So based on your contrast between engineering culture and rule of law (ROL) culture, it seems to me that you’re claiming a connection between ROL culture and a tendency to emphasize first principles. While I don’t doubt your account of how this played out for you (i.e. that growing up in an ROL culture caused you to place lots of value on first principles), it seems to me that these two things are at least partially in tension. As a child, I always hated arbitrary rules. My general response to teachers’/parents’ appeals to authority was some variant of, “I’ll do what you tell me to do, if you can convince me.” I mention this not to say that I was in the right, but to point out that following the rules laid out by outside authorities often means ignoring one’s own internal rules, and following one’s internal rules means breaking/ignoring the rules laid out by outside authorities. That is, deriving results for oneself, from first principles, often means breaking the (external) rules, which is anathema to an ROL culture as I’m understanding it (if I’m misunderstanding ROL culture, or what you mean by first principles, please let me know).
I think you gesture at this at the beginning of your description of “Defensive Irony”:
So, what is an autonome to do?
One solution is to speak the truth despite social incentives to do otherwise. The problem with that approach is that social incentives are powerful.
However, I think this is much more common than you seem to be giving it credit for. I don’t think most people who are on the “Autonomous” end of the spectrum end up like Socrates, I think they end up like (my mental caricature of) Marx, trying to replace what they see as a hopelessly misguided system with one actually derived from first principles. I think your description of a Kantian who adapts their internal rule system to match the external rules is insightful, and probably correct in a lot of cases, but I don’t think that most autonomes who don’t end up like that try to hide their internal rule systems, but rather end up in a clash with the external culture.
The alternate (very likely) interpretation of my intuition is that I’m massively falling victim to availability heuristic and generalizing-from-one-example. But my main point isn’t necessarily about frequency, but rather this: if one is inclined to first-principles style thinking, that can lead to a clash with an ROL culture if one’s own first principles don’t match the first principles of the ROL culture itself. (Though I can see how an ROL culture could inculcate first-principles style thinking, and I can see how, if one’s first-principles style thinking is due to said ROL culture, the likelihood of a clash is greatly reduced because in all likelihood one’s own first principles simply are the principles of the ROL culture itself).
I recently had the opportunity to compare notes with someone from a strong Calvinist background. The Calvinists also have a strong culture of “obey all the rules”, but one with an ethos of “lawfulness is submission to rightful authority” rather than “law is the tree of life”. Their parents and teachers had an ethos of “don’t talk back,” very different from my Jewish upbringing where, even among the Orthodox (which we were not), while you were expected to eventually come to the endorsed answer, and were expected to follow the object-level rules in the meantime, it would be considered wrong not to ask questions until you understand.
The Jewish way is of course still highly imperfect, because the system as a whole lacks the appropriate error-correction mechanism for cases where the objection really is valid. Lacking a proper line of retreat short of abandoning the community altogether, there’s strong social pressure not to ask some of the most important questions. But it’s different in an important way from systems that treat argument per se as disobedience.
I agree that in the absence of this error-correction mechanism autonomes still end up clashing with the culture. Consequently, I think that a full ROL culture would have to have social structures for error-correction. Taking another Jewish example mainly because it’s been on my mind lately, the protected role of prophets during and before the era of the First Temple seems like it served something like this purpose—prophets’ main role was to criticize, not to predict. And they criticized kings for things that are only violations of orthodoxy in the hindsight of a tradition that made some of their criticisms canonical. Quaker meetings where everyone has full standing to say anything the spirit moves them to say seem like a different and promising sort of error-correction mechanism. Courts of law or other formal venues for petition are another.
So based on your contrast between engineering culture and rule of law (ROL) culture, it seems to me that you’re claiming a connection between ROL culture and a tendency to emphasize first principles. While I don’t doubt your account of how this played out for you (i.e. that growing up in an ROL culture caused you to place lots of value on first principles), it seems to me that these two things are at least partially in tension. As a child, I always hated arbitrary rules. My general response to teachers’/parents’ appeals to authority was some variant of, “I’ll do what you tell me to do, if you can convince me.” I mention this not to say that I was in the right, but to point out that following the rules laid out by outside authorities often means ignoring one’s own internal rules, and following one’s internal rules means breaking/ignoring the rules laid out by outside authorities. That is, deriving results for oneself, from first principles, often means breaking the (external) rules, which is anathema to an ROL culture as I’m understanding it (if I’m misunderstanding ROL culture, or what you mean by first principles, please let me know).
I think you gesture at this at the beginning of your description of “Defensive Irony”:
However, I think this is much more common than you seem to be giving it credit for. I don’t think most people who are on the “Autonomous” end of the spectrum end up like Socrates, I think they end up like (my mental caricature of) Marx, trying to replace what they see as a hopelessly misguided system with one actually derived from first principles. I think your description of a Kantian who adapts their internal rule system to match the external rules is insightful, and probably correct in a lot of cases, but I don’t think that most autonomes who don’t end up like that try to hide their internal rule systems, but rather end up in a clash with the external culture.
The alternate (very likely) interpretation of my intuition is that I’m massively falling victim to availability heuristic and generalizing-from-one-example. But my main point isn’t necessarily about frequency, but rather this: if one is inclined to first-principles style thinking, that can lead to a clash with an ROL culture if one’s own first principles don’t match the first principles of the ROL culture itself. (Though I can see how an ROL culture could inculcate first-principles style thinking, and I can see how, if one’s first-principles style thinking is due to said ROL culture, the likelihood of a clash is greatly reduced because in all likelihood one’s own first principles simply are the principles of the ROL culture itself).
I recently had the opportunity to compare notes with someone from a strong Calvinist background. The Calvinists also have a strong culture of “obey all the rules”, but one with an ethos of “lawfulness is submission to rightful authority” rather than “law is the tree of life”. Their parents and teachers had an ethos of “don’t talk back,” very different from my Jewish upbringing where, even among the Orthodox (which we were not), while you were expected to eventually come to the endorsed answer, and were expected to follow the object-level rules in the meantime, it would be considered wrong not to ask questions until you understand.
The Jewish way is of course still highly imperfect, because the system as a whole lacks the appropriate error-correction mechanism for cases where the objection really is valid. Lacking a proper line of retreat short of abandoning the community altogether, there’s strong social pressure not to ask some of the most important questions. But it’s different in an important way from systems that treat argument per se as disobedience.
I agree that in the absence of this error-correction mechanism autonomes still end up clashing with the culture. Consequently, I think that a full ROL culture would have to have social structures for error-correction. Taking another Jewish example mainly because it’s been on my mind lately, the protected role of prophets during and before the era of the First Temple seems like it served something like this purpose—prophets’ main role was to criticize, not to predict. And they criticized kings for things that are only violations of orthodoxy in the hindsight of a tradition that made some of their criticisms canonical. Quaker meetings where everyone has full standing to say anything the spirit moves them to say seem like a different and promising sort of error-correction mechanism. Courts of law or other formal venues for petition are another.