A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply rooted those sources of sympathy where in American elite intellectual tradition.
He basically thought he needed to eliminate some foreign sources of corruption and that he would be helped rather than sabotaged by well meaning Americans in positions of great power at least after they where made aware of the extent of the problem. He was wrong. For his quest to have been less quixotic he would have needed to basically remake the entire country (and at that point in time, the peak of American power that basically meant by extension the remaking of the entire West).
Let’s suppose—for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise—that you’re right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration—even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy’s time—was not such a bad thing?
Let’s suppose—for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise—that you’re right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers.
I don’t think there is much dispute on the large scale of communist infiltration at the time, though obviously it isn’t often mentioned or emphasised. One can however make a good case that what is by some interpreted as communist sympathy wasn’t really such. One say easily use the same standards that are often used when declaring some historical figure had Fascist connections or sympathies, to go on and prove that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists. :) I think such a standard is pretty silly one though, both for fascism and communism.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration—even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy’s time—was not such a bad thing?
Sure why not. The US of the 1950s is a shining gem of what well meaning technocrats can do for the middle class. One can either credit them for it, or say it would have been even better without them, that is open to debate. But hindsight bias is at play here I think. The Cold War period could easily have ended in a horrible way, including the end of the modern civilization. We where very lucky.
If you looked at Stalin’s USSR in the 1950s, knew about the Gulags, the famines of the 1930s, the atrocities of the Russian Civil war, the mass graves of Eastern Europe and the aggressive foreign policy (remember Finland and how they basically divided up Poland with Hitler?) now freshly armed with nuclear weapons (developed with the significant aid of spies in the US leaking the tech!)...
Isn’t fearing the potentially catastrophic outcome of Communist sympathy and infiltration a really understandable position to hold?
I think such a standard is a pretty silly one though, both for fascism and communism.
Me too. I’m not sure why you even bring it up.
The Cold War period could easily have ended in a horrible way
It certainly could, but what does that have to do with the question at issue here? Are you suggesting that a US filled with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers was more likely to turn the Cold War into a civilization-ending catastrophe? I’d have thought (perhaps naively) that if there was so much communist sympathy at such high levels that it’s not flat-out insane to say “that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists” then that would have made large-scale war with the USSR less likely, rather than more.
Isn’t fearing the potentially catastrophic outcome [...] a really understandable position to hold?
It certainly is. I think you may be mistaking the point I’m making, which isn’t actually “so being filled with Communist infiltrators isn’t so bad after all” but “so, are you really sure the world looks the way it would if the 1950s USA were full of Communist infiltrators?”.
Because it often is used when talking about fascism.
It certainly is. I think you may be mistaking the point I’m making, which isn’t actually “so being filled with Communist infiltrators isn’t so bad after all” but “so, are you really sure the world looks the way it would if the 1950s USA were full of Communist infiltrators?”.
Well we know they had enough infiltrators to steal detailed info about a superweapon for starters, so I’d tend to say: Yes, it does.
I’d have thought (perhaps naively) that if there was so much communist sympathy at such high levels that it’s not flat-out insane to say “that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists” then that would have made large-scale war with the USSR less likely, rather than more.
I think it could have escalated to one however. China was for quite a while in the unfortunate situation of having a few nuclear weapons but not enough for MAD. The Soviet Union did have enough to wipe China off the map.
enough infiltrators to steal detailed info about a superweapon
That would be … one infiltrator?
(Of course I’m not suggesting that there was only ever one Communist infiltrator in the US. Of course there were more. Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.)
Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.
I’m Russian, and I can say that the “capitalist infiltrators” were, in a mirror reflection of the situation in the US, just a subset—a really large subset—of Soviet intelligentsia; their memes were “human rights” and “peaceful coexistence” and such on a far-mode level, and the feeling that a society that’s so much wealthier and more comfortable to live in must be the “right” one on a near-mode level. And they did help dismantle the USSR when the hour struck. What followed is complicated.
(Dear Reader: doesn’t this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such “Soviet influences” or “Soviet subversion”, so that it doesn’t appear in their writings as simply the Other, an unexamined nefarious force?)
EDIT: Vlad has already made a disclaimer that’s kind of useful. That’s very nice of him, although I’d really like to see some actual examination of the USSR from him. Think of which, I don’t think he ever publicly examined the Socialist ideology in detail, despite the numerous times he denounced some of its particular results.
doesn’t this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such “Soviet influences” or “Soviet subversion”,
Keep in mind that the memes the USSR was using for memetic warfare were not always the same ones it was using for internal propaganda.
Yup, but the people making both external and internal propaganda must have been influenced by some memes, whether USSR-mainstream, radical, doublethink-heavy or even disapproved ones. I want someone who’s denouncing Soviet/communist influence to look at what the people at the source of that influence thought, in detail.
It’s a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole “McCarthyist” reaction (a.k.a. the “Second Red Scare”) did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it’s always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
McCarthyism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that unelected and/or extra-governmental officials should be responsible to elected officials.
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal,
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit.
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
McCarthyists [...] did want to make Communism disreputable
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to get classified as promoting “hate” by the SPLC.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
By the way, did you know that the media assault on [McCarthy] was in fact CIA-orchestrated?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions.
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
ever since the New Deal
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history)
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
“Our civilization this and our civilization that.”
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise
** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneselfandnature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual.
And even said so:
improvements in the sense you have defined
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Prosperity is the state of flourishing, thriving, good fortune and / or successful social status. [1] Prosperity often encompasses wealth but also includes others factors which are independent of wealth to varying degrees, such as happiness and health.
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
and more
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time?
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
“The rate of increase in the mean fitness of any organism at any time ascribable to natural selection acting through changes in gene frequencies is exactly equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time”
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier.
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so. (And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical [...] in the Western world it can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
And if you look to policies preferred by the McCarthy and other hardcore cold warriors (WW3 or ceaseless Vietnam and Afgan-like wars all over the world) and value life and well-being of non-Americans, every one of the 205 or 78 or 57 communists on Tailgunner Joe’s list deserved to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, together with equivalent awards of all nations of Eurasia.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration—even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy’s time—was not such a bad thing?
It’s hard to weigh these kinds of alternative histories. Given their strategy of supporting protest movements, and indeed, getting in front of every parade they could, I’m sure they lended impetus to a number of good movements. On the other hand, when they got out in front of the movements, they would alter the course of the movements. Whether the net perturbation was good depends on your values, and the empirical facts of how large and in what direction those perturbations were.
Me, I’m not very fond of communism, so I find the lingering effects of their ideology harmful.
On the other hand, when they got out in front of the movements, they would alter the course of the movements.
Alter to what? You are implying some sort of underhanded maneuvering that I not sure ever actually occurred.
After Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr was moving to topics of that are still controversial today—like ending the Vietnam War and ending pervasive poverty. As you say, one’s the net effect of that change depends on one’s prior values. More importantly, I think these types of change were organic to the movement that King was leading, not imposed from above.
Instead of imply, I’ll just state that they supported movements to further their own interests, which were not identical with the interest of the followers of those movements.
I don’t disagree that leaders like Ralph Nader or Martin Luther King advocated for what they thought was a good idea, which might not have a close relationship with what the followers would necessarily articulate as goals.
What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I’m particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn’t.
What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I’m particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn’t.
I don’t think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn’t help.
A better example to answer Tim’s question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Don’t get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond’s narrative.
First, his ideological concept of “suicidalism” is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology—with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic—and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)
Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion—in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow—was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it’s very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way.
At that point, I’m not sure that there’s anything left of the article that isn’t better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
Thanks for the link. Whatever the merits of post-modern thought, I don’t think King was a post-modernist. Assuming that the FBI was right to monitor him, what did he do to further the Communist agenda?
And I don’t really agree that your link was a fair minded view of post-modernism, or that it was a poison-meme from the Soviet Union.
According to this article, postmodernism seems to be, in its barest essence, a form of impiousiconoclasm as applied to the analysis of traditional concepts. It’s a very honoured tradition in Western Philosophy: in one century of democracy, the Athenians managed to practically destroy their entire body of traditions by discovering the base, petty group interests behind the so-called “sacred” and “natural” laws of their City.
Let me just say that I don’t think that post-modernism can be thought of as Socratic iconoclasm. I think it has valuable insights, many of which have been co-opted by more “rationalist” philosophy.
For example, I don’t think Michel Foucault can profitably be described as a nihilist. And whatever his sympathies to the Soviet Union (it appears that it was different at different stages of his life), I think the idea that he was generating poison-memes on behalf of the Soviet Union is ludicrous.
I would downvote your post because of the way its statements seem to be disjointed to each other, but I’d rather not have your post go below threshold, so I’ll directly ask you:
Why do you not think that post-modernism can be thought of as a form of methodological and cultural iconoclasm, and in hwat measure do you think it is not comparaabe to the efforts of Socrates and his contemporaries… and the backlash they suffered because of it.
What are those valuable insights you talk of, and what is that quote “ratonalist” unquote philosophy that has coopted many of them?
Why would Foulcault be described as a nihilist?
You are aware that Appeal to Ridicule advances the discussion excatly nowhere. Why do you think the fact that he was “spreading poision memes on behalf of the Soviet Union” to be remarkably unlikely and incongruous?
I find myself very very confused by this article. There are too many priors we don’t seem to share, too much inferential distance I need to jump. What is the American Way of Life, and what is this “Lockean individualism” he keeps talking about? How is anywhing Bin Laden said comparable to the contents of “Z Magazine”, which appears to be an amusingly old-fashioned doctrinal Marxist publication? He talks a lot about past events I’m unfamiliar with, and sources I haven’t read (yet).
The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.
Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author’s priors to the test, since he clearly didn’t bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.
EDIT: Wooooow comment thread. That is long. Would you recommend reading it?
Also these lines from the Deceleration of Independence are decent summary.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the “right” to goodies from the government.
Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author’s priors to the test, since he clearly didn’t bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.
I’m not sure you understand what he means, he’s not claiming that the all the Paris rioters were motivated by jihad (although that’s probably a larger component than you’d care to admit) any more than all the Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters were motivated by jihad. Nevertheless, the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much moreIslamicfundamentalist. Similarly, the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence and those organizations do promote the Islamization of society.
Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the “right” to goodies from the government.
Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch: if one assumes that the current Governments are acting as merely enablers and administrators of a corporate power that would stand between them and their rights to Life (nationalized healthcare, the right to the minimum amount of resources to survive whether you want to work or not), Liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children), and the pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn’t provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one’s family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work). I guess we should praise the Founding Fathers for the foersight they put in their work, and having made it as flexible as it is.
That said, it is indeed sad how doctrinal Marxism has shown an absolutely deplorable disregard for the rights and interests of anyone who wasn’t a proletarian. Luckily, democratist, egalitarian movements have predated and outlived Marxism, being born of a sensibility that is beyond mere memetic and mimetic propagation.
By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter? A search in google mostly turns out the blog you linked to, Youtube comments, and some right-wing blogs. It does not seem to be a very widespread word… could you allay my suspicions that it isn’t a buzzword? (I don’t say this in a spirit of mockery, I am genuinely curious).
that’s probably a larger component than you’d care to admit
I’d like you to source the priors that allow you to assess such a probability. As a Muslim, and someone who was in close contact with those movements throughout, I do not recall a single source phrasing the conflict in religious terms.
the Islamization of society
What does that entail, exactly, and why is this a bad thing? I’m not assuming it is a good or bad thing, I just want to know why you think it would be.
the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist.
Typical case of reversed stupidity. As I think I have already mentioned somewhere on this thread, you will observe that once people believe themselves free of the yokes of their oppressors, and their oppressors’ agents, the same people will tend to feel attracted to said oppressors’ designated enemies (regardless of the details of the nature of said enmity, or its truth beyond rhetorics). In the Wars of Religion, it was Protestantism, in the Cold War, it was the USSR, and in The War on Terror, well, it’s the guys with the beards advocating the return to an idealized, pure past, and the rights of the common man against the foreign oppressor, again: they’re just wearing a different hat.
the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence
Maybe applying the right-left label here is a mistake: maybe it’s a “left wing” thing in Britain, but in France it’s more of a “right wing” thing: the French left has a bit of a vendetta against religion in any way shape or form, and thinks the “goodies” of the Goverment (and its funds) shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch:
Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough “interpretation”, as you proceed to do in the next paragraph. Also I shown mention that Jefferson broke with what one might call “orthodox Lockeanism” by substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property”.
elimination of censorship and surveillance
Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they’re the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.
By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter?
A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.
A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.
Yes, I know, I have read that article in full, but I still didn’t understand the delimitations of that definition.
Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough “interpretation”, as you proceed to do in the next paragraph.
You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn’t legitimate.
Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they’re the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.
However, I suppose all power units, be they political, economical, or otherwise, will try to get their hands on as much information as they can get away with, while denying it to others. They will also be hypocritically outraged that other power units censor and suveil them. Hardly something endemic to Marxism, regretfully enough. One would argue that the ultimate elimination of censorship and surveilance is simply the complete empowerment of the general public to censor and surveil everyone else: all your words and actions are known to everyone, and no-one dares step out of line. Truly a Tyranny of the Public, if the Public isn’t memetically equipped to resist the temptation.
In case you thought otherwise, I am not suggesting the American Consitution or the Declaration of Independence are tweakable to accomodate leftism. More the opposite: that a leftism that respects individual rights can be Consitution-compliant.
You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn’t legitimate.
Well, yes. I particularly object to your redefinition of the word “liberty”.
liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children)
pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn’t provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one’s family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work)
Also notice that it says “pursuit of Happiness” and simply “Happiness”, i.e., the government shouldn’t get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn’t obliged actively assist you.
he government shouldn’t get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn’t obliged actively assist you.
Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn’t actually helping you be happy in any particular way, they just make sure you are able to pursue whatever would make you happy.
Of course, that’s not Marxism: Marx would have said that “from each in accordance with their capacity, to each according tot their necessity”, which I think is utterly dumb: who’s going to decide how much ouput one is capable of, or where one’s needs stop?
Of course, if your notion of happiness is, say, to be someone’s slave, the government shouldn’t get in the way of you pursuing that. I’d be curious to see how many people do choose slavery over freedom.
Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn’t forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness. But then you could just reject their help, right?
Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn’t actually helping you be happy in any particular way,
Yes it is. It’s forcing the employer to hire you.
Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn’t forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness.
Speaking of the topic of “generating poision memes”, I think that, since part of our endeavour would involve the deconstruction and destruction of propaganda and its pernicious enabling of “nationalism”, “groupism”, “collectivism” or however else we may call it, it might be interesting to study contemporary Think Tanks and their strategies with as much diligence and interest as those institutions of the past that this deeply interesting (if sometimes objectionable) article mentions.
For a rationalist to be able to function properly as a citizen, and defy the expectation that they would enclose themselves in ivory towers, unconcerned with the affairs of foolish mortals, one must develop tools to identify and deconstruct “poison memes” as soon as they come in contact with them, without having to rely on analysts who are ideologically indentured to the group opposing the creators of those memes, since they would in turn spread “poison memes” of their own.
A seeker of truth that would bounce between these sources would not find said truth, but only confusion piling upon confusion, save if they perform a truly exhausting effort of mental analysis and cross-referencing. As Descartes might have put it, partisan works do contain many excellent and true precepts, but these are mixed in with so much other harmful or superfluous stuff that it is almost as difficult to separate out the truth from the rest as it is to pull a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble by separating out the wanted goddess-shaped marble from the unwanted remainder.
Hence I think developing a toolset to see through politically-motivated memes, if not outright cataloguing and properly sourcing them, would be a worthy task to undertake. If not by us, then by some other, specialized organ, that would be equally commited to the advancement of correct epistemology and mental hygiene.
Note: I want to make it clear that I do not think said article is entirely without merit. Far from that. I have seen some of the very stupid memes therein described existing in left-winger people I know, such as one of my dearest friends saying that, were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed. I was so shocked I could have slapped him then and there. (As a representative of said Third World (and of freaking reason for that matter) I explained to him that that was a preposterous notion,)
Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not “catch” this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda, but came to it on his own entirely. You see, not all pernicious ideas need to be taught (what a wonderful world would it be if they were): sometimes they arouse in parallel, in different people, because they make the same fundamental thinking mistakes, starting from similar but widespread faulty priors. Such as the ideas that:
a criminal should own up to their crimes and allow themselves to be punished, that victims have a right to violent vengeance
that by allowing injustice without speaking out against it one is automatically an accomplice,
that this notion could possibly be valid on the level of an entire country (I blame the Nurnberg trials for that meme),
that punishment can be dealt by proxy.
If the brutal, violent exploitation of the Third World by the colonial powers is seen as a crime, a mind equipped with the aforementioned memes would, with a high probablity, come up with this idiotic idea, without any Soviet prompting at all! Heck, not even those memes could be seen as Soviet-generated, they predate the USSR by far, heck, they probably predate dirt.
As for the horrors of colonialism are undeniable historical fact, and their criminalization seems to have been hardly a matter of left-versus-right, and more of a matter of much more diverse “nationalisms”, including literal Nationalisms, and one country calling out another for a crime the likes of which their own forces proceed to commit immediately, and which they vigorously deny or ignore, when called out in turn. At some point, internationally-minded people, such as, say, humanists, seem to have come up with the conclusion that those are all crimes.
Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not “catch” this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda,
Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.
but came to it on his own entirely.
I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature. Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.
Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.
But then wouldn’t their work automatically be a part of said literature?
Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.
I do find it amazing how many people who are clearly parroting memes without much personal input claim to have come up with them themselves. I for one like to give credit where credit is due.
I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature.
What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts? Because at this rate you’re starting to sound like my “Protocols of the Sages of Zion” reading uncle, who thinks everything the West does is the result of Zionist lobbying, Zionist subversion, and the Zionist conspiracy to sap and destroy our precious bodily fluids. Sorry, not bodily fluids, I mean our precious way of life, our intellectual integrity, the patriotic/religious fervour of our youth, the unity and freedom of the Islamic peoples, etc. etc. etc. . By sapping and neutering it and precipitating its decadence with their filthy propaganda spread through media manipulation and the aid of servile, self-hating intellectuals, them and other sorts of useful idiots. Only to replace it with their own, self serving work, that will render us impotent to resist their tyranny. Sounds familiar?
Hey, actually, the more I think about it, the more this pattern reemerges. I can think of examples from Ancient Greece! Ever heard of a guy named Pausanias? Maybe we could write an interesting article out of this! I genuinely feel we’re onto something.
What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts?
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that “were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed” on his own or my theory that those memes ultimately descend from communist propaganda.
Because at this rate you’re starting to sound like my “Protocols of the Sages of Zion” reading uncle,
Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that “were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed” on his own
No, that’s mytestimony. I’m asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.
Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.
Yes, well, doesn’t it trouble you that maybe Eric Raymond and others like him are being victims of a similar process, given the many remarkable parallels between their discourses, modulo Hated-Enemy-Of-The-Day?
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that “were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed” on his own
I’m asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.
Then why didn’t anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?
From what little I know, I blame, at the latest, Widrow Wilson and the notion of self-determination, i.e. the USA making a power-grab after WWI was over and declaring that Imperialism is, in fact, evil. Followed by WWII and the total, ideological war against an enemy whose entire ideology revolved around the most extreme nationalism possible, leading to everyone embracing diverse forms of Reversing that Stupidity, one of them being Anti-Patriotism. But we can go further back, like, say, Kant’s insane pacifism (what agenda might he have been possibly pushing?), or even much further back, to the Bible. Egypt deserved to be destroyed by the Plague, and its army wiped by the sea, because they refused to set the oppressed Hebrews free, and it was right for God to do so. I do find it amusing that so few Jewish and Christian hegemonies would see themselves in the role of Egypt, nor wonder whether that’s a good place to stand, until so late in the XXth century. You’d think the comparison would be obvious.
A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply rooted those sources of sympathy where in American elite intellectual tradition.
My impression of the situation (which has not been extensively researched) is that, although there really were plenty of spies and such, McCarthy’s methods were largely ineffective at identifying them. Is my impression accurate?
A rationalist has a hard time not reviewing history from that period and concluding that for all intents and purposes McCarthy was right about the extent of communist infiltration and may have indeed grossly underestimated and misunderstood the nature of intellectual sympathies for communism and how deeply rooted those sources of sympathy where in American elite intellectual tradition.
He basically thought he needed to eliminate some foreign sources of corruption and that he would be helped rather than sabotaged by well meaning Americans in positions of great power at least after they where made aware of the extent of the problem. He was wrong. For his quest to have been less quixotic he would have needed to basically remake the entire country (and at that point in time, the peak of American power that basically meant by extension the remaking of the entire West).
Let’s suppose—for I am no expert on the history, nor am I well placed to evaluate your expertise—that you’re right, and that indeed the US in the early 1950s was stuffed with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers. And that McCarthy was not successful in changing this situation.
It seems to me that the US did rather well for itself over those years and the ones that followed, in terms of prosperity and progress and international influence and happiness and just about any other metric you might care to name.
Would our hypothetical history-reviewing rationalist, then, also conclude that communist infiltration—even on the grand scale you say it achieved in McCarthy’s time—was not such a bad thing?
I don’t think there is much dispute on the large scale of communist infiltration at the time, though obviously it isn’t often mentioned or emphasised. One can however make a good case that what is by some interpreted as communist sympathy wasn’t really such. One say easily use the same standards that are often used when declaring some historical figure had Fascist connections or sympathies, to go on and prove that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists. :) I think such a standard is pretty silly one though, both for fascism and communism.
Sure why not. The US of the 1950s is a shining gem of what well meaning technocrats can do for the middle class. One can either credit them for it, or say it would have been even better without them, that is open to debate. But hindsight bias is at play here I think. The Cold War period could easily have ended in a horrible way, including the end of the modern civilization. We where very lucky.
If you looked at Stalin’s USSR in the 1950s, knew about the Gulags, the famines of the 1930s, the atrocities of the Russian Civil war, the mass graves of Eastern Europe and the aggressive foreign policy (remember Finland and how they basically divided up Poland with Hitler?) now freshly armed with nuclear weapons (developed with the significant aid of spies in the US leaking the tech!)...
Isn’t fearing the potentially catastrophic outcome of Communist sympathy and infiltration a really understandable position to hold?
Me too. I’m not sure why you even bring it up.
It certainly could, but what does that have to do with the question at issue here? Are you suggesting that a US filled with communist infiltrators and communism-sympathizers was more likely to turn the Cold War into a civilization-ending catastrophe? I’d have thought (perhaps naively) that if there was so much communist sympathy at such high levels that it’s not flat-out insane to say “that the US at the time was a Communist country in the sense of being run by Communists” then that would have made large-scale war with the USSR less likely, rather than more.
It certainly is. I think you may be mistaking the point I’m making, which isn’t actually “so being filled with Communist infiltrators isn’t so bad after all” but “so, are you really sure the world looks the way it would if the 1950s USA were full of Communist infiltrators?”.
Because it often is used when talking about fascism.
Well we know they had enough infiltrators to steal detailed info about a superweapon for starters, so I’d tend to say: Yes, it does.
It didn’t seem to do much for making war between the USSR and China less likley.
Yes, but it never was a nuclear war.
I think it could have escalated to one however. China was for quite a while in the unfortunate situation of having a few nuclear weapons but not enough for MAD. The Soviet Union did have enough to wipe China off the map.
That would be … one infiltrator?
(Of course I’m not suggesting that there was only ever one Communist infiltrator in the US. Of course there were more. Plenty of capitalist infiltrators in the USSR too, no doubt.)
I’m Russian, and I can say that the “capitalist infiltrators” were, in a mirror reflection of the situation in the US, just a subset—a really large subset—of Soviet intelligentsia; their memes were “human rights” and “peaceful coexistence” and such on a far-mode level, and the feeling that a society that’s so much wealthier and more comfortable to live in must be the “right” one on a near-mode level. And they did help dismantle the USSR when the hour struck. What followed is complicated.
(Dear Reader: doesn’t this sort of thing make you feel that Vlad and others should more seriously inspect the real culture, politics and ideology of the USSR when talking about such “Soviet influences” or “Soviet subversion”, so that it doesn’t appear in their writings as simply the Other, an unexamined nefarious force?)
EDIT: Vlad has already made a disclaimer that’s kind of useful. That’s very nice of him, although I’d really like to see some actual examination of the USSR from him. Think of which, I don’t think he ever publicly examined the Socialist ideology in detail, despite the numerous times he denounced some of its particular results.
Keep in mind that the memes the USSR was using for memetic warfare were not always the same ones it was using for internal propaganda.
Yup, but the people making both external and internal propaganda must have been influenced by some memes, whether USSR-mainstream, radical, doublethink-heavy or even disapproved ones. I want someone who’s denouncing Soviet/communist influence to look at what the people at the source of that influence thought, in detail.
More importantly, communist “nationalism” isn’t quite the same as communist collaboration, or any other form of “treason”.
It’s a much more complex question. For start, while Joe McCarthy himself is the greatest individual symbol of this whole period, there were many other crucial people and events in which he played no role. (For example, the Hiss affair, arguably the very central event of the whole era, had happened before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
Now, the whole “McCarthyist” reaction (a.k.a. the “Second Red Scare”) did have some significant influence on things. After all, the U.S. back then still had some strong and functional institutions of democracy and federalism, and the Washington elites were in genuine fear of politicians who were riding on people’s (quite reasonable) anger against the worst outrages of the New Deal regime. This clash was resolved with the complete defeat of these politicians, who were either destroyed and consigned to infamy, like McCarthy, or eventually lost their edge and got assimilated into the establishment, like Nixon. But the blow they delivered did have a significant influence in altering the course of events in a number of different ways.
(By the way, Moldbug has written a very insightful analysis of McCarthyism as the last dying gasp of meaningful representative democracy in the U.S.)
As for the U.S. prospering in the 1950s and 1960s despite all this, it’s always futile to discuss historical counterfactuals. There are way too many confounding factors involved, not the least of which is that in the 20th century, the benefits of technological progress for living standards tended to exceed the damage by bad government in all but the most extreme cases, making it hard to speculate on what might have happened without the latter. (Also, due to a confluence of lucky technological and social factors, the period in question happened to place low- and medium-skilled labor in industrialized countries in an exceptionally favorable situation.)
(Note that if it hadn’t been for the empirical example of the Western world across the Iron Curtain, people in the Communist countries 30 years ago could also claim, as an argument in favor of the system, that their standard of living was higher than a century earlier. Also, just like in those countries it was dangerous to be too critical of the alleged great progress achieved, nowadays in the Western world it is can also be quite dangerous for one’s reputation to question the results of some of the contemporary grand narratives of progress.)
Could you give a few examples of those worst outrages?
I can’t say I find it very convincing. In particular, he writes (and I think this claim is central to his argument, in so far as there actually is an argument)
which seems to me rather like saying “Intelligent Design, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the education establishment should be responsive to the opinions of the parents of the children it’s educating”, or “Communism, in neutral language, is the irrational belief that the marginal utility of money decreases with wealth”. That is, yes that’s part of it, but it’s far from all of it, and it’s not the bit that people actually get upset about, and pretending otherwise is just silly.
McCarthyism was the belief that unelected officials should be accountable to elected ones. And that that accountability extended to having them fired for having Communist connections. And that this applied not only to unelected government officials, but movie-makers and teachers and union leaders and so forth. And that “having Communist connections” should be interpreted very broadly indeed.
So it seems to me, anyway. I’m very willing to be informed better—but I’d like, y’know, some actual evidence.
Have in mind that the New Deal and WW2 are at the very heart of the political myth of the modern U.S. (and the whole modern West by extension). Demythologizing this part of history is extremely difficult, since huge inferential distances have to be bridged and much counter-evidence to the mainstream view must be marshalled before it’s possible to establish a reasonable discussion with someone who is familiar only with the mainstream view, even assuming maximum open-mindedness and good faith on both sides.
(In fact, one of the reasons for McCarthyists’ seemingly obsessive focus on Communist infiltration was that although they perceived correctly at some level that the problem was much deeper, they never dared to proceed with any further serious attack on the whole grand sacred myth of FDR’s regime. The Communism issue was a convenient thing to latch onto in their struggle against the New Deal establishment, since it was by itself an extremely powerful argument but didn’t require questioning any of the central untouchable sacred legacies. In a way, FDR managed to play the ultimate head-game with all future American right-wingers by wrapping his legacy into the image of a great war leader whom someone strongly patriotic can’t despise without feeling disloyal. Sometimes this leads to grimly amusing stories, like when a few years ago American veterans protested over a new WW2 memorial that featured a bust of Stalin along with FDR and Churchill.)
The least controversial examples, however, are those related to the American cooperation with the Soviets during WW2 and in the immediate post-war period, many of which go far beyond any plausible claims of strategic necessity. Some of them are in the “outrage” territory by any reasonable meaning of the term, like for example the Katyn massacre coverup or the Operation Keelhaul. Another example, which was perhaps the principal impetus for McCarthyism in practice, was the handling of the civil war in China (see the OB post I linked elsewhere).
In a sense, you are right. It would be fair to say that the McCarthyists—again, using the term loosely, not specifically for McCarthy and his personal sympathizers—did want to make Communism disreputable in a similar way in which racism is nowadays. For a brief while, they had some success—some people’s careers were seriously damaged due to their supposed Communist connections, much like many people’s careers are damaged nowadays due to their supposed racist beliefs or connections. And indeed, as always happens when ideological passions are rife, there were some overbroad interpretations of Communist connections and sympathies. (Just like today it’s by no means necessary to be a card-carrying neo-Nazi to be accused, with serious consequences, of “racism” and “hate.”)
On the other hand, the McCarthyists were by no means the first ones to start with such hardball ideological politics. FDR’s regime certainly didn’t use any gentler methods to destroy its own ideological opponents, and the tactics that were used against McCarthy and other similar figures of the period were also every bit as dirty from day one. (By the way, did you know that the media assault on him was in fact CIA-orchestrated?)
So, on the whole, it shows a huge lack of perspective if you believe that McCarthyism was somehow novel or unique in pushing the idea that people’s careers, especially public careers, should suffer if they commit certain ideological transgressions. That has been a permanent feature of American society ever since the New Deal, and the only question was who would get to wield the ideological hegemony and determine these bounds of acceptability. Therefore, I don’t think it’s justified to define McCarthyism by this aspect, when in fact it merely meant acceptance of the already established rules of the game. Sure, you may want to condemn all sides from some idealistic perspective, but believing that McCarthyism was really exceptional in this regard is merely buying into the propaganda of the winning side.
With that in mind, I do think it’s accurate to see the struggle of elected politicians against the permanent bureaucracy (and its close allies in the media, academia, etc.), and the defeat of the former that firmly confirmed the dominance of the latter, as the central and most important element of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
Actually that’s far from original. Obtaining great victories for the advancement of your power unit is a great way to take control at a very hearts-and-minds level and memetically and without further effort brand all opposition or even serious criticism as traitorous to the cause of the power unit. De Gaulle did it (with limited but still substantial success), Churchill did it, Lenin did it, Ben-Gurion did it, Patton tried to do it but got shot, same for MLK and Julius Caesar (but Augustus succeeded and lived to enjoy it), Gandhi did it, Hassan II of Morocco did it, and every tinpot strongman dictator tries to invoke it even though they never stepped on a battlefield!.
It does feel liberating to express this fact so bluntly, though, especially in the cases of Churchill, FDR, and De Gaulle.
You mean to say it wasn’t even before that, or that it is in any way exclusive to American society, as opposed to every society in the planet save for very specific corners of the Internet?
It didn’t even let Churchill win reelection right after the war ended.
No, but he became a freaking legend, and I don’t remember coming across any serious criticism of his regime or his ideology, beyond the most timid whimpers that he might have been a little too enthusiastic about the whole ordeal, or that he might have been a little bit racist.
By the way, politics in Britain remain a huge mystery to me, what with the lack of actual changes in regime or in written constitution. Could anyone point me to any work that would give me a coherent narrative of the events, generally speaking?
This, however, didn’t translate into having his policies implemented.
Britain has regime changes they’re just peaceful.
As for violent regime changes, Britain has had those, just not recently.
The word regime usually means “the overall structure of the government” or “a period of legal and administrative continuity”—not just a particular cabinet or party in power. It’s misleading to refer to a General Election as a change of regime.
That might be what people mean, but I think Eugine is right in his implicit statement that the common understanding is not a natural kind in terms of political analysis.
Of course. Most terms in politics are socially constructed, not natural. They have meaning because we have collectively agreed to use them in some particular ways. It impedes communication to use them in a non-standard way without being clear about the nonstandard use. Hence, I commented to flag it.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Um… Orwell? :)
Sure, but I meant something more specific in FDR’s case. Basically, any post-WW2 American right-winger (by which I mean someone whose values and beliefs are roughly in line with what’s commonly understood as “right-wing” in the American context) is in a position where his values and beliefs would naturally lead him to a strongly negative overall view of FDR—except for FDR’s role as a great war leader, where his patriotism will lead him to feel like it would be treasonably unpatriotic to condemn FDR and examine critically the whole mythical legacy of WW2. This has indeed been a source of major cognitive dissonance for the entire post-WW2 American right, and one of the reasons why it could never come up with anything resembling a coherent and practical ideology. (The previously discussed 1950s era McCarthyists being one example.)
Of course, there have been some right-wingers who have bit the bullet, condemned FDR, and went on to attack the sacred myth of his legacy head-on. However, these have never been more than a marginal phenomenon, and in fact, such tendencies have always been a surefire way to get oneself ostracized from the respectable mainstream of the American conservatism.
The key difference is that in the pre-New Deal American society, the norms to which one was supposed to conform were determined at the local level. The enforcement of conformity was indeed often quite severe and unforgiving, and it ranged anywhere from just shunning to extralegal retaliation by the local law enforcement to downright mob violence, up to and including lynching. However, it was completely local in character, and one always had the option of moving to a different town or state where the local opinion would be more to one’s liking.
The New Deal was an innovation in that it established the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure for ideological enforcement on the nation-wide scale, not just directly through the vastly expanded federal government, but also through its myriad tentacles that have since then grabbed just about every institution of organized society, both state and private. Of course, this control has been much gentler than the previous localism, and, thanks to the enormous wealth it commands, this system has been able to afford using carrots more than sticks. However, it has also led to an utterly dreadful intellectual uniformity compared to what had existed before.
(To be precise, there had been some precedents before that, but they were all short and happened during exceptional wartime situations. The New Deal however established it as a permanent and regular feature.)
I don’t see what’s “dreadful” about it: I’m fairly happy I can go do some tourism in the Deep South without fearing getting lynched after dark. That said, how do you think the Age of the Internet affects this ideological uniformity?
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to get into any race issues, but merely to discuss the prevailing norms of public discourse. In many places in the U.S. a century ago, I can well imagine that spiting the local public opinion too heavily might get you in really bad trouble, including even mob violence. Nowadays this is no longer the case, but such improvements come at a cost. Instead of a bunch of places with different standards in which different things are permitted and forbidden, you get the same standard imposed everywhere. Hence the present uniformity.
Of course, judging these changes is ultimately a matter of personal opinion, value, and preference. If you believe that the ideological standards of public discourse, academic scholarship, etc. that are presently imposed across the Western world are merely promoting truth and common sense, clearly you’ll see the present situation as a vast improvement. If you seriously disagree with them, however, you may well prefer a world in which there is a patchwork of places, where in some of them your opinions might get you in serious trouble, but in others you’d be free to discuss them in respectable venues—even if the present standards are not enforced by any sort of draconian penalties, but mostly by ostracism, marginalization, and career damage.
The effect is twofold. On the one hand, it has given rise to various obscure venues in which extremely interesting contrarian opinions can be read. These are however read by tiny audiences and written by people who are either anonymous or, for whatever reason, don’t have much to lose in terms of further marginalization and public opprobrium. Their influence on the mainstream opinion is effectively zero.
On the other hand, the internet is greatly increasing the pressure for ideological conformity, because it has vastly amplified all sorts of reputational damage. Once you’re on record for having expressed some disreputable opinion, this record will be instantly accessible to anyone who just types your name into a computer, forever and irreversibly. I think this is the strongest effect brought about by the internet, and it clearly goes towards strengthening of the ideological uniformity.
One also often reads opinions about how the internet is supposedly some big technological game-changer that’s somehow going to undermine the traditional institutions of public opinion. As far as I can tell, however, such arguments have never risen beyond sheer wishful thinking.
The trouble with such a setup is that it’s the people who are least protected from backlash for doing, speaking or being unapproved things who’d find it the hardest to move to a more ideologically friendly venue. Try telling e.g. a poor black family in 1920s Alabama that they “only” have to move to New York if they want to be treated less like second-class citizens! Oh, wait, wait, you said no race issues. OK, then, one meta-level up: a family of a known but poor egalitarian activist that also mingles a lot with “respectable” minority members—not (exclusively) because it seeks them out to signal its fashionable egalitarianism, but because everyone else truly is hostile to those and they have no-one of an equal economic stratum to turn to. I imagine that the vast majority of their middle-class neighbours would (at least) actively shun and spread gossip about them. At worst, they might get a burning cross in front of their home and such.
You’re losing sight of the topic. My remarks were not about the norms imposed on common people, but specifically about the ideological norms imposed on people in intellectual and governmental positions.
(Yes, I should admit that I’ve more or less projected the example above from today’s realities; it’s more plausible for lower-middle-class people to launch some kind of a community-changing venture now, due to new technology and all that.)
Nowdays, nearly anyone—either with an IQ above room temperature, or some creative trait that people like—can aspire to be an “intellectual” just by starting a blog; most people who are in a “position” like that would be very vulnerable, say, in China, where political discourse both on the left and on the right is strictly controlled.
Perhaps I’m confused, but it doesn’t look as if you actually gave a few concrete examples of outrages perpetrated by the “New Deal regime”. You mention “the Katyn massacre coverup”, which I’ll willingly agree was a Bad Thing but doesn’t seem to me to qualify as an “outrage” (and seems much better explained by wanting Stalin on-side for WW2 than by communist infiltration or approval of such massacres) and “the handling of the civil war in China”, on which AIUI the standard view is that the US supported the Nationalists. Reading the OB post to which you linked, and its associated comment thread, leaves me … unconvinced … that the standard view is wrong.
Communism was already disreputable. What was distinctive about McCarthy and his allies wasn’t that they disapproved of Communism, it was that they claimed there were an enormous number of Communist sympathizers and infiltrators around, and worked hard to get those people into trouble.
This seems like a strange analogy here. The SPLC, so far as I know, isn’t claiming that the people and organizations it criticizes are neo-Nazis or neo-Nazi sympathizers. It’s claiming that various entitles are “hate groups”, and there are varieties of hate other than Nazism. (I make no comment on how much of the time they are right; I just don’t see that there’s a good analogy between McCarthy saying “X is a Communist” when X isn’t a Communist, and the SPLC saying “Y is a hate group” when Y isn’t neo-Nazi. Because Communist = Communist, but hate group != neo-Nazi.
For me, whether an action is good or bad, or sensible or foolish, has scarcely anything to do with whether other people have done similar things before. Do you take a different view?
The link you give doesn’t make or support that claim. It does say (with an absolute absence of specificity about what they did) that the CIA attacked McCarthy, which is not the same thing. And the source it cites doesn’t seem super-credible, though perhaps you know more about its reliability than I do. (Incidentally, since you seem to think “But he started it!” a fair rejoinder in cases like this, I remark that according to the page you linked to the CIA’s attack on McCarthy was precipitated by McCarthy’s attack on the CIA.)
No, I don’t think that. I think that that idea was one of the distinctive features of McCarthyism. (Similarly: Christianity’s belief that a god exists is neither novel nor unique, but a purported summary of what Christianity is about that doesn’t mention that belief would be insane.)
Er. Are you suggesting that the idea of punishing people for ideological transgressions—which we agree was by no means invented by McCarthy—was in fact invented by the architects of “the New Deal”? Or that FDR’s administration was particularly given to doing this? If so, I would be very interested to see your evidence. -- Perhaps you’re merely saying that McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities were the rough equivalent of some anti-something-else activities engaged in by the FDR administration; if so, then again I would like some details.
Agreed, but keep in mind that the British, not the Americans, played the largest role in Keelhaul, such as rounding up the prisoners and deceiving them. And most of them, such as Lord Forgot-His-Name, who betrayed the White Cossacks (look it up), were hardly left-wingers—just scumbags.
(Generally speaking, Churchill, despite being extremely cynical and loathing Stalin, in practice made more concessions to him by way of appearsement and realpolitik than Roosevelt’s administration ever did—for all its supposed naivety and/or Communist sympathies)
You know, I’ve got to use this one sometime, with a straight face, just to see the reaction.
The thing is, it’s not completely wrong :-). (Except for the fact that that belief itself certainly isn’t irrational in any useful sense.)
Well, if I’m going to use this, I might as well ask for a little additional help, because I only have three credits of macroeconomics under my belt, and while I’m familiar with some of the meanings of the terms individually I’m not quite certain I understand what each of them means in this contexts.
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That’s a pretty huge more-or-less.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.
Without questioning them yourself, could you give examples of such grand narratives? I’m worried because, well, we in Less Wrong do buy into a particular grand narrative of progress.
I don’t know in whose name you’re speaking when you talk in first person plural. However, if I would have to point out one valuable insight from the whole of OB/LW, it’s that the kind of progress that is considered the least controversial and problematic one nowadays, and which is hailed as uniformly beneficial by a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum—namely, technological progress—in fact likely has some nasty surprises in store for us.
On the other hand, technological progress is a matter of objective and measurable accomplishment, not some grand moral narrative. For the sort of example you’re looking for, you can consider any major social change in recent centuries that is considered a matter of enlightenment and moral progress nowadays.
Well, there have been many dead-ends in political evolution, but at the end of the day and all things considered and between one thing and another, one can say that:
The law applies equally to everyone regardless of wealth, birth, sex, sexual preference, creed, etc. etc.
You don’t get punished retroactively.
Everyone is involved to some degree in lawmaking and policy decision.
Children having rights and being granted special protection.
The diffusion of barriers between in-groups and the progressive elimination of mutual exclusivity between them.
The Scientific Method, and its continuation in Modern Rationalism
The development in gender equality when it comes to rights and powers.
And so on and so forth.
Are actually healthy structural improvements in a society, and make it more fit to achieve any goal it sets its collective mind to. At least in terms of productivity, both economical and intellectual. It’s also better at averting the Original Position Fallacy: the less the original position matters over your skills to keep it, the better the distribution of powers in terms of competence and work capacity (not accounting for the frightful overhead wasted in power-jockeying, but that can be moderated in a society where people are properly equipped to assess their own competence and that of others, so that they don’t aim for a position they weren’t capable of keeping).
See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Except for the scientific method, I could take pretty much any of these examples and show that—even assuming complete agreement on values, which by itself means almost begging the question—the contemporary narrative of progress rests on the twin pillars of ignorance (or falsification) of actual history and arbitrary assignment of weight to trends that have gone in opposite directions. (And even for the scientific method, it can be argued that the contemporary official academic science is in far worse shape than the scientific community a century or two ago.)
Now, it is true that one can criticize certain narratives of progress without raising too much controversy. For example, I could dispute your first two points by arguing that the modern Western legal systems place common people in a far worse position than what their theoretical high principles would suggest, so much that, by some reasonable measures, the system is in fact more capricious, cruel, and unjust than what existed in the past. (However, it would be more difficult to get away with saying that the attempts to enforce some of these contemporary high principles, rather than insufficient vigor and consistency in enforcing them, are in fact among the causes of these problems.) On the other hand, for many other narratives of progress, any similar argument would quickly brand the speaker as unfit for polite society.
I actually think most of the items on your list are not of this kind, but rather expensive concessions to our increasingly forager mindset.
Fundamentally all the evidence I have encountered so far in favour of these being improvements in the sense you have defined (and make no mistake I have been exposed to the arguments nearly my entire life and have indeed sought out to study them and even reconstruct better arguments from their corpses) seems to boil down to looking around the world and see these sorts of things as causing prosperity and other nice things, because they tend to correlate with them. But there is nothing preventing us from saying the same of obesity and other diseases of civilization! What we are doing here is irrationally privileging such a hypothesis, engaging in wishful thinking, because we (now) like democracy or the state having more resources to manage children’s lives and don’t like obesity or substance abuse, we apply differing standards when thinking about what makes our civilization “more formidable”. Don’t get me wrong I like many of the other things on your list, but I am highly confident at least a few are liabilities rather than assets.
The scientific method seems to be the only major exception. Not punishing people retroactively sounds to me very much like a good idea, but our society is not one that consistently abstains from this (I suggest you consider recent history), so I can’t really say whether societies that stuck to this principle really would work better as theory predicts they should.
You mean the Nurnberg trials?
I don’t come from “your civilization”. I come from a horrible, repressive, absolute dictatorship, that fakes the game of democracy in order to keep up appearances. I can tell the ideal from the pretense, and believe me I can spot the hypocrisies and contradictions from miles away. The goodness of those progresses has, from my point of view, nothing to do with material prosperity, about which I don’t care all that much: I can get by on a minimalist, simple diet, with plain clothes, in a plain, small house, using only public transportation, etc. As long as I have health (the guarrantee that I will live long and in a comfortable body), education (free access to knowledge consumption and creation, the ability to sate my lust for intellectual growth), and a friendly, healthy environment where I feel loved and appreciated, I have everything I need.
Now, sure, “material prosperity” can be redefined to mean exactly that, rather than, say, “conspicuous consumption, shiny stores, and impressive architecture” (which seemed to be what you were hinting at with the term), or simply “high rhythm of resources ownership, exploitation, and expenditure”, or even more simply “(material) wealth” but then we’d be playing with semantics, and I’m not sure that’d be productive.
What I mean to say is that those things make the world better, with or without more wealth. The reason some of them associated with more wealth than others is that it takes more wealth to be able to pull them off. If I could formulate the justification properly, it’d probably involve the term “marginal utility” or “marginal cost”, or something like that. May I ask you to fill the blanks?
However, these benefits are not exclusive to “your prosperous civilization”. They’ve showed up in plenty of other civilizations, at different points in history, not all of them acknowledged by the standard narrativa (for example, if memory serves, it was the Persians that thought up the idea of democracy first, before the Athenians). I could speak to you at length about the merits of society, government, and welfare of some “primitive” societies.
They aren’t exclusive to “prosperity” or “civilization” either, and in fact have seemed to correlate negatively (if they correlate at all) with the wealth of nations throughout history at some points: see Imperialism, from Ancient Egypt to the USA Hegemony, including Mesopotamian civilizations, the diverse Chinese empires, the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the USSR, and so on and so forth…
Privelege,
discrimination,
arbitrary punishment,
authoritarianism,
oppression of the weak (including children and women),
sharp division between conflicting groups,
irrationality and anti-empiricism,
and so on and so forth, in some combination or another, were the bread and butter of many of these systems. Conflating social freedom and justice with overall prosperity, I think, is following a red herring.
Finally, what’s wrong about thinking something is good because we like it?
I like ice cream, and I don’t admonish people who buy ice cream because they like the taste, I do admonish people who think buying ice cream will help their health or improve their chances of winning a marathon (I would have used smoking since ice cream may not be that unhealthy but I don’t like smoking).
In other words, nothing really. What is wrong is the human tendency to assume that things that we like also make us more capable or are the best course of action in the long run.
The long run… has to stop somewhere, if you want to make an evaluation. Otherwise, like Dr. Manhattan said, there’s no such thing as “in the end”. Societies face very different challenges depending on the era they are in, and what is good at one time may not be good at another. However,
if you think in terms of humanity as a whole, rather than any group in particular, then
a state of sustainability and optimal distribution of tasks and wealth for maximal stable formidability-happiness compromise ** (being formidable is a source of happiness in itself, as well as a source of sources of happiness, but is, by itself, insufficient to achieve it: in economic terms, think of Stalin’s Quinquennial plans and the complete emphasis on developing production goods and military might over consumption products and end-user services),
would, I think, require all the things I said and more.
Of course, that entire statement depends on what we define as “happiness” and “formidability”… and how much weight you give to each aspect of it
Happiness as achievement of will-to-power: heavily dependent on the feelings of growing stronger and achieving great things and overcoming difficulties and challenges. One way of achieving this in the maximum capacity for the maximum number of people requires that the rules be as fair as possible. “Fair?” Well: feelings of being given handouts spoil one’s sense of achievement, but victories that are too easy do that too, so one may want to handicap oneself, increase the difficulty of a course and/or give unworthy adversaries a head start.
Field-leveling rules, such that, ideally, everyone starts out with the exact same chances of success save for genetic difference, would be an extension to that, as would rules that enforce that you won’t be discriminated over factors you have no control of and that do not affect your social value, such as race or sexual preference.
No-retroactivity is another aspect of “keeping things fair”, as are
clear and accessible rules,
transparent rules-making, and
not allowing the rule-making to fall in the hand of a particular set of players that would spoil the fun of the game by giving themselves too many advantages: hence: “democracy”
helping newbies out (giving rights to children), free, top-quality public education for everyone, and other forms of avoiding the Original Position Fallacy by rule-writing while wearing the Veil Of Ignorance.
Maybe what you meant by
was “Happiness-as-contentment”, a numb, pleasant stupor… The happiness of a full stomach and a warm bath. If that alone is what is sought, then societies like Huxley’s Brave New World and their narcotic soma would work just fine. But the fact that people consistently find Brave New World horrifying could be seen as evidence that this type of happiness is not the one with the most weight, and/or is insufficient or even counter-productive in the absence of the other kinds. But it is necessary: humans need to rest on occasion, simmer down, regenerate. In order to properly enjoy the game, one must be able to take certain things for granted, to only need to worry about a limited amount of sources of conflict. Hence why “social welfare”, “full public health insurance”, and so-on, that protect players even after they have left the “newbie/tutorial stage” and entered the game with the only difference between them being their quality as players.
Then there’s Happiness As Sensuous Stimulation: the other side of “fun”, the easy pleasures, the instant gratification, the local maxima, the happiness that doesn’t create or achieve, conserve or rebuild, but destroys and consumes and burns. It’s the antithesis of Formidability-building (even Resting can be justified as “formidability-consolidating”). But it appears that it’s a necessary spice for the recipe of happiness...
And there’s also Happiness As Social Status: feeling loved, feeling important, feeling helpful, feeling helped, feeling that you matter, feeling that you are liked, needed even.… Being these things is important for formidability, but why is it so important to most people’s happiness that they feel they are these things, even more so than being them (this is, according to recent research which I’d rather not have to look up, the main reason clients pay for prostitutes: they want to feel feminine if they are women, masculine if they are men, they want to feel loved and young and powerful and wanted, and even though they know those feelings to be based on fiction, they are still ready to expend an enormous amount of effort/resources/power to purchase that fictional ersatz).
In order to achieve all four forms of happiness (there’s probably more, but I haven’t thought of them yet :P) to the fullest combined extent for the sum of all humans, the intellectual and material output of humanity as a whole, its material enabling of the freedoms and powers to achieve these results, then human groups barriers, the very idea of Blue VS Red, Us versus Them, “looking out for our own and screw everyone else”, must go die in a fire, as a sheer matter of augmenting everyone’s labour’s marginal utility by cooperation and specialization, and of eliminating the grotesque overhead in negative-sum games such as arms-racing and crab-bucketing.
This would also apply to everyday individuals: Tall Poppy Syndrome is another error that should be confined to the vaults of history. Will-to-power isn’t just about overcoming others, it’s about overcoming oneself and nature (one could say they are the same thing): the game need not, should not be zero-sum, and should be set up in such a way that “the best outcome for everyone on the whole” is where the Nash Equilibrium rests.
Hm. I’d think there’s material here for a top-level post, but I somehow feel like I’m just regurgitating the Fun Theory Sequence with a Socialist flavor… Do you think I’ve said anything new or worthwhile here?
Pretty rambling. But near as I can tell, mostly correct, except for the parts where you try to be “socialist”.
I don’t try to be socialist, it comes to me as naturally as breathing: it’s not just an identity, or “my favourite pick of political beliefs”: I don’t notice when I’m “being socialist” any more than a fish notices when it’s swimming, it just comes out that way by default. Anyway, which are the precise points that you see as incorrect?
One blatant example, yes.
I wasn’t talking about material prosperity necessarily, I was talking about prosperity, formidableness in the sense you defined:
And even said so:
You also included an economic aspect, but it seemed to me the bolded part was the key. Perhaps the word prosperity threw you off? I didn’t mean to use it in a primarily material sense, so I went and checked if I didn’t perhaps misuse it (I am not a native speaker).
Considering I’ve run into such opinions several times, I think many still believe in moral progress. I criticized that hypothesis here (yes I really should finish the articles on this that I promised soon, but I wanted to read as much of old LW material as possible before that, especially the cited literature on metaethics).
This isn’t a specific case of such a grand narrative but basically transforms any plausible moral narrative quite a bit. It becomes less
“We are on a path towards something like objective morality for humans. Yay the future is bright and I really should learn to accept changes to values of my society that I disagree with.”
and more
“Something as uncaring as evolution may be determining future morality. Eeek! My complex values are being ground down!”
You’re not making sense to me. What is “This”?
What are you talking about?
You originally asked for examples of grand narratives. I didn’t really provide a specific example, since if one believes in narratives of progress in one field of morality or ethicse, then he in general does believe in what I term moral progress. I dispute moral progress being a good hypothesis about how the world works, this means that I necessarily dispute anything objective-morality-ish being behind say a narrative on woman’s liberation or the spread of Christianity or the end of slavery or the spread of democracy.
So when I below said “This” I was talking about the above paragraph and the post I linked to.
Then I proceed to demonstrate how I think starting to take the idea of there being no such thing as moral progress seriously changes one’s opinions on observation of moral change or even orderly and predictable moral change:
If you believe in moral progress than interestingly and quite anomalously our society claims that we have been seeing moral progress for the past 200 or 300 or X years. Basically the world is supposed to have at some period after humans evolved suddenly started to act as a sort of CEV-ish thing, the patchwork of human communities started to aggregate some improved and patched up morality or past preferences instead of just developing to fit whatever had the greatest memetic virulence or genetic fitness or economic value or whatever at that particular the time. Taking this as a given, one should then be pretty open to the idea that while the ethics of 2100 or 2200 might be scary or disturbing at first glance, they will be genuinely better not merely different.
Most humans who really understand it don’t feel comfortable with letting evolution continue to shape us, why should we hold lesser standards when it comes to a poorly understood processes that go into making people and entire societies change their values?
I would like to use this opportunity to remind you that you owe us a post about this :-)
ETA: Sorry, I should have read the grandgrandparent first. Anyway, I’m eagerly awaiting your post!
Have you seen this post by Eliezer?
Yeah, I read the Metaethics Sequence twice so far, but I’m still not really convinced by it. Though that doesn’t mean that I know of better metaethical theories than Eliezer’s, I’m just confused and very uncertain so I would like to hear Konkvistador’s arguments.
I’m not really convinced by it either.
I think it is where I first came upon the random walk challenge to allegedly “observed” moral progress. I do think I upgraded the argument even in that basic post, please tell me if you disagree.
Also I think Eliezer was basically working to rescue the notion of moral progress because that is what he sees as “adding back up to normality”. I disagree, I think normality is the futility of preserving your values or their coherently extrapolated successors. Finding a way to make something like “moral progress” real or even preserve currently held values would be a massive project comparable in difficulty and perhaps even importance to developing FAI (which is one potential solution to this problem). I find it telling he dosen’t seem directly touch on the subject afterwards.
Well, obviously the right thing to do is understand those poorly-understood processes and extrapolate future paths of development, develop a system to judge their relative value (within the limits of our current understanding), and implement way to steer our future in the chosen direction. That’s what human rationality is for: finding out what we would want and then how to achieve it.
That, and evolution is still shaping us, it just so happens that we are a special case of its rules that allows for an entirely different minigame to be played. Rebellion against nature from within nature and all that jazz.
Don’t see why you use a disjunction here: can’t both things happen at the same time? Also, why think in terms of patchwork rather than in terms of continuum? You appear to be using a loaded metaphor here.
I would tend to agree. But this would completely change our public discussions on morality, far more than the transition from a very religious to a secular society. It would also shatter our shared historical narrative of moral progress.
Sure I directly talk about this scenario and its implications in the original post I linked to.
I think patchwork is pretty appropriate before globalization (by globalization I don’t mean modern globalization but the whole era since the Age of Discovery).
Ohmygosh, another paradigm shift. How could we possibly cope? It’s not like we’ve had many of those throughout history...
Getting excited over possible paradigm shifts is too passée for the cool kids now? Dammit, I guess I’m a square after all.
To be serious though, what I was getting at is that there are very popular and powerful ideological groups that would work against any such interpretation.
Like these guys?
I highly doubt that genetic evolution has had any significant relevance to human morality since the invention of agriculture. Which really ruins the metaphor you are using.
Eee-nope. Adaptation executers not fitness maximizers.
Sorry, don’t understand. At best, morality is godshatter from genetic evolution. But that doesn’t mean genetic evolution has produce recent (within 10k years) morally relevant changes.
There are some pretty reasonable arguments against this. Honestly I would be rather surprised if the genotypic distribution of say the tendency towards empathy or different kinds of altruism or tribalism or religiosity weren’t significantly different among Sumerian farmers of 4000 BC compared to the Mongolian horsemen of 1400 AD or the petty bourgeois of England in 1850 AD.
It it is hard to argue that the distribution of such traits would not influence the fitness landscape of memeplexes claiming to systematize and correct such intuitions into a framework of “ethics”.
Not quite. The results of genetic evolution up to this point have produced ^tons of morally relevant changes. All of them, in fact. All those instincts and pulsions and capacities, all those different types of brains, all the biological current state of humanity. The input of evolution hasn’t changed much, but the output of the human kind has gone off the scales. So we are still influenced by evolution in that we’re the result of it. And we will always be, even if we halt it forever and become immortal or upload into machines or whatever.
The input of evolution changed dramatically about when humans invented agriculture. The increase in quantity and reliability of food supply mean that biological selection pressures became much, much less powerful.
For a more recent example, consider the hemophiliac monarchs of the early 1900s. Hemophilia is genetic and does not enhance reproductive fitness. But the shear wealth of the monarchs (compared to nomadic pre-agriculture humans), meant that there wasn’t a limit on the ability of those monarchs to reproduce. Hence, no selection pressure.
I’m saying that most of the relevant wealth increase that removed biological selection pressure (on morally relevant traits) was the agricultural revolution (~8000 B.C.E.)
Why would you think that? If anything this should make evolution more powerful in shaping us.
Humans are not just a species or a family of them, they where also an ecological neiche. A type of animal is stable or slowly changing in its form over millions or tens of millions of years (like say the crocodile), not because evolution can’t cook up massive changes in a much shorter time span but because over those eons the sweet spot of the various trade offs for the animal living in that part of the ecosystem don’t much change.
Let us in this light review Fischer’s fundamental theorem of natural selection:
In other words crocodiles also didn’t have much variance after being pushed for so long towards that sweet spot. The advent of both agriculture and modern medicine have massively changed the evolutionary trade offs. In other words it has moved the sweet spot from under our feet or at least moved it from where we used to be moving towards to a completely different place in the fitness landscape. Thus theoretically one should see massive differentials between the fitness of various populations of humans and between individuals in those populations.
And this precisely what we observe.
Tell that to Charles II of Spain, there was still the pressure of not being infertile. Also the spread of hempohilia was a rapid change caused by a change in selection pressures on several families. Isn’t this basically the same kind of change we see with vestigial organs? If for some reason flight wasn’t as useful fitness wise for a type of bird living on an island and its wings started to deteriorate to the point of being useless, wouldn’t we say flightless birds evolved on that island. Or say people on an island lost the ability to produce anti-bodies to a type of disease that wasn’t present there. Isn’t that evolution?
The perfect monarch in a secure kingdom where revolutions are impossible is from evolutions point of view a bag of meat that can cry particularly convincingly for food and reproduces until it eats up as much as its competent ministers can provide it via the states taxes.
Incidentally this is the perfect voter too.
Yes, so the pressure of biological evolution isn’t shaping our morality genetically, but the adaptations that our brain wants to execute are its direct and inescapable heritage.
I fear we may have been talking past another for the last few posts, haven’t we Tim?
Sloppy. Most such “empirical examples” of Communist rule and prosperity being inversely correlated make for very, very weak Bayesian evidence of Communism’s low comparative utility for the countries in question.
The only even remotely proper comparison here would be East Germany vs. West Germany, as they started out in more or less similar conditions, including “sociocultural” ones - and even that is precarious, as communist ideology + communist sentiment were less native to East Germany than they were enforced by an occupying foreign nation-state, while West Germany underwent very little foreign coercion after 1948 or so.
(And to me this one is in favor of Western dominance—yet things are not nearly so one-sided regarding the poorer Communist countries. I might have had a different attitude on Germany as well, if only the Eastern regime de-Nazified itself more thoroughly and exacted more comprehensive vengeance on those complicit in the Holocaust. That’d be a worthy goal in itself to my eyes.)
In this vein, you would’ve been disingenious in judging between, say, Mao’s regime and a hypothetical Western-oriented China by comparing the post-1947 standards of living in China and Japan, or China and Singapore—a more apt and meaningful parallel would be China and South Vietnam, China and India, or Maoist China and a counterfactual Chang Kai-Shek regime that could have ruled in its place.
(I hope I’m making myself clear enough, am I?)
Um. In the USSR, being too critical of the government’s policies and their effects could get you sent to a prison camp in Siberia. In the present-day US, being too critical of “the contemporary grand narratives of progress” can get some people to think your opinions are weird. “Just like”? Really?
Most of the time in the USSR after Stalin’s death or Communist Yugoslavia being too critical of the reigning ideology just got you fired, passed up for promotion, a failing grade on your essay, charged with what is basically hate speech (freedom of speech was constitutionally guaranteed in the USSR btw), be considered mentally ill, denied a vacation request or put you on a watch list or under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
The difference is pretty clearly of degree not kind.
But I generally agree that the bloodbaths that where Communism and National Socialism in the 20th century where much more oppressive than Democracy.
This was essentially imprisonment and incapacitation without trial for dissenters. You got locked up and basically tortured.
Yes and if you are today considered dangerous and mentally ill and you actually aren’t your experience is different… how?
What I’m hinting at is that slowly but surely dissent from the prevailing ideology in the West is being medicalised. We aren’t exactly talking about sluggishly progressing schizophrenia yet. But I can easily imagine someone being locked up and treated for say their “sexism” or “racism” in twenty years time. This is far from a new thing in Western intellectual trends either, sixty years ago The Authoritarian Personality was basically a political attack implicitly trying to establish certain political opinions and preferences the result of pathology (which also implies treatment or prevention as normative).
In other news, Barack Obama is literally Stalin and his Socialist Healthcare will dismantle dissenters for spare organs.
(C’mon, bro.)
Dammit it all makes sense now! I just knew I was missing something.
Seriously, though, the comparison is preposterous. Look at how Anders Breivik (curse his name) is treated.
I didn’t mean to imply we are there already, just that the intellectual groundwork is laid out there if anyone will want to enforce some “muscular liberalism” on a more and more unwilling populace (native and immigrant descented) or troublesome dissident intellectuals in a few decades. I think the potential pretty clearly exists and isn’t at all negligible a threat, considering the growing reach of the state in the past decade or two that has been happening in the name of fighting terrorism, ensuring social justice and other anarchy-tyrannical silliness .
The time we are talking about was not “after Stalin’s death”.
I didn’t mean to say that their mechanisms of enforcement are identical; that would certainly be absurd. I just made an analogy between the two systems’ ideological narratives of progress and their confounding of the alleged beneficial effect of the system itself with the exogenous effects of technological progress. (Note the difference between my characterizing of dissent in the former system as dangerous in general, and my claim that in the West nowadays, it is typically dangerous only for one’s reputation. I did mean by this that the latter system practices, for the most part, more subtle reputation-based mechanisms instead of downright censorship, repression, etc.)
Indeed. Even Moldbug himself states that many times; liberal democracy, he says as a disclamer, might be really really rotten, but it’s laughable to think of its appetite for violence and system of repression as similar to those of Nazism or Communism.
And if you look to policies preferred by the McCarthy and other hardcore cold warriors (WW3 or ceaseless Vietnam and Afgan-like wars all over the world) and value life and well-being of non-Americans, every one of the 205 or 78 or 57 communists on Tailgunner Joe’s list deserved to be awarded Hero of the Soviet Union, together with equivalent awards of all nations of Eurasia.
It’s hard to weigh these kinds of alternative histories. Given their strategy of supporting protest movements, and indeed, getting in front of every parade they could, I’m sure they lended impetus to a number of good movements. On the other hand, when they got out in front of the movements, they would alter the course of the movements. Whether the net perturbation was good depends on your values, and the empirical facts of how large and in what direction those perturbations were.
Me, I’m not very fond of communism, so I find the lingering effects of their ideology harmful.
Alter to what? You are implying some sort of underhanded maneuvering that I not sure ever actually occurred.
After Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr was moving to topics of that are still controversial today—like ending the Vietnam War and ending pervasive poverty. As you say, one’s the net effect of that change depends on one’s prior values. More importantly, I think these types of change were organic to the movement that King was leading, not imposed from above.
Instead of imply, I’ll just state that they supported movements to further their own interests, which were not identical with the interest of the followers of those movements.
I don’t disagree that leaders like Ralph Nader or Martin Luther King advocated for what they thought was a good idea, which might not have a close relationship with what the followers would necessarily articulate as goals.
What specific changes in positions advocated occurred based on this disconnect? I’m particularly interested in changes that occurred because the leaders were Communist sympathizers when the membership wasn’t.
I linked to a relevant article elsewhere in this thread.
I don’t think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn’t help.
A better example to answer Tim’s question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.
Don’t get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond’s narrative.
First, his ideological concept of “suicidalism” is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology—with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic—and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)
Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion—in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow—was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it’s very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.
Well said.
At that point, I’m not sure that there’s anything left of the article that isn’t better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
Thanks. Leaving out your ideological statements and some other contrarian things, much of that was my impression of the article as well.
Thanks for the link. Whatever the merits of post-modern thought, I don’t think King was a post-modernist. Assuming that the FBI was right to monitor him, what did he do to further the Communist agenda?
And I don’t really agree that your link was a fair minded view of post-modernism, or that it was a poison-meme from the Soviet Union.
According to this article, postmodernism seems to be, in its barest essence, a form of impious iconoclasm as applied to the analysis of traditional concepts. It’s a very honoured tradition in Western Philosophy: in one century of democracy, the Athenians managed to practically destroy their entire body of traditions by discovering the base, petty group interests behind the so-called “sacred” and “natural” laws of their City.
Let me just say that I don’t think that post-modernism can be thought of as Socratic iconoclasm. I think it has valuable insights, many of which have been co-opted by more “rationalist” philosophy.
For example, I don’t think Michel Foucault can profitably be described as a nihilist. And whatever his sympathies to the Soviet Union (it appears that it was different at different stages of his life), I think the idea that he was generating poison-memes on behalf of the Soviet Union is ludicrous.
I would downvote your post because of the way its statements seem to be disjointed to each other, but I’d rather not have your post go below threshold, so I’ll directly ask you:
Why do you not think that post-modernism can be thought of as a form of methodological and cultural iconoclasm, and in hwat measure do you think it is not comparaabe to the efforts of Socrates and his contemporaries… and the backlash they suffered because of it.
What are those valuable insights you talk of, and what is that quote “ratonalist” unquote philosophy that has coopted many of them?
Why would Foulcault be described as a nihilist?
You are aware that Appeal to Ridicule advances the discussion excatly nowhere. Why do you think the fact that he was “spreading poision memes on behalf of the Soviet Union” to be remarkably unlikely and incongruous?
I find myself very very confused by this article. There are too many priors we don’t seem to share, too much inferential distance I need to jump. What is the American Way of Life, and what is this “Lockean individualism” he keeps talking about? How is anywhing Bin Laden said comparable to the contents of “Z Magazine”, which appears to be an amusingly old-fashioned doctrinal Marxist publication? He talks a lot about past events I’m unfamiliar with, and sources I haven’t read (yet).
Okay, that practically discredits the entire work, and puts the predictive ability of the author’s priors to the test, since he clearly didn’t bother to do the research here, and dared to speak of subjects he is ignorant of. As it turns out, it fails. I will only say this much: the Paris Riots were about as much of an Islamic crusade as The Los Angeles riots were Christian ones.
EDIT: Wooooow comment thread. That is long. Would you recommend reading it?
Here is a good place to start.
Also these lines from the Deceleration of Independence are decent summary.
Two large differences with Marxism and volk-Marxism is that rights are attributed to individuals rather than groups, and that emphasis on freedom from government interference rather than the “right” to goodies from the government.
I’m not sure you understand what he means, he’s not claiming that the all the Paris rioters were motivated by jihad (although that’s probably a larger component than you’d care to admit) any more than all the Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters were motivated by jihad. Nevertheless, the effect of the revolution in Egypt has been to make the government much more Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, the way Europeans (at least everyone to the left of Geert Wilders) responds to riots by Muslim youth is to officially give Islamic organizations more influence and those organizations do promote the Islamization of society.
Strangely enough, this fragment of the declaration, out of context, appears to enable a Marxist revolution as easily as any other, and without much of a stretch: if one assumes that the current Governments are acting as merely enablers and administrators of a corporate power that would stand between them and their rights to Life (nationalized healthcare, the right to the minimum amount of resources to survive whether you want to work or not), Liberty (job protection, safety nets, elimination of censorship and surveillance, not being discriminated from jobs because of race, creed, sexual life, or having children), and the pursuit of Happiness (depending on whose definition, it might involve minimizing time spent working, assuming your job doesn’t provide you with happiness, and maximizing the time spent with one’s family, or doing other stuff one actually likes to do, including non-remunerated but actual, tiring, productive work). I guess we should praise the Founding Fathers for the foersight they put in their work, and having made it as flexible as it is.
That said, it is indeed sad how doctrinal Marxism has shown an absolutely deplorable disregard for the rights and interests of anyone who wasn’t a proletarian. Luckily, democratist, egalitarian movements have predated and outlived Marxism, being born of a sensibility that is beyond mere memetic and mimetic propagation.
By the way. what is volk-Marxism, for that matter? A search in google mostly turns out the blog you linked to, Youtube comments, and some right-wing blogs. It does not seem to be a very widespread word… could you allay my suspicions that it isn’t a buzzword? (I don’t say this in a spirit of mockery, I am genuinely curious).
I’d like you to source the priors that allow you to assess such a probability. As a Muslim, and someone who was in close contact with those movements throughout, I do not recall a single source phrasing the conflict in religious terms.
What does that entail, exactly, and why is this a bad thing? I’m not assuming it is a good or bad thing, I just want to know why you think it would be.
Typical case of reversed stupidity. As I think I have already mentioned somewhere on this thread, you will observe that once people believe themselves free of the yokes of their oppressors, and their oppressors’ agents, the same people will tend to feel attracted to said oppressors’ designated enemies (regardless of the details of the nature of said enmity, or its truth beyond rhetorics). In the Wars of Religion, it was Protestantism, in the Cold War, it was the USSR, and in The War on Terror, well, it’s the guys with the beards advocating the return to an idealized, pure past, and the rights of the common man against the foreign oppressor, again: they’re just wearing a different hat.
Maybe applying the right-left label here is a mistake: maybe it’s a “left wing” thing in Britain, but in France it’s more of a “right wing” thing: the French left has a bit of a vendetta against religion in any way shape or form, and thinks the “goodies” of the Goverment (and its funds) shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Only in the sense that any text can be interpreted to mean anything with enough “interpretation”, as you proceed to do in the next paragraph. Also I shown mention that Jefferson broke with what one might call “orthodox Lockeanism” by substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property”.
Marxists tend to be all for censorship and surveillance as long as they’re the ones doing the censoring and surveilling.
A term for the Marxist-dervied/inspired memes that Eric Raymond discusses in the blog post I linked to above.
Yes, I know, I have read that article in full, but I still didn’t understand the delimitations of that definition.
You seem to imply that my interpretation wasn’t legitimate.
However, I suppose all power units, be they political, economical, or otherwise, will try to get their hands on as much information as they can get away with, while denying it to others. They will also be hypocritically outraged that other power units censor and suveil them. Hardly something endemic to Marxism, regretfully enough. One would argue that the ultimate elimination of censorship and surveilance is simply the complete empowerment of the general public to censor and surveil everyone else: all your words and actions are known to everyone, and no-one dares step out of line. Truly a Tyranny of the Public, if the Public isn’t memetically equipped to resist the temptation.
In case you thought otherwise, I am not suggesting the American Consitution or the Declaration of Independence are tweakable to accomodate leftism. More the opposite: that a leftism that respects individual rights can be Consitution-compliant.
Well, yes. I particularly object to your redefinition of the word “liberty”.
Also notice that it says “pursuit of Happiness” and simply “Happiness”, i.e., the government shouldn’t get in your way of pursuing happiness but isn’t obliged actively assist you.
Why, yes, what I meant to say there was that the government should enable you to pursue happiness in any way you choose, by guaranteeing your liberty to choose who to work for, what to work at, and how much you work. To be precise, the freedom to do whatever you want with your very limited time on this earth (I think people will still end up working just as much, when offered this freedom, unless they deliberately want to starve en masse, among other losses of comfort). The government isn’t actually helping you be happy in any particular way, they just make sure you are able to pursue whatever would make you happy.
Of course, that’s not Marxism: Marx would have said that “from each in accordance with their capacity, to each according tot their necessity”, which I think is utterly dumb: who’s going to decide how much ouput one is capable of, or where one’s needs stop?
Of course, if your notion of happiness is, say, to be someone’s slave, the government shouldn’t get in the way of you pursuing that. I’d be curious to see how many people do choose slavery over freedom.
Anyway, the Constitution forbids the Government to get in the way of your happiness, it doesn’t forbid it to make that pursuit easier for you, unless that gets in the way of your happiness. But then you could just reject their help, right?
Yes it is. It’s forcing the employer to hire you.
Or gets in the way of someone else’s freedom.
Speaking of the topic of “generating poision memes”, I think that, since part of our endeavour would involve the deconstruction and destruction of propaganda and its pernicious enabling of “nationalism”, “groupism”, “collectivism” or however else we may call it, it might be interesting to study contemporary Think Tanks and their strategies with as much diligence and interest as those institutions of the past that this deeply interesting (if sometimes objectionable) article mentions.
For a rationalist to be able to function properly as a citizen, and defy the expectation that they would enclose themselves in ivory towers, unconcerned with the affairs of foolish mortals, one must develop tools to identify and deconstruct “poison memes” as soon as they come in contact with them, without having to rely on analysts who are ideologically indentured to the group opposing the creators of those memes, since they would in turn spread “poison memes” of their own.
A seeker of truth that would bounce between these sources would not find said truth, but only confusion piling upon confusion, save if they perform a truly exhausting effort of mental analysis and cross-referencing. As Descartes might have put it, partisan works do contain many excellent and true precepts, but these are mixed in with so much other harmful or superfluous stuff that it is almost as difficult to separate out the truth from the rest as it is to pull a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble by separating out the wanted goddess-shaped marble from the unwanted remainder.
Hence I think developing a toolset to see through politically-motivated memes, if not outright cataloguing and properly sourcing them, would be a worthy task to undertake. If not by us, then by some other, specialized organ, that would be equally commited to the advancement of correct epistemology and mental hygiene.
Note: I want to make it clear that I do not think said article is entirely without merit. Far from that. I have seen some of the very stupid memes therein described existing in left-winger people I know, such as one of my dearest friends saying that, were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed. I was so shocked I could have slapped him then and there. (As a representative of said Third World (and of freaking reason for that matter) I explained to him that that was a preposterous notion,)
Nevertheless, knowing this person well, I can say with some certainty that he did not “catch” this meme from any marxist or progressivist literature or propaganda, but came to it on his own entirely. You see, not all pernicious ideas need to be taught (what a wonderful world would it be if they were): sometimes they arouse in parallel, in different people, because they make the same fundamental thinking mistakes, starting from similar but widespread faulty priors. Such as the ideas that:
a criminal should own up to their crimes and allow themselves to be punished, that victims have a right to violent vengeance
that by allowing injustice without speaking out against it one is automatically an accomplice,
that this notion could possibly be valid on the level of an entire country (I blame the Nurnberg trials for that meme),
that punishment can be dealt by proxy.
If the brutal, violent exploitation of the Third World by the colonial powers is seen as a crime, a mind equipped with the aforementioned memes would, with a high probablity, come up with this idiotic idea, without any Soviet prompting at all! Heck, not even those memes could be seen as Soviet-generated, they predate the USSR by far, heck, they probably predate dirt.
As for the horrors of colonialism are undeniable historical fact, and their criminalization seems to have been hardly a matter of left-versus-right, and more of a matter of much more diverse “nationalisms”, including literal Nationalisms, and one country calling out another for a crime the likes of which their own forces proceed to commit immediately, and which they vigorously deny or ignore, when called out in turn. At some point, internationally-minded people, such as, say, humanists, seem to have come up with the conclusion that those are all crimes.
Well, he might of caught it from someone who caught it from said literature.
I find this extremely unlikely. At best he came to it by following trains of thought inspired by reading progressive literature. Note that the most effective propaganda stops lays own all the premises but stops just short of stating the intended conclusion, so that the target believes he came up with the idea on his own.
But then wouldn’t their work automatically be a part of said literature?
I do find it amazing how many people who are clearly parroting memes without much personal input claim to have come up with them themselves. I for one like to give credit where credit is due.
What evidence would falsify your theory that those memes are automatically descended from deliberate Soviet efforts? Because at this rate you’re starting to sound like my “Protocols of the Sages of Zion” reading uncle, who thinks everything the West does is the result of Zionist lobbying, Zionist subversion, and the Zionist conspiracy to sap and destroy our precious bodily fluids. Sorry, not bodily fluids, I mean our precious way of life, our intellectual integrity, the patriotic/religious fervour of our youth, the unity and freedom of the Islamic peoples, etc. etc. etc. . By sapping and neutering it and precipitating its decadence with their filthy propaganda spread through media manipulation and the aid of servile, self-hating intellectuals, them and other sorts of useful idiots. Only to replace it with their own, self serving work, that will render us impotent to resist their tyranny. Sounds familiar?
Hey, actually, the more I think about it, the more this pattern reemerges. I can think of examples from Ancient Greece! Ever heard of a guy named Pausanias? Maybe we could write an interesting article out of this! I genuinely feel we’re onto something.
Do you mean my theory that your friend came up with the idea that “were the oppressed masses of the Third World to invade his country in revenge, he would allow himself to be killed” on his own or my theory that those memes ultimately descend from communist propaganda.
Another good example of a memetic weapon doing damage long after the war it was created to fight is over.
No, that’s my testimony. I’m asking about your theory that anyone coming up with those memes is a result of the previous existence of those memes, and that said existence is exclusively owed to soviet agents manufacturing them under a specific agenda, as opposed to them being autonomous thinkers drawing similar conclusions in front of the same facts because they have a similar sensitivity and share some preconceptions that are in no way exclusive to a societ influenced or for that matter even leftist culture.
Yes, well, doesn’t it trouble you that maybe Eric Raymond and others like him are being victims of a similar process, given the many remarkable parallels between their discourses, modulo Hated-Enemy-Of-The-Day?
Then why didn’t anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?
From what little I know, I blame, at the latest, Widrow Wilson and the notion of self-determination, i.e. the USA making a power-grab after WWI was over and declaring that Imperialism is, in fact, evil. Followed by WWII and the total, ideological war against an enemy whose entire ideology revolved around the most extreme nationalism possible, leading to everyone embracing diverse forms of Reversing that Stupidity, one of them being Anti-Patriotism. But we can go further back, like, say, Kant’s insane pacifism (what agenda might he have been possibly pushing?), or even much further back, to the Bible. Egypt deserved to be destroyed by the Plague, and its army wiped by the sea, because they refused to set the oppressed Hebrews free, and it was right for God to do so. I do find it amusing that so few Jewish and Christian hegemonies would see themselves in the role of Egypt, nor wonder whether that’s a good place to stand, until so late in the XXth century. You’d think the comparison would be obvious.
My impression of the situation (which has not been extensively researched) is that, although there really were plenty of spies and such, McCarthy’s methods were largely ineffective at identifying them. Is my impression accurate?
I would agree with your impression.
Yes McCarthy was pretty ineffective.