But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?
We should neither reject nor accept beliefs based on their scariness alone. Let's check the logic instead...
Is morality an evolved thing? Yes.
Does it mean that "whatever is good for survival, is moral"? Nope.
It seems to me that such conclusion is a result of accepting a more general unspoken assumption, something like "whatever evolved is good for survival, otherwise evolution would not have selected for it". But taking this the naive way would mean that immoral behaviors are simply impossible -- because everything we do is driven by our instincts, our instincts are a result of evolution, which means that our instinctive behavior is good for survival, which means that we must perceive it as moral because morality is also a result of evolution. And yet, we see that many behaviors driven by instinct (such as theft) can be perceived as immoral by others, so clearly something is wrong with this naive interpretation.
Which implies that the evolutionary benefits of morality are less direct. It is not like "morality is simply a set of actions that are convenient for me, plus hypocritically pretending that it is something more", but rather "being moral as a general strategy increases my survival on average". Stealing is good-for-me in many situations (otherwise the instinct to steal would not have evolved either), and yet, stealing is immoral. If morality was really the self-serving hypocritical thing as this article suggests, stealing would be considered moral.
How is that possible? First, stealing involves a risk; maybe 9 times out of 10 it gives me nice stuff without having to pay for it, but that remaining 1 time I choose a wrong target and get killed as a result. So it is not worth doing on average, and "morality" means practicing self-control to avoid the kind of action that are harmless and tempting in most cases, and yet harmful on average -- which may be difficult to observe in person, but you rely on the wisdom of others who got burned or have observed someone else get burned. This is not the whole of morality, but self-control definitely feels like a central concept here.
However, consider that in today's supermarkets, you can steal cheap items with impunity. Like, if you grab a cheap pastry and eat it, no one is going to do anything about it. (That's because "doing anything about it" is more expensive on average than the cost of the pastry you ate. Security approaching you would cause commotion, which means that other customers would be distracted and buy less. There is also a chance that you are a crazy person and might start a fight, which could mean lots of broken things and even more commotion, or a possible injury and a following lawsuit. The employees are all told during their training to just let you eat the fucking pastry and pretend that it did not happen, because the alternative is worse.) And yet, probably most people would agree that stealing in supermarkets is immoral.
Another function of morality is signaling: you signal your ability to self-control, and your willingness to follow the rules. I might not care that you stole something from the supermarket, but I can still notice that you are "the kind of person who steals" and assume that you would also steal from me, given opportunity. Therefore I will never invite you to my home, unlike other people who have a reputation of behaving morally. I will avoid certain deals with you, because I will expect you to screw me over. I might even generalize it further and assume that given opportunity you would also do other forbidden things, not just theft.
But morality goes even further. You can have a society where it is convenient to own slaves, where it is considered normal to own slaves (i.e. owning slaves does not send any negative signal to most people), and yet some people will oppose slavery. That is a historical fact. I am not sure how this works in exact details, but I think it involves generalization of moral principles. Like, first we make a deal that if anyone tries to enslave one of us, the other would come to help (the cost of helping the other is worth the reduced chance of getting enslaved myself); then "protecting your friends from slavery" becomes the thing that all friends are supposed to do, even if they haven't negotiated it explicitly; and at some moment it generalizes into a belief that perhaps no one should be enslaved... which is controversial when it is expressed for the first time, but the tendency to generalize is latent in many people, so gradually more and more get convinced that slavery is wrong... and at some moment the slaveowners need to actively defend themselves (rather than be obviously in the right), so they go like "yeah, it might naively seem that slavery is wrong, but it is a part of our sacred traditions; if you get rid of slavery the whole society will collapse", but gradually more people recognize this as self-serving bullshit. So from "self-serving beliefs are called moral" we get to "self-serving beliefs are called out as immoral".
>If morality was really the self-serving hypocritical thing as this article suggests, stealing would be considered moral.
No because a community that condones stealing as moral would see itself bled dry. It's not the pathway to good evolutionary fitness. The tension between what a gene "wants" and what the organism "wants" is well-documented within the field of evolution, and you can extrapolate the dynamic to a similar tension between what an individual "wants" and what the community "wants". The best example of this is "kin selection" where an organism engages in altruistic behavior or even complete sacrifice to benefit their close relatives.
So, morality is doing what is good for the community? That sounds nice (well, depending on who is included and excluded from the definition of the community).
No, my argument is that morality is whatever replicates best. Often it means "doing what is good for the community" because a healthy community is in a better place to replicate its guiding values. But not always.
Evolved mortality doesn't have to be what is good for the individual at all , and it doesn't have to be instinctive once culture is available. For instance, societies will evolve at least defensive warfare, and quite possible offensive warfare. That's pretty bad for the individuals sent off to do the fighting, and they aren't going to win "on average" if they get killed. Because it is so inherently unatractive, it has to be buttressed by a great deal of cultural mythos about how noble and glorious it is.
True... but this also opens another question, how could the "ability to believe myths that are likely to get you killed" have evolved, especially if one does not believe in group selection.
Because it's connected with a lot of other things? It's not that cultural morality is always inimical to the individual .. and it's not that cultural morality is cleanly split off from cultural Everything Else. Most people have learnt how to make war, how to make families and how to make bread as part of a single package.
Because ability to believe whatever most people around believe was net beneficial. Also, the situation when going to war means risking your life and getting nothing valuable in return is rather modern.
There are a few significant things to say about this post. The first is that you ought to read the Metaethics sequence (long version) or Value Theory (abridged version). Knowing how our current values arose is reason for pessimism about whether AIs we create will share our values, about humanity's values in unsteered futures, and about what the values of aliens might look like. Knowing how our current values arose is not something that should move us away from them, or confuse us about which things are good and bad.
The impression I get from this post is that you're trying to argue, through subtextual moves, that values are explained away rather than merely explained. You make a number of subtle errors, which consistently bend towards that direction. The practical upshot of which is that you are spreading falsehoods about moral philosophy which, if widespread, would make people adopt worse values and make the world worse.
You mix up your tenses in sneaky way, projecting bad aspects of the past onto the future:
"Cultural values which valorize physical male violence and facilitate its coordination at scale will become the dominant paradigm purely as a result of the circumstances’ ruthless logic."
"Any folklore or morality code which facilitated this core mission will replicate, spread, and become enshrined as humanity’s unquestioned zeitgeist."
"Fundamental to this community’s well-being is a male’s ability to commit acts of horrific physical violence in his individual capacity and to coordinate others to do the same"
(Emphasis added).
You speak positively of violence through the lens of past societies that needed it, without disclaiming that it's bad in a present-day lens:
"The men of martial prowess — those exceptionally good at killing people and taking their shit — were appropriately exalted and deified for the base survival and material gain they were able to provide to their community."
Taken together, these make me think that you would prefer to live in a world of pure Azathoth, with more violence and more oppression.
Which is bad.
Strong downvoted.
You mix up your tenses in sneaky way, projecting bad aspects of the past onto the future:
I think this would normally be an astute observation but in my case mixing up tenses has been a persistent source of frustration for my editors. Despite the scolding I get and my efforts to watch out for it, I screw this up constantly (I don't know if this explains it but English is my third language and I mostly learned it in an ad-hoc manner). All I can say now is that the tense mix-up was an inadvertent error on my part. When I talk about which cultural values "will become" the dominant paradigm, I wasn't referring to the future or present, but rather a jump forward in time from one past date to another (e.g. from 600 AD to 605 AD or whatever). Same when I talk about which code "will replicate", it's about a date in the past that is future from another date in the past. When I talk about "this community" I was referring to communities in the past that materially profited off of warfare.
I'm normally really bad at conjugating verbs consistently, so the mixed up tenses should not be seen as evidence of any hidden messages. I don't know if that clears up any ambiguity.
You speak positively of violence through the lens of past societies that needed it, without disclaiming that it's bad in a present-day lens
You're not the only one to make this criticism but I admit I'm confused by it. I'm generally an optimist about the human condition largely because of how personally thrilling and eternally grateful I am towards the steady obsolescence of violence as a solution in modern life. I think it's a Good Thing™ that humans nowadays are significantly more inclined to favor peaceful cooperation over violent conquest. But if I had to include throat-clearing passages in between all my sentences (violence is bad! trade is good! slavery is bad! peace is good! etc.) I wouldn't fault the reader who would find this patronizing and infantilizing.
So in the passage you quoted above, I relay an observation that Men of Violence were "appropriately" praised by their community. All this means is that, purely from a base material gain, the community had a reason to praise conquerors who bring back stolen and looted riches. "Appropriately" here serves only to distinguish whether the community was acting arbitrarily or rationally; it was not at all intended to be praise for that conduct. The description here was fully intended to describe what is, not what ought. I'm reminded of a similar confusion regarding the "evolutionary benefits" of rape. Describing how sexual coercion can be a "successful" evolutionary strategy is not at all the same thing as arguing that rape is "good" or whatever. I would hope that this distinction is well established within these circles.
I already worry too much about being overly wordy, so in the interest of brevity and also to reduce the risk of coming off as patronizing, I avoid repeating points I think are too obvious. So in this case, I didn't find it necessary to repeatedly disclaim how much I dislike rape, slavery, and violence. The exclusion of my denunciations in my post should not be taken as evidence of endorsement.
Then you quote Samuel Cartwright "conjuring up creatively compelling excuses" for slavery, and never argue against the quotation.
Do you mean this quote?
Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:
A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn’t want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by “whipping the devil” out of them. It’s an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.
That's someone criticizing Cartwright's practice of coming up with such excuses, so having the quote is already an argument against Cartwright (and thus slavery). Arguing against the quotation would be arguing for slavery and oppression.
The first is that you ought to read the Metaethics sequence (long version) or Value Theory (abridged version).
Why? Does it solve everything? Does it make any good points?
Knowing how our current values arose is reason for pessimism about whether AIs we create will share our values, about humanity’s values in unsteered futures, and about what the values of aliens might look like.
I am very unconvinced that we humans have a single coherent set of values, and reading the metaethics sequence did not change my mind -- the claim is assumed , not proven.
(A commentator notices the problem: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right?commentId=pgSokbnCJDWPbCRDC No one solves it)(But you responded by editing out the link to Meaning of Right).
Knowing how our current values arose is not something that should move us away from them, or confuse us about which things are good and bad.
Would that have been true if stated by a roman slave owner? If his values were wrong then, yours could be now.
(A commentator notes the problem-- well, he uses Washington, not a Roman: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fG3g3764tSubr6xvs/the-meaning-of-right?commentId=eR5f6SZS3iJydHQsH)
Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do.
I can't speak to every era, but in the middle ages, about 75% of us would have been serfs: not tradeable individually, but bound to a plot of purchaseable land. No way most of us would have been spending our time innovating arguments for the moralilty of slavery.
Arguments for the morality of slavery come down to us from the words and images of the past. Who made the words and images that survive? Mainly slaveholders and serf-owners. As you point out, those who didn't subscribe to a pro-war, pro-slavery morality selectively died out or became enslaved until the economy made the institution of slavery obsolete, and they lost the ability to transmit their moral views into the future.
Many commenters seem to be reading this post as implying something like slavery and violence being good or at least morally okay. Which is weird, since I didn't get that impression - especially since the poster explicitly says they don't support slavery and even quotes someone saying that a defense of slavery was an "idiotic" explanation.
I don't read the post as making any claim about what is ultimately right or wrong. Rather, I read it as a caution similar to the common points of "how sure are you that you would have made the morally correct choice if you had been born as someone benefiting from slavery back when it was a thing" combined with "the values that we endorse are strongly shaped by self-interest and motivated cognition"; both the kinds of sentiments that were made many times in the Sequences as well as the original Overcoming Bias blog.
Many commenters seem to be reading this post as implying something like slavery and violence being good or at least morally okay... I read it as a caution similar to the common points of "how sure are you that you would have made the morally correct choice if you had been born as someone benefiting from slavery back when it was a thing" combined with "the values that we endorse are strongly shaped by self-interest and motivated cognition"
I don't agree with your characterization of the post's claims. The title is synonymous with "morality is arbitrary virtue-signaling," and it promotes a cynical attitude toward moral argument in general. There is nothing wrong with having a cynical attitude, provided it's useful and/or correct. Is there reason to believe such cynicism is in fact useful or correct? The post doesn't promote moral cynicism by considering more sincere moral perspectives, falsifying them, and then promoting a cynical approach as a better alternative. It promotes cynicism by painting an evocative series of images that encourage us to cast ourselves as George Washington (rather than as one of his 150 slaves) or as a powerful Bronze-age warrior (rather than as one of the women he just raped and murdered in his latest town-sacking), and thereby take a cynical stance toward our own modern-day morality because it's just an arbitrary material fact that we were born as ourselves rather than as slaveholders and city-sackers.
I do think that characterizing morality as a way of promoting attitudes that lead to net better outcomes for their subscribers (despite short-term temptations) is a pretty good one. And it would therefore be true that morality is governed by materiality. But materiality is anything but arbitrary and self-congratulatory. It's as objective as the ratio of slaves-to-Washingtons and peasants-to-knights. If morality is about living well within our material conditions, then morality is mainly objective, asking questions like "given my resources and abilities, what is the best-in-expectation way for me to live in modern society?" There are other questions one could ask that might lead to different answers and actions, such as "what's the best way to improve the state of the world for my grandchildren?" How we prioritize these questions is probably more subjective. But the answers to the questions is in theory mostly objective.
From this point of view, the idea that we'd have been pro-slavery had we been born into a slaveowning family should no more disturb us than the idea that we'd have been flat-Earthers if born in a place and time when the Earth was widely considered to be flat.
Kaj_Sotala's interpretation of my post is absolutely correct.
It promotes cynicism by painting an evocative series of images that encourage us to cast ourselves as George Washington (rather than as one of his 150 slaves) or as a powerful Bronze-age warrior (rather than as one of the women he just raped and murdered in his latest town-sacking), and thereby take a cynical stance toward our own modern-day morality because it's just an arbitrary material fact that we were born as ourselves rather than as slaveholders and city-sackers.
There's an obvious reason I did not encourage anyone to view themselves as the victims; my assumption is that no one needs any convincing to agree being raped and murdered is awful. The second reason I did not focus on that perspective is because my argument was about how memeplexes achieve dominance, which means that the opinions of the historically oppressed is by definition irrelevant.
I understand your point is that material circumstances control the moral ideas prevalent in a culture, and that these cultural ideals in turn control individual beliefs and actions. Our morality and that of our ancestors is therefore determined largely by material circumstances.
Alongside this deterministic framework, you are arguing for a Dawkins selfis meme-based explanation for which cultural ideas survive and flourish. Specifically, you are arguing that historical material circumstances favored the survival of a pro-slavery, pro-war morality, while modern circumstances favor survival of an anti-slavery, minimal- or anti-war morality. Which view we hold is an accident of birth, and knowing this, we should treat our moral views with some skepticism and cynicism. Under this relativist perspective, being pro-slavery is actually an equally valid moral stance as being anti-slavery.
I think your post could have benefitted by an explicit consideration of whether or not there are objective moral truths that we can uncover. It's certainly scary in some sense if an accident of birth can cause us to miss out on objective moral truth. Missionaries used to travel the globe to tell poor benighted tribes about Jesus and solve this exact problem. I'm an atheist, so I think they screwed up figuring out "objective morality." But I remain sympathetic to the idea that there are objective moral truths to be discovered. So what's scary isn't necessary that there is no morality and all things are relative. It may be that there is morality and we're screwing it up!
From that point of view, cynical skepticism toward one's own moral view doesn't seem to me the proper attitude. Neither does being scared of how materiality shapes one's morality: historically, you were much more likely to have been born a slave than a slaver. While it would have been terrible to be a slave, from a moral perspective, you're relatively safe from accidentally having been born into a pro-slavery worldview.
As an alternative to cynicism and fear, I prefer sincere curiosity about how to think about morality and a healthy appreciation for how materiality and culture shapes our worldview.
Thank you for your reply, you accurately summarized my argument.
Regarding "objective" morality, I honestly would have no idea where to start, especially as an atheist. I was hoping my post would prompt some responses pushing back on this particular point. I'm not opposed towards working to discover what this "objective" morality would be, but given my argument above there should be significant caution that we're not just slumbering into yet another self-congratulatory narrative. Along that same line, nothing I wrote above should imply that I lack curiosity, hopefully I established quite the opposite.
I think that if there is an objective morality, then you can use your concern about self-congratulatory narratives as a starting point. What moral view is leading you to think there’s any problem at all with enjoying a self-congratulatory narrative? Once you’ve identified it, you can figure out what other moral positions it might imply.
What moral view is leading you to think there’s any problem at all with enjoying a self-congratulatory narrative?
It doesn't have to be a moral objection. It's circular argumentation, so it already goes against epistemic norms.
What moral view is leading you to think there’s any problem at all with enjoying a self-congratulatory narrative?
It's not any specific moral view that causes me concern, but rather how the entire edifice is organized. There's likely no end to the specific moral principles I can cite which hit me on a visceral level which I, purportedly, feel very strongly about. This includes the revulsion against slavery, which in my case partly extends even to consensual labor arrangements that have a significant imbalance of power (this is most prominent for the hospitality industry in poor countries serving a much richer clientele).
But when I contemplate how genetically identical I am to people from just a few hundred years ago, and when I see what those people felt strongly about, it's reasonable for this to generate some pause on my end. Because what it demonstrates to me is that even the core visceral disgust I reflexively feel can't be trusted. Nevertheless, I still rely heavily on this disgust reflex but it's with the understanding that I'm engaging in fiction but have no better alternative.
Regarding “objective” morality, I honestly would have no idea where to start, especially as an atheist
It helps to separate the epistemic version of moral realism .. that there are mind independently true true moral propositions... from the ontological version ...that there are moral facts or properties.
It also helps to notice that "objective" doesn't have to equate to "universal". There might be an objective answer to "what is the objectively correct morality for this particular set of circumstances'.
I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person's interests in the moment.
Basically, a resolution of the Parfit's hitchhiker problem is inducing morality into the setup: it is immoral not to pick up a dying hitchhiker, and it is dishonorable to renege on the promise to pay. If you dig into the decision-theoretic logic of it, you can figure out that in repeated Parfit's hitchhiker setup you are better off picking up/paying up, but humans are not great at that, so evolutionarily we ended up with morality as a crutch.
I thought it was a sort of mundane statement that morality is a set of evolved heuristics that make cooperation rather than defection possible, even when it is ostensibly against the person’s interests in the moment.
Evolutionary, and other naturalistic accounts, aren't quite a slam dunk, because they leave the open question -- the question of what is actually moral, beyond what you have been told is moral -- open. A society might tell its members to pillage and enslave other socieities, and that would be good for the society, but it can still be criticised from a universalistic perspective.
The question of what is the prevailing, de facto morality is different to the question of what is the best-adapated form of the prevailing morality, given the constraints a society is under. But that question itself is itself different to the question of the ideal morality without any material constraints -- but note that such morality could be a "luxury belief", an unimplementable ideal.
I don't think there's a physical difference between morality being arbitrary because it is the evolution of blind selfish memes, or morality being limited by practical considerations. If someone had a hypothetical objective morality they could still be a slave-owner and war-monger in one age and a civil-rights activist calling for world peace in a different age.
I think this is getting downvoted more because it sounds kind of mean and argumentative than that it doesn't make sense. LessWrong tries to uphold much high standards of not only rationality but civil discourse. For the most part we succeed, and I think it's absolutely crucial for effective rationality that we keep things civil and therefore emotionally level. Strong emotions shut down rational thought. Most of the internet seems like evidence for that.
There are quite a lot of assumptions about culture in this post which are popular but not well justified. Morality may well be partially relative, but if your view is that slavery's evil was not objective, I think we disagree on a fundamental level. Given your other posts, I think we have a values disagreement fundamental enough that I'm concerned about the agency represented in your choices of words. I'll come back and explain this viewpoint more later, but for now:
If you’re allergic to the word “patriarchy”, reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels
No - patriarchy as used by lefties today is specifically a reference to an active network of people now.
I am quite concerned about the argumentation style in this post, which appears to me thoroughly undersupported.
Can you be more specific about what exactly you find objectionable about my argumentation style?
Regarding 'patriarchy', I don't disagree that the word has muddled meaning nowadays but what other term would you recommend for me to use to describe the concept I wrote about?
I don't feel it's worth my time to go into detail, but I'm fairly happy with one AI's response.
Me:
[paste of post]
I am concerned about this post. While it makes some reasonable claims, the original claims - from WoodFromEden, especially - seem odd to me. What are your views on this post? What would you comment, in order to be able to communicate with people who were impressed by the post that there are mistakes? I am concerned that explicitly disagreeing will be dismissed.
AI:
1. The post makes overly broad generalizations about human history and culture. Claims like "For most of history, living the good life meant killing people and taking their shit" or "Any mythology pasted on top (including institutionalized racism) was always just set dressing" are vast oversimplifications that ignore a lot of nuance and complexity in human societies. I would point out that there is a lot of diversity across cultures and time periods, and these kinds of blanket statements can be misleading.
2. The post relies too heavily on evolutionary psychology arguments that are speculative. Claims about how human intelligence evolved to adopt "fashionably irrational beliefs" or how certain behaviors were adaptive in our evolutionary past are difficult to prove and often rely more on conjecture than evidence. I would argue that human psychology and behavior are complex results of both biology and culture, not simplistic adaptations.
3. The post makes questionable analogies, like comparing energy usage to slavery. While an interesting thought experiment, equating modern energy consumption to actual human slavery is inappropriate and minimizes the horrors of the institution of slavery. I would argue that this is a false equivalence and not an appropriate analogy.
4. The post fails to consider alternative explanations and perspectives. For example, in explaining the origins of patriarchy, the post relies entirely on a militaristic argument and ignores other social, cultural and economic factors that likely also contributed. A more balanced analysis should consider multiple complementary explanations, not just one narrow theory.
5. The tone of the post comes across as overly confident and dismissive of dissenting views. Words like "dreadfully simple" and "nothing at all remarkable" imply that the theories being promoted are obvious and unquestionable, rather than complex and open to debate. I would suggest a more open-minded and less absolutist tone that acknowledges the nuanced, multifaceted nature of these kinds of discussions.
I acknowledge that you believe this is not worth your time and do not hold you to a response. That said it's generally not helpful to assert a criticism and then refuse elaboration. Outsourcing that task only serves to highlight how deficient LLMs currently are at this task because of how distracted they get with ethical guardrails. Point no. 3 is exemplary of this problem because I already said that energy slaves are a crude comparison and already said I don't support slavery. So this criticism essentially boils down to not having enough throat-clearing negative adjectives directly adjacent to any discussion of slavery.
My claim is that the boring ethical guardrails are in fact what I endorse as describing the errors you made. jimrandomh's response is a higher quality version.
I think anyone making claims that they're on the side of "objective" morality is hopelessly confused and making a category error.
Where exactly does the objectivity arise from? At most, a moral memeplex can simply become so omnipresent and universal that people take it for granted, but that's not the same as being actually objective.
I can look around and see no evidence of morality being handed down from the heavens (and even if it was, that would be highly suspect. I deny even a hypothetical ASI or God himself the right to make that determination, any more than they can make 2+2=3 by fiat).
At the end of the day, there's nothing to hide behind when subject to the Socratic Method, at one point or another, you simply need to plant your feet in the ground and declare that it is so because you say so.
At most there are axioms that are convenient to hold, or socially useful, or appealing to the same mammalian brain, in the manner that monkeys and dogs hate unfairness or show kin preference.
To look for something fundamental below that is foolishness, because there's no reason to think that such a grounding even exists.
Mind you, being a moral relativist doesn't stop me from holding onto the supremacy of my own morals, I just don't need the mental comfort of having an ineffable objectivity to prop that up.
Perhaps at the end of the day there'll be a memeplex that's hyperoptimized for human brains, such that we can't help but be attracted to it, but that's more from it being convincing than it being true.
See Probability is Subjectively Objective, The Meaning of Right. (Probably only makes sense in context of the dependencies, and the metaethics sequence is notoriously misunderstood.)
The Selfish Gene remains one of my favorite books of all time and although published in 1976 it remains a compelling and insightful introduction to the brute mechanics of natural selection. Richard Dawkins later acknowledged that his book’s title may give a misleading impression of its thesis, erroneously ascribing conscious motivations or agentic properties to non-sentient strands of DNA. The core argument is dreadfully simple: genes (as opposed to organisms or species) are the primary unit of natural selection, and if you leave the primordial soup brewing for a while, the only genes that can remain are the ones with a higher proclivity towards replication than their neighbors. “Selfish” genes therefore are not cunning strategists or followers of some manifest destiny, but rather simply the accidental consequence of natural selection favoring their propagation. Nothing more.
Dawkins is responsible for coining the word ‘meme’ in the book to describe how the same principles behind gene replication can apply to ideas replicating. I thought about this when I read WoodFromEden’s post about the origin of patriarchy.[1] Their explanation for why male dominance persisted historically for so long is elegantly tidy:
Men make war. Or rather, groups of men make war. The groups that were good at making war remained. The groups that were less good at making war perished. That way, human history is a history of successful male military cooperation. Groups with weak male bonding were defeated by groups where men cooperated better.
Here too, there is no dirigible trajectory mapped out ahead of time. Cultural values which valorize physical male violence and facilitate its coordination at scale will become the dominant paradigm purely as a result of the circumstances’ ruthless logic. Any deviation from this set of values would lead your tribe towards extinction, which accidentally also meant your bards wouldn’t be around to write songs and poems extolling the virtues of sex equality. At least not until there have been an extensive change in circumstance.
This “security dilemma” may have been borne out of petty squabbles over hunting grounds in the Serengeti but its ramifications persisted throughout history. Military service today may be seen as a low-status and distasteful profession — quite literally grunt work — but it used to be venerated deeply as a path to honor and a cornerstone of civic duty. This philosophy is epitomized by the recurring and central portrayal of military men in stories from a long time ago (Homeric heroes of ancient Greece, Genghis Khan, Jedi knights, etc.), their deeds forming the backbone of societal narratives and cultural mythologies.
The historian Bret Deveraux analyzed the grand strategy video game Europa Universalis 4 to illustrate the war-hungry reality of the late medieval period:
Military power requires revenue and manpower (along with staying technologically competitive) and both come from the same source: the land. While a player can develop existing provinces, taking land in war is far cheaper and faster. The game represents this through both developing old land and seizing new land requiring similar resources [but compared to incorporating newly conquered land, development is about 4x as expensive while providing only marginal improvements]. That may seem like the developer has placed their thumb a bit unfairly on the scale, but, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006) for pre-industrial societies that is a historically correct thumb on the scale. Until the industrial revolution, nearly all of the energy used in production came out of agriculture one way or another; improves in irrigation, tax collection and farming methods might improve yields, but never nearly so much as adding more land. Consequently, as Gat puts it, returns to capital investment (hitting the development button) were always wildly inferior to returns to successful warfare that resulted in conquest.
For most of history, living the good life meant killing people and taking their shit. The men of martial prowess — those exceptionally good at killing people and taking their shit — were appropriately exalted and deified for the base survival and material gain they were able to provide to their community. Fundamental to this community’s well-being is a male’s ability to commit acts of horrific physical violence in his individual capacity and to coordinate others to do the same (this too with violence if necessary). Any folklore or morality code which facilitated this core mission will replicate, spread, and become enshrined as humanity’s unquestioned zeitgeist. Not because it’s the “right” thing to do, but solely because no pacifist egalitarian civilization could have possibly survived to say otherwise.
I’ve written before about slavery, along a similar vein of Devereaux-inspired historical analysis. Although subject nowadays to some quixotic revisionism about why it existed, there is nothing at all remarkable about slavery’s near-universal historical pervasiveness. The only justification anyone ever needed to press another into bondage is the universal desire to have someone else do all the work. Any mythology pasted on top (including institutionalized racism) was always just set dressing. When industrialization made slavery increasingly politically and economically untenable, the moral and legal consensus conveniently caught up.
Consider the chasm with how much material circumstances changed. Promises of milk and honey used to serve as the bounty of divine compacts, but today I can performatively buy entire vats of the stuff and barely notice the financial hit. Cheap and abundant electricity is part of the reason I have trivial access to luxuries ancient royalty could only dream about. Buckminster Fuller coined the term energy slave as a way to contextualize energy consumption by calculating the equivalent kilowatt-hours a healthy human could provide through labor. It’s a crude equivalence for sure but with some basic assumptions[2] we can calculate the average American relies on the “labor” of about 150 energy slaves. Well what do you know, that happens to be around how many slaves George Washington owned.[3]
The most fascinating book I’ve never read is The Secret Of Our Success which essentially argues humans succeeded because we’re uniquely adept at making shit up — social conventions, cultural norms, religious mythology, etc. — which happens to be directionally useful.
One of the reasons stone tool technology languished for millions of years is likely a result of the brute limitations of a then-human’s cognitive capacity. It took about 3 million years of evolution for the human brain to triple in size; a pace too glacial to contemplate but still remarkably fast for natural selection. By contrast, the pace of cultural memetic evolution is not constrained by the corporeal cycle of birth and death. Once the human brain got swole enough, the jet fuel that really powered the next few thousand years of technological advancement was almost entirely a result of cultural advancement. Our ability to create viral memes, in other words.
I’m an atheist who believes religion is a fiction, but I happily recognize it as a materially useful fiction. The Dunbar limit normally would make us dreadfully wary of any interactions with Person No. 151, a hurdle which would have otherwise foreclosed the already impossibly long alloy trade routes necessary to start the bronze age. BUT if you make some shit up about how Person No. 151 is actually totally cool to trade with because they’re of the same religion or K-pop fandom or whatever, the cultural fiction is soothing enough for your flighty lizardbrain to let its guard down. Keep this up long enough and maybe pencils can exist.
Our mind’s rational capacity to observe patterns, question assumptions, and test hypotheses provides us with an envious advantage in mastering the physical world with everything from tracking game to optimizing steam turbines. But paradoxically as Gurwinder notes in his highly-recommended essay Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things, the very same intelligence can become an effective source of delusion:
As a case in point, human intelligence evolved less as a tool for pursuing objective truth than as a tool for pursuing personal well-being, tribal belonging, social status, and sex, and this often required the adoption of what I call “Fashionably Irrational Beliefs” (FIBs), which the brain has come to excel at. Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being.
Unlike George Washington, I don’t support slavery (please clap). But also unlike Washington, I conveniently happen to benefit from a dense tapestry of infrastructure and tendinous globe-spanning supply chains affording me near-immediate satisfaction of my most trivial of whims. Based on the evident historical record, without the environmentally deleterious bounty fossil fuels facilitated, most of us would be conjuring up creatively compelling excuses for why forcing your neighbor to work for free is the Moral thing to do. Gurwinder cites exactly such an example with the 19th century physician Samuel A. Cartwright:
A strong believer in slavery, he used his learning to avoid the clear and simple realization that slaves who tried to escape didn’t want to be slaves, and instead diagnosed them as suffering from a mental disorder he called drapetomania, which could be remedied by “whipping the devil” out of them. It’s an explanation so idiotic only an intellectual could think of it.
The cynical ramifications of my argument might be impossible to avoid completely. Perhaps acknowledging how much our technological milieu guides our moral spirit could beckon us to intensify our agentic nature. To the extent the field of evolutionary psychology can be deployed to shed light on past and present mysteries, perhaps it can shed insight into the future too?
But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?
As Scott Alexander noted: “If you’re allergic to the word “patriarchy”, reframe it as the anthropological question of why men were more powerful than women in societies between the Bronze and Industrial Age technology levels.”
The average per capita consumption in the US is 300 million BTUs. A human can sustain 75 watts of work over 8 hours, which translates to 2,047 BTUs of energy per day. If we generously also give our energy slaves the weekends off, that’s 260 days times 2,047 BTUs, or 532,220 BTUs of energy per year. I very likely fucked this up but I stopped caring hours ago.
Another crude equivalence, but Washington’s net worth in today’s dollars is around $700 million, far outstripping every other US president until Trump showed up.