vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society.
I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.
The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.
But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change.
I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.
I think there is something to a Steven Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)
However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.
I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.
I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'
I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understanding of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.
Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.
In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as a Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.
While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.
I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.
I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.
I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.
Edit: Grammar.
While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.
I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?
At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.
But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.
If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.
A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.
I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?
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