At Cato Unbound this month, Larry Arnhart argues evo psych supports classical liberal politics. Herbert Gintis disagrees: The existence of human universals does not suggest a unique form of social organization. Indeed, there have been many distinct types of human society, and many of these have been widely embraced and broadly defended by their members. … Arnhart’s main argument here is that “evolutionary psychology has confirmed and deepened [the] Darwinian understanding of moral order that arises in civil society through the spontaneous order of human action rather than the coercive order of governmental design.” However, he does not present this evidence and I do not believe that it exists. Indeed, a reasonable generalization is that every known society has a collective mechanism that deals with the establishment of social values and that regulates the treatment of individuals who violate social norms.
I read Gintis's essay as an argument that Libertarians delude themselves that we are still living in hunter-gatherer societies with plenty of empty environment to move off into should you strongly object to a norm your band agrees upon. Clearly this is not so in modern populous nations that issue passports and "strong collective governance" is needed from time to time to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise from our ambivalent human nature. A nature that constantly has to balance self-enhancing and self-transcending desires or urges upon which there are now so many choices in modern life.
National dialogues suffer from the biases of far thinking (Hanson) and stereotypes (Lippmann). There are reasons to be skeptical of such deliberation at the highest levels even if you're generally a fan of voice over exit:
I think the biggest whole in "rationality" is the idea that we can come up with a "rational goal" for humanity. We tend to make the same mistake the eugenicists made: that evolution had a goal, and that evolution's goal should be our rational goal. Of course evolution has no goal, it just happens, and the trilobites, the dodo and the baboon have all done just fine reaching the "goal" of evolution. Further, the idea of taking elimination of existential risk, a.k.a. survival, as our rational goal is just "stockholm syndrome," we are at the mercy of the world and of evolution, why not identify with our oppressor and root for him?
Is there a rational argument for deifying the evolutionary goal of survival? Is that really the best, or even the only, goal we can come up with?
liberal sentiment and liberal societies are different things. liberal sentiment among a populace does not lead to a liberal society. liberal sentiment among elites does.
Intuitively, it seems that voluntary, competing "tribes" could coexist with a classical liberal society and a minarchist government. Gintis posits that "civil society" institutions cannot take part in any kind of governance, but this seems obviously wrong to me, since a voluntary contract with the tribe could well include punishment when the tribe's norms are violated. In fact, modern religions seem to be much like "tribes" in this sense.
That's not accurate at all. Liberal societies normally form in extremely unsettled conditions, most frequently in the middle of a revolution. The 3rd Republic was formed with the German army in France demanding (and getting) vast reparations and the French army going door-to-door in Paris killing Communards by the thousands. Even the English liberal society formed during a period (1660-1720) with at least the ordinary rate of unrest (the Dutch invasion of the Glorious Revolution, multiple Stuart revolts, complicated sectarian persecutions, etc.)
liberal societies develop in the rare condition of stability (protection from bandits) and lack of onerous government intervention. this is rare because governments strong enough to protect you from bandits are strong enough to do what it wants.
what breaks the deadlock is the interplay of the costs of attack and defense. where the costs of defense are relatively low, even a weak government can defend the populace from bandits.
Liberal societies rarely arise from liberal majorities. Liberal societies are usually formed as a powersharing arrangement between multiple competing illiberal groups where none can successfully take control. Once they are formed, liberal societies develop constituencies which support the current arrangements, based on loyalty, familiarity, and personal benefit (e.g., leaders in a liberal society tend to be those who are successful leading a liberal society and thus favor its continuation). Large illiberal groups always remain and often even collectively are a majority, but as long as one particularly group isn't a majority by itself liberal societies tend to be pretty stable.
The classic example is the French 3d republic, which was formed by an overwhelmingly monarchical convention where the monarchist were split between Bourbonists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists. They couldn't agree on a king, so they compromised on a Republic. But, by the time the Orleanist line died out some 15 years later, and the Bonapartists had faded in interest, there was too much inertia for the Republic to push it aside. But France had large reactionary and revolutionary socialist parties for decades afterwards and even today both Communists and neofascists sit in the National Assembly.
I can't see liberal society as arising from evpsych based on this history. It's not a system that normally develops in small groups; it's a complex system that has been rare in human history and normally arises only as a resolution to intractable conflicts in large societies. As you point out, in a 40K yo hunter-gather band the resolution to an intractable intergroup conflict would be secession, not liberalism.
Classical liberal and libertarian governance evangelism seem to me to be algorithms. Here we have people making the case that they are persistence maximizing for humanity, because of evo psych. You Prof. Hanson seem sympathetic to the claim. I'm skeptical -I'd rather we start from first principles of "How can we minimize existential risk" rather than the implicit "How can two conflicting schools of thought that both appeal to nerdy white guys be synthesized?"
As an algorithm, classical liberal and libertarian ideology seems predatory to me on the population that would be sympathetic to evidence-based persistence maximizing public policy.
The problem I see with this view is that societies where people identify primarily with small groups rather than the nation tend to be from disfunctional to violent (I vaguely recall some research that comes to this conclusion). Or is that where your argument for apathy comes in? Have we achieved a benevolent combination of small group affinity and apathy?
The notion of relying on behavior within 40kya hunter-gatherer tribes to instruct our behavior today is fundamentally flawed. You could not get a hunter-gatherer to sit in a cubicle - or be a peasant farmer - it just couldn't happen. We are substantially different people today as a result of evolutionary changes brought on by agriculture inter alia. See Cochran & Harpending, or Nick Wade in the current Science Times. Some of us probably never have an abstract thought cross our minds and like to live in the great outdoors and have only loose associations and fend for ourselves. But most people prefer to live in large structured communities with deference to authority in safe, reliable locations to eat, sleep and work.
I was surprised recently to read that your colleague Bryan Caplan is a fan of deliberative political theory (or one particular example of it). I'm blanking on where I read this and so can't provide a link. Perhaps as with "The Myth of Democratic Failure" he was just giving credit to a good presentation of a case he disagrees with.
Seasteading is intended to recreate the ability to separate off into bands that pursue independent goals. In that situation should we remove many of our cultural innovations designed to deal with strangers?
Robin, it is consistently fascinating to watch you try to reconcile your stated meta politics of "I don't know" with your clear feeling that you have useful points to make about the specifics of politics.
I feel this too with imdb, which I have publicly proclaimed to be the best estimate of a movie's quality. It means that I can't very consistently hold opinions on specific movies anymore beyond what the aggregate rating is.
I would be very interested to see hear how you grapple with the meta and the specific, generally.
I read Gintis's essay as an argument that Libertarians delude themselves that we are still living in hunter-gatherer societies with plenty of empty environment to move off into should you strongly object to a norm your band agrees upon. Clearly this is not so in modern populous nations that issue passports and "strong collective governance" is needed from time to time to deal with the inevitable conflicts that will arise from our ambivalent human nature. A nature that constantly has to balance self-enhancing and self-transcending desires or urges upon which there are now so many choices in modern life.
National dialogues suffer from the biases of far thinking (Hanson) and stereotypes (Lippmann). There are reasons to be skeptical of such deliberation at the highest levels even if you're generally a fan of voice over exit:
http://oxlib.blogspot.com/2...
Did the eugenicists really think that? That's not the impression I had ...
I think the biggest whole in "rationality" is the idea that we can come up with a "rational goal" for humanity. We tend to make the same mistake the eugenicists made: that evolution had a goal, and that evolution's goal should be our rational goal. Of course evolution has no goal, it just happens, and the trilobites, the dodo and the baboon have all done just fine reaching the "goal" of evolution. Further, the idea of taking elimination of existential risk, a.k.a. survival, as our rational goal is just "stockholm syndrome," we are at the mercy of the world and of evolution, why not identify with our oppressor and root for him?
Is there a rational argument for deifying the evolutionary goal of survival? Is that really the best, or even the only, goal we can come up with?
liberal sentiment and liberal societies are different things. liberal sentiment among a populace does not lead to a liberal society. liberal sentiment among elites does.
The virtues of libertarian apathy with regard to maintaining demand in the economy have put that economy in the ditch!
Intuitively, it seems that voluntary, competing "tribes" could coexist with a classical liberal society and a minarchist government. Gintis posits that "civil society" institutions cannot take part in any kind of governance, but this seems obviously wrong to me, since a voluntary contract with the tribe could well include punishment when the tribe's norms are violated. In fact, modern religions seem to be much like "tribes" in this sense.
That's not accurate at all. Liberal societies normally form in extremely unsettled conditions, most frequently in the middle of a revolution. The 3rd Republic was formed with the German army in France demanding (and getting) vast reparations and the French army going door-to-door in Paris killing Communards by the thousands. Even the English liberal society formed during a period (1660-1720) with at least the ordinary rate of unrest (the Dutch invasion of the Glorious Revolution, multiple Stuart revolts, complicated sectarian persecutions, etc.)
liberal societies develop in the rare condition of stability (protection from bandits) and lack of onerous government intervention. this is rare because governments strong enough to protect you from bandits are strong enough to do what it wants.
what breaks the deadlock is the interplay of the costs of attack and defense. where the costs of defense are relatively low, even a weak government can defend the populace from bandits.
Liberal societies rarely arise from liberal majorities. Liberal societies are usually formed as a powersharing arrangement between multiple competing illiberal groups where none can successfully take control. Once they are formed, liberal societies develop constituencies which support the current arrangements, based on loyalty, familiarity, and personal benefit (e.g., leaders in a liberal society tend to be those who are successful leading a liberal society and thus favor its continuation). Large illiberal groups always remain and often even collectively are a majority, but as long as one particularly group isn't a majority by itself liberal societies tend to be pretty stable.
The classic example is the French 3d republic, which was formed by an overwhelmingly monarchical convention where the monarchist were split between Bourbonists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists. They couldn't agree on a king, so they compromised on a Republic. But, by the time the Orleanist line died out some 15 years later, and the Bonapartists had faded in interest, there was too much inertia for the Republic to push it aside. But France had large reactionary and revolutionary socialist parties for decades afterwards and even today both Communists and neofascists sit in the National Assembly.
I can't see liberal society as arising from evpsych based on this history. It's not a system that normally develops in small groups; it's a complex system that has been rare in human history and normally arises only as a resolution to intractable conflicts in large societies. As you point out, in a 40K yo hunter-gather band the resolution to an intractable intergroup conflict would be secession, not liberalism.
Classical liberal and libertarian governance evangelism seem to me to be algorithms. Here we have people making the case that they are persistence maximizing for humanity, because of evo psych. You Prof. Hanson seem sympathetic to the claim. I'm skeptical -I'd rather we start from first principles of "How can we minimize existential risk" rather than the implicit "How can two conflicting schools of thought that both appeal to nerdy white guys be synthesized?"
As an algorithm, classical liberal and libertarian ideology seems predatory to me on the population that would be sympathetic to evidence-based persistence maximizing public policy.
The problem I see with this view is that societies where people identify primarily with small groups rather than the nation tend to be from disfunctional to violent (I vaguely recall some research that comes to this conclusion). Or is that where your argument for apathy comes in? Have we achieved a benevolent combination of small group affinity and apathy?
The notion of relying on behavior within 40kya hunter-gatherer tribes to instruct our behavior today is fundamentally flawed. You could not get a hunter-gatherer to sit in a cubicle - or be a peasant farmer - it just couldn't happen. We are substantially different people today as a result of evolutionary changes brought on by agriculture inter alia. See Cochran & Harpending, or Nick Wade in the current Science Times. Some of us probably never have an abstract thought cross our minds and like to live in the great outdoors and have only loose associations and fend for ourselves. But most people prefer to live in large structured communities with deference to authority in safe, reliable locations to eat, sleep and work.
I was surprised recently to read that your colleague Bryan Caplan is a fan of deliberative political theory (or one particular example of it). I'm blanking on where I read this and so can't provide a link. Perhaps as with "The Myth of Democratic Failure" he was just giving credit to a good presentation of a case he disagrees with.
Seasteading is intended to recreate the ability to separate off into bands that pursue independent goals. In that situation should we remove many of our cultural innovations designed to deal with strangers?
Robin, it is consistently fascinating to watch you try to reconcile your stated meta politics of "I don't know" with your clear feeling that you have useful points to make about the specifics of politics.
I feel this too with imdb, which I have publicly proclaimed to be the best estimate of a movie's quality. It means that I can't very consistently hold opinions on specific movies anymore beyond what the aggregate rating is.
I would be very interested to see hear how you grapple with the meta and the specific, generally.