I’ve put together some guesses about what’s important for US competence as a nation, loosely based on ideas from WEIRDest People and Where is my Flying Car?.
Human societies likely default to small groups that fragment (due to disagreements) if they grow much above 20 people.
Over the past 10 millennia or so, it has become common to use extended ties of kinship to scale up to the Dunbar number, and sometimes well beyond that.
Western civilization scaled up to unprecedented levels of trust and cooperation via a set of fairly new cultural features: moral universalism, use of impartial rules rather than contextual particularism, the expectation of supernatural punishment for undetected crimes, more emphasis on analytical thinking, and more positive-sum thinking.
The US has been partly held together by a shared religion, whose teachings promote trust between co-religionists, and which also encourage treating others as potential converts.
Shared enemies (Nazis, Communism, maybe briefly Islam) created additional, but temporary, boosts to cooperation within the English speaking world. Some of the polarization we’ve recently experienced is just a return to patterns that were previously common. If that were most of what’s going wrong, I’d be fairly optimistic about the future of the US.
Over the past few decades, the US has experienced a decline in religion (or a least in a shared religion).
Science got too aggressive about demanding that we disbelieve any knowledge beyond what scientific journals would publish. That eroded beliefs in supernatural phenomena, and also eroded beliefs in the religion(s) that helped to promote large-scale trust and cooperation.
Science didn’t succeed in replacing religion with something more rigorous. Instead, new quasi-religions sprouted (e.g. Green fundamentalism, and the cult of Trump). They’re optimized more for features such as compatibility with forager instincts, than the ability to promote prosperity.
In contrast, the Protestant religion was selected in part for its ability to foster cooperation between distant strangers.
I’m concerned that many US problems of the past few decades (including The Great Stagnation) can only be solved by something like a return to being a Christian nation. The tension between Science and Christianity seems strong enough that it’s hard to see how that is feasible.
Another problem is that democracy has morphed from a tool, to a goal in itself.
That has undercut the authority of political parties. They used to have near total control over what candidates were on the ballot. Then, starting around 1970, there was a massive shift toward direct voter control over who each party nominated.
That made it harder to hold any institution accountable for political results. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this trend started around the same time as The Great Stagnation. It seems correlated with reduced trust in authority in general, although I can’t tell whether this is a cause or effect.
WEIRDest People also claims that WEIRD cultures have produced lower testosterone levels, via monogamy. That’s important, since it reduces impulsivity, reduces competitive urges, and increases positive-sum thinking.
But testosterone seems to have decreased over the past few decades, so the US ought to be in a better position than most societies to rebuild institutions.
I’m maybe 90% confident that the US still has enough competence to postpone collapse and civil war for a few decades.
It seems like there should be some research on how companies, nonprofits, etc. scale up past the Dunbar number. But I’m unclear whether it’s relevant to groups as big as the US, but WEIRDest People has led me to expect that the optimal approach for a group of 300 million people will be rather different from the optimal approach for 200,000 people.
I’ve put together some guesses about what’s important for US competence as a nation, loosely based on ideas from WEIRDest People and Where is my Flying Car?.
Human societies likely default to small groups that fragment (due to disagreements) if they grow much above 20 people.
Over the past 10 millennia or so, it has become common to use extended ties of kinship to scale up to the Dunbar number, and sometimes well beyond that.
Western civilization scaled up to unprecedented levels of trust and cooperation via a set of fairly new cultural features: moral universalism, use of impartial rules rather than contextual particularism, the expectation of supernatural punishment for undetected crimes, more emphasis on analytical thinking, and more positive-sum thinking.
The US has been partly held together by a shared religion, whose teachings promote trust between co-religionists, and which also encourage treating others as potential converts.
Shared enemies (Nazis, Communism, maybe briefly Islam) created additional, but temporary, boosts to cooperation within the English speaking world. Some of the polarization we’ve recently experienced is just a return to patterns that were previously common. If that were most of what’s going wrong, I’d be fairly optimistic about the future of the US.
Over the past few decades, the US has experienced a decline in religion (or a least in a shared religion).
Science got too aggressive about demanding that we disbelieve any knowledge beyond what scientific journals would publish. That eroded beliefs in supernatural phenomena, and also eroded beliefs in the religion(s) that helped to promote large-scale trust and cooperation.
Science didn’t succeed in replacing religion with something more rigorous. Instead, new quasi-religions sprouted (e.g. Green fundamentalism, and the cult of Trump). They’re optimized more for features such as compatibility with forager instincts, than the ability to promote prosperity.
In contrast, the Protestant religion was selected in part for its ability to foster cooperation between distant strangers.
I’m concerned that many US problems of the past few decades (including The Great Stagnation) can only be solved by something like a return to being a Christian nation. The tension between Science and Christianity seems strong enough that it’s hard to see how that is feasible.
Another problem is that democracy has morphed from a tool, to a goal in itself.
That has undercut the authority of political parties. They used to have near total control over what candidates were on the ballot. Then, starting around 1970, there was a massive shift toward direct voter control over who each party nominated.
That made it harder to hold any institution accountable for political results. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this trend started around the same time as The Great Stagnation. It seems correlated with reduced trust in authority in general, although I can’t tell whether this is a cause or effect.
WEIRDest People also claims that WEIRD cultures have produced lower testosterone levels, via monogamy. That’s important, since it reduces impulsivity, reduces competitive urges, and increases positive-sum thinking.
But testosterone seems to have decreased over the past few decades, so the US ought to be in a better position than most societies to rebuild institutions.
I’m maybe 90% confident that the US still has enough competence to postpone collapse and civil war for a few decades.
It seems like there should be some research on how companies, nonprofits, etc. scale up past the Dunbar number. But I’m unclear whether it’s relevant to groups as big as the US, but WEIRDest People has led me to expect that the optimal approach for a group of 300 million people will be rather different from the optimal approach for 200,000 people.