On its own I can think of several things that these words might be uttered in order to express. A little search turns up a more extended form, with a claimed source:
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.
Said to be by G.K. Chesterton in the New York Times Magazine of February 11, 1923, which appears to be a real thing, but one which is not online. According to this version, he is jibing at progressivism, the adulation of the latest thing because it is newer than yesterday’s latest thing.
ETA: Chesterton uses the same analogy, in rather more words, here.
If I advance the thesis that the weather on Monday was better than the weather on Tuesday (and there has not been much to choose between most Mondays and Tuesdays of late), it is no answer to tell me that the time at which I happen to say so is Tuesday evening, or possibly Wednesday morning.
It is vain for the most sanguine meteorologist to wave his arms about and cry: “Monday is past; Mondays will return no more; Tuesday and Wednesday are ours; you cannot put back the clock.” I am perfectly entitled to answer that the changing face of the clock does not alter the recorded facts of the barometer.
It is vain for the most sanguine meteorologist to wave his arms about and cry: “Monday is past; Mondays will return no more; Tuesday and Wednesday are ours; you cannot put back the clock.” I am perfectly entitled to answer that the changing face of the clock does not alter the recorded facts of the barometer.
Note that this accentuates the relevance of a detail that might be skipped over in the original quote- that Thursday comes after Wednesday. That is, this may be intended as a dismissal of the ‘all change is progress’ position or the ‘traditions are bad because they are traditions’ position.
That’s using history as evidence. What I was complaining about is closer to the people who declare that all opponents of a change that they plan to implement (or at best have only implemented at most several decades ago) are “on the wrong side of history”.
I think you may not be interpreting the phrase “the wrong side of history” as people who say it mean it.
There a classic saying that ”
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck
Effectively there’s a position that’s obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can’t be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct. When you tell someone they are on the wrong side of history you are reminding them they are behaving like one of the old men that Plank mentions.
Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
I wouldn’t wish away war unless I also wished away the things we need to go to war for, in which case you could as easily say that I would wish away cancer treatments or firefighters.
Inter-state war is by far the least common type of warfare in the modern era, although the proxy wars growing out of the Cold War muddy the waters some. Civil and ethnic warfare is much more common, and I don’t think we can say that civil conflicts, at least, can always be described in terms of straightforward aggression and defense against aggression.
(Truthfully I wouldn’t say that for inter-state wars either, not all of them, but they’re a lot easier to spin that way.)
I was using wish away to mean magically get rid of. Unmagically getting rid of it requires unmagically fixing a lot of other things, which is why it hasn’t happened.
Magically getting rig of it strikes me as one of those wishes that will backfire horribly in one of several ways depending on exactly how the wisher defines “war”.
The point being that you can’t infer that everyone believes in X in a society where X exists. They may dislike it but be unable to do anything about it.
The point being that you can’t infer that everyone believes in X in a society where X exists. They may dislike it but be unable to do anything about it.
I’m not making that argument. There polling out there that tells you what people like or dislike. I think that responsibility to protect (R2P) is accepted by a lot of people as a valid reason for military intervention.
Considering it was the norm for several thousand years of history and many philosophers either came out in favor of it or were silent … no, it’s not obviously correct.
There is obviously no one here who will disagree with it.
Mencius Moldbug does argue that all moral changes after a certain point in time should be rolled back. That timeframe does include the abolition of slavery.
I don’t know whether there at the moment someone on LW willing to make the argument for slavery explicitly but you might find people who do have Moldbug’s position.
The last census shows a bunch of neoreactionaries.
A former poster here (known elsewhere on the net as “James A. Donald”) does disagree with it. He believes that slavery is the rightful state for many people. And for what it’s worth, he also believes that moral judgements are matters of fact, in the strong sense of ethical naturalism.
Where can I find evidence linking the sam0345 account to the identity James A. “Jim” Donald?
Somewhat laboriously, by searching LessWrong for his very first postings and working forwards from there, looking for my replies to him and he to me. I recognised him as James A. Donald as soon as he started posting here, from his distinctive writing style and views, which were very familiar to me from his long history of participating in rec.arts.sf.* on USENET. As evidence, I linked to other places on the net where he had posted views identical to what he had just posted here, expressed in very similar terms. He never took notice of my identification, even when replying directly to comments of mine identifying him, but I think it definite.
BTW, while “sam0345” is obviously not a real-world name, I have never seen reason to think that “James A. Donald” is. Searches on that name turn up nothing but his online activity (and a mugshot of an unprepossessing individual of the same name who served 35 years for forgery, and who I have no reason to think has any connection with him). I have almost never, here or anywhere else, seen him post anything personal about himself. He is American, and an Internet engineer, and that’s about it. And 10 inches taller than his wife, for what that’s worth. I have never seen anyone mention having met him. His ownership of jim.com is unusual, in that it goes back well before the advent of public Internet access and easy private ownership of domain names. Try getting a domain name that short and simple nowadays! They’re all taken.
Interesting! Before the great-grandparent I would have assigned a pretty low prior to sam being Jim; I never even considered the possibility explicitly. Now that I’m looking at it closely, sam does use a similar writing style. I’m updating substantially, and now believe there is a roughly 50-75% chance they’re the same person. Thanks for answering!
Effectively there’s a position that’s obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can’t be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct. When you tell someone they are on the wrong side of history you are reminding them they are behaving like one of the old men that Plank mentions. Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
A bit less than two millenia ago one could have said “Effectively there’s a position—that Jesus gifted eternal life to humanity -- that’s obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can’t be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct.”
I was actually thinking of eugenics, which was once a progressivist “obvious correct thing where we just need to wait until these luddites die off until everything will be great” thing, until it wasn’t. Incidentally a counterexample to “Cthulhu always swims left” too.
It’s a case where “correct”, “right side of history” and “progress” dissociate from each other.
I think you could make a case for totalitarianism, too. During the interwar years, not only old-school aristocracy but also market democracy were in some sense seen as being doomed by history; fascism got a lot of its punch from being thought of as a viable alternative to state communism when the dominant ideologies of the pre-WWI scene were temporarily discredited. Now, of course, we tend to see fascism as right-wing, but I get the sense that that mostly has to do with the mainstream left’s adoption of civil rights causes in the postwar era; at the time, it would have been seen (at least by its adherents) as a more syncretic position.
I don’t think you can call WWII an unambiguous win for market democracy, but I do think that it ended up looking a lot more viable in 1946 than it did in, say, 1933.
fascism got a lot of its punch from being thought of as a viable alternative to state communism when the dominant ideologies of the pre-WWI scene were temporarily discredited.
Seen by some as doomed by history, perhaps. The whole point of US liberalism as I understand the FDR version was to provide a democratic alternative; you may recall this enjoyed some success.
Now, of course, we tend to see fascism as right-wing, but I get the sense that that mostly has to do with the mainstream left’s adoption of civil rights causes in the postwar era; at the time, it would have been seen (at least by its adherents) as a more syncretic position.
Indeed, many of the most prominent supporters of fascism came from the traditional left. Mussoloni was originally a socialist, Mosley defected from the Labour party, and they didn’t call it “national socialism” for nothing. In fact part of the reason why communists and fascists had such mutual loathing (aside from actual ideology) was that they were competing for the same set of recruits. Then again, Quisling and Franco especially were firmly in the right-wing camp.
With such concordance from all sides of the political spectrum it’s easy to see how one could conclude that totalitarianism was the next natural stage in history.
Incidentally a counterexample to “Cthulhu always swims left” too.
Interestingly, if you press the people making that claim for what they mean by “left”, their answer boils down to “whatever is in Cthulhu’s forward cone”.
For a more modern example, wouldn’t that have been said for marijuana a few decades ago?
Everyone expected that once the older people who opposed marijuana died off and the hippies grew into positions of power, everyone would want it to be legal. That didn’t work out. (The support for legalization has gone up recently, but not because of this.)
The point is that decades ago, illegal substance use was popular among people of college age. Yet as those people grew up, they stopped using the substances and did not, once they were in power, try to make them legal. I’m not comparing young people today versus older people today, I’m pointing out that all those marijuana smokers from the 1960′s and 1970′s didn’t grow up and legalize pot. I’m sure back then if you went onto a college campus you’d have heard plenty of sentiment of “when the old fogies die off and we’re running the country, we’ll legalize weed”. The old fogies died off; the people from the 60s and 70s grew up to rule the country, and… it didn’t happen.
According to your link, a poll in 1973 shows 43% of students having tried it with 51% in 1971. That 1979 figure is for people who are currently using it. I suspect the percentage that have tried it, rather than the percentage of regular users, is a closer fit to the percentage who would have supported legalization back then.
Furthermore, even if the percentage was under 50%, it’s clear that once they grew older they didn’t exert the massive influence over marijjuana policy that would have been expected. If 30% or 40% of 25-40 year olds actively support something, even if they are not a majority, that’s going to be very prominent in politics, and heavily drive the discourse, and that just hasn’t happened. (And even 30% or 40% might be enough to pass legalization considering that a lot of the remainder are probably just neutral on the issue.)
If 30% or 40% of 25-40 year olds actively support something, even if they are not a majority, that’s going to be very prominent in politics, and heavily drive the discourse
Not really. US politics is a lot about what the kind of people who donate to political campaign thinks about issues. The Koch brothers are for example old people supporting marijjuana legislation.
It’s not unheard of for people who’ve recently tried various substances to nonetheless support stricter restrictions on them. The usual narrative goes something like “I can handle this, but there are lots of people that can’t, and we have to keep it out of their hands”, though the people in question vary—drawing class, demographic, or cognitive lines is common.
There can be other ulterior motives, too. In the early 2000s, a few marijuana growers in Northern California were among the opponents of a ballot proposition that would have legalized it in the state—because legalization was expected to harm their profit margins, doing more damage than than removing the chance of arrest would have made up for.
The usual narrative goes something like “I can handle this, but there are lots of people that can’t, and we have to keep it out of their hands”, though the people in question vary—drawing class, demographic, or cognitive lines is common.
Or, alternately, “It was a mistake for me to do it, and I was lucky to get away without punishment, but legalizing would encourage other people to make the same mistake.” I seem to recall a few U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle saying things of this nature.
I would believe that people who used drugs back then would say this now. I find it hard, however, to believe that people who used drugs back then would have said it back then, and the point is that people back then thought they would legalize weed once the old fogies died off.
Was the forceful kind ever an obviously correct/leftist position? To my mind non-violent eugenics is still obviously the correct thing where we just need to wait until the luddites die off—it’s just the association with the Nazis has given ludditery a big (but ultimately temporary) boost.
The authors theorized that the best solution for the Swedish welfare state (“folkhem”) was to prevent at the outset the hereditary transfer of undesirable characteristics that caused the individual affected to become sooner or later a burden on society. The authors therefore proposed a “corrective social reform” under which sterilization was to prevent “nonviable individuals” from spreading their undesirable traits.[4]
Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
Is this falsifiable?
I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims
1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)
2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.
2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population
For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.
2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].
2.5) Not having status quo bias isn’t equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum—chronic contrarians.
Effectively there’s a position that’s obviously correct
In politics, no position is obviously correct. Claiming that one’s own position is obviously correct or that history is on our side is just a way of browbeating others instead of actually making a case.
Claiming that the opponents of some newly viral idea are “on the wrong side of history” is like claiming that Klingon is the language of the future based on the growth rate when the number of speakers has actually gone from zero to a few hundred.
When you tell someone they are on the wrong side of history you are reminding them
No—you are telling them. To remind someone of a thing is to tell them what they already know. To talk of “reminding” in this context is to presume that they already know that they are wrong but won’t admit it, and is just another way of speaking in bad faith to avoid actually making a case.
Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
One’s person status quo bias is another person’s Chesterton fence. The quote from which this comment tree branches is from Chesterton.
I don’t think you agree. I think Eugine has a problem with the idea that just because an idea wins in history doesn’t mean that’s it’s a good idea.
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history. Marx idea that you don’t need a God to tell you what’s morally right, history will tell you.
Neoreactionaries don’t like that sentiment that history decides what’s morally right.
You have to compare it to the alternatives. Do you think it’s more or less silly than the idea that there a God in the sky judging what’s right or wrong?
Marx basically had the idea that you don’t need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history with supposedly moves in a certain direction. You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality. It’s what someone who got a rough idea of calculus does, but who doesn’t fully understand the assumptions that go into the process.
In the US where Marx didn’t have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism. On a scale of silliness that’s much worse.
Today the postmodernists rule liberal thought but there are still relicts of marxist ideas. Part of what being modern was about is having an absolute moral system. Whether or not those people are silly is also open for debate.
Sure. Let’s compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined. By comparison the idea that “history decides what’s morally right” is silly.
Marx basically had the idea that you don’t need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history
Yep, he had this idea. That doesn’t make it a right idea. Marx had lots of ideas which didn’t turn out well.
You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality.
Oh, so—keeping in mind we’re on LW—the universe tiled with paperclips might turn out to be the perfect morality? X-D
And remind me, how well does extrapolation of history work?
In the US where Marx didn’t have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism.
Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?
Yep, he had this idea. That doesn’t make it a right idea.
We didn’t talk about right or wrong but silly.
Let’s compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined.
Let’s do what partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined is not exactly the battle cry under which you can unite people and get them to adopt a new moral framework. It also has the problem of not telling people who want to know what they should do what they should do.
Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?
Yes, I do think that Marxism and Socialism has a lot to do with spreading atheism in Europe. Socialist governments did make a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists than democratic governments did.
If I hear Dawkins talk how it’s important that atheists self identify as being atheists to show the rest of America that one can be an atheist and still a morally good person, than that does indicate to me a problem of American culture that’s largely solved in Europe. Socialist activism has a lot to do with why that’s the case.
Thanks. The fact that I made that error is pretty interesting to me. Someone else used the Dawkings spelling a few days ago on LW. I felt that it was wrong and looked up the correct spelling to try to be sure.
Somehow my brain still updated in the background from Dawkins to Dawkings.
Oh yes, they certainly did. I take it, you approve of these efforts?
That question indicates being mindkilled.
I happen to be able to discuss issues like that without treating arguments as soldiers.
Discussing cause and effects is hard enough as it is without involving notions of approval or disapproval.
The implication that somehow socialism isn’t responsible for spreading atheism in Europe because socialist used some immoral technique is a conflation of moral beliefs with beliefs about reality.
It seems to me that you two are talking past each other. Here’s what I hear:
ChristianKI: “Socialist movements and governments did successfully promote atheism and materialism in the populations of Europe. This is why Europeans do not tend to believe, as Americans do, that atheists are incapable of being moral.” (This is a descriptive claim about history and public opinion.)
Lumifer: “We should not advocate socialism as a way of promoting atheism and materialism, because socialism is awful and Marxist ideas of historical progress are silly.” (This is a normative claim about advocacy.)
The implication that somehow socialism isn’t responsible for spreading atheism in Europe because socialist used some immoral technique is a conflation of moral beliefs with beliefs about reality.
I haven’t said anything about morals. In particular, I haven’t labeled any actions as immoral. I just inquired whether you approved of the efforts that the socialist governments have made in reality in the XX century to spread atheism.
Moreover, we are already past the question of whether the socialist governments made “a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists”—we know they did—the issue now is the cost-benefit analysis of these efforts. You clearly like the outcome, so do you think the price was worth it? This is what I mean by the question about whether you approve.
I’m heavily opposed to what currently happens in France when it comes to fighting religion.
But I guess both claims won’t tell the average person here where much because the political background of European politics isn’t that clear in English speaking forum.
The question wasn’t which political system you approve.
The question was whether you think the outcome of more atheists in Europe was worth the cost incurred during the efforts of the socialist governments to suppress religion and promote atheism.
I’m living in a country in which the people who want socialism who had the most political power favor democratic socialism over communism.
In Germany you had a split in the left. One half thought that you need a revolution to achieve the goal of socialism and the other half thought that you can work within the democratic institutions to achieve the goal of socialism.
I haven’t meet any young earth creationists in Berlin or for that matter people who doubt the theory of evolution so I’m completely happen with the state of affairs where I live. No catholics bombing protestants either.
On the other hand I don’t approve of the kind of policies that exist in France or Soviet Russia.
I’m not familiar enough with Swedish policies to tell you whether I approve of them.
This is a bit of a sideline, but if you’re talking about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I think modeling it as a religious conflict is the wrong way to go. The impression I get is more of religion as a shibboleth for cultural and political ties than the other way around.
There advocated way of getting there wasn’t the “way through the institutions” but “revolution”. There are Marxist arguments that revolution is the only way and that it’s not possible to change the system from the inside.
According to our university constitution students are supposed to vote in an election for a 5 person group to represent the body of students of a university department. At our university the students of the political science department don’t like this.
The elected 5-person body doesn’t constitute itself and the decisions are rather supposed to make by a self governed open body in which everyone who wants can speak and that makes decisions via “consensus”.
I don’t see myself in that tradition or have any loyalty to that fraction. As far as current affairs go, I would want liquid democracy for those student institutions with some elected persons taken representative roles and not “consensus” style democracy.
If I hear Dawkings talk how it’s important that atheists self identify as being atheists to show the rest of America that one can be an atheist and still a morally good person, than that does indicate to me a problem of American culture that’s largely solved in Europe. Socialist activism has a lot to do with why that’s the case.
Because Socialists are so well-known for their morality. Seriously, in the US Socialists and Marxists are the standard examples of how atheism causes people to lose their morals.
I cannot interpret that comment, because I cannot understand how you are using “socialism” or “morality.
Or how ironic you’re being.
Where I come from, the term “Christian Socialist” can be taken with a straight face.
Do you think it’s more or less silly than the idea that there a God in the sky judging what’s right or wrong?
I think they’re both quite silly. Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
Part of what being modern was about is having an absolute moral system.
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
Beforehand there was the idea that God’s simply beyond human comprehension. One day he tells the Israelis to love their neighbors and the next he orders the Israelis to commit genocide.
You were supposed to follow a bunch of principles because those came from authoritative sources and not because you could derive them yourself.
If you read Machiavelli, he’s using God as a word at times when we might simply use luck today. Machiavelli very much criticizes that approach of simply thinking that God works in mysterious ways.
Greeks and Romans had many different Gods and not one single source of morality.
Of course absolute morality is not all the modernism is about.
Beforehand there was the idea that God’s simply beyond human comprehension. One day he tells the Israelis to love their neighbors and the next he orders the Israelis to commit genocide.
I was thinking about classic and medieval Christian philosophy, which tied morality to an unchanging (and so absolute) God.
As an aside, when the Israelis were ordered to love their neighbors, the reference was to the neighboring Israelis and peaceful co-inhabitants of other tribes. Jews were never told by God to love everyone or not to have enemies; that is a later, Christian or Christian-era idea.
I was thinking about classic and medieval Christian philosophy, which tied morality to an unchanging (and so absolute) God.
But still a mysterious God who’s so complicated that humans can’t fully understand him so the should simply follow what the priest who has a more direct contact to God says.
Furthermore you should follow the authority of your local king because of the divine right of kings that your local king inherited.
The idea that you can use reason to find out what God wants and then do that is a more modern idea.
Things switched from saying that if the telescope doesn’t show that planets move the way the ancestors said they are supposed to move, then the telescope is wrong to the idea that maybe the ancestors are wrong about the way the planets move.
The dark ages ended and you have modernity.
I don’t have much to say about the actual point you’re making, but you’ve been setting off alarm bells with stuff like this:
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history.
...You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality...
Beforehand there was the idea that God’s simply beyond human comprehension.
What’s your background on the history of this period? And on the philosophy of Marx and Hegel? The things you are saying seem to me to be false, and I want to check if the problem isn’t on my end.
What’s your background on the history of this period?
What do you mean with this period?
I don’t think that modernity started with Hegel but with people like Machiavelli with is around ~1500. Hegel and Marx on the other hand did their work in the 19th century. I did read Machiavelli’s The Prince cover to cover.
In the case of Marx and Hegel I’m a German and in this case speaking about German philosophers. That means I have been educated in school with a German notion of what history happens to be. I don’t see political history in the Anglosaxon frame of Whig vs Tory.
I did spent a bunch of time in the JUSOS with is the youth organisation of the German SPD and the abbreviation roughly translates into Young Socialists in the SPD. I therefore did follow debates about whether socialism as end goal should be kicked out of the party program of the SPD or be left in.
Lastly I did a lot of reading in political philosophy both primary and secondary sources. Most of it a while ago.
But one sentence summaries of complex political thoughts are by their nature vague. Of course Hegel already had the notion of history and me saying replaced might give the impression that he didn’t. But Hegel did have God and Marx did not.
It’s still in there but more for symbolic reasons. Party leadership didn’t really want it but the party base did. The relevant phrase also happens to be democratic socialism. Meaning that the goal is economic equality but representative democracy and not a bunch of soviets and “consensus” decision making.
In practice the party policies under Schroeder were more “third way” and as a result they wanted to “update” the party program to reflect that policy change.
What do you mean by “economic equality”? Do you mean that everyone should have the same amount of money/resources? (This is not a stable state of affairs if people then proceed to engage in commerce).
If you have a government which constantly redistributes money you could hold it constant if you wanted to do so. But the people with whom I spoke usually don’t go that far. Concerns are rather that everyone has access to a “living wage”.
Defining how exactly the end state will look like isn’t that much of a concern if you can decide whether or not you move in the right direction. There the feeling that third way policies of cutting government pensions don’t go in that direction.
What is a living wage changes with changes in society, and that isn’t obviously a problem. If society becomes richer, people expect higher wages, and if society becomes richer, it can afford them. Depending on the quantities.
Amazingly enough, freedom supporting policies can negatively impact equality. To put it another way, if there were no conflicts between values, there would be no politics. To put it a third way, you keep writingas though you are the Tablet, and have the One True Set of Values inscribed in your brain.
Christian mentioned having the government constantly redistributing money as a possibly desirable end state. I was pointing out one of the implications of said end state.
Also I’m getting increasingly frustrated at people, yourself included, who keep trying to pass off their false beliefs about the nature of the world as different preferences.
In particular, to use the economic equality example, if you constantly redistributed money to keep everyone equal, as I mentioned it would destroy anything resembling freedom. But suppose you claim to have a utility function that puts no value on freedom. Well, another consequence is that it would destroy the motivation for people to engage in productive work (if the benefits would just get redistributed) so you’d wind up with a bunch of equally starving people. Assuming, that is, that this redistribution was somehow magically enforced, more realistically you’d wind up with everything in the hands of the redistributors.
Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” begins with the words:
MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
I don’t think that any modern person on the left is as direct as that when it comes to freedom, but in European political thought the idea of the Social Contract is quite central.
Well, another consequence is that it would destroy the motivation for people to engage in productive work (if the benefits would just get redistributed) so you’d wind up with a bunch of equally starving people.
The idea is that in the end state people would be motivated to work as a way of self actualization and don’t need financial incentives to do work. Star Trek has characters who work without getting payed to do so.
The observation that today many people need money to be motivated to work doesn’t mean that will always be true in the future and that we shouldn’t work on moving society in that direction.
The idea of an end state doesn’t mean something that can be reached in 10 years a state that can take quite a while to reach.
MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
Could you taboo what Rousseau means by “master” and “slave” in that quote. As is, to me it sounds like deep wisdom attempting to use said words in some metaphorical way that’s not at all well-defined. Also I don’t see what this has to do with the subject.
The idea is that in the end state people would be motivated to work as a way of self actualization and don’t need financial incentives to do work.
The problem is that the work that’s self-actualizing is not necessarily the same as the work that’s needed to keep society running. In other words, attempting to run society like this you’d wind up with a bunch of (mediocre) artists starving and suffering from dysentery because not enough people derive self-actualization from farming or maintaining the sewer system. Historically, many attempts by intellectuals to create planned communities fell into this problem.
Star Trek has characters who work without getting payed to do so.
Rousseau writes his central work to justify that men is everywhere in chains. Rousseau attempts to legitimize the Social Contract that takes away men’s natural freedom.
Rousseau later argues that man get’s new freedoms in the process, but he’s not shy in admitting that men loses his natural freedoms by being bound in the Social Contract.
MAN is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
Could you taboo what Rousseau means by “master” and “slave” in that quote.
The full text is readily available online. A “master” is someone with the power to tell others what to do and be obeyed; yet these masters themselves obey something above themselves (laws written and unwritten). Rousseau’s answer (SPOILER WARNING!!) is the title of his work. (To which the standard counter-argument is “show me my signature on this supposed contract”.)
A few more Rousseau quotes:
The social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights.
...
All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor?
...
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.
He is arguing here against theories whereby sovereignty must consist of absolute power held by a single individual beyond any legitimate challenge, his subjects having no rights against him. For Rousseau, sovereignty is the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity—or in Rousseau’s words, “the exercise of the general will”. Rousseau’s sovereignty is still absolute and indivisible, but is not located in any individual.
One can cherry-pick Rousseau to multiple ends. Here’s something for HBDers:
Liberty, not being a fruit of all climates, is not within the reach of all peoples.
Libertarians may find something to agree with in this:
It is wrong therefore to wish to make political institutions so strong as to render it impossible to suspend their operation.
But to know what Rousseau thought, it is better to read his work.
He is arguing here against theories whereby sovereignty must consist of absolute power held by a single individual beyond any legitimate challenge, his subjects having no rights against him. For Rousseau, sovereignty is the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity—or in Rousseau’s words, “the exercise of the general will”. Rousseau’s sovereignty is still absolute and indivisible, but is not located in any individual.
Here is a decent debunking of the notion that modern society is based on a social contract. The basic argument is that if one attempts to explicitly right down the kind of contract these theories require, one winds up with a contract that no court would enforce between private parties.
More generally, Nick Szabo argues that the concept of sovereignty is itself totalitarian.
Here is a decent debunking of the notion that modern society is based on a social contract.
I agree with that.
More generally, Nick Szabo argues that the concept of sovereignty is itself totalitarian.
It certainly is. Where does that leave FAI? A superintelligent FAI, as envisaged by those who think it a desirable goal, will be a totalitarian absolute ruler imposing the CEVoH and will, to borrow Rousseau’s words, be “so strong as to render it impossible to suspend [its] operation.” Rather like the Super Happies’ plan for humanity. The only alternative to a superintelligent FAI is supposed to be a superintelligent UFAI.
I didn’t want to give an example of work done as a volunteer but an example of a futuristic society where people don’t work for money.
People in Star Trek work sometimes for patriotism, sometimes for gold-pressed latinum, but mostly toward whatever the plot says they need to be doing. I foresee problems with using narrative tension as a medium of exchange.
I actually agree that running for 100% equality would likely result in 0% freedom.
For my money that is an extreme illustration of “you can’t satisfy all values simultaneously” , not of “left bad”.
Christians absolute egalitarianism is view I have never heard articulated before. It seems to be the mirror image of anarcho-capitalism, the philosophy that guns for 100% freedom.
To me, it’s symmetric.
To you there is apparently a “side” that is in contact with reality, and a side that isn’t.
Yes, there are a lot of things that would go wrong, to the average utility function, with absolute egalitarianism . Ditto for absolute libertarianism. But you never mention that.
It’s an open question whether a given extremist, of any stripe, is someone who has (1) a one-sided utility function, (2) who wrongly thinks that an average, mixed UF can be satisfied by extreme policies.
As such, you don’t get to assume that (2) is true of anyone in this discussion.
I actually agree that running for 100% equality would likely result in 0% freedom.
It wouldn’t result in much equality either. (Unless you mean equality in the sense that everyone is equally dead, which is a possible if extreme outcome.)
Ditto for absolute libertarianism. But you never mention that.
I also never called absolute anarcho-capitalism (I assume that’s what you mean by “absolute libertarianism”) as a desirable end-state.
It’s an open question whether a given extremist, of any stripe, is someone who has (1) a one-sided utility function, (2) who wrongly thinks that an average, mixed UF can be satisfied by extreme policies.
The problem is that as I pointed out the way these people pursue their one-sided goal won’t even maximize the one-sided utility function.
Edit: Speaking of freedom and equality don’t you also want a term for prosperity in there somewhere?
Christians absolute egalitarianism is view I have never heard articulated before. It seems to be the mirror image of anarcho-capitalism, the philosophy that guns for 100% freedom.
If you want to have it articulated in a bit more detail Zeitgeist Appendum can give you an impression. With 5 million youtube it there are quite a few people on the internet who profess to follow that ideology.
According to it we need a central computer who tells everyone what work to do. People will do what the computer tells them because their education teaches them the value of following what the computer tells them, so perfectly that everybody just does what’s in the “public interest” and follows the directions of the central scientific computer program.
Because there won’t be money anymore, nothing will stop the digging of intercontinental tunnels for transportation needs so that you don’t need airplanes.
I have meet multiple people who believe that framework. Fortunately people outside of the political process where they won’t do much harm. Unfortunately a bunch of them are smart, so intelligence doesn’t seem to protect against it. One of them ranks quite well in debating tournaments.
Wow, there so many things wrong with this proposal that I’ll just mention the one that disgusts me on a visceral level. One effect of this scheme (if it could somehow be made to work) is that there is a certain organ that consumes nearly one quarter of the body’s energy that is now completely vestigial.
I’m trying to figure out what Christian, and more generally the typical German, mean by “socialism” these days. Does it have a more moderate end goal then the older socialists, or do they have the same end goal and have simply decided to approach it more slowly.
Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
For Hegel and Marx history is the process of change.
Both the amounts of Gods per person and the percentage of people who believe went down over time. Thus history favors atheism.
I don’t see why the ‘amount of Gods per person’ is a valid metric for anything. Progression from poly- to monotheism doesn’t imply a future progression to atheism.
The actual percent of atheists in society has indeed increased over time, but it’s never been significantly above 10% worldwide and it’s not clear that’s it’s rising right now (Wikipedia source). It’s hardly strong enough evidence to conclude that a majority of humanity will be atheistic one day. Other religions surely exhibit or previously exhibited rising trends at least as strong.
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield’s critique of what he called the “Whig Interpretation of History”. Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
There are (at least) two things wrong with “the right side of history”. One is that we can’t know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn’t happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don’t even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he’ll say where he stands on this.
There’s a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What’s the precise sense of “attribute” in that claim? It’s not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn’t have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn’t even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering “what side history is on” a useful concept after noticing the second one.
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history. Marx idea that you don’t need a God to tell you what’s morally right, history will tell you. Neoreactionaries don’t like that sentiment that history decides what’s morally right.
Speaking of which, let’s see what history has to say about Marx. It would appear that the Marxist nations lost to a semi-religious nation. Thus apparently history has judged that the idea that history will tell you what is right to be wrong.
Neoreactionaries don’t like that sentiment that history decides what’s morally right.
I’m very far from being a reactionary or neoreactionary, but I also don’t put much moral weight on history—that is, on what most other people come to believe.
For one thing, believing that would mean every moral reformer who predicts for themselves only a small chance of reforming society, should conclude that they are wrong about morals.
If you’re on the winning or ascending side, you have more arguments in your favour..at this point in history,where democracy and it’s twin, rational argument, reign. That doesn’t add up to being right because epistemology, ie styles of persuasion, have varied . To know the right epistemology,you need...epistemology. That’s why philosophy difficult.
Considering how many centuries it took humanity to get from its first curiosity about how things work to predicting the trajectory of a falling rock (the irony of your handle piles higher and higher), predicting trajectories in history is a fool’s task. How many predicted the Internet? How many predicted the end of the Soviet Union? How many can predict developments in Ukraine?
“History is on our side” is not an argument, but a cudgel.
Might someone offer an explanation of this to me?
On its own I can think of several things that these words might be uttered in order to express. A little search turns up a more extended form, with a claimed source:
Said to be by G.K. Chesterton in the New York Times Magazine of February 11, 1923, which appears to be a real thing, but one which is not online. According to this version, he is jibing at progressivism, the adulation of the latest thing because it is newer than yesterday’s latest thing.
ETA: Chesterton uses the same analogy, in rather more words, here.
Note that this accentuates the relevance of a detail that might be skipped over in the original quote- that Thursday comes after Wednesday. That is, this may be intended as a dismissal of the ‘all change is progress’ position or the ‘traditions are bad because they are traditions’ position.
Not to mention the people who think accusing their opponents of being “on the wrong side of history” constitutes an argument.
So you are not going to argue that history has shown that socialism has failed?
That’s using history as evidence. What I was complaining about is closer to the people who declare that all opponents of a change that they plan to implement (or at best have only implemented at most several decades ago) are “on the wrong side of history”.
I think you may not be interpreting the phrase “the wrong side of history” as people who say it mean it.
There a classic saying that ”
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Max Planck
Effectively there’s a position that’s obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can’t be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct. When you tell someone they are on the wrong side of history you are reminding them they are behaving like one of the old men that Plank mentions. Put another way, what it’s saying is “if you look at people who don’t come from the past and don’t have large status quo bias you will notice a trend”.
In physics, yes. In history / political science, no.
“Slavery is wrong” isn’t obviously correct?
I find this comment particularly ironic given your chosen username.
“War is wrong” isn’t obviously correct?
I think the majority of the population believes that there are valid reasons to start a war. R2P etc.
I was talking about war,not wars. Everybody would wish away war if they could. Many people think THIS war need to be fought.
I wouldn’t wish away war unless I also wished away the things we need to go to war for, in which case you could as easily say that I would wish away cancer treatments or firefighters.
People go to war because of war, because they have been attacked. That would get wished away as part of the deal.
Or they go to war less honorable reasons like grabbing resources, or making forcible converts to a religion.
Can’t see anything I’d want to keep.
Or because they are being mistreated by others in ways that don’t qualify as war.
Inter-state war is by far the least common type of warfare in the modern era, although the proxy wars growing out of the Cold War muddy the waters some. Civil and ethnic warfare is much more common, and I don’t think we can say that civil conflicts, at least, can always be described in terms of straightforward aggression and defense against aggression.
(Truthfully I wouldn’t say that for inter-state wars either, not all of them, but they’re a lot easier to spin that way.)
I was using wish away to mean magically get rid of. Unmagically getting rid of it requires unmagically fixing a lot of other things, which is why it hasn’t happened.
Magically getting rig of it strikes me as one of those wishes that will backfire horribly in one of several ways depending on exactly how the wisher defines “war”.
Depends. For starters are you counting revolutions and civil wars as “wars”?
The point being that you can’t infer that everyone believes in X in a society where X exists. They may dislike it but be unable to do anything about it.
I’m not making that argument. There polling out there that tells you what people like or dislike. I think that responsibility to protect (R2P) is accepted by a lot of people as a valid reason for military intervention.
Considering it was the norm for several thousand years of history and many philosophers either came out in favor of it or were silent … no, it’s not obviously correct.
There is obviously no one here who will disagree with it. But it is still a moral judgment, not a matter of fact.
Mencius Moldbug does argue that all moral changes after a certain point in time should be rolled back. That timeframe does include the abolition of slavery.
I don’t know whether there at the moment someone on LW willing to make the argument for slavery explicitly but you might find people who do have Moldbug’s position.
The last census shows a bunch of neoreactionaries.
A former poster here (known elsewhere on the net as “James A. Donald”) does disagree with it. He believes that slavery is the rightful state for many people. And for what it’s worth, he also believes that moral judgements are matters of fact, in the strong sense of ethical naturalism.
Where can I find evidence linking the sam0345 account to the identity James A. “Jim” Donald?
Somewhat laboriously, by searching LessWrong for his very first postings and working forwards from there, looking for my replies to him and he to me. I recognised him as James A. Donald as soon as he started posting here, from his distinctive writing style and views, which were very familiar to me from his long history of participating in rec.arts.sf.* on USENET. As evidence, I linked to other places on the net where he had posted views identical to what he had just posted here, expressed in very similar terms. He never took notice of my identification, even when replying directly to comments of mine identifying him, but I think it definite.
BTW, while “sam0345” is obviously not a real-world name, I have never seen reason to think that “James A. Donald” is. Searches on that name turn up nothing but his online activity (and a mugshot of an unprepossessing individual of the same name who served 35 years for forgery, and who I have no reason to think has any connection with him). I have almost never, here or anywhere else, seen him post anything personal about himself. He is American, and an Internet engineer, and that’s about it. And 10 inches taller than his wife, for what that’s worth. I have never seen anyone mention having met him. His ownership of jim.com is unusual, in that it goes back well before the advent of public Internet access and easy private ownership of domain names. Try getting a domain name that short and simple nowadays! They’re all taken.
Interesting! Before the great-grandparent I would have assigned a pretty low prior to sam being Jim; I never even considered the possibility explicitly. Now that I’m looking at it closely, sam does use a similar writing style. I’m updating substantially, and now believe there is a roughly 50-75% chance they’re the same person. Thanks for answering!
In which meaning do you use the word “correct”?
In which meaning do you use the word meaning?
Is this falsifiable?
Sure, just step back in time.
A bit less than two millenia ago one could have said “Effectively there’s a position—that Jesus gifted eternal life to humanity -- that’s obviously correct but there are also people who are just too hidebound and change averse to recognize it and progress can’t be made until they die off. But progress will be made because the position is correct.”
I was actually thinking of eugenics, which was once a progressivist “obvious correct thing where we just need to wait until these luddites die off until everything will be great” thing, until it wasn’t. Incidentally a counterexample to “Cthulhu always swims left” too.
It’s a case where “correct”, “right side of history” and “progress” dissociate from each other.
I think you could make a case for totalitarianism, too. During the interwar years, not only old-school aristocracy but also market democracy were in some sense seen as being doomed by history; fascism got a lot of its punch from being thought of as a viable alternative to state communism when the dominant ideologies of the pre-WWI scene were temporarily discredited. Now, of course, we tend to see fascism as right-wing, but I get the sense that that mostly has to do with the mainstream left’s adoption of civil rights causes in the postwar era; at the time, it would have been seen (at least by its adherents) as a more syncretic position.
I don’t think you can call WWII an unambiguous win for market democracy, but I do think that it ended up looking a lot more viable in 1946 than it did in, say, 1933.
Note terms like the third position or third way.
Seen by some as doomed by history, perhaps. The whole point of US liberalism as I understand the FDR version was to provide a democratic alternative; you may recall this enjoyed some success.
Indeed, many of the most prominent supporters of fascism came from the traditional left. Mussoloni was originally a socialist, Mosley defected from the Labour party, and they didn’t call it “national socialism” for nothing. In fact part of the reason why communists and fascists had such mutual loathing (aside from actual ideology) was that they were competing for the same set of recruits. Then again, Quisling and Franco especially were firmly in the right-wing camp.
With such concordance from all sides of the political spectrum it’s easy to see how one could conclude that totalitarianism was the next natural stage in history.
Interestingly, if you press the people making that claim for what they mean by “left”, their answer boils down to “whatever is in Cthulhu’s forward cone”.
For a more modern example, wouldn’t that have been said for marijuana a few decades ago?
Everyone expected that once the older people who opposed marijuana died off and the hippies grew into positions of power, everyone would want it to be legal. That didn’t work out. (The support for legalization has gone up recently, but not because of this.)
Guilty as charged.
The point is that decades ago, illegal substance use was popular among people of college age. Yet as those people grew up, they stopped using the substances and did not, once they were in power, try to make them legal. I’m not comparing young people today versus older people today, I’m pointing out that all those marijuana smokers from the 1960′s and 1970′s didn’t grow up and legalize pot. I’m sure back then if you went onto a college campus you’d have heard plenty of sentiment of “when the old fogies die off and we’re running the country, we’ll legalize weed”. The old fogies died off; the people from the 60s and 70s grew up to rule the country, and… it didn’t happen.
The peak year for the popularity of marijuana use among young adults (18-25 years old) was 1979, and it was still less than half.
According to your link, a poll in 1973 shows 43% of students having tried it with 51% in 1971. That 1979 figure is for people who are currently using it. I suspect the percentage that have tried it, rather than the percentage of regular users, is a closer fit to the percentage who would have supported legalization back then.
Furthermore, even if the percentage was under 50%, it’s clear that once they grew older they didn’t exert the massive influence over marijjuana policy that would have been expected. If 30% or 40% of 25-40 year olds actively support something, even if they are not a majority, that’s going to be very prominent in politics, and heavily drive the discourse, and that just hasn’t happened. (And even 30% or 40% might be enough to pass legalization considering that a lot of the remainder are probably just neutral on the issue.)
Not really. US politics is a lot about what the kind of people who donate to political campaign thinks about issues. The Koch brothers are for example old people supporting marijjuana legislation.
It’s not unheard of for people who’ve recently tried various substances to nonetheless support stricter restrictions on them. The usual narrative goes something like “I can handle this, but there are lots of people that can’t, and we have to keep it out of their hands”, though the people in question vary—drawing class, demographic, or cognitive lines is common.
There can be other ulterior motives, too. In the early 2000s, a few marijuana growers in Northern California were among the opponents of a ballot proposition that would have legalized it in the state—because legalization was expected to harm their profit margins, doing more damage than than removing the chance of arrest would have made up for.
Or, alternately, “It was a mistake for me to do it, and I was lucky to get away without punishment, but legalizing would encourage other people to make the same mistake.” I seem to recall a few U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle saying things of this nature.
I would believe that people who used drugs back then would say this now. I find it hard, however, to believe that people who used drugs back then would have said it back then, and the point is that people back then thought they would legalize weed once the old fogies died off.
How do you know that this wasn’t the cause?
Because as army1987 points out, legalization is supported by the young, not by people who were young in the 1960′s and 1970′s.
Was the forceful kind ever an obviously correct/leftist position? To my mind non-violent eugenics is still obviously the correct thing where we just need to wait until the luddites die off—it’s just the association with the Nazis has given ludditery a big (but ultimately temporary) boost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden
Do you actually mean non-coercive? There are great many ways to apply pressure on people without actually getting violent....
I suspect it is falsifiable. I might unpack it as the following sub claims
1 Degree of status quo bias is positively correlated to time spent in a particular status quo (my gut tells me there should be a causal link, but I bet correlation is all you could find in studies)
2 On issue X, belief that X[past] is the correct way to do X is correlated with time spent living in an X[past] regime.
2.5 Possibly a corollary to the above, but maybe a separate claim: among people who you would expect to have the least status quo bias position X[other] is favored at much higher rates than among the general population
For most issues 2 and 2.5 can probably be checked with good polling data. Point 1 is the kind of thing its possible to do studies on, so I think its in principle falsifiable, though I don’t know if such studies have actually been done.
2) is also what you would expect to see if X[past] was indeed better than X[other].
2.5) Not having status quo bias isn’t equivalent to being unbiased. A large number of the people that are least likely to have status quo bias are going to be at the other end of the spectrum—chronic contrarians.
Note that which X is better may depend on circumstances (e.g. technological level).
In politics, no position is obviously correct. Claiming that one’s own position is obviously correct or that history is on our side is just a way of browbeating others instead of actually making a case.
Claiming that the opponents of some newly viral idea are “on the wrong side of history” is like claiming that Klingon is the language of the future based on the growth rate when the number of speakers has actually gone from zero to a few hundred.
No—you are telling them. To remind someone of a thing is to tell them what they already know. To talk of “reminding” in this context is to presume that they already know that they are wrong but won’t admit it, and is just another way of speaking in bad faith to avoid actually making a case.
One’s person status quo bias is another person’s Chesterton fence. The quote from which this comment tree branches is from Chesterton.
I strongly agree. It’s possible that history has a side, but we can hardly know what it is in advance.
I don’t think you agree. I think Eugine has a problem with the idea that just because an idea wins in history doesn’t mean that’s it’s a good idea.
Marx replaced what Hegel called God with history. Marx idea that you don’t need a God to tell you what’s morally right, history will tell you. Neoreactionaries don’t like that sentiment that history decides what’s morally right.
I am not a neoreactionary and I think the sentiment that history decides what’s morally right is a remarkably silly idea.
You have to compare it to the alternatives. Do you think it’s more or less silly than the idea that there a God in the sky judging what’s right or wrong?
Marx basically had the idea that you don’t need God for an absolute moral system when you can pin it all on history with supposedly moves in a certain direction. You observe how history moves. Then you extrapolate. You look at the limit of that function and that limit is the perfect morality. It’s what someone who got a rough idea of calculus does, but who doesn’t fully understand the assumptions that go into the process.
In the US where Marx didn’t have much influence as in Europe there are still a bunch of people who believe in young earth creationism. On a scale of silliness that’s much worse.
Today the postmodernists rule liberal thought but there are still relicts of marxist ideas. Part of what being modern was about is having an absolute moral system. Whether or not those people are silly is also open for debate.
Sure. Let’s compare it to the alternative the morality is partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined. By comparison the idea that “history decides what’s morally right” is silly.
Yep, he had this idea. That doesn’t make it a right idea. Marx had lots of ideas which didn’t turn out well.
Oh, so—keeping in mind we’re on LW—the universe tiled with paperclips might turn out to be the perfect morality? X-D
And remind me, how well does extrapolation of history work?
Do you, by any chance, believe there is a causal connection between these two observations that you jammed into a single sentence?
Since culture evolves with history there is a lot of overlap between culture determining moralty and history determining morality.
What’s the overlap between two empty sets?
There’s no culture and no history?
Oh yes, there is culture, and there is history, and there is an overlap.
Now work out what two sets I am implying are empty.
OK. You’re one if the people who think that morality is arbitrary because your training did not equip you to think about it as non arbitrary.
We didn’t talk about right or wrong but silly.
Let’s do what partially biologically hardwired and partially culturally determined is not exactly the battle cry under which you can unite people and get them to adopt a new moral framework. It also has the problem of not telling people who want to know what they should do what they should do.
Yes, I do think that Marxism and Socialism has a lot to do with spreading atheism in Europe. Socialist governments did make a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists than democratic governments did.
If I hear Dawkins talk how it’s important that atheists self identify as being atheists to show the rest of America that one can be an atheist and still a morally good person, than that does indicate to me a problem of American culture that’s largely solved in Europe. Socialist activism has a lot to do with why that’s the case.
Dawkings → Dawkins
Thanks. The fact that I made that error is pretty interesting to me. Someone else used the Dawkings spelling a few days ago on LW. I felt that it was wrong and looked up the correct spelling to try to be sure.
Somehow my brain still updated in the background from Dawkins to Dawkings.
Promoting a century-and-a-half-old wrong idea looks pretty silly to me. You want to revive phlogiston, too, maybe?
That’s a good thing. I am highly suspicious of ideologies which want people to adopt new moral frameworks, especially if it involves battle cries.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Oh yes, they certainly did. I take it, you approve of these efforts?
That question indicates being mindkilled. I happen to be able to discuss issues like that without treating arguments as soldiers.
Discussing cause and effects is hard enough as it is without involving notions of approval or disapproval.
The implication that somehow socialism isn’t responsible for spreading atheism in Europe because socialist used some immoral technique is a conflation of moral beliefs with beliefs about reality.
It seems to me that you two are talking past each other. Here’s what I hear:
ChristianKI: “Socialist movements and governments did successfully promote atheism and materialism in the populations of Europe. This is why Europeans do not tend to believe, as Americans do, that atheists are incapable of being moral.” (This is a descriptive claim about history and public opinion.)
Lumifer: “We should not advocate socialism as a way of promoting atheism and materialism, because socialism is awful and Marxist ideas of historical progress are silly.” (This is a normative claim about advocacy.)
You’re using “socialism” vaguely. Iron curtain socialism was awful. North-western European social democracy is not.
What do we get if we Taboo socialism?
Detail
I haven’t said anything about morals. In particular, I haven’t labeled any actions as immoral. I just inquired whether you approved of the efforts that the socialist governments have made in reality in the XX century to spread atheism.
Moreover, we are already past the question of whether the socialist governments made “a greater effort to push back religion and make people atheists”—we know they did—the issue now is the cost-benefit analysis of these efforts. You clearly like the outcome, so do you think the price was worth it? This is what I mean by the question about whether you approve.
I do approve of democratic socialism.
I’m heavily opposed to what currently happens in France when it comes to fighting religion.
But I guess both claims won’t tell the average person here where much because the political background of European politics isn’t that clear in English speaking forum.
The question wasn’t which political system you approve.
The question was whether you think the outcome of more atheists in Europe was worth the cost incurred during the efforts of the socialist governments to suppress religion and promote atheism.
I’m living in a country in which the people who want socialism who had the most political power favor democratic socialism over communism.
In Germany you had a split in the left. One half thought that you need a revolution to achieve the goal of socialism and the other half thought that you can work within the democratic institutions to achieve the goal of socialism.
I haven’t meet any young earth creationists in Berlin or for that matter people who doubt the theory of evolution so I’m completely happen with the state of affairs where I live. No catholics bombing protestants either.
On the other hand I don’t approve of the kind of policies that exist in France or Soviet Russia. I’m not familiar enough with Swedish policies to tell you whether I approve of them.
This is a bit of a sideline, but if you’re talking about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, I think modeling it as a religious conflict is the wrong way to go. The impression I get is more of religion as a shibboleth for cultural and political ties than the other way around.
Lucky you X-D
Right. Instead you had the Baader-Meinhof gang. They wanted socialism, too, didn’t they?
There advocated way of getting there wasn’t the “way through the institutions” but “revolution”. There are Marxist arguments that revolution is the only way and that it’s not possible to change the system from the inside.
According to our university constitution students are supposed to vote in an election for a 5 person group to represent the body of students of a university department. At our university the students of the political science department don’t like this.
The elected 5-person body doesn’t constitute itself and the decisions are rather supposed to make by a self governed open body in which everyone who wants can speak and that makes decisions via “consensus”.
I don’t see myself in that tradition or have any loyalty to that fraction. As far as current affairs go, I would want liquid democracy for those student institutions with some elected persons taken representative roles and not “consensus” style democracy.
Because Socialists are so well-known for their morality. Seriously, in the US Socialists and Marxists are the standard examples of how atheism causes people to lose their morals.
I cannot interpret that comment, because I cannot understand how you are using “socialism” or “morality. Or how ironic you’re being. Where I come from, the term “Christian Socialist” can be taken with a straight face.
I think they’re both quite silly. Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
Beforehand there was the idea that God’s simply beyond human comprehension. One day he tells the Israelis to love their neighbors and the next he orders the Israelis to commit genocide.
You were supposed to follow a bunch of principles because those came from authoritative sources and not because you could derive them yourself.
If you read Machiavelli, he’s using God as a word at times when we might simply use luck today. Machiavelli very much criticizes that approach of simply thinking that God works in mysterious ways.
Greeks and Romans had many different Gods and not one single source of morality.
Of course absolute morality is not all the modernism is about.
I was thinking about classic and medieval Christian philosophy, which tied morality to an unchanging (and so absolute) God.
As an aside, when the Israelis were ordered to love their neighbors, the reference was to the neighboring Israelis and peaceful co-inhabitants of other tribes. Jews were never told by God to love everyone or not to have enemies; that is a later, Christian or Christian-era idea.
But still a mysterious God who’s so complicated that humans can’t fully understand him so the should simply follow what the priest who has a more direct contact to God says. Furthermore you should follow the authority of your local king because of the divine right of kings that your local king inherited.
The idea that you can use reason to find out what God wants and then do that is a more modern idea.
Things switched from saying that if the telescope doesn’t show that planets move the way the ancestors said they are supposed to move, then the telescope is wrong to the idea that maybe the ancestors are wrong about the way the planets move. The dark ages ended and you have modernity.
I don’t have much to say about the actual point you’re making, but you’ve been setting off alarm bells with stuff like this:
What’s your background on the history of this period? And on the philosophy of Marx and Hegel? The things you are saying seem to me to be false, and I want to check if the problem isn’t on my end.
What do you mean with this period?
I don’t think that modernity started with Hegel but with people like Machiavelli with is around ~1500. Hegel and Marx on the other hand did their work in the 19th century. I did read Machiavelli’s The Prince cover to cover.
In the case of Marx and Hegel I’m a German and in this case speaking about German philosophers. That means I have been educated in school with a German notion of what history happens to be. I don’t see political history in the Anglosaxon frame of Whig vs Tory.
I did spent a bunch of time in the JUSOS with is the youth organisation of the German SPD and the abbreviation roughly translates into Young Socialists in the SPD. I therefore did follow debates about whether socialism as end goal should be kicked out of the party program of the SPD or be left in.
Lastly I did a lot of reading in political philosophy both primary and secondary sources. Most of it a while ago.
But one sentence summaries of complex political thoughts are by their nature vague. Of course Hegel already had the notion of history and me saying replaced might give the impression that he didn’t. But Hegel did have God and Marx did not.
Just out of curiosity, what was the result of those debates?
It’s still in there but more for symbolic reasons. Party leadership didn’t really want it but the party base did. The relevant phrase also happens to be democratic socialism. Meaning that the goal is economic equality but representative democracy and not a bunch of soviets and “consensus” decision making.
In practice the party policies under Schroeder were more “third way” and as a result they wanted to “update” the party program to reflect that policy change.
What do you mean by “economic equality”? Do you mean that everyone should have the same amount of money/resources? (This is not a stable state of affairs if people then proceed to engage in commerce).
If you have a government which constantly redistributes money you could hold it constant if you wanted to do so. But the people with whom I spoke usually don’t go that far. Concerns are rather that everyone has access to a “living wage”.
Defining how exactly the end state will look like isn’t that much of a concern if you can decide whether or not you move in the right direction. There the feeling that third way policies of cutting government pensions don’t go in that direction.
Yes, but that’s not exactly compatible with anything resembling freedom.
The problem is what’s considered a “living wage” changes with changes in society.
It is a concern if you want to evaluate whether you should even be trying to move in that direction.
What is a living wage changes with changes in society, and that isn’t obviously a problem. If society becomes richer, people expect higher wages, and if society becomes richer, it can afford them. Depending on the quantities.
Amazingly enough, freedom supporting policies can negatively impact equality. To put it another way, if there were no conflicts between values, there would be no politics. To put it a third way, you keep writingas though you are the Tablet, and have the One True Set of Values inscribed in your brain.
Christian mentioned having the government constantly redistributing money as a possibly desirable end state. I was pointing out one of the implications of said end state.
Also I’m getting increasingly frustrated at people, yourself included, who keep trying to pass off their false beliefs about the nature of the world as different preferences.
In particular, to use the economic equality example, if you constantly redistributed money to keep everyone equal, as I mentioned it would destroy anything resembling freedom. But suppose you claim to have a utility function that puts no value on freedom. Well, another consequence is that it would destroy the motivation for people to engage in productive work (if the benefits would just get redistributed) so you’d wind up with a bunch of equally starving people. Assuming, that is, that this redistribution was somehow magically enforced, more realistically you’d wind up with everything in the hands of the redistributors.
Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” begins with the words:
I don’t think that any modern person on the left is as direct as that when it comes to freedom, but in European political thought the idea of the Social Contract is quite central.
The idea is that in the end state people would be motivated to work as a way of self actualization and don’t need financial incentives to do work. Star Trek has characters who work without getting payed to do so.
The observation that today many people need money to be motivated to work doesn’t mean that will always be true in the future and that we shouldn’t work on moving society in that direction.
The idea of an end state doesn’t mean something that can be reached in 10 years a state that can take quite a while to reach.
Could you taboo what Rousseau means by “master” and “slave” in that quote. As is, to me it sounds like deep wisdom attempting to use said words in some metaphorical way that’s not at all well-defined. Also I don’t see what this has to do with the subject.
The problem is that the work that’s self-actualizing is not necessarily the same as the work that’s needed to keep society running. In other words, attempting to run society like this you’d wind up with a bunch of (mediocre) artists starving and suffering from dysentery because not enough people derive self-actualization from farming or maintaining the sewer system. Historically, many attempts by intellectuals to create planned communities fell into this problem.
Fictional evidence.
Rousseau writes his central work to justify that men is everywhere in chains. Rousseau attempts to legitimize the Social Contract that takes away men’s natural freedom.
Rousseau later argues that man get’s new freedoms in the process, but he’s not shy in admitting that men loses his natural freedoms by being bound in the Social Contract.
The full text is readily available online. A “master” is someone with the power to tell others what to do and be obeyed; yet these masters themselves obey something above themselves (laws written and unwritten). Rousseau’s answer (SPOILER WARNING!!) is the title of his work. (To which the standard counter-argument is “show me my signature on this supposed contract”.)
A few more Rousseau quotes:
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He is arguing here against theories whereby sovereignty must consist of absolute power held by a single individual beyond any legitimate challenge, his subjects having no rights against him. For Rousseau, sovereignty is the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity—or in Rousseau’s words, “the exercise of the general will”. Rousseau’s sovereignty is still absolute and indivisible, but is not located in any individual.
One can cherry-pick Rousseau to multiple ends. Here’s something for HBDers:
Libertarians may find something to agree with in this:
But to know what Rousseau thought, it is better to read his work.
Here is a decent debunking of the notion that modern society is based on a social contract. The basic argument is that if one attempts to explicitly right down the kind of contract these theories require, one winds up with a contract that no court would enforce between private parties.
More generally, Nick Szabo argues that the concept of sovereignty is itself totalitarian.
I agree with that.
It certainly is. Where does that leave FAI? A superintelligent FAI, as envisaged by those who think it a desirable goal, will be a totalitarian absolute ruler imposing the CEVoH and will, to borrow Rousseau’s words, be “so strong as to render it impossible to suspend [its] operation.” Rather like the Super Happies’ plan for humanity. The only alternative to a superintelligent FAI is supposed to be a superintelligent UFAI.
The open source movement is a better example of voluntary word than star trek.
In this case I don’t think so.
I didn’t want to give an example of work done as a volunteer but an example of a futuristic society where people don’t work for money.
The Open Source movement also also a bunch of different people doing things for various reasons and incentives.
People in Star Trek work sometimes for patriotism, sometimes for gold-pressed latinum, but mostly toward whatever the plot says they need to be doing. I foresee problems with using narrative tension as a medium of exchange.
I actually agree that running for 100% equality would likely result in 0% freedom.
For my money that is an extreme illustration of “you can’t satisfy all values simultaneously” , not of “left bad”.
Christians absolute egalitarianism is view I have never heard articulated before. It seems to be the mirror image of anarcho-capitalism, the philosophy that guns for 100% freedom.
To me, it’s symmetric.
To you there is apparently a “side” that is in contact with reality, and a side that isn’t.
Yes, there are a lot of things that would go wrong, to the average utility function, with absolute egalitarianism . Ditto for absolute libertarianism. But you never mention that.
It’s an open question whether a given extremist, of any stripe, is someone who has (1) a one-sided utility function, (2) who wrongly thinks that an average, mixed UF can be satisfied by extreme policies.
As such, you don’t get to assume that (2) is true of anyone in this discussion.
It wouldn’t result in much equality either. (Unless you mean equality in the sense that everyone is equally dead, which is a possible if extreme outcome.)
I also never called absolute anarcho-capitalism (I assume that’s what you mean by “absolute libertarianism”) as a desirable end-state.
The problem is that as I pointed out the way these people pursue their one-sided goal won’t even maximize the one-sided utility function.
Edit: Speaking of freedom and equality don’t you also want a term for prosperity in there somewhere?
Or wellbeing, since dollars aren’t utilons.
I don’t define prosperity in terms of dollars.
If you want to have it articulated in a bit more detail Zeitgeist Appendum can give you an impression. With 5 million youtube it there are quite a few people on the internet who profess to follow that ideology.
According to it we need a central computer who tells everyone what work to do. People will do what the computer tells them because their education teaches them the value of following what the computer tells them, so perfectly that everybody just does what’s in the “public interest” and follows the directions of the central scientific computer program.
Because there won’t be money anymore, nothing will stop the digging of intercontinental tunnels for transportation needs so that you don’t need airplanes.
I have meet multiple people who believe that framework. Fortunately people outside of the political process where they won’t do much harm. Unfortunately a bunch of them are smart, so intelligence doesn’t seem to protect against it. One of them ranks quite well in debating tournaments.
Wow, there so many things wrong with this proposal that I’ll just mention the one that disgusts me on a visceral level. One effect of this scheme (if it could somehow be made to work) is that there is a certain organ that consumes nearly one quarter of the body’s energy that is now completely vestigial.
I can describe ideas without them being mine. In this case we are speaking about ideas in the party program of the SPD.
Is this line of conversation still “just curiosity” about the results of SPD debates, or are you trying to bait an argument?
I’m trying to figure out what Christian, and more generally the typical German, mean by “socialism” these days. Does it have a more moderate end goal then the older socialists, or do they have the same end goal and have simply decided to approach it more slowly.
Thanks, that’s helpful.
For Hegel and Marx history is the process of change.
Both the amounts of Gods per person and the percentage of people who believe went down over time. Thus history favors atheism.
I don’t see why the ‘amount of Gods per person’ is a valid metric for anything. Progression from poly- to monotheism doesn’t imply a future progression to atheism.
The actual percent of atheists in society has indeed increased over time, but it’s never been significantly above 10% worldwide and it’s not clear that’s it’s rising right now (Wikipedia source). It’s hardly strong enough evidence to conclude that a majority of humanity will be atheistic one day. Other religions surely exhibit or previously exhibited rising trends at least as strong.
In general, neoreactionaries seem to have cribbed this position from Herbert Butterfield’s critique of what he called the “Whig Interpretation of History”. Butterfield was not himself a neoreactionary, and infact warned against the trap that many neoreactionaries fall into: that of thinking that just because Whig histories are invalid, that this somehow makes Tory histories valid.
There are (at least) two things wrong with “the right side of history”. One is that we can’t know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn’t happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don’t even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he’ll say where he stands on this.
There’s a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What’s the precise sense of “attribute” in that claim? It’s not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn’t have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn’t even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering “what side history is on” a useful concept after noticing the second one.
Speaking of which, let’s see what history has to say about Marx. It would appear that the Marxist nations lost to a semi-religious nation. Thus apparently history has judged that the idea that history will tell you what is right to be wrong.
I’m very far from being a reactionary or neoreactionary, but I also don’t put much moral weight on history—that is, on what most other people come to believe.
For one thing, believing that would mean every moral reformer who predicts for themselves only a small chance of reforming society, should conclude that they are wrong about morals.
If you’re on the winning or ascending side, you have more arguments in your favour..at this point in history,where democracy and it’s twin, rational argument, reign. That doesn’t add up to being right because epistemology, ie styles of persuasion, have varied . To know the right epistemology,you need...epistemology. That’s why philosophy difficult.
Meaning: You can’t spot a trajectory in while you’re half way along it?
Meaning: You can,but it doesn’t mean anything epistemologicaly?
Considering how many centuries it took humanity to get from its first curiosity about how things work to predicting the trajectory of a falling rock (the irony of your handle piles higher and higher), predicting trajectories in history is a fool’s task. How many predicted the Internet? How many predicted the end of the Soviet Union? How many can predict developments in Ukraine?
“History is on our side” is not an argument, but a cudgel.
Yep. It’s nothing but a minor variation on “God is on our side!” X-D
Don’t use it then. :-)
Arguing about preferences (=opinions, =values) is pretty pointless.