2018-02-19 RRG Reading Notes

In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization:

In order to win, do we have to embrace "politics is the mindkiller" and "arguments are soldiers"?
After all, if we're about winning, then we should be willing to do whatever it takes to win
If a fight is important, be ready to fight nasty
If politics is war, why not use bullets, both real and rhetorical?
So why not use violence?
- Most of this is derivable from Hobbes
- Example: Protestants vs. Catholics
  - Start with outright war between Protestants and Catholics
  - This isn't sustainable - neither side can annihilate the other
  - So Protestants and Catholics compromise and agree to form a government
    - In the specific case, this is called the Good Friday Accords
    - In the general case, this is just civilization
  - Unfortunately, this just moves the conflict up a level - Protestants and Catholics are now using the government to try to sabotage each other
  - This is also not sustainable - the war is still going on, it's just going on at a slower pace
  - So, Protestants and Catholics agree not to use the government against each other
    - In the US, this is covered by the First Amendment
    - In the general case, this is known as liberalism
- Every case in which two sides have agreed to lay down their weapons and abandon total war has corresponded to a huge increase in human flourishing
- But why is this agreement a stable equilibrium?
2 explanations for why people stop using violence
- Reciprocal communitarianism
  - Probably how altruism evolved
  - Once a small successful community of collaborators running tit-for-tat starts, others have to either join the community or get outcompeted
- "Divine Grace"
  - People successfully interact with people with opposing views all the time
  - Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Jews all interact with each other in "normal" society, without going at each others' throats
  - Reading ancient and medieval texts, there is nothing but honor among foes - honorable conduct among Greek and Roman warriors, codes of chivalry, etc
  - "Christmas Truce" between Triple Alliance and Triple Entente in World War 1
  - The problem with all of these examples is that they are the exception, rather than the norm
    - Codes of chivalry were often observed more in the breach
    - It's not actually clear how well Homer actually describes ancient combat
    - The Christmas Truce was a one-time thing; by 1915 there was already too much bad blood between front-line units in World War 1 to permit a repeat
Most useful social norms exist due to a combination of divine grace and reciprocal communitarianism
- People lie, but not too much
  - It's very rare that someone makes up numbers out of whole cloth
  - What you usually see is (deliberate) misinterpretations of a particular statistic
  - People know that lying is wrong, and want to be able to hedge by saying, "Well, I didn't technically say something completely false."
Groups that are nice places to be attract members and groups that are actively hostile to new members lose them
The advantage of liberalism is that it fails gracefully
- If it turns out that the group you're fighting against is not evil or immoral, liberalism at least allows you the consolation of having treated that group in a civil manner
- This is opposed to the politics-as-war, where outgroups are persecuted, thus laying the groundwork for reverse persecution when the outgroup gains power
So why should we be worried when people on "our side" use unethical tactics to advance causes that we believe in
- Those people are undermining the basis of our community
- Heretics, not heathens
- Making exceptions for particular outgroups is a great way to undermine the foundations of your community and ensure its collapse
Scott names the demiurge of liberalism, Elua, after the god from Kushiel's Avatar

Why The Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

The Culture is the evolutionary winner among all cultures
Banks, unlike other science fiction writers, considered how culture would evolve alongside technology
Banks' works don't fall into the normal science fiction fallacy of assuming that advanced technology won't have any cultural impact
Most far-future science fiction falls into a thinly veiled re-telling of Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Banks considers a future in which technological advancement has freed culture from all functional constraints
- Culture becomes purely memetic
- A culture is "functional" insofar as it contributes to the creation of material goods and services
- In order for civilization to produce everything that it needs to produce, certain collective-action problems have to be overcome
- Functional cultures help civilization overcome these collective action problems
Most cultures have a good fit with their environment
Cases where cultures do not have a good fit with their environment usually arise when the environment changes (due to political conquest, technological advancement, etc) faster than culture can adapt
Human history, so far, has been marked by pluralism among cultures
Cultures have, historically, competed with one another, with more some cultures becoming larger and more dominant and others fading away
- Large facets of Roman culture endured long after the Roman Empire had fallen
- Han culture continues to dominate China, not because the Han empire is still around, but because Han bureaucratic traditions still persist
Societies with strong institutions become wealthier and more powerful militarily
As a result, there has been convergence with respect to institutional structure
- Societies everywhere accept market economies
- Societies everywhere recognize the need for a relatively powerful bureaucratic state
- This convergence is often falsely described as Westernization, when in reality it's the process of cultural adaptation to capitalism and bureaucracy
- Cultures that are incompatible with capitalism and bureaucracy are outcompeted and extinguished
Because of this convergence, competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized
- When comparing the modern "hypercultures" of US, Europe and Japan, there is little to choose from, functionally
- All of these cultures perform about equally well at providing security and material goods for their population
- As a result, the sole basis of competition is memetics - the ability of the culture to reproduce itself
A meme doesn't necessarily have to offer its host any benefits to reproduce
- Example: chain letter - doesn't provide any benefits, but has a halfway plausible story promising benefits, which causes its recipient to forward it on
- Example: religion - religions imbue their members with missionary zeal, which allows them to spread, even though that process is costly for the actual missionaries
Comparing Confucianism and Christianity
- Confucianism spread because of its functional qualities
  - One of the first drivers of state formation
  - Led to the creation of an extremely stable bureaucratic state and social structure
  - Spreads directly through the strength of the institutions that it's functionally related to
- Christianity spread because of memetics
  - Viral properties
  - Much less successful at generating stable states
  - The properties of Christianity that allowed it to take over the Roman Empire explain its success in many non-Western countries
What happens when you take the process that generates modern hypercultures and iterate it forward for another three to four hundred years?
- Cultures become completely defunctionalized
  - All the endemic problems of human society (war, crime, disease, etc.) have technological solutions
  - Scarcity no longer exists, so there is no longer an obligation for anyone to work
  - Important decisions are made by a benevolent technocracy of AIs
- The culture that emerges from this process will be the most virulent culture, the one that's best at spreading by appealing to the tastes and sensibilities of humans
This is why Horza, the protagonist of Consider Phlebas dislikes The Culture
- Horza is a member of the Idiran empire
- Not an Idiran, but a member of an allied species
- The Idirans are religious zealots, so why would anyone choose them over The Culture, which is all about peaceful coexistence?
- The Idirans have a certain depth, or seriousness that is lacking in The Culture
Max Weber: Modernity produces "specialists without spirit, sensualists, without heart."
- In the culture, the specialist roles have all been subsumed by AI
- The primary appeal of The Culture is the promise of non-stop partying with unlimited sex and drugs
The problem with The Culture is that it provides no deeper meaning
However, this decadence should not be mistaken for weakness
- Iridans thought that The Culture would crumple when faced with a determined assault
Culture has a branch, called Contact, which is specialized in interfering in the affairs of newly contacted species
- Opposite of Star Trek's Prime Directive
- Interfere in the affairs of newly discovered species to ensure that factions that share the values of The Culture win
- Thus, the Culture ensures its perpetuation in the guise of ensuring that the "good guys" win
The Culture is the ultimate choice-oriented society, and as a result, it suffers from a crisis of meaning
What happens when work disappears, and everything turns into a hobby?
What happens when you can choose all aspects of your identity, including gender, knowledge, skills, psychology, etc? How do you define your identity?
The paradox of freedom is that choices lose meaning
Socities have two reactions to the paradox of freedom
- Neotraditionalism - choose to embrace a tradtional identity and traditional roles
- Affirm freedom itself as the sole meaningful value and work to bring that value to others
The latter urge is what defines The Culture
- "Secular evangelism"
- The Culture and the Idirans posed existential threats to each other, not because they could physically annihilate each other but because each side's victory would have undermined the very thing that gave meaning to the culture of the other
The Culture, on closer examination, is much like The Borg
Iain M. Banks' great trick was, in essence, to make us sympathetic to The Borg, and to suggest that modern liberal societies are fundamentally Borg-like

How The West Was Won

Bryan Caplan: A Hardy Weed: How Traditionalists Underestimate Western Civ
Argues that defenders of Western Civilization don't give Western Civilization enough credit
Western Civ manages to spread even in the face of determined opposition, not through war and conquest, but through persuasion
The problem is that Caplan isn't really talking about Western Civilization
- Western Civilization is what existed before the Industrial Revolution
- Consisted of traditional things like maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts
Analogy to "western medicine"
- Western medicine is just medicine that has been proven to work
- There's nothing culturally western about it
Western culture is no more related to the geographical west than Western medicine
- Example: Coca Cola: Ethiopian bean mixed with a Columbian leaf, with lots of carbonated sugar water added
  - There's nothing inherently "western" about Coca Cola, it's just that it happened to be discovered by an American chemist first
  - If a Japanese or Arab chemist had discovered Coca Cola, it would have been just as delicious
- Example: Gender norms
  - Modern "western" gender norms would be unrecognizable to someone like Cicero or St. Augustine
  - "Western" gender norms sprung up after the Industrial Revolution in order to facilitate the needs of industrial society
  - As other countries industrialize, they will adopt "Western" gender norms, not because they're becoming westernized, but because those norms are more efficient
As a result it's more appropriate to call "Western culture" universal culture
Culture is a set of useful environmental adaptations, coupled with memetic drift
Before the Industrial Revolution, the process of building a culture was long and slow and left plenty of time for local pecularities to develop
The Industrial Revolution caused such a rapid change, however, that the process of culture-building became qualitatively different
- Frantic search for better adaptations in an environment that's changing faster than society can collectively understand it
- Erasure of spatial distance
Places get inducted into the global universal culture based upon their participation in trade and modern capitalism
Universal culture is the only culture that can survive without censorship
- It is the collection of the most competitive ideas and products
- Coca Cola spreads because it tastes better
- Egalitarian gender norms spread because they're more popular and likeable
The only reason universal culture hasn't achieved fixation is because of barriers to communication
- Geography
- Time
- Censorship
Universal culture is the only culture that can survive high levels of immigration
- Universal culture is adapted to work in diverse multicultural environments
- Accomplishes this through social atomization - everyone does mostly their own thing and broader society provides some least-common-denominator functions
- Because universal culture deals so well with diverse societies, people will increasingly default to universal culture in public whenever there's high levels of immigration
- It's not that foreigners are assimilating into western culture, it's more that both foreigners and natives are assimilating into a new universal culture
Western culture is not the aggressor - the West is as much a victim of universal culture as every other locale
There is a certain level of hypocrisy in universalist culture
- We're okay with small, far-away, or exotic groups trying to maintain their culture
- But when an outgroup tries to maintain its culture, we treat their religion as superstition, and treat their desire to preserve their culture as xenophobia and racism
Conflating universal culture and Western culture legitimizes this double standard - people trying to defend western culture are more trying to defend it from univeral culture than they are trying to defend it from Western culture
Whatever we decide, we should be consistent about it
- Either we say that universalist culture is better, and we support universalist culture's conquest of traditional cultures elsewhere, just as we support its conquest of traditionalist cultures here
- Or we say that traditional cultures are better and allow more space for traditionalist cultures at home
So is universalist culture better or are traditionalist cultures better?
- Traditionalist culture
  - Some studies show that traditional cultures tend to be more happy
  - Correlation between homogeneity and happiness
- Universalist culture
  - Democracies tend to be happier
  - Complicated but positive relationship between national happiness and wealth
The main thing, though, is to abandon this notion that universal culture and western culture are one and the same

Why Do You Hate Elua

Elua (liberalism, universal culture, etc) is slowly consuming everything in its path
Moroever, Elua appears to be good
So why are people attempting so hard to fight Elua?
Because Elua can be reprogrammed
The machinery of universal culture is people, driven by human goals and values
Nationalism is what you get when the machinery of liberalism is reprogammed with traditionalist values