If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you’ll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.
Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn’t assume anything of the sort.
In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn’t surprise me to see “regression towards the mean” in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we’ve known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don’t see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won’t have much tolerance for their assumptions about women’s freedoms.
If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you’ll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place.
Older readers of LessWrong will know that it doesn’t take that long.
In my 40′s I was damn near grabbing people and shaking them and saying “Things change!”
After a while, I got bored with saying that, and also came to the conclusion that if you haven’t lived through things that you thought were basic going away, you don’t know what it’s like.
originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth
… Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
It’s possible that feminists and MRAs will wake up to find a matriarchal future.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we’re used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
My bet is that if cryonics works, the future will divide into home era cohorts, and the vast majority of people from earlier times may be living in reasonable comfort but will have very little power. A few highly adaptable people may be able to get up to speed to join the current culture.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we’re used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
You mean there are people who don’t just shape-shift their apparent sex depending on the precise situational combination of their current mood and what they want to signal? Goddamn you lot are weirdos ;-).
Although the conservation-of-mass issue gets awkward: you can either be a scrawny male but a healthy-looking female or a healthy-looking male and a rather overweight female, or be kinda awkwardly lithe in either form. Or you can go to the bathroom and store the extra unwanted mass when female, but really, there’s only so much biological nanotechnology can do against basic physics.
(EDIT: Yes, I did make this up on the bus one day when thinking of things future people might consider good ideas that we’d consider unutterably bizarre, and was indeed waiting for an opportunity to post it ;-).)
I have thought about possible future societies that aren’t based on biological reproduction. Most of the examples in scifi fall apart after a little MoR-style pocking (their main flaw is keeping certain aspects of the setting the same as ours even if those aspects no longer make sense). The two that seem stable are the following:
1) Sentients become pure infomorphs (or ems as Hanson calls them). This abolishes the distinction between memetic and genetic inheritance. Thus “sex” in the sense of recombining “genetic” material is separate from reproduction and resembles having conversations. Reproduction consists of creating a copy of your mind/source code. This resembles the life cycle of bacteria, who exchange information via conjugation but reproduce via binary fission.
2) Sentients are produced in centralized factories, e.g., most children are grown in artificial wombs, or robots produced in more conventional factories. This effectively makes them eusocial with all that implies about their sense of individuality, or rather lack thereof.
The other possibility is old-fashioned sexual reproduction. I have no idea which of those possibilities will come to dominate.
One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it’s so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn’t have any health implications.
Height might be less significant.
Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?
What do I have to do to be highly adaptable enough to join the culture that is still experiencing growth? What could I be doing now in order to prepare for that?
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don’t see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won’t have much tolerance for their assumptions about women’s freedoms.
At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don’t recall exactly what. And I said: “You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”
I am aware that some people live in Gor-inspired relationships, that some people are masochistic, that some women want to be dominated, and that more people would like to live that way than those who would care to admit it, or even that those who know for a fact that they would. I still assume these numbers to be small.
Of course people would adapt. That’s what people do. That doesn’t make it right.
In the past, almost everyone thought that one should wait until marriage for sex. Now, almost everyone (in my part of the world) believes in serial monogamy. In both these cases people think that their social norms are in the right. I see no reason not to suppose that if Gor lifestyle became the norm then most people (inc. women) would think it right (not just publically saying that its right).
I see no objective way to say that any of these lifestyles are right or wrong, unless it can be shown to be damaging the children.
What they believe in, or rather, endorse, and what they end up actually doing or wanting to do have usually been at odds. The ideal solution is different for every combination of individual and circumstance: the ideal universal solution is therefore an superstructural (ideological, legal, cultural, etc.) framework capable of running and accommodating any specific arrangement between interested parties. Objectively speaking, I think the only hard and fast rule is “Safe, Sane and Consensual”.
Suppose a 16-year-old agrees to have sex. Is that consent?
If a contract is made under “undue influence,” did I consent to it? Is that objective?
If my agreement is made under coercion, did I consent? What counts (morally) as coercion seems very fraught. Leftists and feminists frequently argue that many seemingly voluntary activities are actually deeply coercive, and use terms like “wage slavery.”
Suppose I agree to an act, then change my mind later. If the other person carries out the act anyway, did I consent to it? In law, and in most people’s intuition, the answer is “it depends.”
All in all, it looks very much like “communicated agreement” is the objective fact, and whether that gets upgraded to “consent” depends on a whole host of ethical judgments that are often contentious.
Consent is more objective than sanity, although there are edge cases:
Suppose a 16-year-old agrees to have sex. Is that consent?
Where I live 16-year-olds can legally have sex! Anyway, assuming things are different where you live, then yes, they can give consent, but their consent does not legally authorise sex.
If a contract is made under “undue influence,” did I consent to it? Is that objective?
If my agreement is made under coercion, did I consent? What counts (morally) as coercion seems very fraught. Leftists and feminists frequently argue that many seemingly voluntary activities are actually deeply coercive, and use terms like “wage slavery.”
Well, yes you did consent. This doen’t necessary make everything ok, and it might be better if there was less coersion, but you still consented.
Suppose I agree to an act, then change my mind later. If the other person carries out the act anyway, did I consent to it? In law, and in most people’s intuition, the answer is “it depends.”
You consented, and then withdrew your consent. If the other person carries out the act before you withdraw consent, then they can’t be blamed.
All in all, it looks very much like “communicated agreement” is the objective fact, and whether that gets upgraded to “consent” depends on a whole host of ethical judgments that are often contentious.
I’d say “communicated agreement” is consent by definition. Its possibly a word getting a little overloaded : the word consent can be used as in “Russia consented to hand over 1⁄4 of her territory to Germany” or as in “Let’s have sex!” while these are rather different in most important respects.
Is so called “marital rape” consensual since they consented to marry? (Most societies say yes, but lately in has become fashionable in Western countries to pass laws saying no).
What if someone says yes but feels pressured to?
If two drunk students had sex, has a rape occurred? (Yes, according to California’s new “Affirmative Consent” law).
Is so called “marital rape” consensual since they consented to marry?
A contract where one party permanently gives away all rights (love, honour and obey) seems deeply worrying, but OTOH, I don’t think people should take serious vows so lightly. Maybe a middle ground would be that a spouse can refuse sex, but this is grounds for divorce and they have no claim for alimony because they broke their half of the agreement? Either that, or don’t use the traditional vows.
What if someone says yes but feels pressured to?
What if someone only robs a bank because of peer pressure? Still guilty.
If two drunk students had sex, has a rape occurred?
It depends exactly what ‘drunk’ means. If someone is paralytic and can’t actually articulate the word ‘no’ then its rape. But drunk sex is perfectly normal, and if you consent to getting drunk then you are responsible for your actions while drunk.
Because it is ridiculous with respect to adults and California politicians think they can get away with infantilizing students and treating them like legal minors.
I think the glorious transhuman future will involve some sort of radical change, probably far more radical than Gor. People will have to adapt—even if they live in groups preserving 2014s norms, completely isolated from outsiders, they will have to adapt to the fact that they can’t influence the outside world and that baseline humans will be overtaken in all fields of endevour.
No, that just means that these women haven’t thought very hard about what living a really long time could mean. Those science fiction writers in the last century who postulated the return of traditional social structures in high-tech societies might have come closer to the reality of life in “the future” than they imagined, and some Neoreactionaries have pointed this out. Refer to this podcast by Richard Spencer, for example:
I’m puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don’t want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don’t.
That’s aside from the fact that this really has very little to do with the subject at hand. There’s a distinct question of what you expect will happen and what one should try to make happen.
I’m puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don’t want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don’t.
Thirded. My disquiet comes primarily from the idea of benefiting in status and power from a system that would systematically deny freedom and independent agency and security to half the people I know, and the notion that I would be denied the freedom to take on roles usually assigned to other groups should the situation warrant it.
I’m puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don’t want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don’t.
Seconded. Dear Lord patriarchy is unappealing: you “get to” basically enslave a few women and children at the cost of having to spend your entire life on utterly unappealing status and machismo competitions.
Dear Lord patriarchy is unappealing: you “get to” basically enslave a few women and children at the cost of having to spend your entire life on utterly unappealing status and machismo competitions.
What do you mean by “status and machismo competitions”? Narrowly defined, in many patriarchal societies this is false. Seriously, read some history. Take a look at say 18th-19th century England. Some men could do many different things from becoming ascetic monks, to becoming gentlemen scientists, to sponsoring works of art, to yes even status and machismo competitions if that suites your fancy.
If you define “status and machismo competitions” broadly then we’re mostly doing the same thing today.
I wouldn’t be too surprised by the possibility of a future society returning to traditional social structures. I would be somewhat surprised by every future society returning to traditional social structures. Either way, I don’t see why this means feminists shouldn’t sign up for cryonics.
“Work better” in what sense? Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the longevity and “anti-fragile” nature of practices like religion and patriarchy indicate that they work quite well indeed, despite recent efforts to make them go away.
The traditional neoreactionary counter is that increased quality of life is due to technological advancement, and that social “progress” has been neutral at best and detrimental at worst.
Quality of life. The idea is that without the ravages of modernity, technological advancement would have created an even higher quality of life.
By way of example, consider the 1950s. Their technology was obviously inferior to ours. And yet they had intact families (marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower) and well-paying jobs (a husband’s salary alone sufficed to support his entire family, his wife was free to cook and clean and raise the children). Is our quality of life higher than theirs? It’s not obvious to me. Even if it is, why is this trade-off necessary? Why can’t we have the superior scientific technology of the 2010s and the superior social technology of the 1950s?
marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower
That’s only desirable if there’s strong social pressure in favor of some family models over others. Tolerance of diverse family structures has made marriage less relevant for economic well-being.
wife was free to cook and clean and raise the children
marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower
That’s only desirable if there’s strong social pressure in favor of some family models over others. Tolerance of diverse family structures has made marriage less relevant for economic well-being.
No, that may also be desirable if some family models are more conducive to human happiness and flourishing than others.
a husband’s salary alone sufficed to support his entire family
A 2010s husband’s salary alone would also suffice to support his entire family if they were willing to live according to 1950s standards. See e.g. Mr. Money Moustache.
I do read MMM, and ERE, and other frugality blogsphere titles. I disagree with your characterization that the difficulty in achieving a decent life today merely reflects an inflation of what is considered decent. First, because it’s much harder to get the same kind of job in 2010s that would have been available in the 1950s; a solid, respectable job you easily can get out of high school is not the same as a solid, respectable job you might not even get after wasting a minimum of four years and going thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into debt. That this latter condition holds in modern times can be attributed to academic inflation and increased job competition from immigration and from women entering the workforce, which are all progressive policies. Second, because zero-sum competition for safe housing away from city centers has increased their prices to reflect what a two-income household can barely cover (and, indeed, the increased prices is part of what keeps them safe), not to mention the horrors of commuting (distance from city centers being the other thing that keeps them safe).
Just to be clear, when you say that it’s much harder to get such a job, and that this is due in part to increased competition from immigration and women, what you mean to say is that it’s much harder for non-women and non-immigrants to get such a job, because it’s correspondingly easier for immigrants and women to get them. Yes?
You seem to additionally be implying that how hard it is for women and immigrants to get jobs isn’t a relevant factor in determining the difficulty in achieving a decent life. Yes?
I have no intention of arguing against either of those points here, I just want to make sure I’ve understood you correctly.
Just to be clear, when you say that it’s much harder to get such a job, and that this is due in part to increased competition from immigration and women, what you mean to say is that it’s much harder for non-women and non-immigrants to get such a job, because it’s correspondingly easier for immigrants and women to get them. Yes?
Yes. I am aware of the lump of labor fallacy, and that in theory an increasing number of workers might have economic effects creating more jobs even as said workers take existing ones, ending up with a similar or perhaps even a better job market than existed before the new workers came into the picture. But in practice it seems like workers have increased faster than jobs, and the oversupply of labor has led lower wages, lower non-monetary compensation, and/or lack of jobs.
You seem to additionally be implying that how hard it is for women and immigrants to get jobs isn’t a relevant factor in determining the difficulty in achieving a decent life. Yes?
Let’s start with women. If you think of the family as the basic block of society instead of the atomized individual, then yes. Under the old model, it was understood that women would marry early (men slightly less early), and that their husbands would be financially responsible for the resulting household and children. If there is a strong job market for men under this model, then most women do not need to work; only the very poor, the widows, the spinsters, and other extreme cases. Instead of slaving away 40 hours per week at work like their husbands did, wives were free to slave away cooking and cleaning and raising the children, which is still slavery, but is a much kinder form of slavery, with a more caring master. Under the new model and circumstances, both men and women perform the wage kind of slavery, and either they perform the household kind of slavery on top of that, or they outsource it, with negative consequences all around.
Immigrants are a different matter. Utilitarians can make a good case that immigration increased total utility, improving the immigrants’ quality of life more than it lowered existing citizens’. If you’re one of those guys who thinks we should all be sending all of our spare income to Africa, or whatever percentage of our income is realistically psychologically sustainable, I guess this is pretty great, and it’s also great if you are one of the immigrants waiting to get in, but it’s not so great for existing citizens whose quality of life is being brought to equilibrium with the rest of the world’s, or for the immigrants already here.
Home appliances cut down quite a bit on “household slavery”. And while you might argue that home-based work is preferable to market work due to having a “kinder, more caring master”, the swift demise of cottage industry once early factories became feasible suggests that folks care more about how productive they are than whether they can work from home.
And while you might argue that home-based work is preferable to market work due to having a “kinder, more caring master”, the swift demise of cottage industry once early factories became feasible suggests that folks care more about how productive they are than whether they can work from home.
The folks who were actually around at the time seemed to disagree about that. Plenty of people devised plans for utopian communities where Moloch wouldn’t be a factor, but they cared little for household-based work. (Indeed, some of them assumed that you could get rid of households altogether, and just live in large, factory-like collective arrangements under the supervision of some ‘uncaring’ leader. Of course, modern evo-psych and social anthropology argue against that view.)
OK; thanks for clarifying. Like I said, I have no intention of arguing those points (though I probably ought to say explicitly I don’t find your arguments convincing), I just wanted to confirm that I was interpreting you correctly.
Those marriage rates masked quite a lot of marital misery, and… well, frankly, neoreactionaries just have no right to use the economic structure of the ’50s Western long boom as evidence for their ideas. Those jobs were based on the strong-labor, employment-state, and financial repression policies of the post-war governments—everything reactionaries hate.
Star Slate Codex has a great perspective on this. The institutions that are beneficial depend on the context. Are we playing for survival and can’t afford risk or are we playing for flourishing and the risk is worth it because the gains outweigh the losses and we can afford to be nice?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the longevity and “anti-fragile” nature of practices like religion
Note that ‘religion’ need not imply theism here. Confucianism is older than both Christianity and Islam, and it’s not based on a theistic worldview—instead its focus is on community organizing through rituals and an ethic of care and loyalty. It’s worth stating this, because many people here at LW find theism especially objectionable, as opposed to religion persay.
Can you say more about how you get from “things won’t always be the way they are now” to “the possibility is worth paying attention to that things will return to something meaningfully similar to the particular kinds of pre-Enlightenment society that Moldbug, et al, endorse”? (As opposed to, well, basically anything else?)
I think the basic argument is that our society has existed for maybe 1 or 2 hundred years, whereas kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
Imagine you’re choosing which species to try and be 450 million years ago. You could try and be a mammal, or you could try and be a horseshoe crab. If you become a mammal, maybe one day you’ll go to the stars! Or maybe you’ll wind up like most kinds of mammals, and go extinct. But if you’re a horseshoe crab, you’ll still be around, pretty much the same, 450 million years later!
I personally would rather be a bipedal ape. But I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to want to be the crab.
Each species is best suited to its own environment. It makes perfect sense to be the horseshoe crab if you don’t expect to ever want to walk, breathe air, or pilot a spaceship.
And tribes/bands of foragers have been around for far longer than that. As Robin Hanson likes to point out, recent technological changes have made a “forager” lifestyle and ethic a lot more viable than it used to be—possibly more so nowadays than the “farmer” prototype that was previously favored.
Yes, a century from now we may have discarded the Enlightenment as we’ve discarded so many other things. We may replace it with feudal monarchies, or (as you say) foraging tribes, or tyrranical empires, or rule by philosopher-kings, or obedience to futures markets, or entirely unregulated capitalism, or a thousand other things.
There are lots of “non-Enlightenment” styles of life; to pay particular attention to one such way of life may be justified, but if so it seems like it has to be justified on some grounds other than “the Enlightenment isn’t uniquely stable.”
I think that NRx can be disaggregated into two relatively independent parts—the critique of the current Western political arrangements and the normative this-should-be-so part. It may make sense to discuss them separately.
The problem with that is doing so implicitly encourages those who espouse the this-should-be-so parts every time they are reinforced by seeing the other bits discussed. I REALLY wish there were a way around this, because criticism of democracy and trying to figure out ways around its bad points is a very interesting subject.
First, I don’t see implicit encouragement as a problem. You’re thinking in supply-the-enemy-tribe-with-attention terms which aren’t particularly useful.
Second, the critical part of NRx doesn’t like much more than just democracy. Cathedral is vast and its filaments burrow deep...
kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
This implies that they represent a stable equilibrium. Stable does not imply optimal (though depending on your time-prefernces and degree of risk-aversion, optimal may imply stable).
Well, as I said in this same thread, things like egalitarianism, female rights, minority rights, etc. have been found to be normatively binding due to the falsification of the normativity of certain social structures, usually patriarchy, royalty, and religious rule. Upon finding that those things are unjustified, we revert to the default that everyone is equal simply because there needs to be a reason to ascribe difference!
Pop quiz: explain to me why I should program my FAI to consider materially-different humans to have different ethical weight, to have their values and cognitive-algorithms compose differently-weighted portions of the AI’s utility function.
Well, frankly, because I happen to be human, and because once you get out of animals you cease to see any mental functioning that I could even call subjective valuation. Even if I’m choosing to be omnicompassionate you need to at least restrict to consciously aware creatures.
Not doing so might leave your AI to be vulnerable to a slower/milder version of this. Basically, if you enter a strictly egalitarian weighting, you are providing vindication to those who thoughtlessly brought out children into the world and disincentivizing, in a timeless , acausal sense, those who’re acting sensibly today and restricting reproduction to children they can bring up properly.
I’m not very certain of this answer, but it is my best attempt at the qn.
Good grief. You know, we already have nation-states for this sort of thing. If people form coherent separate “groups”, such that mixing the groups results in a zero-sum conflict over resources (including “utility function voting space”), then you just keep the groups separate in the first place.
Poland had used a version of that when arguing with the European union about the share in some commision, I’m not remembering what. It mentioned how much Poland’s population might have been had they not been under attack from 2 fronts, the nazis and the communists.
Upon finding that those things are unjustified, we revert to the default that everyone is equal simply because there needs to be a reason to ascribe difference!
You mean like the fact that people have different strength, intelligence, personality, ability, etc.
Those are not ethical traits. Honestly, there are arguments you could be using that you’re failing to use here. Instead, you and your comrades seem to enjoy using the downvote button as a form of evidence.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don’t see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won’t have much tolerance for their assumptions about women’s freedoms.
I haven’t really seen much discussion on the intersection of neoreaction and transhumanism. Neoreactionary theories of long-range probable societal trends, like dysgenics or a return to generally pre-Enlightenment social order also tend to assume that humans stay mostly as they are and only get selected by natural evolution. Meanwhile, getting to the point of being able to revive cryonically stored people successfully would probably include a bunch of human condition gamechanger technologies, like an ability to make the whole notion of fixed gender optional on any level (genetics, cognitive architecture, body plan) you’d care to name.
Why couldn’t post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
They could, and there’s the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn’t just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you’d have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There’s no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. “Whatever gets things done effectively” is presently defined as “whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans”.
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.
Why couldn’t post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says “wouldn’t surprise me”? What should even draw “premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies” to anyone’s attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says “wouldn’t surprise me”?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
What should even draw “premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies” to anyone’s attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
No. Are you saying that pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment principles are the only possibilities? Why should either of these be part of a transhuman future?
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many “pre-Enlightenment” situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. “Pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
By “pre-Enlightenment” I understand the social arrangements in Europe of the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, which neo-reactionaries see the Enlightenment as a catastrophic falling away from, and which they desire to return to. This is unambiguously what advancedatheist is talking about upthread, and what, for example, Moldbug unfavourably contrasts our present arrangements with. This is a very specific thing, not the huge space that you interchangeably referred to as “non-Enlightenment”.
“Pre-Enlightenment” bears the same relationship to “non-Enlightenment” as kangaroos do to non-elephants.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say “go back to”, it’s not that simple. Which is why “pre-Enlightenment” seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones “pre-Enlightenment” seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it’s even considered.
In any case, “pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to “non-elephant” than “kangaroo”.
The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context.
...
In any case, “pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to “non-elephant” than “kangaroo”.
The first quote makes it clear that you do mean something specific by “pre-Enlightenment”. Not as specific as, say, “ancien régime France”, but nevertheless defined as the positive possession of “certain traditional principles”.
Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones “pre-Enlightenment”
I am doing the opposite of that, as indeed your first paragraph interpreted me as doing. It appeared to me that you were using “pre-Enlightenment” and “non-Enlightenment” interchangeably, both referring to whatever is not the Enlightenment. And at the end you do claim that “pre-Enlightenment” is a non-elephant, not a kangaroo. If you like, I can analogize it to the class of marsupials, but it still isn’t a non-elephant.
You, and Moldbug, and advancedatheist, and every other neoreactionary are putting forward specific views of how society should be structured, specific views which is not merely “something other than the present arrangements”. There may be a range of views in the nrsphere, but their doctrines are characterised by what they want, not by what they hate. They do a lot of the hating, to be sure, but they have a positive base of reasons for that.
For example, monarchy and libertarian anarchy are incompatible with each other, and neither of them are Enlightenment structures (as “Enlightenment” is used by neoreactionaries). Are either or both of them compatible with or implied by neoreactionary principles? My reading of neoreactionaries suggests to me that monarchy is, and libertarian anarchy is not.
You, and Moldbug, and advancedatheist, and every other neoreactionary are putting forward specific views of how society should be structured, specific views which is not merely “something other than the present arrangements”. There may be a range of views in the nrsphere, but their doctrines are characterised by what they want, not by what they hate. They do a lot of the hating, to be sure, but they have a positive base of reasons for that.
Their doctrines are actually more characterized by what they dislike. As I said, NRx is a criticism first and foremost.
For example, monarchy and libertarian anarchy are incompatible with each other, and neither of them are Enlightenment structures (as “Enlightenment” is used by neoreactionaries). Are either or both of them compatible with or implied by neoreactionary principles? My reading of neoreactionaries suggests to me that monarchy is, and libertarian anarchy is not.
Some of the most prominent neoreactionaries are libertarian anarchists.
Their doctrines are actually more characterized by what they dislike. As I said, NRx is a criticism first and foremost.
Certainly there are far more neoreactionaries than those I have read, but those I have read, including the ones I just mentioned, are arguing for certain arrangements. Their animus towards the present is explicitly based on that. NRx, as I have seen it, is a criticism that explicitly bases itself, as you have done in this thread, on “certain traditional principles” which, to quote your Evola quote, “enjoy a perennial actuality”. That is the core of neoreaction. As for the specifics of which cultures are held up as examples to emulate and which as examples to avoid, Moldbug primarily goes to recent centuries to show how things were done better in those days.
Some of the most prominent neoreactionaries are libertarian anarchists.
Perhaps they are, but they have so far not come to my attention.
Yes, but being a wholly negative doctrine is still the “Dissent” in Dissenter. I think it is a mistake to be wholly negative, but that is a community discussion I suppose.
As long as it’s clear that the term isn’t doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it’s safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
That makes sense, but now that I think about it I don’t find this claim particularly neoreactionary: Enlightenment memes induce a sort of agnosia that prevents the rational design of non-enlightenment social structures. Treating this agnosia will increase the amount of possible social structures we are able to consider and the chances that we will be able to design something better.
What I see proposed are specific forms of monarchy or corporate-like governmental structures. More exotic proposals like futarchy and liquid democracy are dismissed, at least by Moldbug. So pre-enlightenment (or maybe anti-enlightenment) does feel like a better label to my non-expert ears.
First and foremost, neoreaction is about a critique. Positive proposals are less frequently discussed and there is great disagreement about them within neoreaction. So, many people involved in neoreaction are involved primarily for the negative critique, and make no commitment to any specific positive proposals.
So the claim isn’t so much traditionalism is great, only enlightenment is worse than traditionalism after controlling for technology? I was thinking of neoreactionaries as deformed utopians, but the tone is more like, “let’s reset social ‘progress’ and then very carefully consider positive proposals.’
Sort of. Traditionalism is great, though. You have the tone right.
When people see the headline “monarchy!” they’re missing the 2-3 years of thinking and 2,000+ pages of reading that go between step 1 (let’s reset social progress and then very carefully consider positive proposals) and step 2 (maybe, in some specific contexts, something like a certain class of monarchies would be useful for certain small-to-medium states).
Monarchy is just a tentative positive proposal (with limited potential application) I came to after several years of searching after the Cathedral mind virus had been dispelled. Moldbug seems to have come to something closer to anarchocapitalist seasteading-type city state proposals. Land leans even more anarchocapitalist than Moldbug. So, the positive recommendations vary widely. We are definitely not utopians, and admit our proposals are flawed just like any other.
Hmm. You have a point. People often think that an overturning the current order is basically inconceivable. History suggests otherwise. However, we live in a technological society unlike any that has ever existed on earth before, and remains to be seen how predicative historical trends are on a post-industrial revolution post-computer revolution world. All we can safely say is that all bets are off.
However, I think we can assume that at least some of the technology will stick around (people still use computers, even if we run out of oil). The question is, How much of our social change is the direct result of the technological change.
Does feminism exist because of birth control? How likely is birth control to disappear? Is patriarchy predicated on physical strength? Does that matter in an economy that’s not dominated by agriculture?
Given that birth control existed in Ancient Egypt, I find this unlikely.
You’d probably be on firmer ground asking whether feminism exists because of washing machines. In any case given the effect of feminism on fertility (especially fertility of those with high IQ) it’s likely to go away one way or another.
Actually, the situation of women in Ancient Egypt was quite progressive by Bronze Age standards.
Also, are you saying feminists are headed toward breeding themselves out of existence? Human history is well past the age where ideas were only transmitted within the same family. Feminism isn’t genetic; it’s memetic.
Actually, the situation of women in Ancient Egypt was quite progressive by Bronze Age standards.
And was birth control forgotten after Egypt declined?
Also, are you saying feminists are headed toward breeding themselves out of existence? Human history is well past the age where ideas were only transmitted within the same family. Feminism isn’t genetic; it’s memetic.
So what your saying is that feminism is a memetic quasi-sterelization virus. Populations eventually evolve resistance to those kinds of viruses.
Women were socially important in Egypt as far as the Ptolemaic dynasty, at least. It didn’t fully adopt Byzantine culture until the 5th and 6th centuries CE, and this change was largely fostered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. So no, there was no “decline” due to their social system, only a largely unrelated cultural/memetic replacement. (It did fall to the Persians and then to the Arabs shortly thereafter, but by that time the ancient Pharaonic customs had been forgotten.)
If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you’ll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.
Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn’t assume anything of the sort.
In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn’t surprise me to see “regression towards the mean” in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we’ve known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don’t see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won’t have much tolerance for their assumptions about women’s freedoms.
Older readers of LessWrong will know that it doesn’t take that long.
In my 40′s I was damn near grabbing people and shaking them and saying “Things change!”
After a while, I got bored with saying that, and also came to the conclusion that if you haven’t lived through things that you thought were basic going away, you don’t know what it’s like.
Some of us are finding that things are only beginning to get close to what we always wanted.
… Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
Egalitarianism in particular jumps out as an odd entry in that list, since anatomically modern humans probably spent most of their evolutionary history in hunter-gatherer bands appreciably more egalitarian than sedentary civilizations.
Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
It’s possible that feminists and MRAs will wake up to find a matriarchal future.
Or gender (if any) will come to mean something very different from what we’re used to. Once humanity starts bioengineering itself, the range of possibility opens up tremendously.
My bet is that if cryonics works, the future will divide into home era cohorts, and the vast majority of people from earlier times may be living in reasonable comfort but will have very little power. A few highly adaptable people may be able to get up to speed to join the current culture.
You mean there are people who don’t just shape-shift their apparent sex depending on the precise situational combination of their current mood and what they want to signal? Goddamn you lot are weirdos ;-).
Although the conservation-of-mass issue gets awkward: you can either be a scrawny male but a healthy-looking female or a healthy-looking male and a rather overweight female, or be kinda awkwardly lithe in either form. Or you can go to the bathroom and store the extra unwanted mass when female, but really, there’s only so much biological nanotechnology can do against basic physics.
(EDIT: Yes, I did make this up on the bus one day when thinking of things future people might consider good ideas that we’d consider unutterably bizarre, and was indeed waiting for an opportunity to post it ;-).)
Um, if you have the ability to arbitrary rearrange your cells, they’re likely more loosely attached to each other than those in animals. In any case you should be able to process raw environmental material to grow.
I have thought about possible future societies that aren’t based on biological reproduction. Most of the examples in scifi fall apart after a little MoR-style pocking (their main flaw is keeping certain aspects of the setting the same as ours even if those aspects no longer make sense). The two that seem stable are the following:
1) Sentients become pure infomorphs (or ems as Hanson calls them). This abolishes the distinction between memetic and genetic inheritance. Thus “sex” in the sense of recombining “genetic” material is separate from reproduction and resembles having conversations. Reproduction consists of creating a copy of your mind/source code. This resembles the life cycle of bacteria, who exchange information via conjugation but reproduce via binary fission.
2) Sentients are produced in centralized factories, e.g., most children are grown in artificial wombs, or robots produced in more conventional factories. This effectively makes them eusocial with all that implies about their sense of individuality, or rather lack thereof.
The other possibility is old-fashioned sexual reproduction. I have no idea which of those possibilities will come to dominate.
One possibility is that body composition becomes less important because it’s so easily changed. At that tech level, it probably doesn’t have any health implications.
Height might be less significant.
Instead of more mass to be a larger male, how about less density?
Height and density. I’m a moron. brb, retuning bodily nanomachines.
What do I have to do to be highly adaptable enough to join the culture that is still experiencing growth? What could I be doing now in order to prepare for that?
Tentatively—try living in a bunch of different cultures.
Seconded.
That sounds like premature optimization to me.
Unquestionably, but it’s still fun to ask.
And this is worse than death?
Depends on how patriarchal the society is. Few women would like to live in, say, Gor. “Please freeze me again while I wait this out.”
Few women say they would like to live in Gor. But some would. Some live in Gor-inspired relationships now. And maybe people would adapt.
I am aware that some people live in Gor-inspired relationships, that some people are masochistic, that some women want to be dominated, and that more people would like to live that way than those who would care to admit it, or even that those who know for a fact that they would. I still assume these numbers to be small.
Of course people would adapt. That’s what people do. That doesn’t make it right.
In the past, almost everyone thought that one should wait until marriage for sex. Now, almost everyone (in my part of the world) believes in serial monogamy. In both these cases people think that their social norms are in the right. I see no reason not to suppose that if Gor lifestyle became the norm then most people (inc. women) would think it right (not just publically saying that its right).
I see no objective way to say that any of these lifestyles are right or wrong, unless it can be shown to be damaging the children.
What they believe in, or rather, endorse, and what they end up actually doing or wanting to do have usually been at odds. The ideal solution is different for every combination of individual and circumstance: the ideal universal solution is therefore an superstructural (ideological, legal, cultural, etc.) framework capable of running and accommodating any specific arrangement between interested parties. Objectively speaking, I think the only hard and fast rule is “Safe, Sane and Consensual”.
Except the meaning of all three of those terms is culture dependent.
“Sane” is certainly culture dependent, but consent seem relatively objective.
Really?
Suppose a 16-year-old agrees to have sex. Is that consent?
If a contract is made under “undue influence,” did I consent to it? Is that objective?
If my agreement is made under coercion, did I consent? What counts (morally) as coercion seems very fraught. Leftists and feminists frequently argue that many seemingly voluntary activities are actually deeply coercive, and use terms like “wage slavery.”
Suppose I agree to an act, then change my mind later. If the other person carries out the act anyway, did I consent to it? In law, and in most people’s intuition, the answer is “it depends.”
All in all, it looks very much like “communicated agreement” is the objective fact, and whether that gets upgraded to “consent” depends on a whole host of ethical judgments that are often contentious.
Consent is more objective than sanity, although there are edge cases:
Where I live 16-year-olds can legally have sex! Anyway, assuming things are different where you live, then yes, they can give consent, but their consent does not legally authorise sex.
Well, yes you did consent. This doen’t necessary make everything ok, and it might be better if there was less coersion, but you still consented.
You consented, and then withdrew your consent. If the other person carries out the act before you withdraw consent, then they can’t be blamed.
I’d say “communicated agreement” is consent by definition. Its possibly a word getting a little overloaded : the word consent can be used as in “Russia consented to hand over 1⁄4 of her territory to Germany” or as in “Let’s have sex!” while these are rather different in most important respects.
That looks doubtful as you need to be sane to give consent, don’t you?
I think this entire conversation is just getting bogged down as to how do define ‘consent’ and ‘sanity’.
Is so called “marital rape” consensual since they consented to marry? (Most societies say yes, but lately in has become fashionable in Western countries to pass laws saying no).
What if someone says yes but feels pressured to?
If two drunk students had sex, has a rape occurred? (Yes, according to California’s new “Affirmative Consent” law).
A contract where one party permanently gives away all rights (love, honour and obey) seems deeply worrying, but OTOH, I don’t think people should take serious vows so lightly. Maybe a middle ground would be that a spouse can refuse sex, but this is grounds for divorce and they have no claim for alimony because they broke their half of the agreement? Either that, or don’t use the traditional vows.
What if someone only robs a bank because of peer pressure? Still guilty.
It depends exactly what ‘drunk’ means. If someone is paralytic and can’t actually articulate the word ‘no’ then its rape. But drunk sex is perfectly normal, and if you consent to getting drunk then you are responsible for your actions while drunk.
… Why students specifically?
Because it is ridiculous with respect to adults and California politicians think they can get away with infantilizing students and treating them like legal minors.
Actually, I suspect they’re hoping to keep getting away with infantilizing that generation even after they leave college.
Oh, I am sure they’re dreaming of it, but I don’t think it will quite work. Not yet, at least.
“So called?” Do you seriously think a wife surrenders her autonomy permanently before the altar?
I would agree that the desirability of the Gor future largely depends on whether its consensual.
If you are planning your glorious transhuman future on the premise that people will adapt, you’re doing it wrong.
I think the glorious transhuman future will involve some sort of radical change, probably far more radical than Gor. People will have to adapt—even if they live in groups preserving 2014s norms, completely isolated from outsiders, they will have to adapt to the fact that they can’t influence the outside world and that baseline humans will be overtaken in all fields of endevour.
Furthermore, it will likely lead to many outcomes that people today would complain about and disapprove of.
No, that just means that these women haven’t thought very hard about what living a really long time could mean. Those science fiction writers in the last century who postulated the return of traditional social structures in high-tech societies might have come closer to the reality of life in “the future” than they imagined, and some Neoreactionaries have pointed this out. Refer to this podcast by Richard Spencer, for example:
http://www.radixjournal.com/vanguard-radio/2014/8/15/archeo-futurist-messiah
I’m puzzled by your focus on women. Many men probably don’t want to live in a patriarchal society either. I certainly don’t.
That’s aside from the fact that this really has very little to do with the subject at hand. There’s a distinct question of what you expect will happen and what one should try to make happen.
Thirded. My disquiet comes primarily from the idea of benefiting in status and power from a system that would systematically deny freedom and independent agency and security to half the people I know, and the notion that I would be denied the freedom to take on roles usually assigned to other groups should the situation warrant it.
Fourthed.
Seconded. Dear Lord patriarchy is unappealing: you “get to” basically enslave a few women and children at the cost of having to spend your entire life on utterly unappealing status and machismo competitions.
What do you mean by “status and machismo competitions”? Narrowly defined, in many patriarchal societies this is false. Seriously, read some history. Take a look at say 18th-19th century England. Some men could do many different things from becoming ascetic monks, to becoming gentlemen scientists, to sponsoring works of art, to yes even status and machismo competitions if that suites your fancy.
If you define “status and machismo competitions” broadly then we’re mostly doing the same thing today.
I still don’t get why you’d prefer to live in a world where women cannot do all those awesome things as well.
Your mistake here was thinking I enjoy what we have today.
Ok, then you won’t be any more disappointed up on waking up in a patriarchy.
Of course there were plenty of options...they were post enlightenment societies.
I wouldn’t be too surprised by the possibility of a future society returning to traditional social structures. I would be somewhat surprised by every future society returning to traditional social structures. Either way, I don’t see why this means feminists shouldn’t sign up for cryonics.
Just like it’s wrong to reject old ideas merely because they’re old, it’s wrong to reject recent ideas merely because they’re recent.
just happen to work better than everything humans have tried before. Recency has nothing to do with their success.
“Work better” in what sense? Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the longevity and “anti-fragile” nature of practices like religion and patriarchy indicate that they work quite well indeed, despite recent efforts to make them go away.
Where does Taleb argue that patriarchy is anti-fragile?
We have more people living better than ever before in history, and this is because of the Enlightenment.
The traditional neoreactionary counter is that increased quality of life is due to technological advancement, and that social “progress” has been neutral at best and detrimental at worst.
Yes, but if it’s not visible in quality of life, and it’s not visible in technological advancement … what quantity is it detrimental to?
Quality of life. The idea is that without the ravages of modernity, technological advancement would have created an even higher quality of life.
By way of example, consider the 1950s. Their technology was obviously inferior to ours. And yet they had intact families (marriage rates were higher, divorce and bastardy rates lower) and well-paying jobs (a husband’s salary alone sufficed to support his entire family, his wife was free to cook and clean and raise the children). Is our quality of life higher than theirs? It’s not obvious to me. Even if it is, why is this trade-off necessary? Why can’t we have the superior scientific technology of the 2010s and the superior social technology of the 1950s?
That’s only desirable if there’s strong social pressure in favor of some family models over others. Tolerance of diverse family structures has made marriage less relevant for economic well-being.
Your idea of freedom is… curious.
No, that may also be desirable if some family models are more conducive to human happiness and flourishing than others.
That’s a valid argument only if this is so biologically. If it’s so merely culturally, cultures change.
A 2010s husband’s salary alone would also suffice to support his entire family if they were willing to live according to 1950s standards. See e.g. Mr. Money Moustache.
I do read MMM, and ERE, and other frugality blogsphere titles. I disagree with your characterization that the difficulty in achieving a decent life today merely reflects an inflation of what is considered decent. First, because it’s much harder to get the same kind of job in 2010s that would have been available in the 1950s; a solid, respectable job you easily can get out of high school is not the same as a solid, respectable job you might not even get after wasting a minimum of four years and going thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into debt. That this latter condition holds in modern times can be attributed to academic inflation and increased job competition from immigration and from women entering the workforce, which are all progressive policies. Second, because zero-sum competition for safe housing away from city centers has increased their prices to reflect what a two-income household can barely cover (and, indeed, the increased prices is part of what keeps them safe), not to mention the horrors of commuting (distance from city centers being the other thing that keeps them safe).
Just to be clear, when you say that it’s much harder to get such a job, and that this is due in part to increased competition from immigration and women, what you mean to say is that it’s much harder for non-women and non-immigrants to get such a job, because it’s correspondingly easier for immigrants and women to get them. Yes?
You seem to additionally be implying that how hard it is for women and immigrants to get jobs isn’t a relevant factor in determining the difficulty in achieving a decent life. Yes?
I have no intention of arguing against either of those points here, I just want to make sure I’ve understood you correctly.
Yes. I am aware of the lump of labor fallacy, and that in theory an increasing number of workers might have economic effects creating more jobs even as said workers take existing ones, ending up with a similar or perhaps even a better job market than existed before the new workers came into the picture. But in practice it seems like workers have increased faster than jobs, and the oversupply of labor has led lower wages, lower non-monetary compensation, and/or lack of jobs.
Let’s start with women. If you think of the family as the basic block of society instead of the atomized individual, then yes. Under the old model, it was understood that women would marry early (men slightly less early), and that their husbands would be financially responsible for the resulting household and children. If there is a strong job market for men under this model, then most women do not need to work; only the very poor, the widows, the spinsters, and other extreme cases. Instead of slaving away 40 hours per week at work like their husbands did, wives were free to slave away cooking and cleaning and raising the children, which is still slavery, but is a much kinder form of slavery, with a more caring master. Under the new model and circumstances, both men and women perform the wage kind of slavery, and either they perform the household kind of slavery on top of that, or they outsource it, with negative consequences all around.
Immigrants are a different matter. Utilitarians can make a good case that immigration increased total utility, improving the immigrants’ quality of life more than it lowered existing citizens’. If you’re one of those guys who thinks we should all be sending all of our spare income to Africa, or whatever percentage of our income is realistically psychologically sustainable, I guess this is pretty great, and it’s also great if you are one of the immigrants waiting to get in, but it’s not so great for existing citizens whose quality of life is being brought to equilibrium with the rest of the world’s, or for the immigrants already here.
Home appliances cut down quite a bit on “household slavery”. And while you might argue that home-based work is preferable to market work due to having a “kinder, more caring master”, the swift demise of cottage industry once early factories became feasible suggests that folks care more about how productive they are than whether they can work from home.
I think that was just Moloch.
The folks who were actually around at the time seemed to disagree about that. Plenty of people devised plans for utopian communities where Moloch wouldn’t be a factor, but they cared little for household-based work. (Indeed, some of them assumed that you could get rid of households altogether, and just live in large, factory-like collective arrangements under the supervision of some ‘uncaring’ leader. Of course, modern evo-psych and social anthropology argue against that view.)
OK; thanks for clarifying. Like I said, I have no intention of arguing those points (though I probably ought to say explicitly I don’t find your arguments convincing), I just wanted to confirm that I was interpreting you correctly.
Which is generally illegal.
Those marriage rates masked quite a lot of marital misery, and… well, frankly, neoreactionaries just have no right to use the economic structure of the ’50s Western long boom as evidence for their ideas. Those jobs were based on the strong-labor, employment-state, and financial repression policies of the post-war governments—everything reactionaries hate.
Moldbug has actually talked positively about protectionist, make-work government policies.
Their persistence only indicates that those systems are tough and capable of self-maintenance, not that they’re what human society needs.
Star Slate Codex has a great perspective on this. The institutions that are beneficial depend on the context. Are we playing for survival and can’t afford risk or are we playing for flourishing and the risk is worth it because the gains outweigh the losses and we can afford to be nice?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
Note that ‘religion’ need not imply theism here. Confucianism is older than both Christianity and Islam, and it’s not based on a theistic worldview—instead its focus is on community organizing through rituals and an ethic of care and loyalty. It’s worth stating this, because many people here at LW find theism especially objectionable, as opposed to religion persay.
They should, yes. They’re correct, or at least, they’re better approximations than we can otherwise create right now.
Can you say more about how you get from “things won’t always be the way they are now” to “the possibility is worth paying attention to that things will return to something meaningfully similar to the particular kinds of pre-Enlightenment society that Moldbug, et al, endorse”? (As opposed to, well, basically anything else?)
I think the basic argument is that our society has existed for maybe 1 or 2 hundred years, whereas kings and patriarchy have been around for 5000+, which implies that they have some selective advantage.
That’s like saying horseshoe crabs and coelacanths have a selective advantage when compared to bipedal apes.
TBD, ask me again in a million years or so :-/
Imagine you’re choosing which species to try and be 450 million years ago. You could try and be a mammal, or you could try and be a horseshoe crab. If you become a mammal, maybe one day you’ll go to the stars! Or maybe you’ll wind up like most kinds of mammals, and go extinct. But if you’re a horseshoe crab, you’ll still be around, pretty much the same, 450 million years later!
I personally would rather be a bipedal ape. But I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to want to be the crab.
As an aside, can someone please explain what the deal with reactionaries and crabs is? I feel like there’s some context here that I’m missing.
Gnon likes crabs.
Each species is best suited to its own environment. It makes perfect sense to be the horseshoe crab if you don’t expect to ever want to walk, breathe air, or pilot a spaceship.
They had some selective advantage. The world changes.
And tribes/bands of foragers have been around for far longer than that. As Robin Hanson likes to point out, recent technological changes have made a “forager” lifestyle and ethic a lot more viable than it used to be—possibly more so nowadays than the “farmer” prototype that was previously favored.
Right, this is the kind of thing I have in mind.
Yes, a century from now we may have discarded the Enlightenment as we’ve discarded so many other things. We may replace it with feudal monarchies, or (as you say) foraging tribes, or tyrranical empires, or rule by philosopher-kings, or obedience to futures markets, or entirely unregulated capitalism, or a thousand other things.
There are lots of “non-Enlightenment” styles of life; to pay particular attention to one such way of life may be justified, but if so it seems like it has to be justified on some grounds other than “the Enlightenment isn’t uniquely stable.”
I think that NRx can be disaggregated into two relatively independent parts—the critique of the current Western political arrangements and the normative this-should-be-so part. It may make sense to discuss them separately.
The problem with that is doing so implicitly encourages those who espouse the this-should-be-so parts every time they are reinforced by seeing the other bits discussed. I REALLY wish there were a way around this, because criticism of democracy and trying to figure out ways around its bad points is a very interesting subject.
First, I don’t see implicit encouragement as a problem. You’re thinking in supply-the-enemy-tribe-with-attention terms which aren’t particularly useful.
Second, the critical part of NRx doesn’t like much more than just democracy. Cathedral is vast and its filaments burrow deep...
Also democracy has existed before and democracies tend to have short half-lives.
This implies that they represent a stable equilibrium. Stable does not imply optimal (though depending on your time-prefernces and degree of risk-aversion, optimal may imply stable).
Good point. But how does this “is” statement become an “ought”?
You know, there are actual investigations into these things.
Seeking the specific case, not the general case.
Well, as I said in this same thread, things like egalitarianism, female rights, minority rights, etc. have been found to be normatively binding due to the falsification of the normativity of certain social structures, usually patriarchy, royalty, and religious rule. Upon finding that those things are unjustified, we revert to the default that everyone is equal simply because there needs to be a reason to ascribe difference!
On what grey planet are you living on that “everyone is simply equal” is the “default”?
Ethically equal does not mean materially the same. For God’s sakes, this is so simple and obvious there are children’s books that know it.
God probably being the central word in that sentence.
Pop quiz: explain to me why I should program my FAI to consider materially-different humans to have different ethical weight, to have their values and cognitive-algorithms compose differently-weighted portions of the AI’s utility function.
It’s not something easy to answer. I think it might be even on MIRI’s open problems list.
Then why restrict to humans? Or animals or that matter?
Well, frankly, because I happen to be human, and because once you get out of animals you cease to see any mental functioning that I could even call subjective valuation. Even if I’m choosing to be omnicompassionate you need to at least restrict to consciously aware creatures.
Not doing so might leave your AI to be vulnerable to a slower/milder version of this. Basically, if you enter a strictly egalitarian weighting, you are providing vindication to those who thoughtlessly brought out children into the world and disincentivizing, in a timeless , acausal sense, those who’re acting sensibly today and restricting reproduction to children they can bring up properly.
I’m not very certain of this answer, but it is my best attempt at the qn.
Good grief. You know, we already have nation-states for this sort of thing. If people form coherent separate “groups”, such that mixing the groups results in a zero-sum conflict over resources (including “utility function voting space”), then you just keep the groups separate in the first place.
EDIT: Ah, the correct word here is clusters.
So, is my understanding correct that your FAI is going to consider only your group/cluster’s values?
Of course not.
Not to mention those who prosecuted and genocided ideological opponents.
Yes, that too.
Poland had used a version of that when arguing with the European union about the share in some commision, I’m not remembering what. It mentioned how much Poland’s population might have been had they not been under attack from 2 fronts, the nazis and the communists.
This is one of the funnier things I’ve read this year.
You mean like the fact that people have different strength, intelligence, personality, ability, etc.
Those are not ethical traits. Honestly, there are arguments you could be using that you’re failing to use here. Instead, you and your comrades seem to enjoy using the downvote button as a form of evidence.
The point is that it deflates the implicit argument that current norms are “ought”s.
I haven’t really seen much discussion on the intersection of neoreaction and transhumanism. Neoreactionary theories of long-range probable societal trends, like dysgenics or a return to generally pre-Enlightenment social order also tend to assume that humans stay mostly as they are and only get selected by natural evolution. Meanwhile, getting to the point of being able to revive cryonically stored people successfully would probably include a bunch of human condition gamechanger technologies, like an ability to make the whole notion of fixed gender optional on any level (genetics, cognitive architecture, body plan) you’d care to name.
Is there much other than Michael Anissimov’s essay?
Why couldn’t post-democratic outcomes exist even if human nature is deliberately reengineered?
They could, and there’s the are scenarios in the premise where they likely will, but neoreaction isn’t just a program of political philosophy for post-democracy. There seems to be much rhetoric and general memetic clustering in NRX around the idea that progressivism will fail because it has outstretched itself trying to re-engineer human nature with cultural conditioning, and that social orders which comply more with fundamentally unchanging elements of human nature are a good political attack against progressivism. The reactionary commenters at SSC seem to like narratives about long-term human decline which tend to rely on nothing interesting happening with human reproduction in many generations from now on.
With technology that can re-engineer human nature, you could have brand new chances to go at the progressive wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-people-were-more-like-this stuff. Then you’d have to start thinking which bits of traditional values are actually good for a general population of agents, and which are just time-evolved kludges around previously unfixable human systematic suckiness. I see a divide opening up here between people who value the idea of a reactionary society of baseline humans in itself, and people who just go for whatever gets things done effectively. Though I guess NRX already has formed subcultural divides.
In the case of human enhancement, we depend even more greatly on (some subset of) traditional values to maintain societal stability, since the possible dimensions of failure are so much larger.
There’s no divide, since for the time being, baseline humans is all we have. “Whatever gets things done effectively” is presently defined as “whatever gets things done effectively for baseline humans”.
The first priority is the here and now, but people also like to talk about what they expect to see in the next 30 or 100 years. A part of what makes an ideological movement run is a vision of the future, and people seem quite capable of getting into arguments and schisms about the principles of those.
Why would they resemble the pre-democratic outcomes that advancedatheist says “wouldn’t surprise me”? What should even draw “premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies” to anyone’s attention, out of the vast and unknown possibilities of a transhuman estate that removes the reasons that those societies evolved in those ways?
Because some of those, like hierarchy, are game theoretic equilibria that are likely to emerge across a wide range of possible configurations, especially where there are great asymmetries between agents.
Are you saying that you think that a vast majority of the possible transhuman futures rest entirely on Enlightenment principles?
No. Are you saying that pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment principles are the only possibilities? Why should either of these be part of a transhuman future?
Exhaustively speaking, societal organizational principles in the abstract tend to be Enlightenment-oriented or not. So, yes, any given transhuman future will have principles of some kind, which will be inspired by the Enlightenment or not. Non-Enlightenment principles (used here to describe every possible set of societal principles besides those based around the Enlightenment) are a rather huge space of possibilities, which cover not only many societies which have already existed, but many millions which may have yet to come to pass. Many “pre-Enlightenment” situations were organic hierarchies, similar to the way nature itself has operated for literally billions of years. “Pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to a specific thing, but a huge space of configurations which do not closely adhere to Enlightenment principles.
By “pre-Enlightenment” I understand the social arrangements in Europe of the centuries immediately preceding the Enlightenment, which neo-reactionaries see the Enlightenment as a catastrophic falling away from, and which they desire to return to. This is unambiguously what advancedatheist is talking about upthread, and what, for example, Moldbug unfavourably contrasts our present arrangements with. This is a very specific thing, not the huge space that you interchangeably referred to as “non-Enlightenment”.
“Pre-Enlightenment” bears the same relationship to “non-Enlightenment” as kangaroos do to non-elephants.
Viewing reactionaries as wishing to return to a time in the linear past, which evolved organically based on local conditions, and which may not be appropriate to present technological conditions, is mistaken. The goal is not to simply revive a past arrangement but to apply certain traditional principles and spirit to a newer expression of organic principles that is suited to its context. So, when you say “go back to”, it’s not that simple. Which is why “pre-Enlightenment” seems like an oversimplifying label, to me.
In fact, you could call it post-Enlightenment, since it would be the emergence of structure from an Enlightenment society that may retain some Enlightenment principles while discarding others. Calling any system based on principles aside from Enlightenment ones “pre-Enlightenment” seems like assuming a kind of a priori obsolescence, in effect dismissing it before it’s even considered.
In any case, “pre-Enlightenment” does not refer to any specific structure (like kangaroos), but a wide variety of arrangements. Therefore, I see it as more similar to “non-elephant” than “kangaroo”.
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The first quote makes it clear that you do mean something specific by “pre-Enlightenment”. Not as specific as, say, “ancien régime France”, but nevertheless defined as the positive possession of “certain traditional principles”.
I am doing the opposite of that, as indeed your first paragraph interpreted me as doing. It appeared to me that you were using “pre-Enlightenment” and “non-Enlightenment” interchangeably, both referring to whatever is not the Enlightenment. And at the end you do claim that “pre-Enlightenment” is a non-elephant, not a kangaroo. If you like, I can analogize it to the class of marsupials, but it still isn’t a non-elephant.
You, and Moldbug, and advancedatheist, and every other neoreactionary are putting forward specific views of how society should be structured, specific views which is not merely “something other than the present arrangements”. There may be a range of views in the nrsphere, but their doctrines are characterised by what they want, not by what they hate. They do a lot of the hating, to be sure, but they have a positive base of reasons for that.
For example, monarchy and libertarian anarchy are incompatible with each other, and neither of them are Enlightenment structures (as “Enlightenment” is used by neoreactionaries). Are either or both of them compatible with or implied by neoreactionary principles? My reading of neoreactionaries suggests to me that monarchy is, and libertarian anarchy is not.
Read this.
Their doctrines are actually more characterized by what they dislike. As I said, NRx is a criticism first and foremost.
Some of the most prominent neoreactionaries are libertarian anarchists.
Certainly there are far more neoreactionaries than those I have read, but those I have read, including the ones I just mentioned, are arguing for certain arrangements. Their animus towards the present is explicitly based on that. NRx, as I have seen it, is a criticism that explicitly bases itself, as you have done in this thread, on “certain traditional principles” which, to quote your Evola quote, “enjoy a perennial actuality”. That is the core of neoreaction. As for the specifics of which cultures are held up as examples to emulate and which as examples to avoid, Moldbug primarily goes to recent centuries to show how things were done better in those days.
Perhaps they are, but they have so far not come to my attention.
Yes, but being a wholly negative doctrine is still the “Dissent” in Dissenter. I think it is a mistake to be wholly negative, but that is a community discussion I suppose.
Beware of non-apples
As long as it’s clear that the term isn’t doing any semantic heavy-lifting here, it’s safe in this context. No flattering claims are being made about non-Enlightenment principles in general, just that they correspond to a vast space.
That makes sense, but now that I think about it I don’t find this claim particularly neoreactionary: Enlightenment memes induce a sort of agnosia that prevents the rational design of non-enlightenment social structures. Treating this agnosia will increase the amount of possible social structures we are able to consider and the chances that we will be able to design something better.
What I see proposed are specific forms of monarchy or corporate-like governmental structures. More exotic proposals like futarchy and liquid democracy are dismissed, at least by Moldbug. So pre-enlightenment (or maybe anti-enlightenment) does feel like a better label to my non-expert ears.
First and foremost, neoreaction is about a critique. Positive proposals are less frequently discussed and there is great disagreement about them within neoreaction. So, many people involved in neoreaction are involved primarily for the negative critique, and make no commitment to any specific positive proposals.
So the claim isn’t so much traditionalism is great, only enlightenment is worse than traditionalism after controlling for technology? I was thinking of neoreactionaries as deformed utopians, but the tone is more like, “let’s reset social ‘progress’ and then very carefully consider positive proposals.’
Sort of. Traditionalism is great, though. You have the tone right.
When people see the headline “monarchy!” they’re missing the 2-3 years of thinking and 2,000+ pages of reading that go between step 1 (let’s reset social progress and then very carefully consider positive proposals) and step 2 (maybe, in some specific contexts, something like a certain class of monarchies would be useful for certain small-to-medium states).
Monarchy is just a tentative positive proposal (with limited potential application) I came to after several years of searching after the Cathedral mind virus had been dispelled. Moldbug seems to have come to something closer to anarchocapitalist seasteading-type city state proposals. Land leans even more anarchocapitalist than Moldbug. So, the positive recommendations vary widely. We are definitely not utopians, and admit our proposals are flawed just like any other.
Hmm. You have a point. People often think that an overturning the current order is basically inconceivable. History suggests otherwise. However, we live in a technological society unlike any that has ever existed on earth before, and remains to be seen how predicative historical trends are on a post-industrial revolution post-computer revolution world. All we can safely say is that all bets are off.
However, I think we can assume that at least some of the technology will stick around (people still use computers, even if we run out of oil). The question is, How much of our social change is the direct result of the technological change.
Does feminism exist because of birth control? How likely is birth control to disappear? Is patriarchy predicated on physical strength? Does that matter in an economy that’s not dominated by agriculture?
Given that birth control existed in Ancient Egypt, I find this unlikely.
You’d probably be on firmer ground asking whether feminism exists because of washing machines. In any case given the effect of feminism on fertility (especially fertility of those with high IQ) it’s likely to go away one way or another.
Actually, the situation of women in Ancient Egypt was quite progressive by Bronze Age standards.
Also, are you saying feminists are headed toward breeding themselves out of existence? Human history is well past the age where ideas were only transmitted within the same family. Feminism isn’t genetic; it’s memetic.
And was birth control forgotten after Egypt declined?
So what your saying is that feminism is a memetic quasi-sterelization virus. Populations eventually evolve resistance to those kinds of viruses.
Women were socially important in Egypt as far as the Ptolemaic dynasty, at least. It didn’t fully adopt Byzantine culture until the 5th and 6th centuries CE, and this change was largely fostered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. So no, there was no “decline” due to their social system, only a largely unrelated cultural/memetic replacement. (It did fall to the Persians and then to the Arabs shortly thereafter, but by that time the ancient Pharaonic customs had been forgotten.)
Again, what on Earth does feminism have to do with sterilization? What definition of feminism are you using?
The reactosphere theorizes that feminism is behind the drop in fertility, which has now collapsed to sub-replacement rates.
I’ve heard several conservatives teasing liberals for “still living in 1968” or similar.