come to mind are a) these were the focus of a small set of elites rather than broad based although the elites did a lot of compulsory "education" and b) they were generally more about establishing an ideology that would determine how the state should be governed more than a clear measurable objective.
When I think of clear measurable objectives these are rarer but you get things like the United States manifest destiny, the Crusades, or Nazi "lebensraum", which are basically expansion oriented. There was also the Kingdom of Babel which I think is included in the bible as a way of making the point that society _can't_ be structured that way because people just basically don't cooperate long enough to see it through.
I'm super curious to hear how you would see this idea stacked against historical examples.
I didn't mean my comment as a "gotcha" more like an attempt to flesh things out. My questions were a) is this a thing and b) what are the parameters of what's culturally possible?
For a) It sounds like in your view there are historical precedents of sacred goals because you view construction of monuments like pyramids and cathedrals fit within your definition of sacred goals. I wasn't totally sure what was within bounds of what you were talking about.
What's your view on (b)? Are monuments the only examples? What does the space look like?
Also I'm curious c) how did these civilizations arrive at their sacred goals? For the examples I'm aware of they are paired with elaborate set of religious beliefs that the structures are meant to manifest. Would you want to go that route as the method of establishing the sacred goals or would you want to forge a new path?
> But in fact, our civilization will plausibly fall, to be replaced by other quite different ones, if we cannot manage to sufficiently organize around a shared civ-level sacred goal.
The evidence points in the opposite direction: No civilization will last unless it suppresses all progressive goals (to achieve something new). A shared civilizational goal sucks up all surpluses, leading to collapse. Which may be exactly what's happening to the West.
I asked Gemini Argon to list shared civ-level sacred goals of all long-lived historical civilizations. (It didn't; it sampled from 16 groups.) The vast majority had no shared goal, or the shared goal of keeping everything exactly as it was or had been.
"The closest Mesopotamian equivalent to a sacred goal was cosmic maintenance through servitude to the gods."
"Egypt provides the strongest historical case for a genuinely shared, multi-millennial sacred orientation: upholding Ma'at (cosmic truth, balance, and order) against Isfet (chaos and injustice). ... Ma'at was strictly anti-progressive; any major institutional innovation was viewed as a slide into Isfet, granting Egypt three millennia of internal cultural continuity at the cost of institutional rigidity."
"Svadharma (one's own particular duty) precluded a single shared goal across the population."
"Chinese civilization organized around harmonizing "All Under Heaven" (Tianxia) under the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) through moral-ritual order (Li). Following the Han synthesis, the Emperor ("Son of Heaven," Tianzi) and the Confucian scholar-gentry aimed to align human society with cosmic patterns (Dao), aspiring toward Datong (Great Unity)—a stable, hierarchical, agrarian commonwealth modeled on an idealized golden age of the ancient sage-kings."
In the 2 cases where a culture got specific about how order was to be preserved, maxing those things quickly destroyed the entire civilization:
"The Aztecs (Mexica, c. 1325–1521 CE): As you noted, the Mexica organized around paying the "blood debt" (Nextlahualli) to nourish Tonatiuh (the Fifth Sun) and Huitzilopochtli, institutionalizing "Flower Wars" (Xochiyaoyotl) to capture sacrificial victims. … This hyper-extractive sacred goal destroyed the empire in under two centuries: when Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, tens of thousands of indigenous Tlaxcalans, Totonacs, and Texcocans enthusiastically allied with the Spanish specifically to annihilate the Mexica priesthood and state."
"The Inca (c. 1438–1533 CE) organized around solar veneration (Inti), state-managed reciprocity (Ayni), mandatory labor tribute (Mit'a), and the perpetual care of royal mummies (Mallqui). Because a dead emperor’s mummy retained legal ownership of all estates acquired during his lifetime to fund his eternal cult, every new ruler had to conquer fresh territory—a sacred feedback loop that triggered unsustainable expansion and civil war just as Francisco Pizarro arrived."
The only other category of goal was "expand our dominion to all the world": Zoroastrianism, the Macedonian Empire, Persia, Rome, Christianity, Islam, the Mongols, Ashoka, the Iroquois, the Zulus, Marxism.
The only civ with an aspirational goal was the West taken as a whole, from Homer to the present. Argon wrote, "If the West is viewed as a single continuous civilization, its unifying core is the sacralization of the individual moral conscience (imago Dei secularized into universal human rights) paired with institutionalized self-critique and rational truth-seeking (Logos / episteme). ... The unique historical experiment of the modern West suggests that organizing a civilization around a high-velocity, forward-looking aspirational goal may be inherently self-consuming—generating rapid material and social transformation that eventually erodes the older familial, religious, and homeostatic traditions that silently kept the society reproducing itself in the background."
The sacred goal is the same now as it has always been. The sacred goal is that we take care of each other.
What did change was the definition of “we” at the origin of our species. For our pre-origin ancestors, “we” were the members of the single-family (genetically homogeneous) social system. For our post-origin ancestors, “we” were the members of the multi-family (genetically heterogeneous and culturally homogeneous) band-sized (no bigger than Dunbar’s number of 150 individuals) social system.
The definition of “we” changed again when system size increased at the dawn of the Neolithic Period (because human population density exceeded the hunter-gatherer carrying capacity of roughly 2 square miles per mouth).
Today, we are all members of one global social system numbering more than eight billion individuals. Whether we have accepted that reality is readily apparent in our behavior.
Adam Smith expressed his acceptance of that reality in the name of his book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759). Real capitalism thrives while it rests on that solid moral foundation. Phony capitalism exists because people (Milton Friedman and others) promote the idea that capitalism without morality is so much easier (and it is, but only for the powerful and only in the short term).
I think that any society which is committed to respect and enforce all of the rights necessary to sustain a free market of the type Milton Friedman wrote of, already has a high morality by the standards of our world.
I'm curious what you think of historical attempts at a sacred goal. Do you view it as something that was common in past societies or something that is basically unprecedented?
Although cultures can vary quite a bit my guess is there are some cultural changes that are much more difficult to achieve than others and sacred goal seems to me a) quite hard to achieve and b) certain flavors are much harder than others.
When I think of historical precedents, I think of things like the Carolingian courts interest in "correctio" (reforming society along the lines of the Kingdom of God), the Iranian revolutionaries, or Marxism-Leninism. The immediate things that come to mind are a) these were the focus of a small set of elites rather than broad based although the elites did a lot of compulsory "education" and b) they were generally more about establishing an ideology that would determine how the state should be governed more than a clear measurable objective.
When I think of clear measurable objectives these are rarer but you get things like the United States manifest destiny, the Crusades, or Nazi "lebensraum", which are basically expansion oriented. There was also the Kingdom of Babel which I think is included in the bible as a way of making the point that society _can't_ be structured that way because people just basically don't cooperate long enough to see it through.
I'm super curious to hear how you would see this idea stacked against historical examples.
Clearly a great many societies had sacred goals of building and maintaining big momuments.
I didn't mean my comment as a "gotcha" more like an attempt to flesh things out. My questions were a) is this a thing and b) what are the parameters of what's culturally possible?
For a) It sounds like in your view there are historical precedents of sacred goals because you view construction of monuments like pyramids and cathedrals fit within your definition of sacred goals. I wasn't totally sure what was within bounds of what you were talking about.
What's your view on (b)? Are monuments the only examples? What does the space look like?
Also I'm curious c) how did these civilizations arrive at their sacred goals? For the examples I'm aware of they are paired with elaborate set of religious beliefs that the structures are meant to manifest. Would you want to go that route as the method of establishing the sacred goals or would you want to forge a new path?
> But in fact, our civilization will plausibly fall, to be replaced by other quite different ones, if we cannot manage to sufficiently organize around a shared civ-level sacred goal.
The evidence points in the opposite direction: No civilization will last unless it suppresses all progressive goals (to achieve something new). A shared civilizational goal sucks up all surpluses, leading to collapse. Which may be exactly what's happening to the West.
I asked Gemini Argon to list shared civ-level sacred goals of all long-lived historical civilizations. (It didn't; it sampled from 16 groups.) The vast majority had no shared goal, or the shared goal of keeping everything exactly as it was or had been.
"The closest Mesopotamian equivalent to a sacred goal was cosmic maintenance through servitude to the gods."
"Egypt provides the strongest historical case for a genuinely shared, multi-millennial sacred orientation: upholding Ma'at (cosmic truth, balance, and order) against Isfet (chaos and injustice). ... Ma'at was strictly anti-progressive; any major institutional innovation was viewed as a slide into Isfet, granting Egypt three millennia of internal cultural continuity at the cost of institutional rigidity."
"Svadharma (one's own particular duty) precluded a single shared goal across the population."
"Chinese civilization organized around harmonizing "All Under Heaven" (Tianxia) under the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) through moral-ritual order (Li). Following the Han synthesis, the Emperor ("Son of Heaven," Tianzi) and the Confucian scholar-gentry aimed to align human society with cosmic patterns (Dao), aspiring toward Datong (Great Unity)—a stable, hierarchical, agrarian commonwealth modeled on an idealized golden age of the ancient sage-kings."
In the 2 cases where a culture got specific about how order was to be preserved, maxing those things quickly destroyed the entire civilization:
"The Aztecs (Mexica, c. 1325–1521 CE): As you noted, the Mexica organized around paying the "blood debt" (Nextlahualli) to nourish Tonatiuh (the Fifth Sun) and Huitzilopochtli, institutionalizing "Flower Wars" (Xochiyaoyotl) to capture sacrificial victims. … This hyper-extractive sacred goal destroyed the empire in under two centuries: when Hernán Cortés arrived in 1519, tens of thousands of indigenous Tlaxcalans, Totonacs, and Texcocans enthusiastically allied with the Spanish specifically to annihilate the Mexica priesthood and state."
"The Inca (c. 1438–1533 CE) organized around solar veneration (Inti), state-managed reciprocity (Ayni), mandatory labor tribute (Mit'a), and the perpetual care of royal mummies (Mallqui). Because a dead emperor’s mummy retained legal ownership of all estates acquired during his lifetime to fund his eternal cult, every new ruler had to conquer fresh territory—a sacred feedback loop that triggered unsustainable expansion and civil war just as Francisco Pizarro arrived."
The only other category of goal was "expand our dominion to all the world": Zoroastrianism, the Macedonian Empire, Persia, Rome, Christianity, Islam, the Mongols, Ashoka, the Iroquois, the Zulus, Marxism.
The only civ with an aspirational goal was the West taken as a whole, from Homer to the present. Argon wrote, "If the West is viewed as a single continuous civilization, its unifying core is the sacralization of the individual moral conscience (imago Dei secularized into universal human rights) paired with institutionalized self-critique and rational truth-seeking (Logos / episteme). ... The unique historical experiment of the modern West suggests that organizing a civilization around a high-velocity, forward-looking aspirational goal may be inherently self-consuming—generating rapid material and social transformation that eventually erodes the older familial, religious, and homeostatic traditions that silently kept the society reproducing itself in the background."
The sacred goal is the same now as it has always been. The sacred goal is that we take care of each other.
What did change was the definition of “we” at the origin of our species. For our pre-origin ancestors, “we” were the members of the single-family (genetically homogeneous) social system. For our post-origin ancestors, “we” were the members of the multi-family (genetically heterogeneous and culturally homogeneous) band-sized (no bigger than Dunbar’s number of 150 individuals) social system.
The definition of “we” changed again when system size increased at the dawn of the Neolithic Period (because human population density exceeded the hunter-gatherer carrying capacity of roughly 2 square miles per mouth).
Today, we are all members of one global social system numbering more than eight billion individuals. Whether we have accepted that reality is readily apparent in our behavior.
Adam Smith expressed his acceptance of that reality in the name of his book, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759). Real capitalism thrives while it rests on that solid moral foundation. Phony capitalism exists because people (Milton Friedman and others) promote the idea that capitalism without morality is so much easier (and it is, but only for the powerful and only in the short term).
Unfortunately, that goal is consistent with civ collapse. So shared adoption of it won't prevent such collapse.
I think that any society which is committed to respect and enforce all of the rights necessary to sustain a free market of the type Milton Friedman wrote of, already has a high morality by the standards of our world.